Back home again in Florida, gotta love humidity…

Aahhh, I’m home again. Big pile of laundry, shaggy lawn, no food in the house, the pool looks like crap, about a metric shit-ton of mail to go through, and I don’t feel like doing any of it. At that point I would have sold the house to anyone ‘as-is’ for about $1.89. Ugh, I wonder if I could hire a service to do all of this for me. Ok, well, grousing about it isn’t going to fix anything, so it’s time to get my happy ass in gear.

After several tele-con meetings late last Friday with the program management I was able to convince the right people that my being in Minneapolis at this point was pretty useless. So I was able to make a last minute phone call to the travel agency and move my plane tickets up a whole week! Of course it made for a mad thrash to get stuff done at work and then run back to the hotel and spend the evening getting packed for a Saturday morning flight.

At least I hopefully will never see Minneapolis ever again in my lifetime. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice place when it’s not underneath three feet of snow and the people are about the friendliest I’ve ever met. I just hate living out of a suitcase and eating in restaurants every day for weeks at a time. It sounds like the good life but it’s not. It sucks.

At the moment I’m looking forward to a five day weekend starting on Friday. I am going to be a complete and total bum. I’m going to get the pool all fixed up for beer floating. Then I’m going to fire up the smokers at least a couple of times. I haven’t done a mess of ribs in quite a while, so it’s at the top of my list at the moment to throw a rack or two in the WSM. I also have a huge piece of pork belly to get processed into bacon starting this week to go into the smoke house for a day. I might even throw some garlic, onions, and cheese in there to soak up some smoke. I can also see a pork butt going into the WSM for some pulled pork. I might even braise up a big pot roast with all the veggies on the big grill one afternoon.

Years ago mom used to do a dish that we called roast beef hash and it was awesome. She would use this super old hand operated food grinder to grind up leftover meat, potatoes, carrots, onion, etc and then fry it up. Man, I could put a huge dent into a bowl of that stuff. Well, I did some searching and found the exact same grinder on eBay and bought it! So now I love to cook up a big pot roast in the smoker or grill and then use the leftovers for smoked roast beef hash. I’ve even used the grinder to make up my own ground beef and pork. It really works pretty well for an antique. Eventually I want to try making my own sausage, but I’ll need to buy a meat stuffer to do that.

So what else is going on? Well, I’ve started looking for a small travel trailer. I found one up in Titusville that I may go look at this weekend. It’s the right size and appears to be clean, but pictures aren’t as good as seeing it in person. I also found one up in North Carolina that looks real nice and in my price range, but it’s a huge long shot. I’m in no hurry so if neither of them works out, it’s no big thing. I’ll just keep looking.

Other than that it's pretty much business as usual at the moment. No great house projects underway right now, but the back yard fence and pool enclosure re-screen are coming up fast. After that it will be the big countdown to kitchen explosion. I've got some neat ideas that I've been mulling over as to how to change it up. With this new schedule and the fact that I'm keeping the house, I can do whatever the hell I want and don't have to answer to anyone about it. So there! (Picture tongue sticking out)

Ah, who knows, this whole road show could change tomorrow and all my plans could go right out the window. But you know, that's the beauty of it. Make it up as you go along, you only get one chance at it so make it a damn good one! Hell, I might even go into work tomorrow barefoot just to see the shocked looks.

I am bored, I am bored, I am bored, etc. etc

If you were to guess that I'm bored, you would be exactly correct!

So far we have had only ONE, yes one, very little hiccup that was mildly interesting but couldn't be considered a failure. That's it? That's the whole ball of wax? All this travel, setting up, and hours upon hours of testing for ONE tiny hiccup?

Send me home. Send me home right now.

That's how work stuff has been going. Hours and hours of pure boredom. I've played hundreds of games of solitaire on my cell phone. I may have even set a new record.

Saturday I did sneak off to Mall of America and made the requisite laps around the place. My purchases? A book, a new teaball, and a new tea to try. Somebody stop me! I'm spending like a drunken sailor!

The book is titled "A Dog's Purpose" and is a very good read. I couldn't put it down and finished it by Sunday-noon. Now I'm going to have to get the sequel "A Dog's Journey". Hopefully I'll make it last a little longer.

