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Or: "Me on a Black tar-papered Roof in 90 degree weather". Fun stuff.I'm still working on de-leaking the porch roof. Today it was putting on the galvanized steel drip metal. I'm up there, kneeling on a towel and nailing long sheets of metal down. (Yes, I really should just buy some knee pads, but I keep forgetting every time I go to Home Depot.) Then to keep the water from getting under the metal, and under the tar paper, I had to seal the seems with roofing tar. (Gearheads - thanks for the offer, but it was only $10 a gallon and it was right there.) The stuff is kind of cool, it comes out of the can looking exactly like chocolate pudding, same color, same texture. You goop it on, spread it smooth and then it dries black and looks & feels exactly like dry tar. Oh, but it doesn't clean up exactly like chocolate pudding - I had to scrub it off my leg (yes, I did use gloves, so my hands were clean.)

.... Anyway, black tar roof, 90 degrees and in direct sunlight. It was hot. I'd work for about 15 minutes, go down and spend 10 minutes under the swamp cooler vent drinking water, head back up and do it all over again.

.... All I know is that if the thing leaks so much as one drop next time it rains I'm gonna end up in a rubber room with a wrap-around jacket.

Ok, so one of the nice things about the wet weather is this rainbow over my garage.

.... So, you've probably heard by now that Michael Jackson is dead.  I won't comment on his impact on American music and the video scene, his personal quirks or plastic surgery.  I'm just going to comment on his impact on my back yard work today.

.... I'm guessing that one of my neighbors in the apartment complex next door is a huge Jackson fan.  All day they have been playing his music over and over and over, with their window open and loud enough for me to hear it over my drill.  I'm still feeling a little down from my cold yesterday, so I've been going in and out, getting a little bit of work done here and there.  Every time I go out the door I'm hit with Jackson's music.  I've heard "Billy Jean" at least 3 times.  Now, I'm not saying I hate his music.  There's quite a bit of it that I do like a lot.  But replaying over and over again gives me images of a 20-something girl, laying on her bed in the relative dark, holding a picture of Jackson and crying the day away listening to his music.  I could be wrong.  She or he could be cleaning the apartment or telecommuting to their job, whilst listening to it over and over.

.... The good part is that I don't hear it at all inside the house.  I may still have to clean them, but the new windows rock.

.... Started feeling it last night. Which should have, but didn't, stop me from taking a late night ride on the motorcycle.  New seat, perfect temperature outside, I couldn't resist. 

.... Summer colds suck.  I woke up this morning feeling like crap, nose all plugged up, mouth all dry.  It's past noon and I just barely got up out of bed.  I was going to work on the house today.  Put the roof back on the porch before it rains again this weekend.  But nooooooo. At least I don't have to drag my sorry butt all the way down to school to get someting together for a substitute.

.... Well, back to bed, little more rest and see if the green tea I just drank does any good.

.... I also got the seat to my foster motorcycle re-upholstered.  The old seat made the whole bike look kind of dumpy.  The leather was ripped at the seams, cushioning hanging out.  Looks a lot better and even has more padding in the seat.  Way cool.  And I only had to pay half of the cost, the bike's real father (male half of The Gearheads) paid for the other half. 

.... Overall, a great day.

...is that when they get dirty cleaning them actually helps. Old double-paned windows with broken seals don't look any better when you don't clean them, which gives you a good excuse for not bothering. My new ones, none of the crap is between the pieces of glass, so I just KNOW they would look a lot better if I cleaned them. Yeah, it was great having an excuse. But now that I spent the entire day cleaning the house, [2 loads of dishes - 4 loads of laundry - a full recycling bin of papers that were laying around], I'm just going to have to fix it so the dirty windows don't stick out like a sore thumb. Which means cleaning them. Bleah!

.... I've actually got a bit of work done on the back porch this weekend.  When I first built it I had no intention of closing it in, so the roof wasn't build waterproof.  Then I screened it in and retro-fitted some roofing to keep out the water.  Didn't work so wonderful, leaks here and there making sitting out in the rain not as much fun.  So, I tore off all the decking on the roof and I'm going to plywood, tar paper and re-deck it so it won't leak anymore.  Got it all torn apart, now just have to put it back together.

