May 16th, 2008 by kitliz
Just for putting up with the mess around here (and yes, the blogroll will be back up soon) I’ll give you your cuteness overload for the day.
But first, if you’re subscribed to the DIYdiva RSS feed, make sure you update your feed using the button above!
You can thank MysteryMan and his Texas adventures for this video. I am so pissed at my life that I have yet to find and hug a baby miniture donkey, but there you have it.
May 13th, 2008 by kitliz
As promised.
The leopard broom!
Handle close-up.
MysteryMan demonstrating improper sweeping technique.
This was an experiment gone right, and thank god since it was a present for MysteryMan’s sister and I finished it the day of. MM saw this in the basement and said, “Hey, I think you could actually sell these.”
No kidding?
I’m going for a zebra print next!
May 12th, 2008 by kitliz
Previous Weight: 126
Current Weight: 124
Goal Weight: 115
Hey, so far I’ve raised $8 for Natures Nursery, which is my Weight Loss Challenge charity of choice. That is almost as exciting for me as being able to put on jeans fresh out of the dryer and not have the circulation to my legs cut off at the waistband.
This week I asked myself exactly what the point of writing about my weight-loss was. (Other than success through public self-humiliation, of course.) Blogging brings into focus that fine line between writing for yourself and writing for your readers. Most of you don’t come here to read detailed descriptions of my love-handles, you come here to see if I have succeeded in proving my father right and removing one of my fingers with a sawsall. I know this.
I feel like it’s a little untruthful though, to be all badass and confidence on your computer screen when in real life I am also an actual female, who has actual female hangups about my weight, the number of gray hairs that have taken up residence on my head, whether or not my boyfriend is going to leave me for a 19 year old who still has perky breasts. You know, the usual.
I just worry about how I look in my tool belt more than my bathing suit is all.
Aside from making a concerted effort to go to the park 3-4 times a week, my weight loss thus-far has been driven mostly by portion control. Which brings about an idea that I had, which I am surprised in this era of weight-loss products no one has invented yet.
Portion appropriate table settings.
I know that someone invented the portion plate, okay? But I’m not eating off something that has pictures of a mouse, baseball, and deck of cards on in when there is company around. Maybe not even in private. Seriously people. I’m talking about real dinnerware that looks just like my regular dinnerware, but smaller.
Like a bowl that only holds 1 cup of cereal, soup, or pasta. Plates that are only 7″ diameter. And huge water glasses that hold 16 oz worth of H20, since that’s how much I think you should drink at every meal. (Then you’ve almost hit the recommended 2L per day.)
I measured my bowls, and they hold more than 3 cups worth of food. I’ve been eating cereal out of my little 1c ramekins or coffee mugs instead.
I wouldn’t mind smaller silverware as well… only good could come from being able to shovel less food in my mouth at a time. I’m just sayin.
Before I even started the weight-loss challenge I was at TGI Friday’s and couldn’t stop bombarding MysteryMan with the effusive praise I had for their shot-glass sized desserts. $2 bite sized desserts… as opposed to their regular sized desserts, which not only contain more calories than I (should) eat in one day, but make me near comatose from sugar overload.
Now they’ve added some “Right Portion, Right Price” items to their menu. Hel-lo smart people. More places need to jump on that train.
The other thing I love are the Ben & Jerrys singles, which are just enough. I don’t need to eat a bowl of icecream the size of my head (obviously) to be happy. I’m thinking of getting little half-cup gladware containers so I can dish out my favorite Handel’s flavor (banana cream pie) into easy to-go desserts. (Only around 150 calories each.) Even if I’m not going anywhere with them besides the patio. It will definitely keep me from eating an entire pint at a time “on accident.”
Okay, okay. You’ve had enough. I made a leopard print crooked broom last week for MysteryMan’s sisters birthday, because she is totally in to animal prints. It turned out ab-fab, if I do say so myself, and I’ll post pics later today to prove it. Cause we can’t get enough of belly rolls and brooms on this website, baby.
May 9th, 2008 by kitliz
Maybe you haven’t been around here long enough to notice, but I don’t generally take on small projects. Mostly not even regular sized projects. And definitely hardly ever maintenance projects.
I like fixing and/or building things. Changing oil, cleaning filters, and making the bed are not high up on my priority list. This makes me a poor homeowner at times, and it also makes me the type of person who needs to have a cleaning service in their employ at all times.
The good angel Fran, who comes in a shovels me out of my hovel every other week, cancelled yesterday, and I made the mistake of telling her just to come on her next scheduled day. After all I’m here at home, I can do this.
Okay, and this post about is exactly why I shouldn’t do this. It’s also about plumbing.
Aside from throwing a load of laundry in the washer, I start my cleaning adventure with the bathroom. I hit all the regular spots… bath, toilet, mirror, sink.
As I’m washing the sink I notice the walls around my wall-mounted faucets are dirty so I go get a sponge and I start to wash the walls. As I’m letting the water run and washing the walls, I notice that the sink is draining poorly.
This is a lie. I’ve noticed the sink drains poorly every time I’ve brushed my teeth for the last year. This wasn’t some new 80 year old house symptom that needed to be taken care of right away. Especially because I hate dealing with plumbing. When one morning you walk into your house to find a waterfall spanning three floors of living space, you become a little gun-shy about dealing with plumbing.
