Poor and Weird

I'd like to offer you all some free home improvement advice. No matter how much it may sound like a good idea at the time (and I can't fathom what sort of fever addled brain would think it is), gluing vinyl down onto a hardwood floor is not a smart thing to do. I got to spend Saturday prying up vinyl from our entryway, as you can see from the picture I've posted here. When we bought our house, the owner had just put down new carpeting through the main floor. Okay, carpeting makes sense - some people like carpet. But gluing down vinyl onto a hardwood floor? When we asked her about it she said it was done in preparation of having the entry tiled, which she never got around to doing. So it stayed - even better, the vinyl had a fake hardwood design on it. Yep, she replaced real hardwood with fake vinyl hardwood. Smart, huh? It's gone now, but we still have plenty of glue to scrape up. Yuck.

This is the same person who thought it was a good idea to glue carpet down over the tile floors in the bathroom - its removal was a project we tackled a year or so ago. "Tile is so cold in a bathroom, it’s so much nicer to step out onto carpet" was her brilliant reason for that decision. "Why not just buy a bathmat?" I wanted to ask her. You can throw a bathmat in the washing machine when it gets dirty, and replace it when it gets worn. Carpet in a bathroom is hard enough to keep clean - and we found that glued down carpet is more or less impossible to even vacuum effectively. Between the entryway, the bathroom, and the basement project in our old Seattle house, the li'l woman figured that she has quite a few pictures of me with a scraper in my hand. Ah, the pride of ownership.

We went out to see Seattle punk band The Briefs at the Bluebird on Friday. Even better, we received email freebies for the show- that's always a plus. The Briefs are a band I saw numerous times in Seattle, and who I've seen quite a few times in D-town as well. I've always enjoyed them, and Friday was no exception. No real surprises, just a fun show with all of the usual suspects - Rotten Love, Sylvia, I'm a Raccoon, New Shoes, Silver Bullet, Knife, Poor and Weird, (Looking Through) Gary Glitter's Eyes, We Americans, and many more. This is the second show I've seen where Lance Romance wasn't on bass, I don't know if he still in the band. Maybe their next album will provide some clues. Warming up was Brain Failure from China. After a few songs, I leaned over to my wife and said "hey, it's Chinese Rancid!" They were fun and spirited, if not overly original (kind of like, well, Rancid). The Cheapskates, some local kids, also played. I think all of their songs were about skateboarding, except for their cover of Black Flag's Rise Above. The li'l woman thought they were "cute." I'm not sure if that was the effect they were going for!