During the most recent Getting To Know Your Neighbor bash hosted by the downtown Philly condo I live in, I was talking to a neighbor about home improvement. My tiling experience, specifically. She had recently redone her bathroom floor, but this alledged handyman guy in the building who did the work had done a sub-sub-par job. He’d barely grouted anything which left giant gaps between the tiles that would inadvertantly trap hair and dirt and whatever else fell on the floor (gasp!). He charged $300 for this. Feeling obnoxious and boastful (and light-headed thanks to my recent consumption of 3 beers in 30 minutes), I said something like, ”Hell, even I could fix that!” So, she took me up on it. Sixty dollars for supplies (from my neightbor), one Home Depot trip and forty-five days later, I was in the bathroom chiseling out whatever mystery material was stuck between the tiles. It looked like a combination of non-sanded grout, mortor, and in one area this guy experimented with caulking between the tiles. Duh. Not of it was even, so I went through spurts of ”Man this is hard” to ”Man this is so easy!” Once done and vacuumed, I mixed some attractive sanded DeLorean Gray grout and began, uhhh, re-grouting. Take a guess why I picked that color and you win a prize. After a few hours, I was done with my cycle of meticulously applying grout and wiping the excess down with a wet sponge. On Thursday, I’ll buff out the excess haze, fill in the edge gaps with sanded DeLorean Gray Caulk and seal the grout. I should have taken before-after photos just so you can see my mad home improvement skillz, but trust me, it’s gonna look good. My word is bond, dude. James Bond. And my word wants a vodka martini, shaken, not stirred. Is it really necessary to say the “not stirred” part? It’s as if you think the bartender is an idiot and that he doesn’t understand what “shaken” means, so you toss in the additional “not stirred” to make him realize that shaking doesn’t involve stirring. Okay. Tangent.
I bought a laptop from a friend at work. Nice laptop, a few imperfections on the display but for the price I was happy. I set it up on the plane ride into town on Sunday night. Once I returned to the confines of my cozy apartment, I plugged everything in and… nothing. The power supply acted as if it were on vacation. I had 16 minutes of power left to figure out the problem. After crazily fumbling through the battery options manager for two precious minutes, I threw my hands up in the air, looked at the ceiling, and screamed like I was kneeling over a dead Klingon. A distance neighbor behind the walls yelled, ”What the hell was that?” I shut off all the lights and feigned absence. The laptop died, quietly. A phone call to my friend the next day revealed that I was given the wrong power supply. One Fedex package later (which I get later this afternoon), and it’s onward to Round 2.
