Posts Tagged ‘condo’

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Look like a real champ

Thursday, November 24th, 2011

Ack… it’s American Thanksgiving, and the first time in over a month that I’ve felt relaxed enough to post an update to this thing.

There isn’t an awful lot of news to report on. I’ve been working like crazy on both the dancing and singing for Joseph, which opens in only a couple of weeks. It’s terribly difficult but I’m doing okay, at least when I’m not actually in the moment where we’re performing the scene. It will get to where it needs to be in time, but it’s still nervewracking. There are a lot of men and women in this show who are more “pro” than I am (or at least vastly better equipped with the necessary skills to be in the chorus of a show like this) and it’s hard not to feel like the odd man out.

Combine that with work suddenly getting extremely busy. I’d been assigned to a different project and was suddenly crunching in a way I hadn’t for months. It seems like the worst of that is over, but I should be careful about jinxing it.

The good news is that my replacement green card finally arrived. The previous one had arrived about five months earlier, but had the incorrect date of birth on it. It took longer than the average posted time (3.5 months) and I was getting quite stressed about it. When it finally arrived, everything correct this time, I was more relieved than anything else. Now my biggest dilemma is that I’m required by law to carry it with me everywhere I go, but I now have first-hand knowledge of how painful they are to replace if lost or stolen ($450 fee, the forms and biometrics appointment, and up to 6 months of waiting where you’re in a tough spot if you need to travel internationally). Conversely, the fine if you’re “caught” without it is a maximum of $100 and 30 days in jail. The jailtime wouldn’t be cool (although I can’t imagine anyone has ever had to serve such a term) and I wouldn’t want a misdemeanor on my record, but it seems absurd to me that the fine is less than a quarter of the replacement fee. I’ve decided to carry it with me in spite of what seems like poor reasoning. After all, the odds of my wallet getting lost or stolen (just recently there was a rash of personal effects stolen from improvisers at Theatresports while they were performing) are immeasurably greater than the odds of any local authorities asking to see my card. There is a huge divergence of opinion on the Internet regarding this matter. Some people carry a color photocopy in their wallet, but this is still clearly agains the law and the typical response to that is to see how effective it is if you’re pulled over carrying a photocopy of your driver’s license. I wish I had a good solution to this.

I had a little adventure in home-ownership the other day: my kitchen faucet has always been somewhat leaky, and even though I successfully repaired it back in March it recently began leaking again, even worse than it had before. Since I was evidently unable to do anything long-term to fix it, I decided to run over to Home Depot and just pony up for a new faucet. It seemed almost like poor judgment that I hadn’t done so the first time: sure, it was more expensive, but installing a new faucet is actually a pretty straightforward process, a whole lot less mysterious and error-prone than repairing a thirty-year-old existing faucet.

I estimated it would take less than an hour of work, but it wound up being over seven hours total, accounted for over an afternoon/evening and the following morning. All because I had no idea what I was getting into trying to remove the existing faucet. It’s difficult enough when you’re crammed into a 1-foot-by-2.5-foot opening underneath the cabinet, and the furthest bolt holding the sink in place is about three feet away from you, and there are two sink basins, a garbage disposal and drainage pipes blocking both your arms and vision. The nuts on these bolts were rusted in place, and the majority of my time was spent just getting them to move. I’d already bought a basin wrench to help reach the nut, but I wound up having to buy an even larger one to get sufficient leverage. I had to let them soak in WD-40 multiple times and strike them with a hammer before I could finally summon up enough strength to get them to turn, even the tiniest bit. Even after that, removing the first was a slow, laborious and painful chore. The second one – the further away of the two – proved even more difficult, though: when I finally applied enough force to free the nut, I also disconnected the bolt from whatever was holding it in place, so it would now spin freely when I tried to turn the nut. This meant the only way I could get it to move was by holding the bolt still somehow, which was nearly impossible to do.

I finally managed to get a large and strong enough pair of pliers in there with my other arm to hold the bolt steady (a feat enough in itself, as getting both my arms near the bolt with all of those obstacles was nearly impossible) while I twisted the nut off with the basin wrench. It took multiple tries and multiple bursts of strength, until I finally was able to pull the faucet out enough to jam the pliers in place from above while I twisted the nut the rest of the way off.

Even that wasn’t the end of my difficulties. After putting the new faucet in, I was dismayed to realize that the old inlet valve on the hot water had a built-in tube that didn’t match the new faucet line… and as I tried manipulating the thirty-year-old tube, it snapped off. So the next morning I needed to return to Home Depot and get a new inlet valve, which meant shutting off the water supply to the condo… of course, water still leaks from the pipes after you shut off the source, so I was dealing with the constant dripping and spilling of water as I attempted to install the new valve. I got really anxious when Elizabeth first turned the water back on and it started leaking out the end of the valve… it was already very tightly installed, and they caution you about over-tightening. Still, I tightened it some more and the leak went away, and after all that I finally have a shiny new faucet with a removable spray head that most importantly doesn’t leak and had better not for the remaining days I live in this condo.

