Making Albert Wesker my Bitch

So I finished Resident Evil 5 last night (this morning). I stayed up until 3am playing it. It ends on a good note with all the plot points resolved and everybody happy. The nice thing is that even though all the conflict going all the way back to RE1 is now over, there's still plenty of stories that can be written about bioweapons and terrorism. Of course, you won't have too much in dramatic reveals in RE6 (unless one of the good guys goes bad) but the series will just keep on chugging on. Now I just have to get the rest of the trophies (about 13 more) and then I'll be done-done. Of course, one of the trophies is to beat it on Professional which is one step above where I was. For that it's mostly one hit kills from everything....I was swearing profusely on Hard, I just might have a heart attack on Professional.

As promised here are some pics of my reflooring of the coat room. I couldn't find a picture of the floor before I started (and I didn't have my camera when I started).

If there wasn't that section on the right (I suspect that's where the old basement stairs were before the addition), we almost could have kept the original hardwood.

Halfway there

Woo hoo. I still have to put in trim, but that's not too hard. It would be even easier if I didn't have to make beveled cuts. :(

So it's alllll good so far. Just gotta finish the trim in both rooms this weekend, and clean the garage and basement. After all that, I may just be able to get the endless setlist done in. So yeah, it's busy, busy, busy again.

Dude, where's my weekend?

I spent the bulk of Saturday and Sunday working on the damn coat room floor. Trying to do the edges takes forever, especially because ceramic tile is such a pain in the ass to cut through. Nevertheless, I worked my ass off and now the floors themselves are done. Now we just need to mop a few times, I have to put the trim in and it is FINISHED!!!! I'll be posting pics once I get them off the camera.

Speaking of pictures, Pam and I took the girls to a St. Patricks day parade in Fox Lake Sunday. Fox Lake has about only 1000 people in it so it's a big event for them. The kids liked it but I was pretty meh about the whole thing. I'm not Irish, not Catholic, and I don't like getting drunk in public :) Seriously, the parade is nothing more than an excuse to get shitfaced for most people, which happened to include most of those standing by me. Oh well, fun was had by most and that's what matters.

I did manage to go through some more on Resident Evil 5 and Rock Band 2. I got all of the bass trophies and am now working on the guitar. We're going to have to have some people over eventually so I can get the actual band ones (8X multiplier, etc)

As far as RE5 goes, it looks like I was right. Chris Redfield's dead former partner does figure into the story (and I've got a good idea who she is in the game). The infection agent is the Las Plagas parasite from RE4 but the samples that were stolen by Ada Wong and Albert Wesker were apparently modified by Tricell (the new Umbrella) and tested out on the population of a small African village. You do get to fight some tribals later in the game so that's fun. I'm doing pretty well as far as the trophy's go. I'll have to go through a few more times to find all the secrets and also score Rank S on every chapter, but it's keeping me busy :)

Things are hopefully a little better now

So the living room is 98% done for now. I still have to lay Quarter round around the room to hide the gap for the laminate floor. Other than replacing the drop ceiling tiles (and upgrading the electronics *nudge* *wink*) that room is D-O-N-E, done. After that, there's replacing the ceiling tile in the office and installing a closet door, putting ceramic tile in the coat room and then putting in recessed lighting in the kitchen and then I think the entire 1st floor is complete.

It was a bit of a pain in the ass and took up all my weekend, but the new living room it fucking sweet. I'll admit I didn't think it would turn out well but that's because I couldn't imagine the wall color on the non-brick walls. With the color it used to be, a brick wall would have looked stupid. But I guess I have a failure to visualize the whole room. Guys don't operate like that, and I suppose Pam will never let me forget that I was vehemently oppoosed to a brick wall in there. Oh well, at least it looks nice.