.... I also added a little art work to the inside of the porch.  It's called a Tapa Cloth.  Made from the bark of the Mulberry Tree.  At the end of last week I got together with the other 2/3 of the Triumphant Trio of the IDET program (the two I went through Master's program with).  I met them up in Layton (pronounced "Lay-n"), where Leilani lives, and we went out to dinner at this great little Italian dive called Paisano's.  Seriously, we thought about leaving as soon as we walked in (only one elderly customer there at 5:00, tacky Pizza-Hut-turned-Italian decor, sticky tables and a waitress that looked 12 and a half).  Ok, maybe 14.  Anyway, we decided to stay and were glad we did.  The food was great.  I won't go into details, just try it if you're ever in Layton. 

.... So we get back to Leilani's apartment and she had this huge painted cloth hanging on the wall, and I commented on how cool I thought it was.  Turns out she made it herself, smashed the cloth out of Mulberry tree bark into this huge piece of cloth and then hand painted it.  I think the piece she had on the wall was used in her wedding ceremony in Tonga.  So she asked me if I wanted a piece, and I said sure, figuring on a one foot square.  She pulls out this huge roll of the stuff and hacks me off a 5.5 foot by 2.5 foot piece.  Way cool.

.... I thought and thought about where to put it, realized it was just about the right size for one of the pieces of glass I harvested from the old storm doors I replaced a few years ago, and that I had a bunch of clear plastic contact paper laying around the house.  So I cleaned up the glass, taped the cloth to it, put enough contact paper on the back to keep it protected from what little weather it will get and hung it up inside the back porch.  Looks good, if I do say so myself.

Other than lay around and watch SG1?

First I finished putting in the bedroom windows.  The two windows I did today took about 3 hours to complete, about the same time as the first one took.  I learned a lot from that first one.

I still have to do the trim on the inside, but I want to let the caulking cure for a few days before I do that.  I also have to figure out how to do the trim since the windows don't fit quite the same as the old ones.

Then I started to refinish my school desk.  If you missed me mentioning it before, or maybe I didn't, one of the nice things about leaving a school that is closing down is that you get to take a bunch of stuff with you that normally would stay at the school.  Like my desk.  It's a really nice old wooden desk, built back when they were built to last.  6 drawers all together, and they even lock, all but one.  The finish is a little worn down by some 50+ years of classroom exposure, so I decided to re do it.  I got about 3/4 of the way through the sanding when I realized it's 10:00pm on a weeknight and the noise was probably annoying neighbors who have to get up for work in the morning.

3 years ago I had new windows put in the house.  All except for three in the bedroom and one in the laundry room.  I had already bought a window for the laundry room, and they wanted $600 extra for the three 2' x 2' windows on the east side of the bedroom.  So, I decided to do it myself.  Up until yesterday when I started the project, they were old 1940's single pane windows that I had covered with a couple levels of plexiglass to help insulate them.  Which meant that although they kept the heat in pretty well, they not only didn't allow me to open my windows in the summer, but they looked like hell too.  I bought three 2' x 2' double paned vinyl windows sometime this winter, and just had to wait for school to get out so I could install them. 

The first one went quite well.  The hardest part was getting the old window out, since I had sealed the plexiglass with silicone caulking it wasn't too eager to come out.  I ended up breaking the glass and demolishing the window frame.  I don't care about the frame, I'd be tossing it whether it was intact or not, but the glass is certainly a pain to clean up.  But that's ok, it went in really easy, and looks pretty good for an amateur, if I do say so myself.

It's 11:00 at night and I've been strolling around the blogosphere looking for something interesting. I found this instead;

(Found on the "On The Front Porch" blog, and just in case you're wondering if this is some sort of joke, it's not. According to Google Maps, Red House Furniture really does exist. I even went to their homepage and they had their own link to this commercial. Go figure.)

Yeah, summer has started, I haven't gone to the Chevron to see if they want to hire me, and I've got a lot of free time right now.

I don't put a lot of stock in those interenet quizzes, but I still find them fun to take and see what results I get.  So, when Jannx listed a few on his blog I took them, and then a few more random ones.  Don't worry, I won't be offended if you find them boring and just skip this post.  Hell, I won't even know if you do.  Enjoy, or not.  The choice is yours.

....If you look across the valley at the mountains, you can see why they say that the Salt Lake Valley used to be covered with the water of Lake Boneville.  There's an almost perfectly straight line across the bottom of the mountains that looks like a shore line.  Ring around the valley.

