Fifteen Minutes of Delusion

OK - I've got the tile hung and grouted, and pretty much cleaned up the mess. Granted, it's not the world's greatest tile and grout job, but it's on a short wall behind the dishwasher and under a counter. This means that 1) it was really, really hard to do, all squatted down, and 2) nobody but you lucky blog readers will ever see it. For reference, here is before: and after: It will be a little while before the dishwasher is sufficiently off-gassed enough to install. In the meantime, the towels are catching the water and the new tile is keeping the wall safe from mold.

I just realized it's been over a week since I blogged. Well, there's a good reason for this - I've been busy. The kitchen repair project has taken more than a few hours of my time, and I hope to finish up tomorrow. And of course, no job is done until the blog post is written, so I'll give you the photo tour once it's done. One reason this week was so busy was because I wanted to take the girls to Sea World again on Saturday. This meant I needed to get everything I would normally do on Saturday done during the week, including the kitchen repairs. It was busy, but I succeeded. Yay, me! So Saturday morning we got up early and took off for San Antonio at around 6:30 am. It's a 4.5 hour drive, plus potty stops, so we arrived at around 11:15. I could tell already it was going to be a very busy day at the park. It was also much cooler than I expected - Weather.com forecast 75 degrees, and it hit that by the time we left in the afternoon, but the temps when we arrived w...

I wanted to post the pictures of the repaired wall and newly installed dishwasher today, but unfortunately this is still a work in progress. What follows is an update. Here is our new dishwasher, as I unpacked it Monday on the back patio and prepared to spray down all of the plastic bits with vodka. I also hooked it up here on the patio using the garden hose and a half-dozen little brass adapter doo-dads. It only leaks a little. I am grateful that I am not a plumber. We picked a model with a stainless steel tub because we figured it would take a plastic tub a lot longer to off-gas. Unfortunately, I hadn't anticipated the asphalt-based insulation that covered the thing. One smell of that stuff during the wash cycle told us it had to go. Here I am scraping it off. Not fun. We'll have to come up with some other way to insulate the tub. On Monday, we also had a mold specialist come and do an assessment. He looked at the wet drywall and thought we probably caught the leak in time to...

I took the girls to the zoo today. It's Spring Break around here, so the move was a bit reckless, but since we have season passes it was OK. Granted, if I'd actually paid money to spend 20 minutes driving the 1/4 mile between the street and the parking lot, then crowd my way through hundreds and hundreds of harried, stroller-pushing parents, I'd have been a bit upset. But the purpose of the adventure wasn't actually to see animals. No, the trip to the zoo was a ruse. The real reason we went out today was so Alyssa could go to the eye doctor, and Anna could go to the dentist. Unfortunately, Anna doesn't like to go to the dentist, and pulls out all of the fret and worry an 11-year-old Drama Queen can muster. I'm not really up for that lately, so I simply didn't tell her about the dentist. I said "We're going to the zoo," and we went. Then I told her "Alyssa has an eye doctor appointment. We need to leave the zoo at 1:00." What I didn...

Longtime readers of this blog will recall the love/hate relationship we have with our dishwasher. Well, actually it's more of a tolerate/hate kind of thing. We even named it Pawelu , which means "old, worn out, worthless." We've put up with weak wash cycles and noisy operation and a top rack that likes to fall out on a regular basis, but this week we discovered the last straw - incontinence. Pawelu is old, and now it is leaking. Fortunately, we have no cabinets to hide the water, or it may have been years before we found the problem. With Kara and our boarder Shari both very sensitive to mold, this is potentially a very serious problem. So yesterday, I went on a quest to find a new dishwasher - one with a stainless-steel tub that won't have to off-gas nearly as much as a plastic one. I found an LG model at Best Buy that fit the bill, and it will be delivered on Monday. Now, the tricky part will be trying to get it off-gassed quickly so we can install it without ca...

Thanks to everyone who played my 500th post liar's game. I'm pleased with the turnout we had this time, and amazed at how wrong everybody was. Let's discuss. By far, the most popular answer is number 3, which I suppose proves that my skill rests not in lying, but in telling the truth in such a was that nobody believes me. This answer was cited because people didn't believe: I got (almost) all A's and A minuses is college (which I did - I was a bit of a nerd that way) I wasn't flaky enough to miss a test (ha!) missing one test wouldn't pull my grade down to a B (it did) I would have been able to make up the test (which I probably could have, but my flaky 19-year old self didn't believe it could be done) The Salutatorian traditionally gives a speech, not a prayer (this is true at most schools, but I really gave the prayer - I have witnesses) In short, answer number 3 is not the lie. The second most popular guess was the story with Danny DeVito. It's t...

