Finished laying tiles!

Yesterday I finished cutting the tiles for the guest bathroom. For some crazy reason, I thought I could quickly cut the tiles for the entryway and tile them all at once. Of course cutting the tiles in the entryway took way longer than expected and the thinset started drying out on me before I finished with just the guest bathroom. I had to work really hard to get the thinset to spread out properly for the last few tiles in the bathroom, but I got them set. The rest of the batch of thinset was totally wasted.

Today my flight back home was 2 hours early so I had the entryway tiles laid before Michelle even got home from work. Tomorrow the thinset will be cured enough for her to grout both sections. Tonight we have to clean up the garage and start moving stuff from the bedrooms into the garage so we can paint them. Gotta keep moving when the momentum is rolling.

The carpet quote came in today, I was hoping to get a better price, but they did not come down much on price. It's the nicest carpet, but they are almost double that of the other carpets we are looking at. I think we won't end up with the really nice soft carpet, but any new carpet will be WAY better than the crap we have now.

There are some updated pics on the tiling photo album
http://picasaweb.google.com/jayson.brouchoud/TilingTheKitchen/photo#s5157436591087299458

Last of the linoleum

I finished scraping the linoleum by the front door and started the guest bathroom. I pulled the toilet and Michelle finished the last of the linoleum in the guest bathroom! Now we just have to tile the guest bathroom, front entrance, and front closet and we are finished with the tiling!

Michelle finished painting the kitchen and dining room ceiling and I finished the trim behind the stove and fridge so we finally put the kitchen back together today. I still have to finish the rest of the trim in the kitchen, but that will probably wait until after the carpet is in since we have to wait for the carpet before doing the trim in the rest of the house.

Painting

Here's the link to the painting progress. We were having some problems picking the right kitchen color, but I think we're set and will start making progress again. We need to finish the kitchen so we can put the fridge and stove back in there and stop having to eat out everyday.

http://picasaweb.google.com/jayson.brouchoud/Painting

Tiling

I have a Google Picasa web photo album of our home improvement projects. This string of projects all started because we need to replace our carpet (really badly). Since we wanted to also replace the linoleum and paint at somepoint, it only makes sense to do it now while we don't care if we spill paint on the old carpet. I also want the carpet people to butt the carpet to the new tile instead of me trying to butt the tile to the new carpet, so the tile has to go in first. Go here to see the progress on our tiling project.

http://picasaweb.google.com/jayson.brouchoud/TilingTheKitchen

Five dead after car crashes off end of private airstrip

This headline came from CNN.com; here's the link. http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/01/26/airstrip.car.crash/index.html
It's weird to say I'm glad these idiots are dead, but I am. This way the story made it into the national media and maybe some of these idiots will think twice before they use a runway for a drag strip. I think this is becoming a big issue and that people don't yet realize it's seriousness. I personally (and my now wife) were almost killed due to this same thing. I was landing at night at Anoka County (Jane's Field) just outside of Minneapolis, MN. Since it was dark out, I couldn't see the 2 cars racing towards me. They had their headlights off and were racing each other with only their running lights on. I didn't see them until I was about 50 feet above the runway. I firewalled the throttle and overflew them as I climbed back up. If I hadn't seen them, there would have been at least 4 people killed that night (not including any passengers they might have had). I called the police after I landed. Of course the racers were gone by then, but the officer said they have had similar complaints before. Hopefully the new security requirements at airports make it harder for people to gain access to airport runways. I truly hope the people who are caught for this kind of crap aren't just slapped on the wrist or charged with trespassing. It needs to be a felony for reckless behavior or something so that it doesn't become a bigger problem.

N951CC

Here are a few pics of my new airplane.




Michelle and me in front of our new airplane. It's a 1979 Cessna 182Q Skylane with GPS, digital nav/comms, and air conditioning.




First time flying my new airplane (other than the test flight).

Flight Tracking

This is pretty cool, you can track my airplane when I go flying (see the link below). It looks like it bases it's info from flight controllers. This means that I'm only tracked when I'm on an IFR flight plan, and maybe tracked when I'm on a VFR flight plan with flight following. Since I'm not currently legal, I don't file IFR even when it's severe clear. I hope to regain my currency this summer.

By the way, the last flight that was recorded (as of 19 Jan 08), was the flight on 26 Dec 07, when Maynard and Duaine flew it from Detroit to Manitowoc. They flew it over for me to test fly and have a pre-purchase inspection completed. Since that all went well, I bought the airplane on the 27th. Merry X-mas to me!

http://flightaware.com/live/flight/N951CC