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Here are some updates on recent conversations with the children.  They are more into weapons.  We don’t really have many weapons in the house, but they have good imaginations.

Cup-Bearer

One day I came home from work and the kids were glad to greet me.  The 5-year-old brought me one of his plastic play cups from a food/kitchen set and told me I should drink it.  So I pretended to drink from the empty cup, and then we had the following conversation:

“I just gave you medicine with diabetes in it!” (and he was laughing that I fell for his trick)
“Diabetes?”
“Yeah, what possums have.”
“I think you mean rabies.”

They are trying to poison me.  Once they’re old enough to cook, I’ll have to be careful.

Proofs

Driving home from church one recent Sunday, I heard the following coming from one of the car seats behind me: “Our van is shooting spears and bullets and everything that hurts.”

When it not that, it’s the quicksand and hot lava (not just lava – hot lava) and lasers and electric (not electricity – electric).  Anything that they can wave their hands and pretend is shooting out of them, they will do that.  I think it started with Spiderman’s web-shooting abilities and then progressed from there.  They’ll shoot ice at you to freeze you and then squirt hot lava at you to unfreeze you.  Or tell you that the floor on which you are standing is really quicksand.

But don’t worry, our kids are quicksand proof.  And hot lava proof.  And “everything proof”.  So if you ever try to pretend-squirt them back, it won’t work.  And it also won’t work if they try to shoot/squirt each other, because whatever one says to the other, the other quickly claims that he is that-proof.

Always Winning

Then there was the Super Bowl.  The kids usually like to watch football with me, and they usually want to know whom I want to win.  So they asked me who I wanted to win, and I replied “The Cardinals.”  And then they asked who was winning, and I replied “The Steelers.”  Then my 5-year-old shared his philosophy: “Whatever team is winning is the team I want to win.”  I suppose he will always be happy with whatever game he watches.

Like many other people I know, I was hoping that the Cardinals would win but expecting that the Steelers would win. I was not cheering against Pittsburgh, as I have nothing against them. But I did want Kurt Warner to win. So I cheered for Arizona but was not depressed when they didn’t win. Disappointed, yes, but not so much that I had trouble sleeping.

I find that with college football, I cheer for (or against) teams because they are those teams. For the NFL, I cheer for or against teams based on certain players. If Kurt Warner were not with Arizona, I don’t know that I would have been cheering for them.

My take on the game, not that my take matters much (and why is it called a take when really I am giving my opinion? I am not taking anything…) is that the Steelers didn’t win the game as much as the Cardinals lost it.

Certainly, the Steelers played well enough to win, and win they did. The Cardinals also played well enough to win, but they helped the Steelers a lot whereas the Steelers didn’t help the Cardinals much. The Cardinals made so many mistakes that’s it is easy to think that they should have won. The infamous “They were the better team.” They were the better team, but they didn’t play as well. It all matter how you play during that one game. Of course, after a game is over you can always say “If this had gone differently” or “If this hadn’t happened” and anyone can concoct a scenario where the loser would have won.

How many yards did the Steelers get as a result of Cardinal personal fouls? Is it legal for an offensive lineman to pull his own quarterback into the end zone? Did they really let a linebacker run 100 yards? Could nobody catch him before the 2-yard line? Is it possible for Clark to use his limbs to tackle someone instead of using only his helmet?

I was just glad that the Cardinals played well enough to almost win. It wasn’t looking too good at the half, and I was worried that Arizona would be lumped into the same category as Oklahoma and Ohio State – the team that gets put through to the championship game and then gets blown out by a real team.

“{A man of} great anger will bear the penalty, For if you rescue {him,} you will only have to do it again.”
– Proverbs 19:19

I put sheet vinyl flooring in the bathroom. It is the least favorite of my flooring types. By least favorite I mean least favorite to install.

Here are my rankings, in order of easiest to hardest to install:

• Vinyl tiles are the easiest to install but they are also the easiest to mess up.
• Laminate flooring is easy to install. Plus it is not permanent – you can remove it with no destruction to the sub-floor.
• Ceramic tile is nice because the grout will fill in many mistakes. But it requires the most surface prep and can be messy.
• Sheet vinyl is awful because of the large size (unwieldy to maneuver) and messy glue.

I have not installed hardwood floor, but I assume I will like it slightly less than laminate.  I plan on never installing carpet myself, so I’m not going to rate its ease of installation.  (Carpet, drywall, and now sheet vinyl are on my list of things that are not do-it-yourself).  Also, thinset and grout for ceramic tile can be messy, but they clean easily. Vinyl glue is messy and does not clean easily.

