Memories

The decluttering fairy has worked her magic again. I decided to do something about the box of photo albums and scrapbooks gathering dust in the basement. I don't look at them very often, and when I move again, I don't want to take that much stuff. So I spent the last two weekends turning a two-foot-high stack of albums into a 2" stack of photos. I am throwing out 90% of the photos, scanning a representative sample, and keeping a select few for non-digital viewing. If you are a collector, this news will give you heart palpitations, and I apologize for that, but it's turned out to be a delightful project. The photos span my life age 0-31, when digital cameras became commonplace. It reminded me of many people who were treasured friends during a time when our lives intersected. I have lost touch with many of them, but that doesn't negate all the wonderful experiences we had.

A few of memories, in reverse chronological order...

One of the biggest Star Trek conventions is held in Las Vegas each year. in 2007, I attended with Andrew (my new boyfriend) and Tom, a friend from my research group. I didn't tell my advisor I was going, because I was scheduled to take my physics qualifying exam the week after I returned and I didn't want him to think I wasn't serious about studying.

My cousin S got married in one of Liberace's houses, and the dress code was something like film star. I chose to come as a 1920's film star.

A momento of the year I worked as a chef. It's the hardest physical labor I've ever done, and they paid me a whopping $7.25 per hour. In comparison, I thought my physics graduate school stipend of $18k annual was a king's ransom. I would never return to professional cooking, but I am still pleased with how confident I am in the kitchen as a result.

During high school, I studied abroad in Germany. At the end of the year, my parents and brother came to visit. Here, my host father introduces my mother to many European liquors. My brother was a junior in high school, so I vaguely remember him being continually annoyed with being away from his friends and wanting to eat a lot of McDonald's. This is a far cry from his current life.

 I lived with three families during my year in Braunschweig, but my favorite was the W Family. They tolerated my vegetarianism,although my host father repeatedly admonished me that "Vom Schwein kommt die Kraft", i.e. strength comes from eating pork.

The first day of school. My brother broke his arm a lot. This was probably fourth grade for me, and was the last year we lived in Illinois before moving to Georgia, then Ohio. Boy, we were both really blond back then.

A very long story about a new floor

The real headline on this post ought to read, "I hired someone to do work on my house!" Because, for basically the first time ever, I paid someone to fix something in my house. I have this amazing 1960's vinyl sheet flooring. When I first moved in, I started ripping it out because I thought there was hardwood under it. When I discovered that wasn't the case, I stapled down the edge and decided to deal with it later. The line of gigantic staples made this 1960's floor look even better, let me tell you.

Fast forward three years. I am convinced that when I try to sell the house in the future, a real estate agent will tell me I have to make the floor less offensive, and I decided to do it now so I could enjoy it as well. as well Furthermore, I decided that I would hire someone to do the work, because cutting flooring to exact measurements does not play to my strengths. (I am a persistent DIYer, but I am not always an accurate DIYer.)

I chose my new flooring, arranged to hire someone, and then scheduled the measurement, delivery, etc. This involved many phone calls to different subcontractors, and every time I talked to a new person, I realized that there was part of this I could do myself. I'm paying $200 to remove the old floor? Cancel it, I can do that myself. I'm paying $100 to have the materials delivered? Cancel it, I can do that too. Eventually I reduced the price by 50%, and I was only paying for installation and materials.

So, getting ready for installation, I rip out the yellow, 1960's floor and the underlayment, which is attached by approximately eleventy hundred nails that have to be pried out. This exposes the next layer, the 1950's floor...

 ...which is actually kind of beautiful and vintage but the eleventy hundred nail holes mean I can't save it. So I remove that.

Now I'm down to the subfloor covered in some black gooey tarpaper stuff. For context, subfloor is the wood underneath your main flooring (whether that is carpet or hardwood or vinyl flooring). It's just there to support your floor, and therefore is not pretty. It's usually made of plywood these days, but when my house was built, subfloor was made of actual wood boards.

I'm ready for the installation. I arrange to work from home, move the appliances, and then the installation guy arrives to tell me that actually, he can't install the flooring I've chosen. My floor is too unstable and the new vinyl wood planks will not attach well. He does, however, tell me that the boards I have exposed are not subfloor, but actual wood flooring from the 1940's.

Quickly changing the plan, I get some quotes, find a floor refinisher, and have him refinish the softwood floor. It's got a farmhouse feel, because there are lots of sealed nail holes and different colored wood, but I'm pleased with it. It's warm looking, I was able to use what I already had instead of buying a bunch of new plastic flooring, and hopefully it will attract, rather than repel, future buyers some day.

All in all, a happy end. But hiring people turns out to be much more work than I expected. So I guess I'll keep DIYing as much as I can.