Tempusfugitive.com Personal Blog

Day five Roof Done! Welcome to Champagne Friday!

Pop a cork for me. My new roof is done and perfect! Really happy with it! I know everyone thinks their child or pet is the best, but sorry Danville people, I have the best roof in the whole city. The company I choose while pricey was worth every penny. You don't always get what you pay for, but you will never get what you really want without spending enough. I was very excited when the city inspector not only approved the work but said it's some of the best he's seen in 30 years of doing his job! Now of course I will be truly happy after that first rain when I really see the new gutters at work and so on, but I have no doubts.

I have included two pics above. It's not really easy to show you, as the blog re-sizes the pictures which removes so much details. But trust me it looks great. In other good news, my fenced which is trussed up like a Christmas day turkey is still holding up. Of course if you breathe on it the wrong way I'm sure it would fall back down, but for now it allows me a day to just relax. I will do a hardware store run soon and try and work out a better fix plus fix my gate entry. Trust me I'm not a guy who loves doing things around the house. If you send me to the hardware store for home repairs, there's a 50/50 chance I might just sneak off to SFO airport and depart for a foriegn country instead. Of course I tempted to do that under any situation. Here are two other shots of my house. The first one shows my roof with the morning frost. How dare ice crystal touch my new roof! Will send a complaint note to Mother Nature. The other picture is the reverse angle of my yard. Thought I would share what the house looks at versus the view of the house.

So hopefully starting tomorrow we can leave the roof and fence obsession behind, and get back to my workout and biking obsession for those who know me. Over the weekend I will update all the other site blogs. I know excuses, but as you can see, I have good photo proof of this excuse. Until then, may all your days start frosty right.   

Day four for the new roof, Day two for the broken fence!

Hi everyone going to keep this short as in a near coma. Was a very busy day. Woke after an entire night of 60-70mph winds and found to spite all my efforts the fence in the four panel section was now down, actually if not for my efforts it would be toothpicks, but it held enough to repair. But I'm out of heavy repair items, I had nothing left. So I pulled something from my two other worlds, working out and cooking. I'm not kidding. If you check out the picture, you will see my fence is now being held by a large steel shaft, which is a weight bar I had from an old weight set. The string is cooking string that I used four loops to create a stronger rope and the items in the earth holding are old BBQ skewers. My friend Chef Julien would approve in my lacing technique. Maybe there is an ultimate cooking / home DYI show that would make me a mega-star.

On the right side of the happy scale my roof is pretty much done. One minor problem with a vent tile and an inspection is planned for tomorrow, but my remodel nightmare should be over soon. Of course I must rise at 6:30am yet again to meet a super perky morning loving roofer, thus bursting into flames as the early morning light hits me. But hopefully with this done, I can get back to my focus on finding my next big step in career as well as my final big self-DYI project, which is to work with a trainer to rebuild my arms and other body muscle mass areas. This final self-sculpting will allow me the freedom to just get into a day to day regimen instead of the intense efforts I have been doing. So check out the picture of the near complete roof. I just love it. Hope tomorrow to submit final pics for the blog.

Sorry to the very boring subject matter. Hope to get back to more exciting entries, but sadly for a while beyond this project I will be trapped in Danville, So welcome to the Stepford Blog (click link for cultural reference) for a while, but will try and travel virtually by keeping in touch with friends from all over the world and besides that's what imagination is for. Until then, may your roof tiles all lie correct and flat

Day Three of new roof, Day one of Fallen Down fence

So first things first. Check out this picture of my new roof! (note 2 MG) Today they finished putting all the composite shingles on, which means no more small earthquakes in the house from people bouncing around above my head, and hung the new gutters. The only bad thing about such a great looking roof is that I will have to paint the house to make it all look new, and don't look forward to that project. I'm already near nervous breakdown from this project, can wait a while for the next one.

But just as I was enjoying the final touches of the roof, we had really strong winds all day, and a four panel section of my fence went down. Great, sigh! One thing fixed, one thing broke. Now if my neighbor would actually be able to do anything handy work, three to four boards re-enforced would solve it, but I live in a country where no one does any work themselves any more.