I would be posting pictures, but our camera has been broken for weeks now. The lens mechanism for going in and out is broken. I just purchased a new one for $89 with 2 day shipping with the funds from selling my external hard drive. That's kind of irritating because in a perfect world, I would have been using that money for either an internal 1TB drive for the computer or the collector's Edition of Resident Evil 5. With the money I have left and money from other places, I still have a shot at getting it but I'll have to see. I guess it depends if I can get Pam to 'loan' me $40 which I'll put back into checking later. Considering I didn't get paid for my 16 hours of work, that should be a fair deal :)

I did manage to get some Rock Band in. I'm making pretty good progress on the trophies. I've gotten the "All venues played" and "1,000,000" fans trophies. I'm hoping to find time for the 'iron bladder' trophy. That's where you go through all 85 songs without pausing or failing. Hopefully if you can do it on Medium that shouldn't be a problem, I just hope my voice and/or arms hold out for 3.5-4 hours of straight playing.

I would have done more last night but I had to get my "24" fix in. I'm all about suspending disbelief for TV, but seriously, a underwater passageway from the Potomac into the White House, really? Oh well, it'll be fun to see Candyman (General Juma) go up against Jack Bauer. It's too bad that David Palmer isn't still the President on the show. I wonder what Jobu would make of the Candyman?

Anyways, gotta go, these calls won't answer themselves

Jesus tittyfucking Christ!!!

So, the plasma place really isn't working out. I never considered that there'd be a problem with me giving whole blood 3 weeks ago, but I got deferred until April because of it, so there's no shot of getting the collector's version of RE5 (or just the game for that matter). So that sucks

Because of the economy, Pam's mom has given us a choice:

-Get less money from her for our birthdays and Xmas, we normally get around $800 between the 3 so I'm thinking somewhere around $200-400.

-Give us $400 to take the kids to Chula Vista or somewhere in Wisconsin Dells

Obviously we took option 2, because we at least get to use the money, whereas with option 1 it all goes towards bills. I don't really get why she made us choose at all, yeah she's laid off, but she VOLUNTEERED for it. Whatever, it's her money and her decision, I just don't understand it. It still sucks because we really do need the bill money.

A little background before this next part: We had a 55 gallon aquarium in the living room and noticed Friday that the wood in the stand is warping and the carpet is soaked. We had no idea where the water was coming from so I emptied the tank, relocated the fish, and moved everything so that the carpet would dry.

Anyways, I come home yesterday, pissed off because I wasted 3 vacation hours for no fucking money from the plasma place and Pam wants me to tear up the carpet in living room because the wet spot (see paragraph above) appears to be growing. So I have to tear apart the AV Center, couch, etc and move everything else out of the room. We were planning on putting laminate in there anyways, so that's not a huge deal I would just rather do it when it's warmer out.

Then we end up going to Menards to buy the stuff to build a brick veneer wall in the living room because Pam has been talking about it non-stop and I am a whipped pussy. She also wanted to repaint and get new blinds. So the short version of the story is that Menards didn't have the flooring in stock so we couldn't buy the one thing that really needed to be done and then maxed out the Menard's card on the stuff for the wall that technically could have waited. At least we had a little tax money left so we could pay the $600 off right away when we got home but we still need the flooring and I can't really move anything back in until that gets done....the walls I could have done with all the furniture in there :-<

Anyways. I peeled out the carpeting and padding and that carpeting is fucking wrecked. Massive stains from our kids/pets and the former owner's are all over. It's pretty fucking stupid because the hardwood underneath is in very good shape.....except for where all the moisture bonded the padding to the wood. I had to bring out a driveway ice scraper to scrape it off. Anyways where the wet spot was the wood is soaked and warped so I'm not even sure if it was the fish tank because it seems like too much or if somehow it's coming up from the crawl space, so now I have to dig out the fucking crawl space and take a look in there. When I got up this morning it did appear a little dryer so I'm not really sure what's going on any more. Either way I'll probably have to replace that section of the floor and then still have to lay down laminate whenever we can afford it.

On top of that we found out that the USDA got our letter, they admitted that they made a mistake (they thought Pam was getting paid 2x a month and not the once that we reported). However they wouldn't indicate how much they would take off of the mortgage or even if we are in line for a reduction.

I can't find my PSP games anywhere because I've completed LocoRoco and I need something new to play at work. On top of that we get the Wii Fit today, but my fucking living room is in shamble and I don't know when we'll be able to use it. I need a fucking new digital camera because the kids broke the old one. There's still the recessed lights to install and the coat room to refloor. I also couldn't watch House, 24, or Monday Night Raw and I'm expecting to be without TV for a while yet..