My entire body is still sore and tender from the experience. Next to going into the crawl space it’s easily the most difficult task I’ve undertaken in this field. I was a total wreck at rehearsal that night as well, and the dirt that wouldn’t come off my hands or out from under my nails must have made me look like a real champ. At least it’s done, though, and next time if it’s going down this sort of road I’ll know to call a plumber.

Dan.

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A tangible network

Friday, April 8th, 2011

UPDATE: I forgot to post a link to this preview article for Spelling Bee, in which I am both quoted and photographed! I sound very scholarly in it.

The last few weeks have been busy, busy, busy. Most notably, Spelling Bee opened and had its first weekend of shows, and we are upon our second weekend as I write this. I was terribly exhausted by the time we opened but we put on a good show and folks are enjoying it, so you should go see it. (It looks like tonight and tomorrow are already sold out, so that’s pretty excellent.) It’s hard not to have a good time at this show!

One of the great things I get from theatre is the opportunity to work with new people, and there are some very talented and skilled people in this show that I’m very pleased to have had the privilege to perform with. Over the years as my circle of friends and colleagues has expanded the size of the community has continued to shrink, and it’s been very enriching feeling like there is a tangible network of these hard-working, dedicated people out there that I am a part of, and towards which I have been able to make a positive contribution.

Still no word about rescheduling of our annual condo meeting. Are we going to just shut down like the federal government?

In tech news, I at last received the final component for my new, home-brewn DVR system, and I’ve had it up and running for about a week now. There have been some initial glitches with its operation but in spite of those it’s lived up to expectations and is proving itself to be a vast improvement over what I had previously. I intend to document the thing in its entirety in an upcoming post.

That’s all for now,

Dan.

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Find out where it lived

Sunday, March 20th, 2011

Spelling Bee is moving along at something of a blitzkreig pace. We open April 1, a scant twelve days from today, and it feels like there’s still so much to do… we’re rehearsing most nights, though, so I’m certain we’ll get it all done. I’m starting to gain a bit of confidence with my part, but there is a ridiculous amount of random information I need to retain, even with my cheat sheets and cue cards that I’m allowed to have on stage. The cast is talented and a lot of fun to work with, and the show should be entertaining. We run all through April and tickets may be purchased online if you’re interested in seeing it.

This was a pretty good weekend for Theatresports for me. I got to emcee on Friday, which is something I’ve missed doing and enjoyed returning to. I then played on a fun team on Saturday, and while the show wasn’t as narrative-heavy as I’d like it managed to have a healthy number of charming moments that I feel good about in it. There’s a chance I’ll be able to continue doing some Theatresports while Spelling Bee is running, since Theatresports doesn’t begin until 10:30 and Spelling Bee is only a 90-minute show. I hope I can pull that off, although I know I’ll probably kill myself from exhaustion if it’s more than just a few times.

My condo board attempted to have its annual meeting this past week. Out of 101 units, we were 11 units shy of having a quorum, which was simultaneously annoying and depressing. They are going to attempt another one next month, and hopefully we’ll get enough people there to at least keep business from grinding to a complete halt. One of the women there confided in me that she believed this was the homeowners’ way of “sending a message” to the board, which pissed me off to no end, if for no better reason than one of the purposes of the annual meeting is to hold an election for new board members, and if people wanted to really send them a message then it seems the courageous thing to do would be to show up and vote a new board in rather than wasting the time and money of everyone in the association. I am frequently annoyed by both the cowardice and the attitude of entitlement that so many people in this complex display… there are plenty of things the board does that I disapprove of, but I recognize that they are volunteers doing the work that nobody else wants to do, and it baffles me the way people are willing to complain about their work without ever offering to step up themselves. At many of these meetings I’ve observed that there seems to be some kind of mental disconnect for people that keeps them for understanding that we are all paying for this, and that when we need to reschedule a board meeting, for example, the cost of mailing everyone, renting the space, having the management company attend, etc. comes out of all of our own pockets, not just the board members they want to stick it to. And then they somehow expect to win over the opinions of people like myself, when they a. refuse to show the commitment to even show up to meetings (let alone invest the time and effort that the board does), and b. make us pay for their antics. Grrr.

In more condo news, I took a crack at what was a first in home repair for me: fixing the leaky faucet in the kitchen. That faucet has been dripping on-and-off ever since I took possession, but until recently I’ve been able to get it to stop for the most part (or at least drip at a slow enough rate that I don’t notice it) by yanking the articulating handle around in some kind of mysterious, visceral routine. Over the past few weeks, though, I’d been gradually forced to acknowledge that the situation had worsened, and that the faucet was going to drip no matter what kind of mojo I worked on that lever.

