The longtime readers of Gurno.com will recall the story of the Nose-less Hobo Snowman from last year. (Quick recap: derelict snowman wakes neighborhood, neighbors think it belongs to me, I threaten to kill snowman with hammer; heart warming tale, soon to be a kids' book.) Anyways, a good friend of mine is apparently opposed to hammer-based Snowman-icide and offered to give the snowman a home last year. I dropped it off before moving out of town, but neglected to update the story because I’m lazy and you can just quit thinking it because there, I said it.

Flash forward to this year and I get these nice pictures via email:

• Picture 1
• Picture 2

...showing the snowman very much alive and occupying a prominent, happy position in his new home. (At least until he breaks his proletariat chains again and goes on a drunken scrape up and down the neighborhood, waking everyone.)

I was going to award my good friend Tim Freeland a “Humanitarian of the Year” award for saving the snowman’s life, but then I realized that snowmen aren’t human and anyways the plaque looks really good on my wall. So next time y’all stop over, ask to see my new award. It’s really shiny. Yay, me!

Was out clothes shopping yesterday, to replace some shirts that I dyed pink in the wash.

I was standing by the discount shirt rack in Jacque Pinnae when a mother with a disgruntled college-age kid in tow approached the other side of the same rack.

She started flipping through the shirts while the kid thumbed his nose at everything suggested. Then she came over to my side, where I was standing, holding shirts taken from the selection right in front of me.

"How about these? These are nice.", she said.

I've outgrown the "Gotta have that thing on TV!" syndrome that you have as a kid.  Call me jaded, but I simply believe almost nothing that I see on television any more.  "Local News" is an abomination, I don't really need the nifty new Zocor/Valtrex/Ambien (ZoVaxAm) triple pill, and the women on Deal or No Deal have so much plastic in them that they could be recycled into some sort of meta-ironic credit card.

That being said, the only thing that I can recall seeing on TV and going "HULK MUST HAVE" in the past decade is that speckled epoxy garage floor coating.  How boring am I?  Yeah, I don't know why, but when I first saw it demoed it was as if cupid sprang out of the TV and shot me in the cement portion of my heart that I wasn't aware of before.

And this lead to that pining heartbreak we're all so familiar with.  While I did have that two components that one needs (a garage, $50), the garage was being used as... well, as a garage.  And as such, it had a car, bikes, a lawn mower, tools, various half-inflated basketballs, an old set of lawn jarts, and the like.  There were corners of the garage that I hadn't seen since we moved in in 2000.  Furthermore I was married, which meant that I couldn't simply turn the garage inside out and dump everything on the lawn for a week.  ("Hon, the reason you have to park a half block away is that the driveway is filled with the snowblower, winter shovels, and the broken kiddie pool that I've promised to fix for two years now so that I can put some speckled paint on the garage floor.  Also, it will take one week.  Hon?  Where are you going?")

So I spent several years mooning over the boxes in the hardware store.  I have this abject fear that products I want will be discontinued before I get a chance to try them.  And so every so often I'd wander over and confirm that yes, the boxes were still there.  I'd button hole the employees with insane badgering questions - "You're going to restock the Qwik-Crete Slate Gray Epoxy Dura-Coat Finish 001-425 soon, right?  Right??!"

And then we bought a different house.  And the skies cleared, the sun came out, and God came down and gave me a high-five.  People would ask me what I liked about the new house and I'd say "The unfinished cement floor in the garage."  The time had come.

It's good that we've got a few weeks before we move in because this sh*t is involved, boy-o. Here are the steps to a proper epoxy-ied floor:

1. Sweep out the garage completely.
2. Wet floor.
3. Apply de-greaser/etching compound.  Vicious, nasty stuff.
4. Scrub compound in.
5. Wash compound out.
6. Allow this to dry for 24 hours.
7. Re-sweep garage.  Nature abhors a swept floor.
8. Mix two part epoxy compound.  Stir for at least three minutes.
9. Wait 30 minutes for some sort of mystery chemical reaction to happen in the paint can.
10. Paranoia sets in as I resweep yet again.  How many leaves can blow into a garage in thirty minutes?  Answer: one million.
11. Clock starts ticking.  I've got 2 1/2 hours to apply the paint before... well, it doesn't say.  It only says you've got 2 1/2 hours.  Considering that the paint can is boiling like a witches' cauldron I don't doubt it.
12. Paint garage floor.
13. Sprinkle those little color flakes.  Worry about randomness.
14. Let dry for three days.

