First, as promised, here are the pictures from my first day at Cal Poly Pomona, now that I have the photo gallery module all setup.
Next, we've had a few new-ish things happen around the house over the last week or so, though I think now the big changes are coming to an end.
First, Dad and Greg and I tore down the patio cover last Saturday because it was getting really old and we needed the open access to the house for texture coating and painting. It's amazingly easier to tear something like that down than it is to put it up. The three of us collectively probably only spent about six hours on it, whereas I'm sure it took weeks and weeks of our time to put it up in the first place. That was a long time ago, though. My dad first built it almost all by himself in the late 80's, and then we rebuilt part of the inside structure around '98 or '99, replacing lots of nails with screws and the broken wood lattice with plastic stuff. It's lasted that long, and it was still pretty structurally sound, but it had termites in a lot of places, and so it had to go. It was pretty fun to take it down, actually.
I managed to drop a 4-by-8 on my toe though, which was definitely not the most fun thing that has ever happened to me. Nothing broke, though it wouldn't surprise me if something was fractured. I fractured my big toe once on a rope swing (actually, it was on a railroad tie underneath the rope swing), and all they did was wrap it against the adjacent toe to let it heal. Most of the hurt this time was skin-level, so we just cleaned it up and put salve and a few band-aids on it, wrapped it in medical tape, and let it heal. It's fine now, only a week later. I'm just pretty surprised that a 10-foot 4-by-8 didn't cause more damage than that, even though it only fell about two inches.
We also got a new dishwasher, after probably 10 years at least of having a non-functional one. We'd just done dishes by hand for all that time, because it's not that much harder, and dishwashers are expensive. We just used it for a drying rack. This new one is pretty awesome though. I'm going to have to get used to putting dishes in it without getting them totally clean first.
Finally, this Saturday, the crew that was here finished the texture coating and re-painting. There was a complication with the actual color, which for some reason ended up being lighter than we'd all anticipated. The problem is that the paint itself has a very special chemical makeup to make it especially resistant to heat and easy to clean, and so it's not your average Behr paint from Home Depot. Returning it wasn't an option, and neither was darkening it. But it ended up being fine, and everyone likes it. It's a nice modern-ish green color, as opposed to the faded light blue we had before for the last 15 years.
On a different front, we moved into a new office building at work this past week. The business owners (my bosses) have been preparing it since last November or something like that, doing all kinds of permits and floor plans and furniture ordering and more administration than two guys can handle easily (which is why it took so long). It's an enormous improvement over the place we were before though, which was sub-leasing about 500 square feet from the property managers of a large shopping center. Here are some pictures of that.
That's it for now. I need to finish the last bit of homework for next week of school.