The hippy is a sex position where three guys are doing three girls doggy style while the girls are all making out. All the while, all three guys are fist pounding, thus resembling a peace sign.

So, I’ve invented the advanced motorboat. You get two girls to stand close (shoulder-to-shoulder) so that they form cleavage with their boobs closest to each other (the girl on the left’s right boob and the girl on the right’s left boob).

I think you see where I’m going with this.

Motorboat away in the newly formed dual-girl cleavage. You sir, are a master.

You’re welcome.

Now I can finally start coverting my VHS collection that spans as far back as 22 years and includes roughly 6 gazillion tapes.

See, I like that something like that happens. It makes conferences and divisions matter.

Otherwise, why not just one big group of 32 teams and the top 8 go to the playoffs. But then people would say it’s not accurate because every team doesn’t play every team – strength of schedule would be an issue.

I’ve never believed sports were supposed to be black & white. The thing that makes me love most sports is the grey areas. We’re slowly taking all of the human factor out of a game played by humans.

I like wacky scenarios like this – it makes divisions matter. I like when a questionable call is made. It makes referees matter. I like when players mess up and drop the ball. It makes players matter. Let’s not remove them from the equation too.

How far do you go to make everything ‘right’ and where do you stop?

I hate this new idea that in sports everything has to be as perfect as possible. Hell, on a larger scale it’s even an idea that seems to have permeated society in general. We’ve reduced everything to a certain way of doing it or feeling dicked if certain expectations aren’t met or something out of the ‘plan’ happens. It’s this overthinking thing that has been bugging me for a few years now. Quit overthinking it people and just fucking do it. Go with the flow.

More people need to take the chance to lead with their balls once and a while and not with their heads – it’ll do you a world of good.

And if you’re not comfortable with that, at least compromise by leading with your heart…or something below your shoulders for once. Just once today, that’s all I ask. Get a taste of it. Go for it. Just fucking do something.

(And for the record, I don’t care too much for college ball, but I hate the idea of a playoff. The fun with the bowl system is in that it’s open ended and you can endlessly debate who the best team may be.)

I dunno. We’re in danger of making it (football and life) too sterile.

This first photo is taken from the far side of the garage looking back at the house. That’s the little nasty workshop nook on the right and the door into the house on the left.

A little closer look at the workshop nook. It was pretty bad, but the nook area was a nice touch. Not too many houses in the neighborhood have that.

I’m not a garage guy. I don’t do much work. I don’t fix things. I don’t touch the cars. The thing is, I can do shit (good enough, at least… or fake my way through it) and my wife is often impressed. I mean, I had some tools and stuff. The act of buying the house made these skills more necessary and our collection of ‘garage stuff’ grow. We just kind of kept stacking things in the garage with no rhyme or reason. I hated the nook. It was dirty and broken and icky. We worked around it rather than with it for over a year.

Then last month on a particularly slow day in early April (right after Easter, I think) I decided that with things warming up and many projects needing done, that I was going to just start ripping shit apart in the garage and see where I ended up. I cleared out the crappy old cabinets and patched all the holes and stuff in the wall. As of April 7th, this is what I had:

I wanted to keep it as simple and cheap as possible, but still do something useable and nice enough. I started with a coat of paint. The same color that’s in the office. Yes, it’s orange-y. It looks really orange until you put something orange next to it and then you realize it’s not nearly as orange as it seemed. Technically, Behr calls it copper. On the 10th I had this:

Oddly enough, that same week my wife scored a bunch of stuff from the hotel. They were finishing up a huge renovation and there were a lot of old items that were no longer needed. She snagged me two cabinets and a little basket/drawer/storage unit thingy. I started to lay out my area:

The next few days I got pulled away as we totally stripped and restained and sealed the deck. It took a bit longer than expected and it was only over those few days that I learned we have almost 450 sqaure feet of deck space. What a pain in the ass. But it looked 1000 times better:

When I got back into the garage I went to work on the door leading outside. I painted both the door and the trim and put new hardware on the door. I used paint we had from other areas of the house and scored the bronze hardware on the bargain rack at Home Depot for under $30. The end result was vastly superior to the white door, white trim, brass hardware combo that was there before:

I also started paining the cabinets (this time with a paint sample we got a few weeks before when considering colors for the laundry room):

I finished the job with the colors from the door and swapped out the plugs and switches with sleek black rocker swtiches and flat, flush plugs and diamond plate covers (look closely). This cost less than $20 – mostly for the diamond plate covers:

Next up was the single biggest purchase of the entire redeux. I needed a topper to create a workbench with the cabinets and figured rather than some specialty thing, I’d just swing by Lowes and pick upa stock piece of laminate countertop, cut it to size and install it. It cost under $100 for an 8 foot piece and an endcap. Oh yeah, that “W” floormat was a christmas gift that we hadn’t had a place for previously:

I wanted a pegboard or something, but I wanted to stay reasonable in terms of cost and I absolutely hate that fiberboard crap that all the stores stock. I wanted something different. After some research I score this clear pegboard for $42 and did a fun Bowser graphic behind it with a piece that no longer had a place in my son’s room since we moved, but I had held on to for some reason:

I new I needed a little more space for stuff than I had and the garage is pretty tall. Seemed like an obvious choice to score a couple of 1×12′s and bracket them up high as shelves. Wood and brackets ran around $30.

I started getting all my crap situated and things started coming together:

At that point, my wife was so motivated by how much better the little nook looked that she said, lets just finish the entire garage. We got rid of the white and went with the khaki/beige color I put on the cabinet doors. I did the attic door and house entry door in the same dark brown/light brown combo as the door leading outside. We had a bunch of shelving from the hotel renovation that didnt quite go together in any useable way, so we picked up some pieces on our own that matched and put together a unit that spanned along the back wall of the garage. We got tools hung up along the far wall, I painted and frosted the windows and still had room for the kids’ bikes and the lawn mower. The almost finished project:

(click for a larger version of that photo)

The total cost to us ended up being right around $300 thanks to using so much “found” stuff to get it done. I still need to get a hook to hang the ladder, pour cement steps and lose the wood ones and put bronze hardware on the door leading into the house. Overall we’re very happy with the results of something put together basically on a whim, a month’s time and a couple hundred bucks.

Before and After:

“The weatherman isn’t calling for snow, but I see 6 inches coming your way tonight.”

(for the record, I picked “six” for the cadence of the sentence, a two syllable “seven” doesn’t flow as correctly and “eight” just sounds like drunken bragging – better to underpromise and overdeliver)

Wow! Really nice stuff. The map now changes from map view to aerial to bird’s eye automatically as you zoom in and they’ve added a “Streetside” feature that viciously crushes Google’s Street View. The whole thing is ridiculously smooth and intuitive – it just feels right and it looks damn good.

Definitely go check out the beta.

(note: this is the 600th entry to my blog)

Just one look at this countdown traffic light and you know it’s a great idea. A progress bar on a stop light? We’re on board with that. Besides alleviating frustration, designer Damjan Stankovi? sees his idea saving energy…

(more)

Two things:

1. My wife is good for at least 6 (probably 7) of those…hence the lockdown.

2. George Romero movies? Pfft. We’ve been in George Romero’s bed watching laserdiscs. (yes, laserdiscs – it was the early/mid 90′s)