Sub-Floor

Ceramic tile needs a flat, solid surface. That would not have worked in the bathroom that now has the sheet vinyl flooring. That floor was not level and not even, so it would have taken quite a few fixes to get the sub-floor in good shape for the ceramic tile. But for the sheet vinyl, we just put down luan plywood so that the surface is smooth. That left slopes and dips and such, but the vinyl conforms to that pretty well.

My Experience

The worst part about the sheet vinyl was the gluing part. The sheet was cut to fit the room exactly. The room is not square – it is more like a L shape. So I couldn’t just unroll it, because no matter which way I rolled it, it was longer than the part of the room where I was rolling it.

The theory is that you spread the glue on the floor and then put the sheet of vinyl on top of that. Then you press it down with a heavy roller and you’re done. If your room doesn’t change width at all, then it might be that easy for you. But if your room has angles or changes widths, think twice about sheet vinyl (or contract it to a professional installer).

Because I could not unroll my vinyl in one shot, I couldn’t put all the glue down at once. The vinyl is thick enough so that it won’t conform nicely. If your roll of vinyl is 8′ 3″ and your walls are 8′ 2.5″, then it’s not going to unroll. It just gets stuck and scrapes your wall. But the vinyl is thin enough that it will tear if you pull on it and it will crease (and tear) if it gets folded.

For my L-shaped room, I had to put the vinyl in place first. Since I couldn’t unroll it, I had to carefully bend it. Once it was in place, I peeled back one leg of the L, put the glue down, and put the vinyl back in place. Then I had to peel back the unglued part of the vinyl. That was both the corner and the other leg of the L. So I had to do two folds or bends without creasing it. Watch the corners – those are the first places that the vinyl starts to rip. But I got it in place, spread the glue on the floor, and restored the remained of the vinyl to its proper place.

All that had to be done with the door closed, because the door opens inward. And the glue gets all over the handle of the trowel but it does not come off very easily. And it has fumes, so I had to keep the window open, which is normally a bad thing to do when it is freezing outside.

Finally, the floor was glued. Then I had to roll it with the 100-lb roller thingy. There was once spot that had a bubble. I would roll over the bubble and the bubble would be pushed along. But as soon as I flattened it there, it would pop back up over where it started. There are no bubbles with any other flooring types.  They cooperate nicely.  But sheet vinyl does not.

One Chance Only

And the last knock against sheet vinyl is that it is all or nothing when you install it. With the vinyl squares, if one goes on crooked you can peel it up and try again. If a square gets damaged, you can throw it out and use the next one and you’ll lose only a dollar or so. The same is true for ceramic tile or laminate flooring or hardwood flooring. But sheet vinyl is not so nice. Once you put it down, it’s not coming back up. Theoretically, you could try to pull it off the glue and re-set it.  But I don’t want to even think about that.

And if it gets damaged in the process, you’ve lost $100-$200. Or you can try to repair it, which will either look bad or create seams. And the reason to get the sheet vinyl is so there are no seams. And don’t forget about the cutting of holes.  I had to cut holes in the sheet for this like the plumbing and the heat vent.  You have to measure very carefully and cut very carefully.  Otherwise you ruin the sheet.  With tiles (ceramic or vinyl), you just mess up a single tile at worst, and it’s not that much of a setback.  If you mess up multiple tiles trying to get a single hole or notch cut, then maybe you should re-think the idea of installing it yourself.

Seams and Gaps

The vinyl tiles (peel and stick) are the simplest to install and are great for small spaces, not much square footage. The problem is that you need to align the edges perfectly. Ceramic tile is similar, but the edges don’t need to be perfect because there are gaps between tiles and they are filled with grout. So slight offsets are okay, because they will be helped by the grout. But with vinyl tile, there is no grout because there are not supposed to be any gaps. If one tile is skewed ever so slightly, there will be a noticeable gap somewhere in the floor.  If the tiles are not perfect, you will notice it.

Conclusion

There’s just too much that can go wrong, too much to worry about, when installing the sheet of vinyl.  Main complaints: the glue is annoying and the big sheet is awkward.  I like ceramic tile for bathrooms.

To cut down on our mail, I selected the option given to us by our credit card company to just do everything online and skip the paper account statements.

One of the benefits of that is that now I don’t have a collection of papers piling up. I like to save things, and financial statements are one of those things. But if they don’t mail them to me, I can’t save them and so I won’t have to wonder how long to keep them. Perfect!

But they still sent me things in the mail, like this:

Read it closely, and you see that they were sending this letter as part of their All-Electronic Program. And we got this letter every month!

At the very least they could do is stop claiming that it is All-Electronic (not to be confused with All Electronics) and call their program Mostly-Electronic.

The letter went on to say how to update our email address and how to update our postal address and how we should enjoy the benefits of the All-Electronic Program. The letter never gave any indication why it was being sent.

