Hotspur.us

So I have somehow managed to produce a few items destined to be Christmas gifts. It is as much a shock to me as it is to those of you who know my perpensity for procrastination. And yet, here is solid evidence that someone is getting an ornament or five. Provided, of course, that I don’t lose them between now and the time of gift giving.

 

 

So I have somehow managed to produce a few items destined to be Christmas gifts. It is as much a shock to me as it is to those of you who kniw my perpensity for procrastination.

So last week sidekick and I went out and mapped the trail for our adventure at Mountwood tonight.

We picked up Gentleman-Carpenter at OUCH!!! (yes, as sidekick pointed out, I refer to places by cache names quite a lot) then headed to BW3 in Bridgeport to meet up with the Bumps. And, as it turned out, Aquacache.

Arriving at Mountwood Park we sorted out the car situation and finally rendezvousing with both of AG349 and headed out on the trail…EARLY. Yeah, you read that right. Early, as in ahead of schedule. Unbelievable. Unheard of. Also shocking. Very shocking.

But anyway, we hit the red reflector for #1 with way too much daylight and then realized that…we kind of needed a tiny bit more darkness. Not that we didn’t try. We walked around, using our awesome flashlights to check out all the nearby trees. Gentleman-Carpenter (it turns out) even went in the correct direction but didn’t see anything.

This clearly didn’t concern sidekick much, since he still had data. That makes sidekick a happy camper.

When finally, around 6:23 (that’s about 30 minutes that we’d been hanging out waiting) Aquacache sees a bright eye and notices it happens to be in the direction in which G-C had looked. So of course we immediately begin to blame G-C’s lack of spotting the fire tacks (that’s how this MAGPI thing works you know). Until we noticed some reflective tape and Aquacache said that he’d seen some of that near the trail – you know while we waited 30 minutes because no one saw anything – because he thought it was funky bark. Which of course meant we all then began to blame Aquacache for his lack of focus  (what do you expect from someone with lumpy corneas?).

Eventually the darkness descended and we had an easier time spotting the fire tacks.

We managed, thanks to the hard work of sidekick and yours truly, to stay on trail and even – believe it or not – shave off some time by cutting off a slew of switchbacks.

I feel that at this point in the narrative I should begin to explain that I fell in the creek, not once but several times, we scared up a bear and then got lost. But none of that happened because for once, MAGPI had no mishaps, no poor decisions and everything went better than could have been wished.  I figure that this particular series of night caches will have used up all the good karma I had left.

After marching ourselves around Mingo Creek Park Chad and I decided to stop by The Spring House to get some delicious food and the best chocolate milk anywhere around.  DELICIOUS.

Also there was some serious Squee going on.

It was all going pretty well…until I saw PIGLET! I despise Piglet. If I had a band it would be called Piglet Must Die. Yes I have issues.

But then Chad pointed out the other Squee nearby….

And things were A OK. Check out some of the very cool pumpkin art.

 

We’d just finished up  gotten the first floor bathroom renovation project to a manageable state.  Which meant that we still needed to do the following:

 

1. Get a towel rack (Chad’s biggest concern)
2. Deal with the baseboard (my biggest concern)
3. Find a light fixture that did not prevent the medicine cabinet from opening
With our list being a mere three items, that meant we could think about start the next project.  And what pray tell might that be?  Oh, that’d be ripping up the nasty stained light blue (well, maybe closer to dingy aqua) carpet on the second floor landing and then ripping up whatever was under it to get to the original wood floor.  And from there refinish said floor.

My earlier experience with a similar project (our bedroom floor) was horrible.  So it was not with a little bit of trepidation that I faced this task.  It was with even more trepidation that I took a gander at what was under the carpet.  It was, oddly enough, a subfloor.  I was confused and then partly horrified because I discerned that previously adhered to the subfloor was some ugly 1970s era sticky tile.  What in the world had happened to the original floor?  Something bad Bad BAD HORRIFYING had to have happened to the original floor for lousy cheap landlords to install a subfloor before slapping down some nasty vinyl floor tiles.  It was the that I realized I  was sweating.
I steeled myself for the worst as we pried the first chunk of subfloor up and revealed………………a pretty nicely preserved piece of wood floor.

That bit of excitement aside, we realized that we did not have the proper tool for removing subfloor on a such a huge landing.  We were soon on our way to Lowe’s in order to buy a new tool.  SWEET!

Back at the landing we got down to work systematically removing carpet and padding, scoring the subfloor and then (me armed with a crowbar – yes, possibly dangerous but terribly cathartic) prying up section by section of the subfloor.  Each time I waited, anticipating the horror of some ghastly disfigured section of floor.  Each time I was stunned to see a really nicely preserved bit of floor.  (And trust me, this landing gets one heck of a workout. Three bedrooms open to it, four if you count the ferret’s bedroom, as well as bathroom.  A lot of foot traffic passes this way.)

We managed to uncover about 1/3 of the landing before completely running out of steam.  I could tell I had run out of steam because I was standing there, crowbar in one hand, hammer in the other and I could not move.
That leaves 2/3 left in which we may or may not uncover a giant hole or something equally awful. Stayed tuned.

The photos are not nearly as exciting as the previous floor renovation – at least not yet.