23 July 2007

A fun weekend

We had rather a wonderful weekend. Friday Stephanie discovered that Palo Alto was having some kind of music festival and movies shown out-of-doors so we decided to go have dinner outside - seeing as the weather was particularly fine. I called a couple we had long planned to have dinner with (who live near by) and they met us and we had a wonderful dinner out in the middle of University at La Strada, watching the legion of Harry Potter garbed go by, in addition to all the other people walking around Palo Alto on a weekend night. The food was very good.

Saturday we took Stephanie's mentee and his grandmother sailing (she had never been) as we had promised before she headed back to El Salvador. We took out the Merit 25, and it was blowing, we think about 20-25 knots. We reefed the mainsail and did not bother to put up the jib - so as not to scare the grandmother. We did not make a lot of distance, but everyone had fun.

03 July 2007

The Kitchen Connection Sucks

When we finally got around to getting to my house we discovered that the dishwasher no longer fits under the cabinet.

After much banging around (gently) we determined that there were three four solutions. 1. Rip out the cabinets. 2. Rip out the floor 3. Get rid of the nearly new dishwasher and buy the one or two models that were 1/2 inch shorter. 4. Sell the house and let the real estate agent and the lawyers deal with it. For some reason the drains on the kitchen sink were also not hooked up.

At the moment, I'm seriously considering option 4.

And then registering www.kitchenconnectionsucks.com and paradiseflooringsucks.com. I have lost all hope of getting this project done by Ski Season and at the moment, if I did not have cat living there, would simply abandon the house for three months until the fear of getting within 20 miles of it has passed.

So far today, the plumber has not called back (so far he is still on my good list since he has done great work so far) the Kitchen Connection did not call, so I called, and they are "trying to get the $1,400 price down for me". If it is much over $500 cost me a dime, I'm really going to have to think about finding a hungry lawyer, or seeing if I can declare them in breach and not pay them anymore. We are a month behind the contracted time.

02 July 2007

Yet more kitchen, and Saling

As usual thing have been busy, so some catching up is in order:

Wednesday's meeting with the granite people (Romarts) was unsatisfying, they want $1,400 to fix the "well most of our customers don't want to spend any extra money, so (for your convenience) we paid no attention to what you wanted when it would have cost $500 to do it right the first time. A rather agitated call to the Kitchen Connection (play Imperial doom music here) got, a day later, the response that there was probably something that could be done, they would get back to me on Monday.


In more fun news, we had a great day of sailing on the Bay. Stephanie's Yacht club has Merit 25s and we took one out. I
t was pretty windy, and we got pretty wet from the waves kicking over the bow and splashing into the cockpit. There was another couple on the boat who had never really been sailing before. (This was a $30 two hour weekend evening cruse - mostly to see if it was worth upgrading Stephanie's membership so we could take these boats out anytime.)