It's a diary of my normal life, the 5%. Just posting my replies to the monthly newsletter questions between the family and cousins. Dragon comments are after, "In the record".
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| Title page of family newsletter |
David–Who are you rooting for, the Kansas City Chiefs or the Philadelphia Eagles? Do you plan to watch it? Do you plan to bet in it? Let us know if you have a Superbowl party planned. Well, I did not watch it but I did watch the highlights here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rOmWIERvzo
Groundhogs day or Cake? Are you with the PETA folks on having a weather reveal cake instead of caged groundhog? Well, I would rather eat cake, so cake it is.
Pancake day is March 4th: What is your favorite pancake and do you have a recipe to share? Yes I know it's early but we need the recipes for the 4th. In the old day it was chocolate chip pancakes or pain pancakes to wrap bacon or sausage, a.k.a. Pigs in a Blanket. But that was because the way my dad made pancakes. I remember him telling us stories of their family constantly watering down the dough for the next kid that woke up for breakfast. So our pancake dough was always running and I thought nothing of it. Later in life, I finally read the directions and realize that we were making panflat not pancakes. So I followed the Bisquick directions and the flats finally turned into cakes. But still pancakes were the medium for chips or meats or berries, which is why I started to prefer waffles, light and crunchy. And french toast made with Siegfried challah using their french toast recipe which was excellent. Never did I like pancakes. Then in the Berkeleyside online newsletter was a recipe for Green House Bakery’s pancakes.
See link for the article with the recipe: https://www.berkeleyside.org/2024/11/22/green-house-bakery-pancake-recipe
The video on how to make the pancakes is here: https://oaklandside.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/PancakesGreenHouseBakery.mp4
After viewing the video I knew that I wanted to eat those pancakes that were truly a cake. Everything I knew about how to make pancakes was turned upside down. I have not made them yet, but I have bought all the ingredients to do it. Wish my taste buds luck.
Tell us how your taste has changed from the early days of syrup to now. Sadly, I think the days of sugar are over for me. I do remember always using Mapline to make syrup. I even converted a maple loving syrup person over to Mapline.
I need stories on how you used to do valentines day, especially in the grade school era. Grade school valentines was about mass producing valentines or you would be looked down on. I remember going shopping with Mom and picking out the valentines once. Still it was fun giving out the valentines to all my school mates.
Tell us how your taste in valentine has changed over the years. It seem predictable on what you had to do. It was as though if you did not do it you would be a lesser person. Also, being divorce and liking my single life does not endear me to wanting to fawn over a person.
Tell us what you like about that late night show. I never liked SNL. Whenever I hear a laugh track I get turned off of the humor, because no one is laughing. The only two late night folks I watch on YouTube is Late Night with Seth Meyers and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
As always tells us about any travel plans, projects and life in general. No travel, but projects a many. Note YouTube is an excellent place to learn any new skill that is needed for around the house work.
Stucco: The folks who stuccoed the outside of the house did the best they could because we decided to spend no money on the outside landscaping. So 20 years later we have to fix all the guesses. Also, the standard, materials have changed and folks are doing shortcuts to speed up the installation. Typically a stucco wall is a bottom edge overlapped with tar paper, wire hammered for base coat, topped with a color coat. Now a days, they put the one coat of stucco on and paint the color on the stucco. I can see this because the painted green concrete Hardie boards we have on the outside of the house have held up. See next page for the step by step work of the stucco patch.
The issues I had were: - The base stucco and top color stucco are out of date. For some reason Walmart has base stucco. - The color tint does not exist except for the three boxes we own. - There are no ¾” stucco nail. I had to cut 1.5” nails to ¾” and grind points on them. We had to pull all the wads off the nail and glue the wads on the wall because of the small patch wire we had. - Some stucco wall have plywood others had only concrete. We used ¾” nuts for spacers for the concrete rivets on the concrete walls.
- They used edge screed not weep screed for the bottom. I had to drill holes in all the edge screed for the weep.
- Skip the paper and rubberize between all layers.
-- They lazily stapled the lath wire to the ply instead of using wads to center the lath in the middle of the base coat.
The good news is that I like to problem solve. It looks great. Floating stucco to smooth it out is easy.
Roof Leaves: I had to get on the ladder again but I purchased pole extensions taped a cheap plastic rake to get the leaves off. 
Waterproofing All Wood: The wood around the house is redwood seat, ramp, stairs, seat, table, 2nd story deck, living room deck, front door deck, soffits all around the house, and barn door panels. I had no idea what to do. The previous waterproofing had wax in it which is why all the wood looks dark. Then YouTube came to may aid. Watched enough videos to understand that I need to use sodium percarbonate to strip and oxalic acid to brighten. The Eco Advance exterior wood siloxane waterproof is plant friendly. So far so good. The only work I had to do was to wire brush the redwood seats to get the old wax off, three times. Now I need to figure out what scaffolding I need to redo do the cedar soffits and paint any wood while on the scaffolding. Front Deck: I was going to patch the corner by the front patio/deck. I went under the deck to tried to unscrew the screws holding the deck boards down. One after the other screw heads broke off. They did not use deck hardware. It is time to completely redo the front deck. Got some videos for viewing: Stucco hammer drilling How to recycle twist ties Deli pencil sharpeners - perfect point every time. Yeah I proceed to sharpen every pencil in the house. Makita sprayer - which is excellent. No more pumping to build pressure.
Update:
