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Three P.M. CDT: I’m out doing some last minute battening down — First Rain felt about 30 minutes ago.

Ike estimated windspeed-currently expecting 87 mph sustained

The predicted path has shifted West, which is bad for everybody to the East of Houston. The current track puts the center going almost directly overhead. (I’m in the 77076 zip code, North of the 610 loop, just below and to the right of the I-45 marker.) My impression is that the eastern coast is more developed, so this is not good. I think, judging by what I’ve overheard on the Weather Channel, it’s going to continue to shift West. Dammit.

I’ll continue to post for as long as I have power and tubes.

Caught my neighbor re-digging a drainage ditch that runs between our houses. I originally dug it for Allison, in a vain attempt to drain the backyard, which was flooding. Just before it topped the slab, I discovered a badly-placed landscape timber in the backyard was blocking the drainage on the other side of the house; the yard drained completely in less than 30 minutes. I’ve since refilled the ditch, which did nothing. Unfortunately, he’d already almost finished. I hope he took care of other business first. Sorry ’bout that.

…And my kitchen. Hm, maybe the living room would look good in tile.

Whatever. As long as I have a good excuse to get me one a these:

ring-bladed saw with mirrored table

I really like the ring-blade idea. Very clever.

Plus: “The Ring Blades”. Great name for a rock-n-roll band that plays wedding gigs, ne?

Yes, the plan was to make the door stand out, to proudly declare, “Here is the door!”

Instead, I get, “Warning! Tasteless crazy person lives here!”

The blue is temporary, tape masking off some trim which is colored a light apricot. I’m thinking I should have made the trim dark, and the door light. Ah well, a bad haircut grows back out, and a bad paint job can be done over.

And, you know, I live behind the door; I only have to look at it as I drive up to the house. Pfft. The neighbors can deal.

“Uncle Dave’s delicate condition.”

Finished door. Needs some touch up here and there, but nothing you can see in this pic. Glare from the in-camera flash; I’ll put up a cleaner pic later.

I intended the trim color to be a few shades darker, more like the occasional light orange bricks, such as what you can to the right of the top of the door. It’s actually pretty close, but against the dark orange, it comes off much paler.

Close up, it’s clear I’m a lousy painter. A few runs here and there, some rough edges around the masking, and a few spots where I placed the mask over the trim a bit too wide, which revealed the primer. Also, I really should have been using the roller from the very start. (I foolishly used a brush, because of the small area, but the roller leaves a vastly better texture. The brush marks, particularly from the heavy primer, are horrendous.)

Frame next, then the pillars holding the roof up.

There’s a joke about a guy whose car quits. The mechanic opens the hood and taps the engine with a ball-peen hammer. “Try it now.” The car starts right up.

“That’ll be $55, please.”

“Fifty-five bucks?”

“Yup. Five for tapping the engine with the little hammer. Fifty for knowing where to tap.”

My parents get their water from a well in the backyard. Yesterday, they had no water pressure. I went out to take a look, and tried draining the water from the pressure tank, which is the trick that worked the last time this happened. Not this time.

So this morning, they called the pump tech out.

Turns out, there’s a circuit breaker, a “reset button”, hidden on the bottom of the control box out in the garage. We had no idea it was there.

“Eighty dollars, please.”

Sigh. At least for their eighty dollars,my folks learned where to tap.

There’ve been lightning storms around here for the past week or so. Yesterday, their power was flickering on and off. That’s almost certainly what did it; the pump has a two-horsepower motor, which takes a pretty hefty starting current.

Gah. When am I going to learn? Never, ever, call the pros without checking the damn Web first.

Over the last 24 hours, I’ve met a crucial milestone:

My weight has dropped below 200 pounds. I’m at 199 +/- 1.

Best of all, I’m even on schedule.

It was my plan to photograph my scale when this happened, but unfortunately, I dropped my camera yesterday, and the shutter no longer works.

I actually saw 199.5 earlier in the week, but I got off the scale to get the camera, and when I got back on, about a minute later, I weighed 202. (My scale is a Taylor 7362. It claims to read to the nearest 1/2 lb, but in fact it, like many digital scales, is notorious for being horribly unrepeatable–in my experience, it can vary by as much as +/- 3 lbs over successive readings. Still, if I weigh myself several times during the day, I do get a reasonably consistent number.)

The 199 lb reading seems to be pretty stable, though.

I really wish I had a camera….

The other reason I wish I had a camera is that I accomplished this by pressure-washing the front of my house. The before and after shots wouldn’t be as dramatic as some I’ve seen, but noticeable nevertheless.

As far as weight loss goes, although the moment-to-moment effort involved in pressure-washing is not that large, if you do it for several hours, it adds up.

I also did some spade work. Let me explain. My front yard does not gently slope from the house to the street. Instead, it humps up in the middle, peaking about 6″ higher than the porch slab. (I plan to measure this over the weekend. ) To make it worse, the front walk is about 1.5″ lower than the porch slab. What this means is that mud washes down from the lawn and flows over the walk just where it turns to meet the porch at the front door. Once a year or so I have to get a shovel and scrape the mud off the walk, and dig out the excess from in front of the porch. That’s what I did today. I’m thinking of buying some concrete pavers to build up the walk to the level of the porch slab. There are other solutions (like, oh, say, skinning the sod off the lawn, removing about six inches of soil, grading properly, and putting the sod back, which is of course the real solution, and which will probably have to be done sooner or later), but that’s the easiest and cheapest.

I’m also probably going to dig a simple gravel-only french drain leading from the front downspout, which lets out right next to the porch, down to the sidewalk by the street,