Happy Halloween to everybody! We didn't have much lined up for this evening other than curling up by the fire and reading books. The weather has turned cold this week with night time lows around 20 degress Fahrenheit. I'm hoping that explains the dearth of trick-or-treaters this year, as we only had two. That's more Almond Joys for me, but it's not like I need their coconutty goodness on my waistline.

What I'm afraid is happening is that Halloween is dying as a children's holiday. This year's turnout was lower than last year's which was lower than the year before. Maybe this is only a neighborhood trend or maybe the weather kept kids inside or maybe September 11 changed everything. I've not talked to anyone else yet to find out about the turnout elsewhere, so maybe I'm wrong. But part of me won't be surprised if the only thing that happens for Halloween in five years is that adults throw costume parties, and I'll think that a shame.

Dave's working a couple days straight in Salem, so he was able to spend the night last night which, as always, was cool. We watched Monday Night Football, and messed around with the plumbing fixtures in the upstairs bathroom. We managed the tub spout and the on/off handle without incident, and I'm very happy to report that there do not appear to be any leaks in the plumbing inside the walls (at least as judged by looking through the ceiling in my office up at the drain lines).

We did, however, run into an issue with the shower. The slider bar is fine, and the shower wand itself is grand, but the nipple coming out of the wall is just a touch too short to firmly attach the shower hose. As it stands right now, it leaks down the outside of the wall into the tub. So it's usable. It's just not perfect yet. I should have it fixed by the end of the week, though, and then we can worry about what color to paint the room, and other, lesser, matters.

I took a shower in the upstairs bathroom this morning, and it was a very pleasant experience. I'm a shower fan to begin with and undoubtedly my outlook on the matter is clouded by the money we've spent, but I am a very happy camper at this point. After the aforementioned minor plumbing fix, we're good to go for full-time usage, and, as they might say in the auto industry, it's a very nice ride.

Just after complaining about how I hadn't been able to find a decent Mexican restaurant, Erin and I stumbled onto Los Dos Amigos on Lancaster Drive on Friday evening. Best Mexican food I have ever had. Festive atmosphere and average prices, but the food is unbelievably good. Having slogged my way through one disappointingly average Mexican dining experience after another, discovering something like Dos Amigos was like finding water in the desert. Highly recommended.

Last night we watched Spy Game with Robert Redford and Brad Pitt last night. Mindless entertainment? Yeppers. The DVD comes packed with extras, but honestly, I have no idea why anybody would care that much. There's just nothing here of substance. It's also—as spy movies tend to be—far too clever for it's own good, and if a viewer really wants to spend the time, he or she can come up with almost innumerable ways in which the story bends reality in order to serve its needs. My recommendation: See it or don't. It's not stone cold stupid like, say, Con Air, but it's not very good either.

I spent about five hours yesterday sealing the grout in the upstairs bathroom. That's a long time to do anything, and the bad news is that I have to do it again this morning. Hopefully it will go faster, because it is insanely boring work. For whatever reason it reminded me of flossing: You've really need to do it, but that doesn't mean it's a whole lot of fun.

Darren, the tile guy, was here on Friday. He drilled through the tile and attached the grab bar—a nice safety feature. Hopefully it will prevent folks from grabbing onto the shower slider bar because that's definitely not a grab bar. It's screwed into a stud, of course, but not so securely that you can put your weigh on it. What can I say? For whatever reason, it was designed that way.

I've also added Darren's company, D&A Tile, as a client. We'll be setting a web site and everything after the first of the year, but for starters it'll just be logo and new business cards. (His old business cards were a sorry text-only amalgam of different fonts and point sizes.) For those interested, here's what the new logo I designed:

Joe came down to assist me in putting in the new toilet and in cutting a couple bathroom doors so that they would fit the frames. Initially, I had planned to have him help me with putting in the remaining shower fixtures as well, but since the installation of those items would've covered some grout lines which I still need to seal, I decided to forgo those minor projects.

And it's a good thing I did, because the first thing I did this morning was break off the end of bolt which secures the toilet to the closet flange (which attaches to the drain pipe under the toilet). We had to go out to Cascade Nut & Bolt and pick up a drill bit and a tap before we could do anything. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Thank God Joe was here. I've never tapped anything in my life and wouldn't have had the first clue in how to do it. (Tapping is the process of re-threading the opening so that a new screw can be put into place.)

That accomplished, the new bolts went into the flange no problem-o, we set the wax ring on the toilet, set it into position, and connected up all the miscellaneous bits. It's not rocket science, but when things—like that bolt breaking—go wrong it can sure seem like it is. Under normal circumstances I could have done this solo; why am I not surprised that another of my home improvement projects turned out to have abnormal circumstances? Like I say, thank God Joe was here.

[The Toto Supreme toilet is nice. It's quiet on the flush and the tank refill, and the seat has an anti-slam feature which keeps it from banging when you close the seat or lid. It's pretty nifty.]

Joe also gets major props for his work in trimming the bathroom doors to fit their respective frames. The upstairs bathroom door wouldn't fit because the new tile raised the floor by a quarter inch. The downstairs bathroom was binding since before we moved in. Joe + saw = doors both fit. Nice!

So the first half of the upstairs bathroom remodel is almost completed. The tile guy will be out again tomorrow morning to attach the grab bar and to do some caulking. On Saturday, Sunday, and Monday I'll be sealing the grout. Yes, that's right: Three times total, once each of those days. On Tuesday, I'll attach the remaining shower fixtures and test it out. If all goes well, we'll be showering in the remodeled upstairs bathroom on Tuesday night.

As I've said before, looking forward to next year, we plan to paint the bathroom, refinish the vanity, put in a new counter top and sink, and replace old hardware (knobs and handles) with more modern stuff. It shouldn't be too difficult a project compared to what we've already completed, but finances being what they are, I'm guessing it will be next summer before we get to it. Not to mention that the guest room transformation into a nursery will leapfrog it on the priority list. For now, I'm sure we'll have no problems being content with what we've got.

I drove up to Tigard yesterday, picked the Toto Supreme toilet from George Morlan Tigard (saving $100), and hooked up with Bret. After a brief stop at his nifty apartment, we went to Sí Señor, a local Mexican place. Food and price was fair. It reminded me that I really need to find a Mexican diner—in Salem, mind you—that I'm thrilled with. I've got Thai and Chinese restaurants I'm excited about, but nothing that really turns me on for Mexican food, and that seems like a shame, since I really enjoy a good burrito grande. Anyway, Sí Señor was OK, and worked out just fine for letting Bret and me sit and chat.

Bret was here last Sunday after the soccer game (a brutal affair featuring 12 yellow cards and 2 reds which we won 2-1), and took some measurements of the house for his Chief Architect class project. He also got a free haircut from Erin, but I prefer to think his motivations were purely altruistic. We talked a lot during that visit about how to best capture the house in blueprint terms, and we decided that I'll be taking a lot of pictures with the digital camera and burning the images on a CD for him. That makes a lot of sense, I think, since chicken scratchings on a piece of paper can only do so much to capture the reality of the house, and having pictures to refer back to will, almost inevitably, provide important details which weren't obvious when the initial measurements and drawings were made.

Erin's in week 12 now, and starting to plump up like a Ballpark Frank. There is a noticeable bulge in the middle if you were aware of her flat stomach prior to pregnancy; if you didn't know her body type before then you might not see it. She's gained probably 10-15 pounds at this point, but she still looks thin to me. Heck, I look more pregnant than she does, and the only thing I'm carrying is too many pizzas.

Her extreme fatigue has gone away now that the placenta is built. I wouldn't characterize her energy level as being back to full-power, but Erin at 80 to 90 percent is better than most of us mere mortals, and I'm confident in saying that she's returned to that range. Based on what I read, the fatigue may well return in the third trimester, but we'll worry about that when we get there.