I’ve mentioned this plumbing thing to MysteryMan a few times hoping he would take pity on the helpless female and come to my rescue with the Drano or whatnot. Firstly, he’s catching on to that routine. Secondly, I totally underestimated his fear of reaching under the sink and accidentally bumping into a box of tampons or some other such thing that would obviously turn him into a girl.
Which is how I found myself here:
Yeah, you saw that one coming a mile away, didn’t you?
Here’s the thing. The plumbing in my house was installed by an absolute fucking moron. I know, I know, I’m trying not to drop the f-bomb unless its absolutely necessary… and since when I think about this douchebag my face turns red and steam starts coming out of my ears… it’s absolutely necessary.
When I say “absolute fucking moron” I mean that the guy installed the water meter in my house backwards despite the arrow embossed on the entire length of the meter that clearly indicates the direction of water flow. The water company noticed this after my meter was running backwards for an entire year.
What I was hoping for, was a clog. A clog in the trap would have been easy to deal with.
No clog.
If you ignore the plumbing gunk (and may I just say, ugh), you can see in this picture that someone forgot how to use their tape measure and put the hole in this cabinet slightly too low. (Yes Guy Ramm, you half-assed construction contractor with the “I can handle the plumbing attitude,” that was you.)
I thought maybe the pressure on this pipe was pushing downward and making it hard for the water to drain. What do I know? I’m not a plumber.
Which is exactly how, while attempting to perform the singular act of cleaning my bathroom, I end up with this on my hands.
Yeah. This is my life people.
At this point the only positive thing I can say about dismantling my sink was that I found a veritable treasure trove under that cabinet, consisting of:
At this point I realize that
1.) The waste pipe in the wall is immovable, so if the slight downward angle is a the problem, there is nothing I can do about it.
2.) I don’t know shit about plumbing.
My DIY system goes something like this:
Step 1: Take something apart.
Step 2: Google it to figure out how it put it back together in proper working order.
Yes. Yes, I see the flaw in this system, evidenced by the fact that when my bathroom fixtures were located in seven distinct pieces strewn about the upstairs…. my internet connection went down.
The best I could do was clean everything out and put it back together. Previously I also noticed there was a tiny bit of water leakage from the drain into the cabinet, so I thought at the very least I may be able to rectify that.
I realized that I could fractionally adjust the angle at which the water trap sat and that this angle did slightly influence both the drainage capabilities of my sink, and the leakage from the pipes. My experimenting went something like this:
Turn on faucet, start counting
…eleven one-thousand… twelve one-thousand… thirteen one-tho…. aaannnd we have back up.
Then I check for leaks.
At 16 seconds before the sink backs up, I have constant dripping in the cabinet. With no dripping in the cabinet, I can only get around 12 seconds before backup. Still, this is an improvement from the .075 seconds it took the sink to backup before.
1.) The plumber who installed this was an idiot.
2.) The sink is positioned too close to the wall, which is why the leaking becomes an issue (the pipes are connected almost at the curve of the trap and the seal doesn’t get as tight as it should.) I need to build a new cabinet. This still doesn’t solve the drainage problem.
3.) I hate plumbing.
4.) This, this is why I don’t clean.
5.) I. Need. A. Nap.
My pipes have been snaked from the basement in the last year, and this plumbing is less than 3 years old. If anyone has any ideas about this it would be greatly appreciated.
Next time, I’ll just live in a hovel until Fran gets here.
Edit: I’m thinking. Do you think it drains poorly because the faucet is located directly over the drain?? This has to do with the cabinet that is not meant to be a bathroom cabinet and the sink positioning as well.
May 6th, 2008 by kitliz
Last week one of the fine upstanding officers of the law decided that the six mph I was driving over the speed limit was recklessly endangering the other drivers on the expressway. All one of them.
It was a slow day for crime in The City of Trees.
He gave me a pass on the speeding, but of course ticketed me for not wearing my seatbelt. I have issues with the seatbelt law, the first of which is that it voilates my nature-given right to endanger myself if I should so choose. What’t next? Knife juggling? Outlawed. Lifting heavy objects by bending from the back, not the knees? Outlawed. Eating french fries? Outlawed.
I don’t kid myself however. The state is less interested in my personal safety that it is in making an easy $90 from my blatent disregard for my own personal safety.
My second issue with the seatbelt law comes from the fact that I have what is essentially a golfball sized tumor* situated directly over my windpipe. In the exact spot that the seatbelt catches my neck, because vehicles are not designed for extra-short people. So while I actually do firmly believe in my own personal safety, I also can’t drive for more than 3 or 4 minutes with all oxygen being forcibly cut off from my brain.
I didn’t relay this information to the kind officer becase rules is rules, so when I knowingly break them I pay for them without complaint.
But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
Luckily I have a self-powered, fully-organic paper shredder in the house. And when I saw this legal notice sitting on my desk today and found myself rather annoyed at the legal system… Well, let’s just say I dealt with it accordingly.
Paper shredder, aka BubbaCat.
I shred any legal papers for free.
Each individual piece guaranteed to be coated with fast-acting paper-disolving reminicent-of-dead-fish cat saliva. No additional charge.
*It’s actually what they call a multinodular goiter. Mmmm, pretty, right? It’s genetic. Thanks Mom.
"I wear a toolbelt and go barefoot the way other girls wear Prada and heels."
