This stuff is terrible. I understand the initial advantages behind popcorn ceiling texture; easy application, acoustic deadening of a room, effective hiding of imperfections. The bad part is, it is eons out of style, difficult to paint, real ugly, and as I'm learning, difficult to remove. Oh, sure, we could just leave it there, but whatever would we do with our weekends and weeknights and lunches and ... well you get the idea.

So, the removal goes something like this:

1. unroll el cheapo plastic sheets
2. apply $6 roll of tape to edge of sheets
3. try to forget that the rolls of tape cost $6 each
4. hang plastic sheets from top edge of walls
5. tape those sheets to the floor sheets (realize the futility of that plan later)
6. scrape and sand
7. chuckle as you recall the trailer home fight scene from Raising Arizona
8. remove plastic crapola
9. vacuum and dust nonstop for three days
10. repeat

One suggestion I read for popcorn texture removal was to buy drywall and just attach it to the existing ceiling. Obviously, whoever wrote that suggestion wasn't nearly as smart as us.

So, we still have to scrape the two bathroom ceilings and the stairway. Following that is prepping, priming, and drag texturing. There might be too much relief in the ceiling to do the drag texture properly, at which point we may decide to do something creative. Any suggestions? Celestial map? Jelly Belly mosaic?

Well, the training regimen did not pay off like I had hoped. I even made sure to load up on pizza and ice cream Saturday in preparation for the big forty mile ride. The food sat well. My butt did not. It, and the rest of my body, is sore. I haven't been exercising like I should, and it showed; I struggled after mile thirty. Travis, however, did great! He's got endurance that I just don't have right now. Maybe it comes with grad school.

I came home, read a little, then fell asleep around 3:30pm. I woke up at 9:30, watched the end of the Sox-Yankees game (go Sox!), and went back to sleep at 1:00am, not waking until about 8:00am. Thirteen hours of sleep! mmmmm..

Me, Travis, and about 6500 other people are riding in the Ride for the Roses this coming Sunday. T and I are signed up for the 40-mile course; should be a pretty easy ride.

I have a question though. How long will these little yellow livestrong wristbands be cool? I think people around here (Austin) will wear them just because Lance is our boy, but what about everywhere else? When Nike ran out at five million, I think the haves thought they were hot stuff. Now that Nike is up to about eighteen million, when is the fad going to die out? It is in support of cancer research/victims/survivors/etc, so maybe it'll go a while...until we find out Nike hired Cambodian kindergarteners in torturous sweatshops to make them and is keeping all the profits. Not that they would do that.

I prepared for the ride tonight by eating fried fish and chips, finishing someone else's mashed potatoes and veggies, and sampling a fried Snickers bar (riiiiight) for dessert. You may be wondering how effective such rigorous training might be, and I will dutifully report the results on Sunday. I trained last night on shrimp fried rice, and today at lunch I sweated on cherry chocolate cake.

Easy ride...

Mike doesn't like pronouns. Pronouns are for lazy people. Pronouns cause confusion. This blogger tried to have an anti-pronoun conversation with the wife a few days ago. Having such a conversation was quite difficult. Imagine trying to only use proper names for an entire discussion. Although fun (and funny), using such a full, descriptive English served to prompt further thought. What if everyone had to think so cautiously before speaking? Furthermore, what if those thoughts extended beyond a denouncing of pronouns to a careful avoidance of mean-spirited or, to a lesser extent, carelessness in speech? The world would once again learn to love. Our communication would be less prone to misinterpretation.

Whew. Yours truly did well to avoid pronouns in this entry. Note that the word "this" is not a pronoun given the context. Here, the word is used as an adjective; "this" entry as opposed to "that" entry.

A search on Google for "anti-pronoun" found only three web sites at the time of writing. One of the entries had the following:

Pro-Noun, Anti-Pronoun - When you speak to toddlers, be specific. Emphasize nouns, not pronouns. Instead of saying, Scotty, put them over there, say, Scotty, put the books on the bookshelf.

Mike will use pronouns in the future; don't worry. (Note the implied pronouns in the command...ah nevermind.)