THIS IS TOO MUCH FOR ME TO TAKE!!! I don't even know where to begin and it's depressing the hell out of me.

Other than that, everything's going great *sigh*

A Clusterfuck of Epic Proportions

So for the last week and a half, I've been reflooring the bathroom. It's been one non stop thing after another. To start, the main reason I was doing it was because somehow the seal at the base of the toilet was leaking and it had to be pulled out anyways. Additionally, I have children who like to splash in the tub so my weak ass vinyl flooring just wasn't cutting it. I have put vinyl flooring in there twice now, so it was now time to move up to ceramic tile.

Ok, so that's great right? Ceramic's relatively easy to install. However, because the cheap ass former owners cheaped out on their bathroom remodel in the 80's the subfloor was a vinyl sheet over 1/4" plywood over 1/4" fiberboard over the vinyl sheet from the 50's/60's over the original floor. Let me say that that is not an effective water barrier because there was super mold from where the wood soaked up all the water from the toilet....gross. Pulling out all that shit sucked ass as well because it was nailed down every 3" (the floor is uneven) and then I had renail the 50's linoleum down because there's nothing but glue holding it in place. On top of that the original subfloor doesn't go all the way to the wall, so I had to fill that with foam sealant.

For a new subfloor I went with 1/2" cement board (I probably should have gone with 1/4", but Menard's didn't have it). It's fairly straightforward to install, you lay down a layer of mortar so that there's no gaps under the cement board and then nail it down about every 6 to 8". It is a pain in the ass to cut out though. It is cement after all, I had to resort to using a knife to mark where I wanted it cut and then hammer the shit out of it to break up the concrete so I could cut out the other side.

Ok, so far so good. The tile isn't too bad to put in, except I got a little crooked in laying it, resulting in 1 row of tiles being a little offset from the rest. My major gripe was that I was cheap and didn't buy a tile saw and had to use a hand tile cutter for straight lines and tile nippers to carve out all the odd shapes. Tile nippers are a bitch to work with. I snapped 4 or 5 tiles before I got the hang of it.

So, woot, woot it's all going smoothly....or is it? Here's where the fun begins. When trying to set the toilet I used a non wax flange. It's essentially a piece of rubber that is glued to the bottom of the toilet and it provides the seal. Well, first of all I got the wrong one. Secondly, my toilet bolts were now too short because the tile added about a 1/2" to the floor height (and one was broken). So I go out, get new bolts and a new flange and the bolts are STILL too short to really get the toilet tight and the flange is going in tight. Anyways because I wanted to have a toilet, I put it in and tightened it as best as I could. Lo and behold, it leaks. It turns out that the cast iron pipe from the 1900's isn't quite 4" in diameter ::facepalm::

I go back to the store, get longer bolts, and a wax ring. I install the toilet and notice that the fucking tank connection is leaking again because the putty I put in there moved. Luckily I actually had another tank (Pam accidentally dropped the lid and it shattered and buying a new tank is easier than trying to find a replacement lid), so I installed the new tank, install the new bolts put the wax ring on, tighten everything and voila, success!!!! But wait, why is there still water on the floor? Apparently I put a chip in the porcelain where the water from the tank drains into the bowl and water is leaking out of that. I sure as fuck am not going to take out the bowl again so I went back to the store and got some marine epoxy which worked. WOOHOO! I haz a toilet.

Now it's time for the sink. OH FUCK! Now I have to raise all the brackets by 1/2" :'-( . In the process of taking the sink off, I broke the plastic drain assembly. I had to go back to the store and buy a new one. After putting it together, lo and behold it works! So at this point all I need to do is seal the grout and put a transition piece in the doorway and I is done.

I like being able to be Mr. DIY, but sometimes I wish I had the money to hire a pro. This was one of those times :) Pictures will be included tonight when I get home.

"As Mr. Sloan always says, there is no "I" in team, but there is an "I" in pie. And there's an "i" in meat pie. Meat is the anagram of team... I don't know what he's talking about." - Shaun of the Dead