Sweet tools for the impending Zombie Apocalypse

I'm behind in catching up with my RSS feeds, so I just saw this thing from CoolTools:

For all the firefighters out there that read my blog, this is nothing new. Just your standard multipurpose tool for prying. And chopping. And slicing. And wedging. And busting various things open.

I guess if you have to have the very best to kill zombies, spring for the titanium version at $550. Your children's children will thank you for it.

Technorati Tags: CoolTools,Halligan bar,zombies

Sudden hailstorm

After assuring my wife it was too warm to hail (what do you mean hail comes from the atmosphere...which is colder...), we had a freak hailstorm for about five minutes last night. It was coming down pretty hard, and the largest segment dumped pieces sized between a quarter and a golf ball.

Luckily there seems to be no major damage except for some window pane gasket things, but I'm sure we'll have someone out to inspect our roof.

After it stopped the accumulated hailstones looked more like snow.

Technorati Tags: hail,Leander,Hill Country

Finally some action pics

I know - playing a child's guitar in my jammies with a micro-Mariachi hat wasn't actioney enough. To satisfy my rabid fans, here you go.



Living on the Greenbelt is nice! Whenever we want to bust out the firepit, I just go outside the fence and find a big log. I tried using an axe, but I've had much better luck with my reciprocating saw from Harbor Freight.



I've gone through all my demolition blades and now I have a pretty scary specialty wood-cutting blade. Itsa nice! By nice, I mean it looks nice - I haven't actually cut anything with it. But believe me - it looks like it will do the job!

Here I am sanding our deck. We rented a huge industrial sander from Home Depot, and it pretty much drove us around the deck.



It was time for another treatment of stain, and we didn't want a repeat of the original stain job (oh, the humanity!) to happen again. Last time we waited too long after we had it built and then waited until the weather was as hot as possible. It was awful. The wood was so hot the stain would not be absorbed, and it never got a good lock, or set, or whatever the term is to indicate that stain has soaked in to your wood correctly.

Now we have to decide whether or not to keep the deck or take it down and build a stone patio!

New carpet

We're finally getting our new carpet all over the house today.

I'm taking today off of work because the process may take all day. We had to move everything off the floors and out of the closets. Neither of us realized how much stuff we were storing (hoarding). This is giving us a great opportunity to collect items for a garage sale, as, literally, almost everything that used to be in carpeted rooms is now in our kitchen and garage.

Death by...Home Depot

We just spent over nine hours across two or three days in Home Depot (with some excellent customer service from Bruce, Daniel and Kent) agonizing over carpet choices. Believe me - our kids thought the agony was much worse than we did. I can make only so many laps around the store with them in the cart waving DANGER flags before they get bored.

Our current carpet is getting a little threadbare in a few places, and kids running around with juice usually isn't good for carpet. We knew we wanted a speckly carpet, as the mixture of colors hides spots very nicely, but it doesn't change the overall color too much. At first we were gung ho for Berber, which can take a lot of wear and doesn't get frazzled, but everything we saw looked like either industrial or indoor/outdoor carpet. Not what you want in the bedroom, much less the living room.

Then we looked at Frieze (free-zay, naturally). This was a good combination of long and short loops that gave a good texture to barefeet, and it looked like we could get one that held up well. The problem was that the Frieze we wanted was coming out to over $1000 more than another one we wanted.

We settled on some light-colored speckly carpet from the Plush family. Now we have to wait some amount of days before the measuring people arrive, and then a few weeks before we move all our furniture out of the house, have them install the carpet and we move everything back.

This was a grueling exercise, and hopefully we won't have to make any more decisions like this until our next house. I know more about carpet now than I thought I ever would.