....The Great Salt Lake has no outlet, no river to drain it, and the only thing that regulates the level of the water is evaporation.  Which is why it's so salty, nowhere for the minerals to go.  All the water from the mountains coming into the Salt Lake and Utah County valleys (and I think Davis County too) ends up there.  Which is why I think Lake Bonneville is making a comeback.

....According to the Salt Lake Tribune, June has been a wet, wet month for us.  In the first 10 days we have gotten triple the amount of water we normally do, 1 1/4 times normal for the entire month.  This has to be Noah and the Ark all over again.

....Yeah, right.  We are in the desert, and triple the water means barely less than an inch.  Normal for the entire month is .77", normal for the first 10 days is a whopping .32".  We also have a regular cycle of drought and wet years, so this kind of rainfall is not abnormal for a wet year.  I don't think I'll list my house as "beach front property" yet.

....That doesn't mean I'm not tired of it.  Generally I love the rain, but it's rained almost every day for the last week or so.  And I'm supposed to be running the swamp cooler, not the furnace.  So I'm putting it out to the cosmos - stop the rain, bring back the sun and 85 degree weather. 

A couple of weeks ago Old Blue started making a scraping noise whenever I drove it. I traced the noise to the front driver side brakes, put it up on stands and tore it apart. Lo and behold, one of the springs in the brakes had broken and was dangling scraping against the drum. Yeesh, scary stuff. So I went out in search of a new spring, just to find nobody had them in stock. Well, unless I bought the entire spring set. Well, since the entire set only cost $10, I bought it. That was about a week ago, and things came up. Until today. It wasn't simply putting the spring in and reassembling, since I had to take apart the whole wheel assembly to get the drum off. That meant repacking the bearings before putting it back together. For those of you who have never packed bearings, that means getting a big gob of thick, smelly grease on the palm of your hand and smooshing the grease into the wheel bearings with the other hand. You've got to go around the whole thing, which means you get both hands completely covered with the grease. Ahhh, fun stuff. Until you have to go inside to clean off your hands and get the grease all over the door handles, soap bottle and faucet. Ah well, they all clean up. At least the brakes are as good as new, got rid of the scraping sound and even a rattling that had been previously unidentified.

.....Teacher dreams.  They usually happen in the weeks before school starts, a remnant of the nightmares between my first and second years of teaching.  Classes are completely out of control and everything I do just makes things worse.  Sometimes the principal or vice comes in and just shake their heads.  No fun, caused by the anxiety of not knowing how the new year will go.

I took this picture during the last week of school. It's been cropped, so you're not seeing the whole thing, but the object is to guess what it is.

....right after the last week of school. I've kind of neglected the household chores the last few weeks. Dishes piled up on the counter, newspapers all over the dining room table, clothes all strewn about the bedrooom floor. Ok, that last one is a constant at my house, but I usually keep the rest of the house reasonably clean. But when I got back from my meeting this morning, I looked around and thought "man, this is gross." We're talking American Slumlord Weekly gross. So I cranked up the iTunes on the computer and got to work. I won't show you the before pictures, or I just might get a full spread in the previously mentioned magazine, but here's what it looks like now:

For most of the teachers in Granite School District, summer started Friday right after school. Not so much for me. I had to get up early yesterday (Saturday) to return the stage and tablecloths we rented for graduation. I've done it every year for the last 3 years, so no big deal. But it still goes on. monday and Tuesday I'll be in meetings all morning with the Math teachers from the high school, junior highs and elementary schools that feed into that high school. It's called Vertical Teaming, I think I mentioned it in a previous post. The whole idea is for us to get togther and work on providing a cohesive learning experience for our students from elementary through high school. We did it when I was at my school out in Magna, and I found it to be very useful.

Anyway, even though I am all for it, it does mean that my week of doing nothing but watching CSI DVDs won't start until Wednesday.

At about 7:45 this evening Granite High's vice principal rang the bell signaling the end of the graduation ceremony. Thus endeth Granite High School.

