We’re in the end-run on the bathroom. We’re going to have our bed moved to the house on Friday, and we currently have an entirely gutted bathroom with no other shower in the house. We have toilets and sinks downstairs, but we have no functional shower. We lose the use of the apartment on Oct 1. Jen and I are totally cool (okay, not “totally,” but pretty okay for a couple weeks) with showering at the gym or at the hospital. However, our first houseguest arrives that week, and we’ve got guest-comfort as a consideration.

So: I’ve got a stack of tasks to do to take this studs and joists shell to “usable bathroom.” I’ve got a couple of competent contractors lined up, but I would also like to save money wherever possible. I would appreciate any wisdom from the peanut gallery on which of these tasks are hard / impossible for the casual home handyman.

Mere sympathy would also suffice. Mockery for the fact that we enthusiastically destroyed the perfectly functional, though ugly, tub can wait.

1) “Sister” the floor joists to level the foor.

The existing joists have been cut to hell and gone by previous plumbers. Instead of drilling through the boards, they notched them. This can’t be good structurally. In addition, the whole room slopes slightly. We figure that by installing a second joist face to face with the old ones we can solve both of those problems. The claim is that this is work intensive, and rather important – since everything else literally rests on the joists – but I think it’s totally do-able.

2) Re-plumb everything.

We’re gonna have to remove all the existing plumbing to sister the joists. This is fine, because the existing plumbing is a total hack job anyway. We’ve got this roll of copper pipe that meanders above the drop ceiling in the kitchen and up through the plaster / bathroom floor to feed the entire room. We’re certainly going to pay a plumber to make a straight shot up from the basement through one of the awesome access chutes (I can see from the attic to the basement at a couple of places) with real pipe and tie everything. He’ll tie that in correctly under the bathroom floor. At the same time, we’re gonna move the shower fixtures to the opposite wall, and make the existing partition wall a 3/4 wall to let air move around.

3) Shiny new electrical work.

I can totally do this part. I need a new ceiling fixture so we can have a shower light and a sink light on the same pair of 3-way switches. Then I need an additional switch to control the new vent fan, and an outlet so the ladies (and ) can blow dry their hair.

The only part of this that I haven’t done before is the vent fan. Does anyone know if I can send the output from a vent fan into the duct that comes out the back of a dryer?

4) Subfloor. Once the plumbing and electrical are in, we need the subfloor. This also strikes me as a lot of work, but totally not rocket science.

5) Shower and floor – tile. Here, we’re back in contractor-land. I want marble walls, a little sitty-bench in the corner of the shower, 1″ decorative tiles for the floor, a nice transition between the shower floor and the bathroom floor, and so on. While tile isn’t rocket science – it seems to be one of those things where your first tile job will be a *lot* worse than your 10th. Also, it’s wicked expensive to re-do. Once the floor is in, we can also re-install the toilet – which is a big thing.

Interestingly, at this point I think that the bathroom becomes usable. We’ll still have no walls … but the water delivery will work okay.

6) Walls. We’re going to put insulation in the exterior wall and then hang drywall. Our friend with a mill-work shop in Maine has offered to make us custom Wainscoting – which we are *totally* going to do. Perhaps more important, he’s offered to help us install it.

7) Vanity / sink. With walls, we can install the sink / vanity. Also pretty straightforward.

8) Ceiling. After the walls comes the ceiling.

What could be simpler? Time to get to work!

After a week during which I was actually expected to work, I find myself with four hours on a train with no constraints on my time. I think that I managed to actually achieve my goals – which were to remove one mid-level to major to-do item from my list each day. I saw five separate customers closed out and billable – which has to be some kind of personal record.

Now I’m looking at a totally adequate stretch of private time with network and power supply … and I find myself unable to summon the initiative to do anything with that time except watch Buffy or maybe sleep.

I feel that if I had anything left, I would be sad that I have nothing left. However, I can’t even muster that.

This weekend we’re gutting a bathroom, down to the studs and joists.

Yeah, Buffy time.

Gorgeous morning on the early train here. I boarded around 5:20 at the station perhaps 10 minutes from my apartment. At 9:15 I’ll get off the train in Newark, NJ and rent a car for the day. A quick drive down to New Brunswick working for Rutgers, and then back on the 6:30pm train to get home around 10:30pm.

Long day, but the train ride is comfortable.

I’ve read a bunch of stuff about our health care system. I’ve also thought about it a lot … not just in the last three months … but over the past 34 years. Being in a medical family will do that to you, or at least it did to me.

I think that none of the remaining proposals for “health care reform” address the critical, foundational issue driving our health care problem.

