Ah yes, Free Folk of Middle Earth it’s good to see you back again! Thanks for stopping by. The holidays in the middle of the week is weird. At least for me anyway. Had a half day Wednesday, New Years Eve and Thursday off. Had to go into work Friday though. It wasn’t bad. Traffic was light. I got hurt at work though. Not too badly. One of those metal post shore jacks fell on the back of my leg while I was holding something. It really hurt. Got a pretty nasty scrape\/cut from the thing right through my Carhart pants though, and the back of my leg swelled up quite a bit. I could walk though so it was okay. Good thing the jack didn’t hit me in the head….I might still be sleeping.<\/p>\n
My New Years Eve days are over. The kids were all out for the night so me and the missus watched CNN coverage with Anderson Copper and Kathy Griffen. It was pretty funny. Entertaining. I was going to stay up but at like 11:30 I hit the wall and couldn’t handle it so we went to bed. Happy New Year!<\/p>\n
New Years Day we had my wife’s family over for an early dinner around 1PM. Very relaxed, baked ziti, meatballs, gravy or sauce (depending on which part of Italy you’re from). Watched the college football games. (Where do they grow these huge kids?) We got to talking about Super Bowl Pools. For those of you who live in another country or under a rock, the Super Bowl is the most heavily bet sporting event in the world. So my father-in-law comes up with this crazy family pool so that everyone in the family can make a wager and sort of get into the action. It went along these lines…Pair up everyone in the room and then they get to pick two of the playoff teams out of a hat. Whoever gets the winning team wins the money. So this is kind of a long term pool here because the playoffs have just started. But…and I know what you’re thinking…there are certain teams that have a lot better chance of winning than others. Like Green Bay and New England for instance. So as the hat goes around and around guess who winds up with New England and Green Bay…..My father-in-law and his partner. What a coincidence, right? It had nothing to do with the fact that my father-in-law cut up and placed all the teams in the hat. Nooooo! It’s the children I worry about though. They’re being disenfranchised. By their own grandparent nonetheless! Amazing! Not only that but nobody liked who they were paired up with or who they picked out of the hat…except me and my wife. (What a great pair!)<\/p>\n
Oh yeah the construction blog, I almost forgot!<\/p>\n
So like I was saying I had a half day Wednesday so I headed up to the Hobbit House to meet Jude and Ethan. I was thinking we might be able to finish leveling and tamping the gravel base in an hour or so. What I was thinking I don’t know. It must be the perpetual optimist in me. Anyway I started showing them how to fine tune the gravel base and as soon as I started I realized this is a pretty big job. To get it right\u00a0 is at least a full days work. I had them pick up a tamper so that was a waste of $70. Anywho as I was telling them it is pretty critical we get this right. You’re not going to get it perfect but it should be within a quarter inch plus or minus. The main thing though is to get the gravel bed flat…that is really the critical part. You want the Styrofoam to lay on a flat gravel bed. If there are voids underneath the Styrofoam this could lead to settling of the slab which could lead to cracks in the slab. If the cracks occur where we put tile down this could transfer to and crack the tile as well. We don’t want this to happen. So I would rather spend an extra day or more making sure the base is flat.<\/p>\n
Other than going over that with the boys that was the extent of our work on Hobbit Hollow this week. Hopefully the weather will stay in our favor and we should get back to work in the next week or two.<\/p>\n
This Friday I met the Editor down at Grand Central Station and went to see the play “Discraced” at the Lyceum Theatre on 45th street. It was really good. Not for everybody but I really enjoyed it. Very thought provoking and quite controversial on a lot of levels, as well. Without getting too into it it was all about varying degrees of racisim and your own perspective as far as racism is concerned. It’s deeper than that but it was very entertaining. We stayed right next to the job I am currently working at on 31st\u00a0street and\u00a06th avenue at the Hampton Inn. It was great because we were able to walk to the theatre. We had a great night.<\/p>\n
We went to the Museum of Modern Art the next day to go see a special exhibit by Henri Matisse. It was a zoo though. I mean I think it must have been the holiday tourists. I’ve never seen so many people at a museum before. It was ridiculous. It was like you were being pushed along by a mob. People weren’t even looking at the art! We left early without seeing the exhibit we wanted to see. We still enjoyed the time we spent at the museum though.<\/p>\n
I hope the holidays were good to you and here’s wishing everyone a wonderful 2015!<\/p>\n
Jim<\/p>\n
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Ah yes, Free Folk of Middle Earth it’s good to see you back again! Thanks for stopping by. The holidays in the middle of the week is weird. At least for me anyway. Had a half day Wednesday, New Years Eve and Thursday off. Had to go into work Friday though. It wasn’t bad. Traffic … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[11,29,26,30,28,8,27],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/myhobbitshed.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2779"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/myhobbitshed.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/myhobbitshed.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myhobbitshed.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myhobbitshed.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/myhobbitshed.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2779\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/myhobbitshed.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myhobbitshed.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myhobbitshed.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}