johnridley | Weekend and this morning

I intended to get a lot done this weekend, but only IMO about half succeeded. I remembered that we had an old interior door lurking in the rafters of the garage, left over from when we redid the upstairs, so I saved myself a trip to Lowes to buy a new door for the new room. It opens on the wrong side, but I don't care that much, and we'll move it elsewhere when we build another room. I didn't get it hung but I got the opening resized and drywalled, which was the critical thing, so I can finish mudding.

It probably would have been a bad idea to drive anywhere with the trailer and minivan yesterday anyway; it was freezing-raining all day.

I finished up the last of an old 5-gal bucket of the DIY 'drys rather than cures' drywall mud on Saturday, and on Sunday finally took the plunge and mixed up a small batch of the 'cures in 90 minutes' stuff; many people had been telling me that I was missing out by not using it. I can see that it's better as far as applying it, and it does much better when it comes to gap filling, etc. But of course, you can't stop if you get hungry/etc, work called and there was a problem with electronic filing that I had to delay fixing, and the last few cups of it set up before I finished with it. I did wind up mixing a larger batch than I intended to.

I guess I'll keep using it, but I think there's still a place for the 'dries, not cures' stuff - especially when wandering around looking for small imperfections on the final coat.

I also looked at projection screens online. I wound up ordering a 100" diagonal 16:9 screen from Newegg. The reviews all say that the retract mechanism is horrible, hard to work and it breaks easily, but nobody minds the screen itself, and I don't really ever plan to retract it, and the thing was < $100 shipped UPS 3-day. I would have gotten a fixed screen but they seem hard to find except in the high end (> $1000) range. I also looked at Screen Goo but I don't really have an entirely flat surface, and I don't trust myself to do this well and be able to keep it clean and unmarred by the cats and other beasts in the house. The screen I got is apparently just held on the roll with sticky tape (thus the bad reviews) so I may decide to just mount the screen rather than the roll.

The kids and I watched some Mythbusters, T caught up on Torchwood and rewatched some Doctor Who (L had already watched the whole Torchwood season), and we all capped it with Moonraker. I didn't think I'd seen Moonraker before, but now I'm sure I have, probably more than once, and I was just repressing the memory.

I couldn't resist hollering at one point "Quick, turn the gravity back on! The zero-G is destroying the effects budget!" I also liked how a little glass docking tube clamped on the front of the space shuttle can hold it against a full G of outward thrust.

I finally had to set up an account on the Mythbusters fan site so I could bitch about the Hindenburg episode. I stated that I never heard of anyone saying that the hydrogen had no part to play in the thing, that it was all the skin (this is what they said and tested); rather I said I thought that the myth was that the skin (conductive, flammable, not properly grounded, spark caused it to catch fire, possibly augmented by leaked hydrogen from the internal bladders) was the primary cause of the fire. Let's face it, I don't care if your skin is made of asbestos, if you get a fire on the surface that breaches through to the hydrogen, you're going down. The question is, what caused the fire? Several people who could string sentences together agreed; we may see a revisit.

The trees right now are beautiful; they have a heavy coat of ice.

There were a lot of branches down in the road on my way in, and I stopped three times to move branches out of the road, one big enough to obstruct the whole road. Obviously not a problem for the bike, but some of them went far enough across the road, and there was ice in places, so that if someone in a car weren't paying attention I could see them going off the road.

The ice on the road itself actually wasn't too bad. I probably would have even driven my car on it.