Hi Ho,<\/p>\n
Zack has a friend named Derek who got this idea last weekend. He thought
we should clean, insulate, sheetrock, and paint our garage. He was most
enthusiastic and offered his services, so I couldn’t say no. Last weekend
we rented one of those big 20 yard dumpsters and started deleting old junk
out of the garage (deleting is the engineering term for disposing). Much
of the junk was from Zack and Derek’s SUV project last year (disassemble a
rolled Blazer and sell the parts on the Internet … they sold a few things,
but we had plenty of parts left). Many trips to Menards and Home Depot
later, we now have a spiffy new garage.<\/p>\n
It looks pretty cool. Bright white paint on walls and ceiling and a still
wet coat of fancy dark blue epoxy garage floor paint. Instructions say we
can walk on it in a day, move stuff back in in 3 days, then allow the cars
back in in a week. I’m composing this in our living room surrounded by
heaps of garage stuff, with the sweet smell of toxic fresh paint and the
sound of a massive jet-engine type heater keeping the garage warm. We have
a bunch of stuff semi-tarped on the driveway, so as long as it doesn’t rain
too hard or the Halloween pranksters don’t visit us, we can probably last a
few more days.<\/p>\n
Zack got his friend at the local sign store to print up some large stencils
of his ‘Winter Systems’ logo (what he calls his car audio work), so he can
paint that in silver on the garage floor. He also got a stencil with the
work ‘Supra’, which is his current dream car (they don’t make them anymore,
but it is just a bit more affordable then a McLaren F1). Seems goofy to put
the name of a car we don’t have on our garage floor, but sometimes dreams
can be a bit goofy. He puts his ‘Winter Systems’ logo on most of the cars
he works on, and is now starting to print it on shirts. We have a big one
on the back window of our white car. The guys at work think I’m about to
retire from IBM and start some sort of new secret ‘Winter Systems’ business.<\/p>\n
Nick is getting to be a better driver. Laurie and I share the duties of
getting up with him at 6:30 am, to get to his 7 am calculus class. He gets
to drive. It is a good time for beginner drivers since you aren’t that
many people driving that time of day. He and I practiced parallel parking
a few days ago. We hope to get him to take the drivers test sometime
before he turns 30.<\/p>\n
Since we had the dumpster, we decided to also delete the basketball pole and
backboard. Various large boys have hung off of it in a manly fashion, so
it doesn’t stand up very straight anymore. Not many players in our house
anyway, so it was time to come down. We put it up when Donna and Johnny
were vising us for the boys x-th birthday (x is somewhere between 3 and 10).
We wanted to surprised them, so Johnny and I pretended to put up a light
pole, then on their birthday, we surprised them and turned it into a
basketball hoop. When Johnny builds something, he builds it very sturdy.
I had forgotten this until I took a afternoon off and started trying to dig
the cement footing for this pole out of the ground. Hours later I got to
the bottom of it and tilted it over, then was faced with the challenge of
getting a 2 foot by 2.5 foot chunk of cement out of this 3 foot hole and
into the dumpster. It was the sort of challenge we engineers live for!
By the time the boys got home from school, I had it out of the ground and
next to the dumpster. I might have engineered a way to get it up into the
dumpster by myself also, but sometimes things go a bit quick with a little
brute (twin 18 year old) force \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n
Bruce<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hi Ho, Zack has a friend named Derek who got this idea last weekend. He thoughtwe should clean, insulate, sheetrock, and paint our garage. He was mostenthusiastic and offered his services, so I couldn’t say no. Last weekendwe rented one of those big 20 yard dumpsters and started deleting old junkout of the garage (deleting…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucewinter.net\/photos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucewinter.net\/photos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucewinter.net\/photos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucewinter.net\/photos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucewinter.net\/photos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brucewinter.net\/photos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1951,"href":"https:\/\/brucewinter.net\/photos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207\/revisions\/1951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucewinter.net\/photos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucewinter.net\/photos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucewinter.net\/photos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}