The problems are legion, but I think that they all pretty much devolve to the fact that “access to health care” is synonymous with “coverage under a comprehensive health insurance plan.” If this were not the case, we could address the problem without resorting to any sort of insurance. We could just give poor people money. Or vouchers. Or something similar.

Instead, we need to tinker with insurance and so on because it is nearly impossible to buy your own health care directly. Even if it were possible to get prices ahead of time and to comparison shop, nobody can afford health care at its current rates.

This is truly odd because we supposedly have a very large collective bargaining group working for us: The insurance companies.

However, it becomes clear when you think about it a bit: Insurance companies, medical provider companies, and pharmaceutical companies look at each other in this situation and say “how rich would you like to be?” The answer, naturally, is “I would like to be very, very rich.” Without any influence from actual consumers, hospitals can charge insurance companies any amount they feel like. It’ll only be felt indirectly because employers will find it harder and harder to keep up with the premiums. Insurers make money on the margin. The margin on a large amount is much larger than the margin on a small amount. Insurance companies *like* large bills. It’s just math to them.

Consider eyeglasses: You can get custom made eyeglasses in an hour or so at the mall for less than $100.

Consider Lasik. When it was new, it was insanely expensive. Now it’s down around $800 per eye, with providers charging more for the use of newer equipment.

Consider breast augmentation or reduction surgery. Same deal.

Consider an MRI. 20 year old equipment, requires a tech and a radiologist about half an hour. They billed my insurance over $1200 when I got mine. Seriously?

The real solution to lowering health care costs is to get the market re-involved on both sides. Medical care providers should post price lists. Insurers should do what my auto insurance company did and offer me some concrete benefit for going to “partner” providers. Employers who choose to offer health benefits should offer them as pre-tax dollars that can either go into insurance or into a flexible spending account. I should be able to take my insurance program with me when I leave my job.

Consumers should make up their own minds on both sides. We would very, very quickly see radical adjustments in the way the industry runs.

As to the unemployed, the impoverished, and other unfortunates – I don’t know – but it would have to help them to have prices come down and be payable in cash – no?

It seems fitting that I should mention the good things every now and again.

Work was gratifying today. We met with a long term customer who intends to renew for a fourth year. The certainty with which they treated the question – obviously they need us to keep coming back – was flattering. Also, we upgraded some software and re-ran jobs that used to fail … and now they succeed. Huzzah for science!

I had a fantastic dinner with a friend. We ate at Darlington House, decided nearly at random as we wandered around Dupont Circle after emerging from opposite ends of the same Metro stop. It’s restaurant week in DC, which is fine with me. Three course, prix-fixe at the schmancy places. Coupled with relaxed and smart conversation and a glass of a decent Argentine Malbec … it was a fine conclusion to the day.

After dinner we walked around town for a bit. Made it almost to the monuments before returning him to his hotel. Then I walked further, back past Dupont Circle – all the way to the Woodley Park Metro stop before caving to the sweaty night and riding the train back out past Bethesda.

It was a good night for watching people. In fact, it still is. I’m sitting in the hotel bar watching two groups of three, two men with a woman in the middle, flirt and strut for each other. The ones on the left are best. The guys are letting the girl punch them, and occasionally tickling her. She just went for a double-punch and smacked her glass clear across the bar.

Anyway, perhaps an early night would top of a successful day. Good night!

Okay, it’s time for some serious internet blog whining. I intend to vent. You are under no obligation to read this, much less to respond … I say it mostly to get it out of my head.

Here I shall say nothing that has not been said before
And in the art of prosidy I have no skill
I therefore have no thought that this might be of beneft to others
I wrote it only to habituate my mind.

I’ve been feeling pretty down lately. I think that it’s multi-factorial – and I suspect that like all of these episodes in my life it will resolve itself as the seasons and my fortunes start to turn.

But gah. Seriously. Meh.

First off, it’s f-ing late August. There has been no summer to speak of. Sure, we married off my brother … and bought a house. That was neat. There was also a bit of whale watching and … um … a weekend in Maine? However most of the summer seemed to involve sweating in an attic, work travel, dying cats, and writing large-ish checks to contractors.

For the first time in two years, I’m stressing about money. I know. Whine whine privilege whine … but I had managed my life to the point where I was *not* stressing about money. Bills came, bills went. The budget worked, and I took time every few months to tune it. Now I’m all “can that wait a couple of weeks so we can get paid?” I hate stressing about money.

Did I mention nursing my cat to her inevitable, bloody end over the course of two months? Did I mention making the bi-weekly decision to not end her life followed by the special one-time-only decision to end it? Because if I forgot to mention that, my whining would be incomplete. We’ve still got the cremated remains in a nice little box on the dining room table … along with about two months worth of backlog on crap that has no deadline to deal with but ought to be handled at some point.

