Colors Named After Vegetables

Sometimes when I'm doing home improvement projects myself, I don't know my ass from my elbow. In this case, I don't know a friggin avocado from an artichoke.

Was going to take advantage of the relatively warm weather today and start to paint my shutters. After going through our usual obsessive-compulsive color speccing (I tend to be a little gay when it comes to picking colors for the house. Am worse than the wife, actually), and testing on the back side of the garage last spring we settled on Benjamin Moore color # 2141-10. Or since everybody has to be fucking Martha Stewart these days, Artichoke. But sometime between last spring, when we picked the color, and last weekend when I went to buy the paint, I transposed vegetables in my mind & went to the paint store and plunked down $75 for two gallons of Avocado paint.

So I just got things all set up today, pulled out the primer & started painting. Color looked a little bright, but since it was just the primer, and was still wet, I didn't worry that much about it. Got through the first shutter & it still looked wrong. It looked more like something I'd dip my nacho chips in, or worse yet, something I'd see after having many too many margaritas with my nachos, than something I'd want to hang on my house. So I check the top coat can & it looked pretty much the same. Then I dug out the test can from last Spring & sure enough, it was supposed to be Artichoke, not Avocado. God damn $75 down the drain because I remembered the the wrong fucking vegetable.

Now the paint store says to bring in the cans & they'll see if they can turn Avocado into Artichoke, but I figure I'll just end up with pukey looking Asparagus or something.

Globe magazine becomes Gay Lifestyles Weekly

When did the Globe magazine turn into The Advocate?
(Not that there is anything wrong with that.)

Lately it seems almost every feature in the Globe magazine focuses on a gay couple. This week's issue is the home design issue, and the lead story focuses on Marty Layne and her partner, Patty Bird's new kitchen/living area. Last week, the story was about couples overloaded with mortgage debt, and sure enough the opening of the story featured Gregory Truman and his 56-year-old husband. A few weeks ago, I remember some story on schools, and one of the features was on a gay couple choosing a school for their kid. The "Coupling" column is just as often about a gay couple as a straight couple.

Now let me preface this by saying that I could care less about gay marriage at this point. When it first came up, it did seem overreaching to me. Why not settle for "domestic partnership" or something, rather than pushing for something you know is going to rile up all the right-wing lunatics, and play right into the Karl Rove playbook. But at this point, who the fuck cares! There is a lot more to worry about in this country, and I'm certainly against any right-wing efforts to amend the constitution to outlaw gay marriage.

But it is clearly obvious that the editors of the Globe magazine are going out of their way to infuse gay culture into the pages in a major way. And even though I am generally liberal, especially on social issues, I still find it strange, and a little manipulative to be reading a mainstream magazine, and find so many what seem forced instances of gay domestic bliss portrayed. It's almost like a mandate that the editors now have to include an example of a gay couple in every feature package.

Hosed again!

My wife has done it again. Heard some great and wondrous product advertised on the radio, and gone and shelled out 30 bucks for it, and left it for me to deal with it being a piece of shit.

This time it was this wondrous Liquid Lime she heard advertised on her garden god Paul Parent's show. So your lawn can be greener in two days rather than five. Never mind that our lawn is half dirt anyways. Of course it's obvious to me and anyone with a cynical bone in their body that behind every product hyped on any radio talk show is some type of payola deal.

So the stuff comes in this jug, with this little flimsy hose end adapter. The directions on the jug are completely unintelligible. Sort of tells you what area it should cover, but makes no mention of how the "convenient hose end adapter" works or how much to spray in any one place. And the adapter is a complete piece of shit. It doesn't even have a full set of hose threads to hold it on the hose. Just these little grooves, that barely hold it, even if you don't turn the water on or move the thing around at all. Turn the water on and it squirts out the back end all over you. After about a dozen tries, I finally got it to hold and not leak too much. I very cautiously made it through about half the back lawn, and then the piece of shit adapter let loose and soaked me all over. And it hadn't even used barely any of the stuff in the jug, so it doesn't seem like it was even mixing right.

I have no idea if the product in the jug is any good or not. Of course the wife will tell me to go spend another 30 bucks on a garden sprayer and apply it that way, but the fact that they would sell the shit as "just attach to your hose and spray" when you can't even get it to stay attached to your fucking hose, makes it more likely it will just be returned to the store. Actually it will probably end up stuck in the corner of the garage with all the other useless crap we've bought that doesn't work.

Contractors Suck

Our house is a money pit, and a magnet for bad contractors. We've owned it for about eight years. Put about as much money into it as we originally paid for it, and still aren't finished. We've hired at least two of the worst contractors in the Boston area, had to threaten to sue one in order to get enough money back to fix all the shit he fucked up. And now that we finally have gotten the fat fuck to give us some money back, we now have to find someone that we can trust to do the next phase of the job. Of course now we don't trust ANYONE.

The next phase involves reshingling the entire house. Over the last couple weeks, I've gotten quotes and time estimates from several contractors. One estimates that the job will take two weeks. Another estimates that the job will take three months. Now what am I supposed to do with that fucking information. Two weeks sounds like they will ship in a whole crew of illegal aliens, who will madly rip the house apart & throw up the shingles, about as good as the fuckhead who did them the first time. Three months seems to work out to about $100 per shingle.

This is the case with everything. After getting screwed so bad the last time, I research everything to death. Every builder who comes out, I ask more or less the same questions. Every one answers them differently. Every one tells me that the guy who told me something different doesn't know what he's talking about.

What's a poor homeowner to do, but learn how to do everything himself, so he doesn't have to live at the mercy of these assholes.

Age of Misinformation

I have fits every time I try to research anything online. Do enough research and you'll find 10 different answers to whatever the question you have is. You'll end up more confused than when you started. We've been doing a lot of renovation work on our house recently. Nothing is more maddening. You can't get a definitive answer on anything. Who are all these bogus "experts" anyways.

Here are two simple remodeling questions I'm trying to get a definitive answer to online:

Can I use a solid stain over paint?

Answer 1a: Cabot tech support says I can use a solid stain over paint with no problem (no need to strip first) and they say the stain should last longer than the paint.

Answer 1b: If you cannot get all the paint off, sand off as much as practical and then apply two thin coats of A SOLID color latex stain. it can peel, but will resist pealing more than paint will.

Answer 2a: You can always stain or paint over a stain, but you can never stain over paint.

Answer 2b: You cannot stain over paint.

If we want to reside our house with cedar shingles, is it better to use red cedar or white cedar?

Answer 1: Red cedar is a much better product because it contains all vertical grains. The Easter white cedar has mixed grains and is more prone to cupping.

Answer 2: White Cedar is the best material to make shingles.

I really shouldn't pick on the internet, because the same thing can be said of live contractors. I've probably talked with at least ten different contractors, and I don't think I've gotten the same answer out of any of them. Someday I'll do a whole post on remodeling and contractors. Heck, with what we've been through the past two years, I could do a whole blog on contractors sucking. I just can't get started on it, because it makes me very ill.