Hristo's FI Journal

[Hristo Botev]

Question about the low profile fan. Where did you get it? Link? How many inches does the bottom extend from the ceiling?

https://www.homedepot.com/p/Home-Decora ... /308038103

[ffj]

You've broken a cardinal rule in remodeling: Never, ever, move into a space until it is finished. You'll be looking at trim-less windows and doors for the next twenty years.

Looks good though. Your drywall mudding has the classic "I'm a beginner" look to it but it all sands out right? All kidding aside, good job!

[take2]

I’ve been walking up and down half-painted carpet-less stairs for 6 months….

[Hristo Botev]

No doubt.

This was a good project for me to cut my teeth on, as it's not part of the house and it'll really only be me who is left to look at my mistakes for the next several years. Stakes will be a little but higher with the next project, which will be in the house.

[ffj]

@take2

Hehe. My dad built our house in 1979 and he still has a couple of places where he didn't finish the trim.

[Hristo Botev]

I'm finding it difficult to get much work done in the new shoffice; and that's OK.

[Hristo Botev]

I'm officially declaring the shoffice project to be complete, as the trim work is now finished. I started to tally up all the costs but gave up, realizing that: (a) it'd take some time going through months of HD and Lowe's receipts breaking out shoffice stuff from other home maintenance stuff; and (b) I probably don't want to know how much this all cost. That said, I was able to save money on framing lumber and paint/primer, as 90% of what I used I already had from prior projects. Most of my expenses were insulation, drywall and its accessories, the A/C unit, and electrical stuff.

Anyway, here're the progress photos for anyone who is interested.

Here's the side of the shed where the shoffice went, before demo:



After demo (mostly):



Some framing and electrical run photos:



















A/C installation (I should have gone with a unit meant to go through a wall and not a window unit, but too late now):





I added an exterior light:



After insulation:





Drywall ready to mud (I made A LOT of mistakes here, some of which I fixed and some that will likely bite me later):





Mud (I am truly awful at this):





The finished product:







Master bathroom renovation is next; God help me.

[mathiverse]

Great work! Looks like a nice place to spend time.

[ffj]

Drywall needed more screws.... I think you may have confused tile underlayment screw spacing with drywall requirements, haha. No danger of that board ever coming down. Congrats on finishing, job well done.

[suomalainen]

Drywall sucks, second only to roofing. Nice job!

[delay]

Amazing that you did all of that yourself! I've got monitor arms too, very helpful, they clear up lots of space on your desk.

[chenda]

Paul Kingsnorth has been interviewed by Rhys Wildermuth, a pagan who grow up in rural Appalachia and now lives in rural Luxembourg. They've been hobnobbing in the comment sections for years. I'm not uncritical of both these men but the discussion may prove interesting.

https://rhyd.substack.com/p/the-realign ... -with-paul

[Hristo Botev]

Paul Kingsnorth has been interviewed by Rhys Wildermuth, a pagan who grow up in rural Appalachia and now lives in rural Luxembourg. They've been hobnobbing in the comment sections for years. I'm not uncritical of both these men but the discussion may prove interesting.

https://rhyd.substack.com/p/the-realign ... -with-paul

Thanks. I'll try and check it out.

I've not been reading Kingsnorth's Abbey of Misrule substack lately, but a good friend and fellow Kingsnorth enthusiast highly recommended his most recent essay on death and burial: https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/d ... re-you-die. I'm glad he did, it's powerful stuff.

[Hristo Botev]

“When you tire of living, change itself seems evil, does it not? for them any change at all disturbs the deathlike peace of the life-weary.” A Canticle for Liebowitz

[Hristo Botev]

A brief* update, as I need to give my brain a short break from work and I already had my daily pipe smoke this morning.

The most recent spat of violent summer storms revealed that we have a roof leak near the chimney, but as the roof was only replaced a couple years ago we thankfully don't have to pay for the repair and I don't have to try and figure out how to do it myself. Man, I can't imagine being a roofer in the Southeast during the summer.

I'm building a work bench in the shed adjacent to the shoffice, which will then be my HQ for the future DIY projects I have on the backburner; the list grows by the day.

I've now got a kid starting high school (!!!) and the other starting middle school. Crazy to think we are now at that point on the parenting journey. Sports continues to play a central role for both kids, with DD playing competitive soccer for a team that has the "right" initials in the alphabet soup world that is competitive youth soccer. This summer she is playing in a more casual summer soccer league with her high school soccer team, and she is also doing flag football summer conditioning with the high school. She's probably finished playing volleyball for good (club and school); which I'm thrilled about because being a volleyball dad is not my cup of tea. For high school she'll probably just play soccer and flag football, and I wouldn't be surprised if she joined the weightlifting team as well, as she has enjoyed strength training with me and she has a natural gift for it.

DS is absolutely loving doing the whole middle school summer football training thing--the weight training, the new friends, the locker room camaraderie, learning how to defend himself from older boys' hazing him, the shared experience of suffering and just the overall military boot camp feel of it all. I just shaved his head because he and his new football buddies all decided to do that for the summer. My closest friends to this day are ones that I met in that same locker room doing middle school summer football training 30+ years ago (though we had two-a-days back then, which have since been deemed illegal). DS also just finished his Little League regular season and is now preparing for the summer all star tournament; and he is loving every second of that experience as well. And he's got club soccer starting this fall as well, which he's excited about because they will finally be transitioning to 11v11.