George Morlan is an Oregon-based plumbing supply store that prides itself on customer service. Since they're local and I like supporting local business when it's not too terrifically to my detriment, from George Morlan we've purchased our water heater and, more recently, our new toilet and most of our bathroom fixtures. That background out of the way, prepare thyself for Ty's latest tale of woe. Soon enough, I am sure, I shall have a corner on the market.

George Morlan is running a special sale at their Tigard store. The toilet we bought three weeks ago for $369, and which has sat unopened in the garage for that time, is now on sale for $269. (That's a lot of money, but it's a heckuva toilet.) So yesterday I took my receipt, went to the Salem George Morlan store and asked about any sort of price protection, since as you may know, both Lowe's Home Improvement and Home Depot offer 30-day low price guarantees. George Morlan, apparently, does not—even within their own chain. I could understand a local not matching a national retailer, given economies of scale and such, but I would have thought that there would be some kind of price protection within the same chain. Nope, Ty gets penalized for buying local, though the customer service guy I talked with adamantly refused to see it in those terms.

So after that rather disappointing experience yesterday, I called up the Salem George Morlan store this morning to try a new tack. I asked about their return policy. Unopened box with the receipt? No problem. Full refund. So then I explained about the sale in Tigard—I left out additional commentary about how running a sale at one store instead of chain-wide in so small a geographic region is a poor business concept—and asked if there were some way I could get the $100 credit through the Salem store instead of making a return and driving to Tigard. This got me put on hold and ultimately transferred to the manager. I explained about Tigard sale and asked if I could get credit at the Salem store—essentially what I'd asked the day before.

The answer? Not so much, no. Despite a corporate credo which begins, "George Morlan Plumbing is a place where total customer satisfaction is our foremost concern," there was apparently no way they were going to just give me a $100 refund. I didn't say so, but I find it unbelievably stupid that customers should have to jump through such hoops, but $100 is $100, and if I have to drive to Tigard to get it, that's what I'll do. So I asked the manager if I could just bring in the toilet for a full refund. He replied very slowly and in tones which I took to indicate he by no means approved, "Yes, that is our return policy." Yeah, you have a nice day, too.

So I returned the toilet to the Salem store for the full refund without issue, and I'll be driving to Tigard tomorrow.

I don't know which I find dumber, the George Morlan shoot-ourselves-in-the-foot corporate policy of not allowing other stores to match in-chain pricing, or the attitude of the George Morlan Salem flunkies who are seemingly oblivious to the distrust and disappointment this policy sows. I'm not certain they even conceive of how this policy runs against their own corporate credo, but maybe, once again, my expectations of humanity are set too high.

Anyway, they've got a fair selection of good products, relatively low pricing all things considered, and, reasonably helpful if a little dim employees. Nonetheless, George Morlan Plumbing, caveat emptor.

The original plan was for the tile guy, Darren, to finish up today. Not gonna happen. He's got a lot of it done, but it'll be Monday at least before all the tiles are in place. Even now, though, the bathroom looks terrific. You can just stand there and stare at the tiles (I know because I have) and be impressed with the difference. Wow, it looks good. I'll post before and after shots in the Gallery sometime next week when the tile work is complete and we have the shower(!) and toilet in working order.

We have more to do in there, of course, but a lot of it is unlikely to happen this year. There's an obvious need to paint, and we want to refinish the cabinets and the vanity. We're pretty much out of cash for those projects at the moment, but completing the bathroom will be one of our primary remodeling goals next year. I'm guessing it'll be about another $1000 to complete the room, but that's somewhat speculative right now. The larger, more important point is that everything—especially the new shower—will be completely functional in less than two weeks time. We're very excited about that.

We have two other remodeling projects for next year. First, we'll be converting the guest room into a nursery. I don't anticipate that being much more than a coat of paint, some pretty designs, and the movement of some furniture. Maybe I'm wrong. I've never created a nursery before. Second, I want to install recessed lights along the overhang out back and insulate that overhang as well. The insulation befits are self-explanatory; the recessed lights will not only increase night time illumination for the back yard (and look great while doing it), they're also the first step in my long-term plan of building a deck back there.

Life is good.

