Mayday
It seems like my posting frequency really dropped to about once a month. Ugh, but I've been feeling extra busy at home in addition to work now.
Recently, I feel like I've been doing lots of house stuff. Last weekend, I moved like 70 bags of rocks (1/2 cubic feet; ~50 lbs)! Since our backyard was dug up from the construction, we added rocks (white marble chips) to go around the addition. It saves us from trying to grow grass in narrow spaces and provides a very clean look.
And randomly, the weekend before that, after doing the fish tank (which was moved to another area of the house), our downstairs bathtub faucet was leaking (and by leaking, it was significant). When I was filling the fish tank, I felt something funny in the handle, and afterwards, it gave a very constant drip/leak. But luckily, based on a video from Home Depot and other internet searches, we were able to replace the shower/tub cartridge. I mainly didn't want to have call out a plumber, so I just bought stuff from Home Depot and tried it. It worked surprisingly well!
And I finally got around to changing my brakes and rotors. The job wasn't too bad. It took longer than I originally expected, but I was being extra good about cleaning everything. It was nice to do, and even though I didn't get a quote from Mini, I'd assume it'd be an easy $1000 (especially since there's a sensor and I changed the rotors).
So I guess that's are some nice projects that I did over the last few weekends. My next one will be to build a turtle enclosure for Sonny (or Sunny). Backstory time! Several years ago, my nephew found a baby turtle during a walk around a local pond. He took it as a pet and it was really cute! But of course, after a few years (5 maybe), he just got bored of it and "gave" it to his grandparents. At some point, we took care of the turtle (when my father-in-law was out of the country). So it is ours now.
At first, I was thinking of creating an indoor tank-like habitat for Sunny. But the internet claims that an outdoor one is far superior, etc. So that's my next project, which involves not only creating a fenced off around (with stones and/or wood), but a little pond. Although I did kind of want to make a backyard pond previously. So we'll see how it turns out and the expense, which is slowly getting higher than I originally thought. But it'll be a nice addition to the backyard, hopefully.
Anyway, on the book side, I've been reading The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke, which is about a space elevator. I really didn't know what to expect from it, so based on that, it's a little different than I expected. So far, it's not bad.