After a few months of these letters (and no problems with the online access), I decided to check my contact information. They had my old email address and so their emails were being rejected and so they were sending me letters. I assume the letters were supposed to get me to update my contact information, but they did a lousy job. Nowhere in the letter did it say anything about my email address being invalid. All they had to do was say that their emails were being returned and I need to provide a good email address. Then I would have known what to do.

So if you’re wondering why the program you enrolled in to receive your statements online only instead of in the mail is still sending you mail, wonder no longer. Just update your email address in their system and the letters will stop.

“Just now the wise men {and} the conjurers were brought in before me that they might read this inscription and make its interpretation known to me, but they could not declare the interpretation of the message.”
– Daniel 5:15

The NFL seems more interested in the Super Bowl halftime show than the game. I have heard numerous ads about the show, and they are over-hyped. Not just hyped, but over-hyped. They are ads about just the halftime show, with no mention of the actual game.

So they got Rick Springfield to perform. “Watch as history is made!” Just because he has never performed in a Super Bowl show before, that makes it history? I’ve never performed in a Super Bowl halftime show either. If I performed, that would make history also. There are billions of people who fall into that group. I am not as impressed as the NFL would like me to be.

I think the reason they promote the show more than the game is that people who are going to watch the game are already going to watch the game. The NFL has them captive, so they don’t need to market it so much. They already know who is going to be playing the football game.  But there are probably people, fans of Bruce Dickinson or whoever he is, who would not normally watch the game but would tune in for the music.

Last year (Superbowl 42) there were 97 millions viewers for the game and 148 million for the halftime show. The show doesn’t need to be promoted – the game does. And the game lasts longer than the halftime show, so there are more ads to be sold for the game than for the show.

I, as usual, plan on skipping the halftime show. Not that I want to protest the music – just that it’s not football and therefore not as entertaining to me. I have other things I would rather do. Maybe I’ll check it occasionally to see if there are any good commercials.

“So I will silence the sound of your songs, and the sound of your harps will be heard no more. ”
– Ezekiel 26:13

We bought a washing machine from an appliance warehouse store. The salesman was of the pushy type. And he was a salesman, paid on commission, not a helpful clerk. I suppose my definition of pushy would be when he asks us more questions than we ask him. And they were “Why don’t you…?” questions, too. That just put me in a defensive mode.

I don’t haggle or negotiate very well. Just tell me the price and let me buy it and get out of there. So I chased the kids around the store while my wife dealt with the salesman. She did a good job of haggling with him, and he ended up giving us a washer for a good price. How good a price was it? He told us that he wouldn’t be making any commission on the sale.

You could think either “Yeah right, that’s just one of your salesman tricks” or “You poor thing, not to be making any money today.” One response that we didn’t give was “If you’re not going to be making any money, then it wouldn’t bother you if we just walked away without buying it.”

We were wondering why he would even bother selling us something if he’s not making any money on it. Does he still have a minimum quota of number of items to sell? But it was only the 9th of the month – nowhere near the end of the month when you would expect quotas to be due.

I don’t like buying things from salesmen working on commission. That’s why the internet is great – price compare and purchase things with no pressure from salesmen.

I have the driving habit of avoiding bits of paper or plastic that are on the road, especially if they were just kicked up by a vehicle in front of me.

Sometimes a vehicle will drive by a piece of trash sitting in the road.  The wind from the car will swirl around the debris, causing it to tumble or dance along the road.  If it’s near the lane markings, I will swerve slightly in order to avoid it.  If it’s in the middle of the lane, then I just run over it.

Either way, after I have gone by the spot where the thing was, I watch my mirrors carefully to make sure that it didn’t get stuck on my car somehow.  I will keep checking both the side mirrors and the rearview mirror until I see the paper or whatever it was.

I have seen another car with a plastic grocery bag stuck to the bottom of the car.  And the person’s just driving along with no clue that they have it.  And I don’t want that to be me.

If I do see the debris in my mirror, then I can relax and continue with my drive.  If I don’t see it after several seconds, there’s not much I can do.  So I keep driving.  I don’t do anything differently, but I do like knowing that nothing’s stuck to my car.

I had that problem once.  A fast-food sandwich wrapper ended on my antenna, and I did not find it until I stopped at my destination.  So I had been driving down the highway with paper stuck to the middle of my antenna, like a flag on a flagpole.  I wasn’t embarrassed while I was driving, because I didn’t know that was there.  But it was rather embarrassing to see my car once I got out of it.

Oh well.

“Even when the fool walks along the road, his sense is lacking and he demonstrates to everyone {that} he is a fool. ”
– Ecclesiastes 10:3