I'm the only person left who doesn't have gardeners or pool people. So I was able to reach over the other side of the fence and put a temporary bracing board, then run over there, nail that, come back, and by total luck had two fence post fixers and did the worlds worst nailing job but got them in. Realize I'm in full spin mode. The mix of dizzy & nailing, not good. I also used an old BBQ skewer and wire to McGyver up further support.

So no clue if I will wake to it back down or I will get lucky and it will hold. Your probably saying whats the big deal, hire someone to build a new fence. Well beyond how costly it is, we have the concept of "Good Neighbor" fences, a real oxymoron. This means we share the fence with the two people on each side. So to replace each has to agree to look and cover half the cost.

For any of you in other countries think, no big deal, we love and get along with our neighbors. This is the US and California, most people have never said a word to their neighbors or are at war with them. Just watch a few minutes of these People Court type shows and you will understand.

So sorry, don't mean to have a pitty party, but the funny part is since being back it has been crazy and I have been told now by four doctors to avoid stress. Yep that's going right on plan. :)

But in the scheme of things, it's all good in the hood. Hope where ever you are it's the same.

Raindrops keep falling on my head...

Hey everyone, sorry AGAIN about the lack of updates. But my last trip was so busy. It was a very unusual Christmas trip. There was no 14th Amsterdam Christmas party which was a major let down. I hope to have makeup party sometime in the future. Right now it's hard to plan anything, but I think it's a safe bet that my first trip out of the country wouldnt be until April at least.

During this past trip I had a recurrence of my neuritis, which had me dizzy and feeling VERY off since Thanksgiving. So a lot of the trips between the Chinese & Western doctor. Lucky the Western doctor found a mix of medicines that can put it at bay, but I'm working through various doctors here to try and find the root cause and a better treatment.

So this is my excuse to why no updates. That and I came home and ran into major house troubles. We had a major storm here, and we have always had animal problems with the roof. So the 2nd day into the rain I found two major leaks. If you ever had water damage you know how bad this can ruin the ceiling and other items.

So this became a MAJOR must solve problem. So as we speak I have people running around on top of my new and VERY costly roof. To put it in perspective, you could buy two cars for the roof cost. If you take a look at this first picture you can see the area where the damage was and my old crappy wooden shake roof.

This next shot shows the beginning of my new roof. I'm going with a roof which is called a composite. This is supposed to last for 50 years. The wooden ones last 15 years, mine only made it 13 thanks to animals and the environment. My new roof will be very animal proof, so really happy about that. I also got a solar tube, which allows natural light to come down from the ceiling and then light up this very dark hallway. Very cool.

So it's killing me to get up to meet them at 7am-5pm. I'm so not a day person, no shock to the people who know me. I like to go to bed around 2am-3am, so 7am would be fine if that's when I was going to sleep. Also the massive amount of noise when they do this is quite nerve shaking. Ironically the doctors number one thing they want from me is to not be stressed. Well as you see that's going well.

But to spite it all in five days I will have a killer new roof, raised the value of my house, and finally peace of mind that the entire forest of animals won't be waking me out of bed nor will it be raining inside. So I will do my best to show you the progress as it occurs.

Until then keep warm and dry.

The world has World Cup fever, the US seems to have at best a cold..

Tonight I'm in the Post Bar waiting for a friend. The bar is slowly filling for the England vs. Portugal match. Filled with many people from around the planet, minus one group, Americans, sans me, but I'm not sure I quite qualify as an American at this point, given our current government, you just never know.

Clearly the US just doesn't get it. Now many a better person has analyzed why this is the case, but here's my two cent version.

I believe it just comes down to our fast food focus. Football i.e. Soccer is too much about skill and not about scoring. This goes against our need to see that perfect American mix of violence and scoring.

It's a shame. It's not called the beautiful game for nothing. Maybe one day, we will embrace this global event, and develop a team worthy of winning it.

Until then American can waste its focus on lame sports like baseball and basketball, unless when Jordan was playing and I must admit I so enjoyed seeing the Dallas Mavericks punk out, that was a true TIVO moment.

So for now, peace out and may Italy win the cup.