Life on the funny farm has improved since my rotten Tuesday. The tile guy continues to make good progress and, so far as I can tell, do good work. I talked again with my friend Sue from Alaska, something I always find heartening. And my friend Joe and I also had an extended phone conversation. Indeed, by the end of the day, my cordless phone battery was in desperate need of a recharge, and believe it or not, that's usually a sign that I've had a good day. I like to talk with people.

So I'm happy again, an unsurprising mood swing perhaps since my default setting (if you will) is optimism. I never stay depressed for long anymore. This wasn't the case during my teenage years—when I was depressed for years on end—but a lot of things that are true for me now weren't true back then and vice versa. Happiness and optimism are more fun if nothing else, and I have so many blessings in my life that it'd be hard to perpetually bummed.

I've started re-reading The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Last time I picked up this book was in high school, and though the recent movie of the same name has chopped liberally from the story line, I can't fault the filmmakers. Unedited, LOTR:TFOTR is simply too large a tale to tell in a 2-3 hour film format. So they're necessarily different, but I think both book and movie deserve high praise.

Some days it's just not your day, and this was one of those days for me. I didn't get much sleep last night, and I'm coming down with a cold. That doesn't help. I've also go tendonitis in my left Achilles tendon, which means it's inflamed and very sore for substantial portions of the day. That doesn't help either.

After a chat last night with Joe regarding some of the final touches on the bathroom in preparation for the tile guy, I woke up early this morning and finished up all the sheet rock and plumbing. The tile guy, Darren, was out for the first time today at 8:30 AM. Nice guy. Presumably he'll do good work. Unfortunately, the first thing he said after looking at the bathroom was, "I need to take down most of the sheet rock." Hahahaha, I laughed until I cried. Apparently the backer board (aka Wonderboard) that the tile is glued to is so thick that it won't fit over the sheet rock on the exterior wall or the wet wall and still fit properly over the tub flange. On the back shower wall (where there were two layers of rock to begin with), he can put the Wonderboard over the sheet rock.

As you can imagine I was less than pleased that the Color Tile sales flunky who was out three weeks ago didn't tell me about this in advance. (Lesson learned: Never rely on the sales person for a punch list; always insist on having the person doing the work viewing the work area.) I've not talked yet with the Color Tile saleswoman—I figured I'd give myself a day or two to be less annoyed—and the upside is, of course, that Darren appears to be doing great work, he's a very nice guy, and at the end of the week we should still have a bathroom that looks great. But good golly Miss Molly I've spent a lot of time and effort (and friends' like Joe and Dave have contributed their time and talent as well) on stuff that now has to be ripped out.

To say I'm miffed at ColorTile is an understatement, and what's worse for them from a business standpoint is that this project will probably come out looking great. I should be a fervent supporter of Color Tile and instead I'm cheesed. And this is on a project going well. Imagine if it were going poorly. So we'll see how it gets handled, but right now I'm irritated.

After a brief discussion with Darren, I left for my 9 AM dental appointment. I walk in and the attractive receptionist asks, "Are you Curtis?" Uh, no, not in this lifetime. "Oh." She shuffles a bunch of papers around and starts looking through various appointment books. Nope, my appointment is nowhere to be found—except my contact card which lists today at 9 AM as the proper date and time. They were apologetic and great about squeezing me in for X-rays and a cleaning, but I think I left the office looking at the sky for falling airplane parts. Who knows what else might go wrong today?

So I went to the library. I tried to think of what I could do to cheer myself up without eating food or spending money. Free books was it. The library is my friend. So I spent an hour, pulled out books on a myriad of subjects and came home a little happier. Darren had the Wonderboard in place and the bathroom honestly looks better than it has since we started demolition on August 22.

Late in the day I had a couple bright spots: One, a call from my friend Sue from Alaska, and another, the opportunity to go over to Ma and Pa's and help them with some Mac stuff. These sound like small things, but when you've had a bad day, they count for a lot.