The last 2 years we have held the ceremonies outside on the football field, and since we wanted to this one last time we spent the day watching the weather to see if it was going to rain, it was cloudy and threatening wetness from the very beginnning. Around 3:00 the principal, two other teachers and I went to the National Weather Service web site and checked out the most current conditions. Huge cell of rain to the west, another huge cell to the north and a bit to the east. Nothing over us and nothing to the south. And it looked like the weather was working northward. Good, but things can quickly change from south to north, so we kind of asked God to keep our ceremony dry. Well, God's got a sense of humor because it was dry as a bone. But as the principal mentioned in her speech (ad libbed) we forgot to mention wind. And there was a lot of wind. Blew down the flowers. Knocked over the flags. All fixed before the ceremony, but what we couldn't fix was the caps being blown off, the book of speeched being blown page to page, every speaker lost their place at at least one point in their speech. But nonetheless, it went off great. And I'm exausted.

The final day of 103 years of Granite High School, the second high school in the Salt Lake Valley. Channel 2 news has us closed down already, I just saw on their newscast that we closed our doors yesterday. Hmmm, maybe I should believe them and not go in today. Yeah. My principal would kill me.

Anyhoo, as of 11:30 today I will no longer be a high school teacher, I will rejoin the ranks of the junior high teacher. Which is ok with me, since at any other high school in my district teachers have a crapload of after school activities that they are all responsible for. Coach this, that club, dances, concerts and plays, oh my! Bleah! So, chapter 4 of my teaching career comes to a close, and chapter 5 starts Monday morning at 9am when all the math teachers from the elementary schools, junior highs meet with the math teachers from the high school we all feed into. It's called Vertical Teaming, and helps coordinate the skills students learn from one level to the next. I did this in chapter 2 of my career with the junior high and high school math teachers out in Magna.

I expect it will be an interesting day today. I'll let you know.

Stupidity reigns above all.  Especially for the moron in the white Honda 4 door behind me on 21st South today.  Now, considering the number of white Hondas on the road, this could be anyone, but soon you'll know if I mean you.

I was driving home around 5:00 tonight, coming up 2100 So between 11th and 13th East.  The light at 13th was out, so traffic was backed up all the way back to 11th.  It took me about 15 minutes to go the 2 blocks.  The whole time with this white Honda riding my back bumper.  I started by rolling back a little bit each time she rode up on my bumper.  Then I escalated to a roll back with flashing the backup lights.  Since she seems to have the right to follow as close as she damn well pleases, this just encouraged her to get even closer each time.  So close that all I could see out my back window was her windshield, and that was before I did any rolling back.  So I yell out the window, before even noticing her window was down also, "Do you have to ride my ass so close?"  No response except to continue following as close as before.  So I decided to limit the number of times she had to move so close to my bumper, figuring the fewer times we move the less likely she is to hit me (and maybe it'll tick her off also).  So I start letting the car in front of me get a full car length ahead, or more, before I would move up at all.  This did not agree with her plans.  She gets even closer.  So I yell out the window again "You're not going to get there any faster riding my ass!"  Still she does.  A couple moves forward and I yell it again.  Then she does something unexpected.  She pulls out her cell phone and points it at my back end as if to take a picture.  Ohhh, nooooo!  The police are gonna git me fer driving slower when tailgated.  So I pull out my camera and pretend to take a picture of her (all I got was the back seat).  Pull up a little further, she pulls up on my bumper again and then flashes her phone at me as if to say "Look, I got a picture of you!"  Again I think "and?"  I shrug my shoulder out the window to show exactly how much that concerns me, just as the car in front pulls up far enough for me to get into the left turn lane, and get my chance to turn left before she pulls up next to me so I can shrug my shoulders at her again.

I vent, therefore I am. (done with it, that is).

Division of Motor Vehicles (DMV) employees have a reputation for being surly workers.  After 54 vehicles in my lifetime, with four currently registered cars, I've spent a lot of time in lines there.  Overall their reputation is undeserved, and my latest experience there reaffirms this.

I went to register the convertible yesterday.  No big deal, except the registration expired back in July of 2008.  I knew this meant that I would have to re-register the car again in a month or so - I should have only been able to register the car until July of 2009.  The lady who was helping me commented on this, and asked me why I hadn't registered the car earlier.  When I explained that it was a classic convertible and spent the last year in the garage, she went to get her manager so that she coule bump up the registration.  That means that they pretty much forgave me the whole year between July 2008 and now and registered the car until June of 2010, at no extra cost.  SCORE!