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two different tradesmen
Thursday, December 20 2018
I'm gradually becoming more comfortable with the Angular Javascript framework (not to be confused, confusingly, with AngularJS, which I worked with back in 2014), which has seemed like a lot of trouble for dubious advantages. Yesterday, for example, I'd been cursing Angular for not allowing me to read the "checked" attribute of a checkbox input tag. But then I'd realized that the framework had automated the whole process of connecting an object to a form wherever I'd used the ngModel attribute (or whatever it is called). So instead of doing what I used to have to do with vanilla Javascript, which was to use different methods to read different forms of INPUTs, I could just read the object connected to the form and all the INPUTs (and even SELECTS) could be read the same way. In that case, Angular was actually fixing a deep-seated problem with HTML forms I'd been working around for years. It would be nice if all the trouble of learning it means there are other stupid things I no longer had to do.
It being Thursday, I wanted to treat myself to lunch out today, so I placed an internet order at the Wildflower Café, the vegan burger place. Just after that, I saw an email from Gretchen freaking out that she hadn't taken into account the gas line that needs to be run to the kitchen island for the new gas stove that will be there. Now, she'd just learned, the gas provider wouldn't be able to run the line until mid-January. I didn't have any solution for that, but I asked her to ask the gas people next time she talked to them if it would be possible for me to run the gas lines through the structure of the house and have them just deal with the ends. Unusually, Gretchen wasn't just giving up and telling me to do the hookup. She knows I've never hooked up gas and that when things go badly with gas, they go very badly indeed.
The Wildflower Café is a weird place. It's not just that it's entirely vegan and appears to be run by teenagers in their first week with a real job. It also feels a little like I've just walked in on a business meeting every time I go there (maybe that's just because one time I actually did). Today I'd ordered the bratwurst with all the fixin's (including sauerkraut and jalapeños). It was pretty good, though a little smaller than I would've hoped.
I left work at 4:30pm. A light rain had started falling, and I wanted to get home before forecasted heavy rains (and then strong winds) got going. When I got back home, the kitchen and dining room were full of all the cabinets to be installed in our kitchen remodel. To get around, one was restricted to a few narrow aisles. Only one cabinet installer was there, and his name was Colin. He was an older guy, with a shaggy mane of grey hair. Judging from his accent, he was from England somewhere. I decided he was alright shortly into the conversation when he said something dismissive about Baby Jesus Day. It turned out that he was also an atheist. A guy who does cabinet installations has to have a lot of skills: electrical, plumbing, and how to do carpentry finishing. Still, Colin (and Gretchen) had overlooked something that I immediately pointed out: that the new oven (which will be in a separate location from the stove) will also need a gas line, something Colin had just abandoned in the new carpentry.
But I couldn't chit-chat. I had to put a tarp on the damaged solar panel. I didn't want the other glass panels blowing off and I didn't want the coming torrential rains to get into the now-exposed insides of the panel, which wasn't really designed to be get wet.
In addition to Colin and his cabinet installation project, we'd been visited by another tradesman today. (Since I do so much of this sort of work, it's rare for us to have even one tradesman working in our house. We're nothing like "the Fussies," in "that 80s house" across the road, which seems to always have contractors there working on something.) He'd come from DishNet to install our new DVR ("the Hopper"), which also required that he climb up on the solar deck and install a new satellite dish. Gretchen was amazed by all the features on the DVR, some of which took advantage of the internet connection to stream on-demand movies. The installer guy had been bemused by our slow 2.6 megabit/second connection speed, but it turned out that this was good enough to stream high-definition movies. This had been impossible with the Roku technology we'd used ten years ago. But for years now I've been able to stream high-definition pirated movies (obtained using Bittorrent) from a virtual server I control somewhere on the internet, so I knew it was theoretically possible. The upshot of all this was that Gretchen was delighted, because she kind of hates the Kodi-based media server I've set up, which requires her to tell me what she wants so I can pirate the movies and teevee shows she wants to see. We'll still have to use that for some things, such as HBO and other premium television, but for trashy old movies on demand, this new DVR makes it all easy.
We ended up watching one such trashy movie, Bad Words starring Jason Bateman and some adorable Indian kid with huge dark eyes. The improbable plot involves a 40 year old man (Bateman) exploiting a loophole to compete in spelling bees against children. There's also a journalist character, a woman who never wears pants and who seems to enjoy hate-fucking the Bateman character. And then there's that adorable Indian kid, whose seeming warm-hearted persistence eventually penetrates Bateman's shell of assholishness. Bad Words has a lot of problems, most of which take the form of attempts at quirkiness that land as
uncalled-for cruelty. (This is particularly true of a scene involving a lobster.) But somehow I watched nearly all of it.
My last act this evening was to route the narrow quarter-inch copper water line from where it starts under the slop sink in the mudroom to the location in the kitchen where the refrigerator will end up. To get it there, I used my tiny camera-on-a-cable to look down through a hole in the bottom of an electrical outlet to see what I might run into in the wall. I saw some romex cable and some copper plumbing, and this helped me decide where to drill in from the side of the pocket I'd made in the wall for the back of the refrigerator. Once I had a hole, I threaded the tiny camera through that to see what might be in my way in a narrow inter-joist bay. Seeing nothing, I used the bit (which was very long) to drill through another stud in that same wall. I could then push the quarter inch copper line in and, using a large access hole up near where that pipe had to bend to enter the mudroom, I could slowly work it into its new position.
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