My health is awesome, yet I feel like my body is falling apart. My knees hurt. My shoulder hurts. My skin has little thingies on it that open up and then take a few days and a band-aid to heal. Some of you have long term chronic pain. I’m whining about skin tags. I know, I know. See the header. My blog.

I have great friends. I hang out regularly with some of the cooler people I’ve ever met, and they seem to think likewise about me. I’ve grown used to the ‘imposter syndrome’ phenomenon, where I can’t really bring myself to believe my own hype. I live in fear of being found out as not really all that clever or productive … and that fear is what makes me work harder to keep it from being a reasonable fear … or at least keeps people from noticing it right-now-today.

I feel like I’m behind on a dozen things. The house in Detroit needs my attention. It needs to be emptied and sold at a loss. Downtown Detroit is not coming back any time soon, and that house isn’t going to get easier to maintain. Of course, dealing with that will require both dealing with recalcitrant family and (naturally) sweating in an attic.

Worse, I ought to be working on something … meaningful … but I don’t know what it is.

I feel this vague and morbid sense of dread when I think about the future. Me. Mr. “I’ve trained my mind and spirit to a high degree.” Mr. “gives decent advice on matters both of spirit and flesh.” I meditate. I do 120 push-ups at a stretch. I cite eastern and western philosophy. I’m working on black belt number two in between yoga practice. I’ve sponsored my own goddamn scholarship. I bring religion to the atheist club and atheism to the thanksgiving table. I play chamber music with my peers, I’m a fish and farm co-op member. I participate in an annual art retreat. Still, I find that I have no goals that extend beyond age 40 (that’s the second black belt … ), no deep passion for my work, and no hobbies that I wake up and think “god, what a cool hobby.”

I waste a lot of time on trivialities. I’m starting to think that I understand what the Dalai Lama means when he says that he considers small talk a sin.

You know what I’m looking forward to right now? Finishing this house move. I want to schedule the movers earlier rather than later, mostly because it will get the process over with sooner. I want to stack up my schedule and get kicked in the ass – win or lose – succeed or fail – but get in the game. I’m sick of waiting for other people’s schedule to determine my own. Bring it. All this week? Great. All today? Even better.

I’m fully aware that I’m the luckiest person I’ve ever met. I can’t even begin to imagine what it’s like to be someone else.

So if you’ve made it this far, then your input is solicited. I don’t need any self help crap. I’ve read it. I write it. Instead of that, expect more of me. Call me on my crap. Don’t let me get by with the same answer I gave you last year – demand more.

Yo. Out. Gonna get on a plane in 7 hours … but first perhaps … yes … a little auto-tune the news.

My father (in law) wrote a book: A Leadership Vacuum is available as softcover, e-book, and even for the Kindle.

The core message is that there is a difference between leadership and manager-ship. Leaders are distinguished by the fact that they have people who choose to follow them. You can’t appoint a leadership team – though you might elect one. Also, teams led tend to be much more effective and efficient than those that are merely managed. I haven’t spent all that much time in corporate america – but this rings true to me. Of course, some of the arguments in the book were hammered out over the dining room table.

Now that the book signing has been held, the free copies distributed to the worthy and the unworthy (including autographed copies to several of the managers who helped to generate the stories) and the embargo lifted, you are all encouraged to head to Amazon to check it out.

If you want a signed copy, I’ve got the hook up.

The Washington Post holds a neologism contest each year … asking readers to supply new meanings for common words. You are welcome to use Google to find the entire list … but a couple reduced me to uncontrolled giggles:

1. Coffee (n.), the person upon whom one coughs.

I mean … yes. Also:

4. Esplanade (v.), to attempt an explanation while drunk..

I got DSL service at the house from a company called “speakeasy”. I realized today that they had promised me a rebate of $100 after the service was all set up, but I hadn’t done anything about that. So I sent a note:

About half an hour later, I got this back:

Its past the rebate date, so I've credited the account and sent an updated invoice reflecting the credit.

Please let me know if you have any further questions or concerns about this issue and if the ticket can be closed.

Let me just say: Damn, that’s some awesome customer service right there. “You seem to have skipped the whole process with forms and stuff … so here’s the amount of money you should have gotten. Cool?”

Mad props.

For the record, hitting a cast iron tub with a sledgehammer *does* break it into pieces, and I have to imagine that the two hours of work (or so) was way better than trying to carry it out of the house intact. The tub is destroyed, no injuries were sustained, and we’ve got a pretty decent story.

That said, you have to hit the tub really damn hard. There is to be no (in the words of capital_l) ‘panty waist’ hitting.

Here’s early in the process

And, near the conclusion.