Monthly Archives: November 2006

• I’m hard pressed to name an album in our house that’s gotten more spins in the last 6 months than ‘Meltdown‘ by Justin Roberts. Thankfully, in the world of kids tunes, it could be a lot, lot, lot worse. Which is why I’ll have no problems dancing both with and like a 3-year old at the Cedar on Saturday as the JRB comes through town. If you don’t have kids, borrow some. It’ll be worth it. [Dec2]
• Indie crafts more you thing? You’re in luck, because the No Coast Craft-o-Rama one day spectacular is scheduled for Saturday at the Midtown Global Market. Yep, you heard me. 80 or so independent crafters selling their handmades in a building stuffed full of tamales and Jamaican patties. What’s not to love? [Dec2]
• For now I’m telling myself I’ll be going to go to the paint store on Sunday to buy the paint for Operation Trim Work, but I’m fairly certain I’ll be drinking beer and watching at least the first half of the Bears/Vikes debacle instead. Here’s hoping they have Grossman mic’d up so we can hear his trash talking. [Dec3]

I think that’s it. Should be doable.

The holiday season is officially underway and that can only mean one thing: that I’d be too busy studying the details of the various Black Friday ads to notice that when I unplugged the server and moved it to a different room, I didn’t plug it back in correctly. Kudos to all you readers who wrote to bitch that the site was down, it’s heartwarming to hear that you still find it worthwhile to come back and make sure I’m not dead or something.
Anywho, I’ve been doing some painting around the new house. (Figure juniorette is 2 months old, it’s probably time to get her nursery in order.) I’ve got one more coat to go on the walls, which means it’s time to tackle the 1000 linear feet of putzy trim work that’s left. Unfortunately that involves painting a light color over a dark color, which means it’s going to be a ton of coats and is going to take me forever and even when I’m done it probably won’t look very good because I’m a clown of a painter. It’s bad enough that I’ve already made a few calls and I’m starting to get bids on having someone come in and do it for me. Of course the first bid came in and it’s super effing expensive, which makes sense in a way, because – as the dude explained – it’s a light color over a dark color and it’ll take him a ton of coats. Doy.
So now I’m trying to have the Hoffmonian conversation with myself whereby I determine what my own time is worth and factor that into deciding if I should hire it out. In other words, if I determine my time is worth $20/hour, and it’ll take me 30 hours to do the painting, any bid under $600 should be deemed acceptable to me. Seems reasonable, right? That’s because it is, right up until the point where I start thinking “$600 dollars?! I could buy all new high buck brushes and tons of that criminally expensive blue tape and paint it myself for way less than that!” You’ll note that that dismissal did not include a value for the aforementioned “cost of personal time” variable. It never does for me. I’m thinking that means I value my own time at $1/hr. I was going to say $0, but that sounds so pathetic, I had to go with $1.
Long story short, I’m thinking it’s back to a Dave special. But at least I’ll get some new brushes out of the deal. And a pink room.