Today's soccer game was not what one would call easy, since I'm still not recovered from yesterday's blood donation. It ended a 2-2 tie. I was unhappy with both my play and the team's, though not the extent that I'll lose any sleep over it. We've got a lot of good players, but very few of them are on the same page tactically and virtually everyone runs away from the ball instead of checking back and giving the passer options. It makes for some dreadful soccer, but it's also good exercise, and as one might easily determine from my tone, I don't care a whole lot either way if we win or lose.

Talked with Bret for a few hours after the game. He's taking a CAD class using Chief Architect and has been impressed with the program. I've used the little brother, Home Architect, to do some CAD stuff around here, and I don't doubt that Chief Architect is a powerful design package. For Bret, it's just another item for the resumé, since he already knows MicroStation, AutoCAD, and others. I'm still hoping to have him over soon to finish mapping out our house so we can get some official blue lines of the place.

After my latest apheresis donation at the Red Cross in Portland (gallon number seven), Erin and I crossed the river for a party at Maria's place in Vancouver. There we met up with Maria, Dennis, Matt, Ginger, Joe, and Carol for conversation, food, and games.

Several of us took an online Jung-Myers-Briggs psychology test while others chatted, snacked, or prepared dinner. My profile is still INTJ, same as when I took a more extensive version of the test about 10 years ago. INTJ stands for Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, and Judging. The more notable INTJ textual description available post-test is titled "The Portrait of the Mastermind," an ego-boosting title if ever there was one. Here's a little bit of the verbiage, courtesy of Keirsey.com:

I'd call this a reasonable descriptor of my personality and attitudes. I don't see anything in there with which I particularly disagree, though I hardly would say this encapsulates who I am. Indeed, one of the biggest dangers of anything which purports to tell you "who you are" is that it'll be used by an individual as a self-limiting identifier or by a group as a means to impede who you can be. Since people are different and even those who share traits have diverse life experiences which inherently change who they are, no set of answers to test questions can do much more than reveal tendencies and inclinations.

The other crucial caveat is that these tests offer nothing in the way of solving deeper psychological problems. If you have issues with any kind of neurosis, psychosis, or character disorder, Myers-Briggs is useless toward affecting a cure. There is a temptation to say, "You're INTJ and I'm ENFP. I'm OK, you're OK" because the various personality profiles are morally neutral descriptors. That's about as wrong as one can get in using these things. People with severe psychological problems or mental illness are not OK, and regardless of what personality type they have. Hannibal Lecter of Silence of the Lambs fame would be an INTJ and so would the late Christian author C.S. Lewis; anyone wanting to argue a moral equivalence between those two on the basis of a personality test is on a fool's errand.

None of which is to say that you shouldn't take the online test and have a good time with the results. Growing self-awareness is a great and sometimes wondrous thing as long as it's not seen as limiting and not something that's taken for more than what it is. All that in mind, I say feel free to take the test and knock yourself out.

After dinner, we played The Game of Real Life, sort of a modernized version of the old board game of Life. Real Life is darkly comedic, with a wide variety of calamities befalling every player in the course of the game. You record a diary of events as you go—I thought for sure somebody would start their diary like Steve Martin's The Jerk ("I was born a poor black child....")—and track both money and health points (an unfortunate term for a lot of us ex-AD&D players who kept calling them "hit points"). For my part, I was an orphan who started with lots of money which I inexplicably lost when I was disowned by my boss. I'm sure that makes sense in somebody's universe. Anyway, I was also hung by neighborhood kids as a child, leading to my first near death experience. I married a rich woman, we had a kid with head lice. I bought Air Jordans and joined a Christian rock band. Then Maria rolled a six, abruptly ending the game in an huge nuclear holocaust. Honestly, we weren't even half way through the board, and -boom!- it's over. That was weird. Regardless, I enjoyed hearing others' diaries read at the end of the game, and it was fun to play despite (or maybe because of) the extraordinarily pessimistic outlook of the game.

Afterward, Joe, Carol, Matt and Ginger departed for their respective homes, and Erin and I hunkered down for the night in Maria's charming second bedroom for some much needed sleep. A good day, and great way to start week 11!