I’ve been hesitant in the past to fix it for two reasons: I’ve always thought that replacing that countertop (and getting a new sink as part of that process) would be the next major upgrade I did to this condo, and – perhaps more significantly – plumbing terrifies me. Water-related repairs take a lot more effort, care and accuracy to do things correctly than many other home projects I’ve done, and the damage caused by a leak if you screw up can be enormous. And yes, fixing a leaking faucet usually only means replacing a rubber O-ring, but my particular faucet has a much more complicated repair process that requires replacement of springs, rubber stoppers, a ball chamber, etc.

I got the necessary repair kit from Home Depot, which was an adventure in itself, since I identified the several parts I needed online and confirmed on their website that they were in stock at my local warehouse, but then could only find one of the parts on the shelf. I had to go through two associates who were unable to help me find the remaining ones, and listen to both of them brush me off  when I brought up the website, claiming that it didn’t have any specific information and only a general catalogue, before I impatiently explained to them that no, these days the website told me exactly how many were in stock at each location, and that according to it there were actually sixteen of them in this very building, and that I only wanted one of them if they would be kind enough to find out for me where it lived. In the end the second guy sold me an after-market repair kit instead of looking, which I was hesitant to take because there was nothing on the packaging that said what original parts it was compatible with, although on visual inspection the contents looked like they matched well enough and there were few enough alternatives on the shelf that it was probably correct.

Doing the repair was no picnic, as there weren’t very specific instructions and the kit had multiple sets of springs and rubber seats to choose from that were all very similar and hard to compare to the old and deteriorated springs and seats. The rubber seats also didn’t fit well onto the springs, and there was nothing in the instructions that detailed how to deal with them. It took me a couple of tries to get it right, and I freaked out a little when I first turned the sink back on and it actually leaked worse than it had before, this time from the base as well as the spout. I also found some minor dripping from the pipes under the sink, which had me really worried since it was nowhere near the faucet, although it doesn’t appear to have persisted after I completed the repairs and may have just had something to do with how I was manhandling the faucet. I eventually got everything more-or-less correct and it no longer leaks, although I’ve told Elizabeth we need to be gentle with it, and I am still shining a flashlight under the sink for the next few days to make sure everything is copacetic.

Someday, I would like to get that entire counter and sink replaced. Someday.

Dan.

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Materialistic things

Saturday, October 2nd, 2010

Life has been hectic. My car got broken into two Saturdays ago while I was at Theatresports, the front passenger window smashed. It was rotten timing because it was raining and I had two guests I had to drop off in addition to Elizabeth, so all three had to cram into the back seat (since the front was covered in shattered glass) and we all had to deal with the rain coming in.

I always take care to make sure there’s nothing visible in my car that can even be remotely construed as worth stealing, and sure enough it didn’t even seem like anything got stolen, until we discovered that my $2 phone charger was missing (and not the $10 bottle of Excedrin or anything else of even marginal value)… the working theory now is that they saw the line running to my stereo and didn’t see where it ended, and imagined there might have been an iPod or something similar tucked away at the other end. In which case, lesson learned… but what scares me is that this was a truly random incident, one which I had no hope of preventing. It’s hard not to feel violated, since the cost of replacing the window doesn’t come anywhere near my insurance deductible, so the only thing you can do is drop the $300 or so on a replacement.

(I will mention, though, that it pays to call around. The first autoglass place I called said they couldn’t get any replacement windows for a car as new as mine, and that I would have to go to the dealership. The dealership near me quoted me over $400… but when I called a different dealership, they referred me to a different autoglass place that had no trouble getting the window, and came all the way from Tacoma in their van, right to my condo to do the replacement on-site, for nearly $150 less.)

In the same vein of window-trouble, I was recently having trouble with my glasses… I was having blurred vision, especially in the evenings. I kept thinking my glasses were unclean, and would obsessively clean them, only to still find my vision blurred. I suddenly got worried that perhaps the problem was with my eyes and not the glasses themselves. I booked an appointment at the optometrist as early as I could, and she (thankfully) found nothing wrong with my eyes, and discovered that the protective coating on my lenses had fragmented in a kind of a lattice pattern. She sent them to the lab to be serviced under warrantee, and so I’ve been wearing an old pair for the past week or so. I just recently got them back and them seem improved for the most part, although I still have trouble focusing my right eye in certain directions, which I think may just be a problem with the lens that I’m stuck with. Every day I give more consideration to the surgery…

It’s been an eventful couple of weeks for materialistic things. My new barbecue finally arrived, and after much frustration I have it almost entirely put together. I couldn’t assemble the side burner, though, as the valve was extremely tough to get positioned correctly and I wound up breaking the casing on it and disconnecting a couple of wires. So I attempted to contact the warrantee company and in spite of the initial setback of being given an out-of-date website and phone number I was eventually able to reach them, and they were very obliging about sending me replacement parts that should arrive in the next week or two.

