The Dead Acorn Has The Floor

I made a little more progress yesterday on my never ending kitchen project (though if a timeline is infinite, how does one categorize activity as “progress?” Sure, something has gotten done that wasn’t done the day before, but who’s to say the final goal hasn’t surreptitiously moved even farther out, so that the net result, in terms of percent of project completed, isn’t actually a step backwards?).

In any case, I bought ceramic tile for the floor. During one of my brief, though numerous, daily on-line shopping trips through the aisles of Craigslist a couple of days ago, I stumbled upon an ad for 400 sq. feet of the stuff, for a shockingly low $.50 a tile! “Holy CARP!” I said to myself, taking a moment to chuckle at my verbal dylsexia. “I’d be a fool to sit here talking to myself about my good fortune rather than calling the phone number shown on the monitor! A DAMN fool, in fact!” So I called up, asked if I could take one piece just to make sure the color was okay (though at that price, it would pretty much have to be neon green with the NY Yankees logo etched in it to not be okay), called back that evening, and sealed the deal.

So yesterday, I drove Jane F’Honda (my new/used car, an ’85 Honda Civic, that is, like her namesake, old and smokin’) up the bench to pick the rest of it up. The seller was a woman about 5’4”, maybe 100 lbs., who looked at my ride with a sad shake of her head, climbed into her giant-ass diesel Ford 950 (or something) to move it, and told me to back into the garage to load ‘er up. That tile is dang heavy, and I figured out pretty quickly that it was going to take two trips. The loading got done pretty quickly, though, what with me lifting one and then taking a break while she carried four at once.

She also had a saddle in the garage. I’m not quite sure that that’s relevant, but somehow it seemed important, so I’ve included it here.

I guess I’ve got my weekend project now … ripping out the old floor. That seems like a fairly straightforward task, and shouldn’t take more than an hour, right? And while I haven’t actually done any tiling before, I have read several websites that have had conflicting information, so I’m pretty sure that whatever I end up doing, I’ll be able to put it up here as a “DIY How-To” post, and someone will take it as sound advice.

Finally, if there’s any question about why the hell I feel that this vacuous rambling is deserving of a post in the first place … the anti-inflammatory/muscle relaxant combo that I take for my aching back (after doing something like unloading two thousand lbs of tile) makes me a little loopy until at least noon the next day.

Seriously ... I’m wasted.