Sunday I drove about 80 miles south to Austin, Minnesota which is the home of Hormel that are the makers of world famous Spam! Sing it with me now in your best Monty Python voice,  Spam, spam, spam!

I had visited the place when I was here before about six years ago and it was a real hoot. Unfortunately they moved it down the street from where it was and severely downsized it. What a bummer! Last time it took me two or three hours to get through it all and this time it was less than 20 minutes. Oh well, guess that will be the last time I'll be making that drive.

The upside is that I might be able to move my checkout date up by a few days and get out of here by Monday or Tuesday. For some reason this trip isn't as much fun as the last time I was here. Oh well, soldier on!

I've also spent a good bit of time perusing small used travel trailers and have found a couple prospects. If they don't get sold before I can get back to Florida, I'll go take a look. I'm looking in the 18-21 foot range which is a whole bunch smaller than the trailer we had before. Surprisingly they have all the same amenities just in a smaller package and that's ok by me. Smaller means lighter and much easier to maneuver.

The great green north??

For once I’m in Minnesota and it’s not frozen and covered in snow!! It actually does turn green in the spring! Who knew?!

Yeah, hello from Minneapolis! Well, actually a suburb called Edina and I’m working closer to Bloomington, but they’re all right in the same general area. It’s been chilly and wet since we got here but the sun is supposed to start coming out tomorrow.

The work part is surprisingly going very smoothly (of course I’ve now just jinxed it), and it’s actually quite boring, but in this game boring is a very good thing. Hopefully if it remains this way for a few days, I may be able to move up my departure date and head back. The guy who came up with me is learning fast and should be able to keep it going. Besides, if there’s trouble later on, I can always come back.

I have a ton of work waiting back in Florida. We have hundreds of hours of flight testing to get done and I would imagine that several parts of it will have to be run multiple times. My biggest concern is doing all of that in July and August when it’s so brutal hot in that plane. I would love to get as much of it done now while it’s still bearable. So getting out of here is a high priority.

I did make one super nice milestone this month. I’m now making extra principal payments on the house mortgage! It feels nice to be able to fast-track paying off the house and get that much closer to doing the RV thing. It will still take a while for the extra payments to start to make a difference but I have to start somewhere.

I also got a house renovation project completed right before I left. The faux lap siding around the front two bedroom windows had failed some years ago and was really getting bad. I was hoping to put it off until after the kitchen renovation, but that just wasn’t to be.

So last Friday I set about tearing into it to do a rebuild. Wow, it was far worse than I had thought. The faux lap siding was made out of what is known as OSB or Oriented Strand Board. OSB is made by taking wood chip pieces, gluing it all together under pressure and then planing/trimming to size. Sounds wonderful right? Well, not really. Over time if it gets wet, the wood swells and rots, the glue tends to fail, and insects just love this stuff.

Guess what I found? Rotted, swelled, and ant infested failed OSB. It was certainly a ton of fun pulling all of that disgusting mess out, not. It was so bad that I put it directly into the back of the truck and to the dump myself rather than stacking it up for the trash. I ended up stripping all the way back to the concrete block. It would have been super easy to replace the windows at that point as I essentially had half the window frame completely exposed. The problem was that I didn’t know I would be that close and I hadn’t looked into windows and couldn’t spend the time right then.

The rebuild was actually quite fast and went very well. I replaced the OSB laps with a concrete material that looks exactly like real wood. It’s impervious to water and won’t rot. Since its concrete, insects aren’t interested in it. It’s the same material that the north and south gable ends were replaced with many years ago and has held up very well. Plus, it’s cheap.

I installed a plywood backer, then a layer of tar paper, a layer of Tyvek, another layer of tar paper, then the lap siding, and it was all buttoned up. I was even able to get the exact same trim paint from Richards that was purchased years ago so it matched up exactly. Scratch one more project off the list!

So here I sit in Minneapolis where it’s raining, chilly, and I’m bored out of my skull. I have very little to do while the test is running so I figured I would do an update. I’ll very likely do several more because of the boredom. Maybe I’ll take some pictures so everyone can see what the great green north looks like.