The grill itself is quite sharp-looking, but heats up a lot slower than my previous one did. Here’s how it looks:

New Barbecue

Also, the company that installed my blinds sent another guy out to finish the job installing a skylight blind on my largest atrium window. It was a very custom and complicated job as the angled blinds are usually vertical, but my window is too wide for any vertically-closing blind to work. So I came up with the (rather clever, in my opinion) idea of using a horizontally-closing blind instead. It very nearly didn’t work, as the blind was drooping out of its track, and I was coming to terms with the idea that I simply wasn’t going to be able to get coverage of that window. But they finally tightened it sufficiently to get it working, and it actually looks pretty decent:

New Blinds

I finally got my hands on some photos from And Then There Were None. They are quite excellent, and I’ve added them to my album. Here are a few selections:

grabbing_vera rogers_point bitter_couch

Cannibal opened yesterday, and we are already having a lot of fun with it. It’s pretty much the same show as last year, with a few new faces and a couple of new jokes to boot.Be sure to come see it, especially if you missed last year’s production. I finally got my hands on a DVD from last year and it is a shpadoinkle show!

Dan.

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A few more quiet days

Monday, September 6th, 2010

The past couple of weeks have been a little more relaxed but I still feel tired on the whole. My quest for the ideal barbecue has been going poorly… it just seems that infrared rotisserie burners are incredibly uncommon in this year’s models, and the only ones that have them tend to be really low-quality brands that are still way overpriced for what you are getting. As the season winds down my options are only getting slimmer and slimmer as well, and my belly hungrier for the kinds of foods I would prepare on it.

Rehearsals for Cannibal start up next week, and I’m pretty jazzed about it. Last year was so much fun, and about 80% of the same cast is returning. I hope it’s received as well and with the same high level of attendance as it was last year, although I don’t know if that’s how these things work, seeing as it won’t have the novelty it did then. I hope so, though, as it’s the kind of show I could easily do for a month pretty much every year, kind of like going to summer camp.

Improv has been going pretty well, and while I’m still not as strong as I’d like to be I’m content overall with how I’m doing. My storytelling is still a bit ho-hum, I think, but I’ve had a number of pretty clever moments these past few shows that have helped make up for it. (I felt particularly jazzed by a gag I contributed last night to a scene in the style of a spaghetti western. I was desperately hunting for a prop that I could roll across the stage to simulate a tumbleweed, but all I could find were the large black stage blocks we use to simulate things like chairs and tables. It was admittedly cheap, but the audience found it hysterical when I clunkily rolled that block across the stage like a big square wheel in front of the performers, and while I can’t claim it a big win in terms of my improv skill or anything I was proud that I had the guts to take a chance on it.)

We’ve been playing King of the Hill for the past year or so, where winning teams come back the following week to defend their title against new competition. In addition to this, we’ve been encouraged to form teams and submit them to compete rather than just teaming up randomly with whoever is available. I haven’t really been a fan of it, because there’s a competitive edge to it that I find jarring with the ensemble mentality and operation, and because frankly I’m not very good at it… there are people in the ensemble who are very adept at actively pursuing teams, designing them to win, and finding ways to come back every week, and I simply am not one of them… I’m neither good at promoting myself nor comfortable with imposing on others to be on a team with me. It’s been frustrating to feel like I have to win in order to keep playing, and knowing that if I lose I might very well not get put on a team the following week just by sending in my availability, especially since priority had been given to new apprentice ensemble members. Well, this week it was announced rather unceremoniously that we are reverting back to random teams based on whoever is available, and while I don’t know what the impetus for the change was (I’m guessing that it’s in response to a dip in availability from ensemble members) I’m rather happy for it, and am hoping it lasts a while.

Everyone’s mood is improving as the light at the end of the tunnel of construction on our condo complex grows nearer. Our building is pretty much complete minus a few touch-ups; it’s nice and painted and we have new numbers on our door and everything. I finally got new blinds installed to replace the fairly cheap ones I had before. I didn’t go whole-hog but the three main ones in my living room are now cellular, top-down-bottom-up blinds, and while I didn’t spring for the cordless kind I did get them professionally installed, so I wouldn’t be voiding the warranty on my new windows or anything. It’s a real improvement having these blinds that can close from the bottom, since you can let in some light and foliage up top while still keeping your privacy down below – nice to have when you’re on the ground floor of a busy condo complex with windows that face a walking trail.

Today is (well, at this hour, more like was) Labo(u)r Day, and a welcome holiday off for me. Between improv, weddings (one last weekend, and one this weekend coming up!), social engagements, shopping for barbecues and the like there’s not a lot of “chill” time. Things are pretty good in my life right now, but I could use a few more quiet days like this.

Dan.

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