DW and I attended a meeting recently of some parents (mostly of younger kids) who are trying to get a new Catholic school launched in our area. I don't suspect that the school will be up and running in time for our kids to attend, and I know they would prefer NOT to do so regardless, as they've formed solid friend groups and it would be a little cruel to pull them from that after having only recently pulled them from the parochial school friends they had before we decided to move home. But, as DD said, it would be nice to have a good, authentically Catholic school here so that her kids might be able to attend one day.

DW and I struggled with our frustrations with Catholic education for years (my journal is replete with diatribes on the topic). And we've come to terms with where we are at and the decisions we've made for own children (our kids certainly have no problem understanding what it means to be "in the world not of it" when their daily interactions are with the minimum penitentiary institutions known as public schools). But we hope that this current effort to start a Catholic school is successful, and we'll support it in whatever way we can, even if our own kids are never students there.

It's a weird time in education, perhaps especially where I live with school choice vouchers and kids allowed to play sports at whichever school they wish. It certainly feels like everything is in transition right now. A friend of ours is the principal at the public high school DD will be going to (same school DW and I went to); and she's got her work cut out for her, because she now has to deal with RECRUITING STUDENTS in addition to all of the other more normal responsibilities of being a public high school principal. Perhaps our parents thought the same when we were in school; I don't know, but we are just trying to get through the next 7 years or so (11 if you include college) with our kids not too damaged from "schooling."

We are selling the boat; which was inevitable. Every time we buy some big "extra" thing--boat, Airstream, fancy car, fancy house--we realize pretty quickly how silly it is; not because of the unnecessary ongoing expenses (the boat must be regularly serviced, we have a Yacht Club membership so that we have a place to park the boat, the boat needs lots of repairs, plus insurance and annual registration fees), but because we just don't have the time or the bandwidth to have yet another thing to worry about. It's enough to keep our house up and running and our kids taken care of; no reason to add more stuff to have to take care of. Plus, with the kids' travel sports activities we are traveling somewhere for a tournament or some other game every weekend as it is.

So, as always, the goal is to keep simplifying until we are at a level where we've got our lives fully in control; which of course will never happen.

Relatedly, after about 3 years I've decided to quit my Great Books seminar group, in part because it was one more deadline I had to meet (making sure I finished reading X before seminar and had something intelligent to say about it). I'm still reading the same books in the same order, I just want the freedom to deviate from time to time to read something that's not on Adler's "Great Books" canon list; like the long backlog of Catholic-y books I've picked up over the years. Also, online seminars really are inferior to the in person experience; and perhaps one day I'll find a group of like-minded people who want to get together in person once a month to talk about Plato, or Aquinas, or to laugh at Aristophanes' dick jokes.

Also relatedly: I just finished A Canticle for Liebowitz and of course I loved it. The Prometheus and Garden of Eden/Tower of Babel themes were very much there; and as such the book was of course as relevant today (with AI, etc.) as ever.

Also, it's snapper season, which means we've had to make room in the garage freezer for fish. I don't always enjoy 14-hour offshore fishing trips with too many people on too small of a boat, but I sure do enjoy having fresh or fresh frozen fish to cook.

*yeah, right.

[Hristo Botev]

I'm reading a surprisingly good book about an idol of mine, John Senior: John Senior and the Restoration of Realism, written by one of his former students who is currently the prior at Our Lady of Clear Creek Abbey. In it the author talks about how aware John Senior was of his natural tempermant (melancholic), and how he ordered his life in a way to make the most of that temparment and to downplay the more negative characteristics of that tempermant. DW and I decided to do our own temperment tests, via one of the ubiquitous online questionnaires.

DW's came out as follows:


And mine came out as:


I then did a couple other versions of the test, the most comprehensive-seeming of which put me as more of a Phlegmatic/Melancholic:
Choleric: 49/100
Sanguine: 29/100
Melancholic: 73/100
Phlegmatic: 74/100

I can see some value in this exercise, especially in using it as John Senior did and as he instructed his students to do--as a useful tool in habituating virtue.

If I'd have guessed what DW's numbers would be, I'd probably have pegged them pretty close to what her online assessment was, except that I'd have probably put her a bit higher as to both choleric and sanguine, but that would probably have been because I'd have been judging her temperament against my own, and she is definitely the more social of us and also the one who is much more likely to get fired up (esp. on the sideline of one of our kids' sporting events ). But judged against the population as a whole it makes sense that she's most a phlegmatic.

ETA: Interesting blast from the past--4 years ago when DW and I did the MBTI thing: viewtopic.php?p=225016#p225016

[delay]

Thanks for your journal update. I located the URL for the Four Temperaments Test here. The result I got:



There's a lot of other fun tests on their homepage!

[Hristo Botev]

Thanks for your journal update. I located the URL for the Four Temperaments Test here. The result I got:



There's a lot of other fun tests on their homepage!

God help us if the two of are ever tasked with taking charge of anything!

[Hristo Botev]

Late afternoon thoughts about some practices I've implemented consistently over at least a few years that are starting to really pay off:

• Maintaining a 50%+ savings rate

• Strength training

• Daily walks

• Setting aside time each day to read old books

• Cooking at home

• Flossing

[zbigi]

How can you tell flossing has paid off?