Don't forget - the 500th post celebration is still going strong until 8:00 pm march 10th. Read about the prize and rules here . Enter here !

Last night Alyssa and I went to the McCall Ball Father/Daughter dance at her elementary school and had a great time. Alyssa has been talking about this activity for weeks, but I wasn't completely sure how she'd handle the crowd and loud music. At first she was very put out, and we sat on the bench outside the cafeteria. Then her best friend Elissa found us, and talked Alyssa into dancing with her and her friends. After that, the ice was broken, and Alyssa danced with me, too. It was a great event - they played all of the classics: YMCA, Footloose, The Chicken Dance, Stayin' Alive, and the Electric Slide. And The Hokey Poky, of course, but that was when we were out on the bench. Elissa won one of the balloon bouquet decorations as her door prize, and she shared some balloons with Alyssa. Why I didn't frame the picture to include the balloons, I'll never know. But it's a great picture from a great evening.

Alyssa qualifies for ESY again this year - essentially summer school to ensure her skills don't regress over the break. Last year, this amounted to 30 minutes of speech therapy each week. Meh. This year, she will be getting 720 minutes a week, covering multiple subjects. 3 hours a day, four days a week. That's a big difference, and very welcome. I think it will really have an impact. And as an added bonus, she'll have a meaningful activity to keep her busy during the summer. One problem this presents is with our summer travel plans. In my delusional exuberance, I planned a nice three week vacation to include the 4th of July weekend. I thought this would probably mean missing two sessions of speech therapy, and it was a sacrifice I was willing to make. But I'm not willing to have Alyssa miss a full twenty-four hours of much needed ESY time. So our summer plans have changed. There is a two week break between the last day of school and the first day of ESY. Guess when we...

Here it is - the 500th post here at Fifteen Minutes of Delusion. To celebrate, I'm having a contest. You can find the rules here . Post your guesses on this post. And now, on to the game. 1. My lunch with Michael Dorn. For several years, I was the Utah Wing Leader for Angel Flight West, a charity flying organization that donates flights in private aircraft for people who need medical attention. Each October, the Wing Leaders would get together with the board of directors in Long Beach, California, for a Wing Leader Planning Day. The first year I attended, actor and pilot Michael Dorn was on the board. I didn't recognize him at first, but as soon as he spoke, there was no doubt who he was. Kara and I were big Star Trek fans at the time. Although we didn't have any direct interaction, we sat at the same table during lunch. I was pleased to note that he took the onions off of his sandwich, just like me. 2. My flight with Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman. One Christmas Kara and...

OK - we're almost at post 500, so it's time to set the stage for the contest. Here's the deal: For this contest, I'm going to play the Liar's Game. That's where I write four experiences from my past, but one of them is not true. Your job is to figure out which one is a lie. If you want some practice, you can look at the last time I did this game. The practice session answer is here . Now, last time I did this, I got a total of 4 guesses, while other players got dozens. Not good enough! Granted, I've made a few more blogger buddies since then, but just to make sure I get a good response, I'm gonna give something away. That's right - a real, genuine prize! Here at our house, one of our favorite things is our Mr. Coffee Cafe Motion hot cocoa maker. We use it almost daily. Perfect cocoa every time! Well, dear readers, I have an extra , and I'm going to give it away to YOU! That's right - one lucky reader in the US or Canada will get their very ...

Tragedy struck our family budget yesterday. Not the financial part of it - thank goodness. No, it was the clerical part that got pulverized. You see, we have this system where we divide our income into different categories on paper, keeping different accounts for things like food, gas, medical, etc. Then as we spend money, we record the transactions in the account book so we always know where the money has gone. It's a good system, but unfortunately what often happens is the receipts tend to collect for a week or two or three at a time before they are actually entered into the book. Life happens - what can I say? This is the situation we found ourselves in this week. Kara had a pile of receipts in her purse, and I had a wad in my left hip pocket. Unfortunately, it was in the left hip pocket of a pair of pants that went into the washing machine. Yup - the receipts got washed, and that flimsy paper the stores use didn't hold up the way a five dollar bill can. So now there's a...