So I'm currently at day 1 of step 14.  The work is done, now I just need to summon the patience to do nothing for another 48 hours.  It's not easy.  But it's done.  I couldn't be happier.

Time to start watching commercials again.  I'll be looking for my project for 2014.

It's been a crazy weather week - well, it's been an entire month of 70°F to snow to 65°F to sleet. On Sunday it started off sunny and followed that up with gigantic flakes of snow. Really, really huge ones.

Linnea, Ginger, and I went outside to do a little Spring frolicking. (How do you spell "frolicking"?)

Gather round, children and let me tell you the story of Snowy, the snowman everyone hated and apparently thought belonged to us.

We went to the US National Figure Skating championships the other night. They were in St. Paul - first time they've been in MN in a long time. I can't say that I'm a big fan of figure skating - for instance, I knew exactly *one* of the 20+ skaters that was on the ice Saturday night.

I do know some of the older skaters though: Michelle Kwan, Kristi Yamaguchi, Sarah Hughes, Oksana Baiul, Rudy (Somebody), Brian Boitano, That Guy Who Got Cancer... and Nancy Kerrigan.

So, it's about 30 minutes before the free dance portion kicks off and Sara and I are walking to our seats. She's about ten steps in front of me (for reasons I don't remember) and I pass by a shorter woman, longer dark hair walking briskly in the other direction. "Hey, Nancy Kerrigan!", I say. This is my idea of humor - it must be hell to be married to me. If there was a blond woman with a stick, I would have said "Hey, Tonya Harding!", I'm a bucket of laughs. Anyways, we make it to an elevator (Ah yes, Sara wanted a slice of pizza) and manage to catch a car before it closes. When the doors close, a lady behind us says "God, that was Nancy Kerrigan - I got her autograph!"

When we got off Sara said "That WAS Nancy Kerrigan - I thought you were joking!" "I WAS joking," I said, "I had no idea."

So there you go, my brush with Greatness.

More inside...

I came within hours of getting skunked on our most recent hunting trip - three days of freezing winds, some snow, and some sleet nearly came to an end without even seeing a deer.  But my luck changed and I bagged the only deer that I laid eyes on.

Well, laid eyes on while hunting, that is.  I saw dozens hanging out at the local golf course, smirking in the knowledge that there was nothing more dangerous in their future than a near-sighted geezer with a five-iron and a nasty slice.

The 30-30 in that picture is a better story though.  It's been dropping deer for at least three generations in my family and a few more for others.

Assumptions are my business and business is good.  So let's get down to something that has been on my mind for a while - when does my purchase of a scooter break even?  There's a number of items to consider here:

1. The initial cost of the scooter
2. The price of gas
3. The difference in gas mileage between my car and the scooter
4. The decreasing value of the scooter as years go by (resale value)

It's not a terribly difficult forumla.  My break even comes when the money saved on gas + the current value of the scooter becomes greater than the initial investment in the scooter.  (This is where the 'assumption' business comes in - scooter devaluation, variable price of gas, inflation, etc., etc.)  Fortunately, we have Google Spreadsheets to the rescue.  Look at the chart above - it's the $3/gallon gas chart and the green line is my 'break even' line.  If a new car (scooter) loses half it's value when you drive it off the lot, then my break even point is out there a ways.  13,000 miles.  Considering that I've been putting 500 miles a year or so on my scooter, that's 26 years.   ...which is a long, long way out there.  But hey, high priced gas to the rescue:   This is UK-style $5/gallon gasoline.  This break even point is just 6000 miles.  If you tend to be gas-pessimistic like I am, then $5+/gal gas is something that's not far around the bend.  And when gas prices continue to rise, I'd bet that I'd put more than 500 miles per year on my scooter.

Okay, so it's been a bit quiet around here as we're taking apart the house to prep it for sale. Did mention that we're selling the house? Because we are. Buy it, please.

Anyways, here's the things that we've been into while my computer was in 100 pieces after taking apart my office...

The Cannon Valley Fair is going on (as I write - it ends today). Sara, Linnea, and our friends Kelly and Araya went to the fair last weekend to ride the rides and nosh on some of the nutritious fair food, since we weren't getting our RDA of hot dogs.

We bought some fireworks. Well "Minnesota" fireworks, which means nothing that goes anywhere or makes too much noise; the celebration of Freedom certainly has a lot of rules attached. The sparkler pics were taking with my camera which has a specific fireworks setting, thanks to the good people at Kodak.

More later, including my sister and a turtle.