Meat Comas & Home Improvement

Friday night, we joined the Megos for a much-anticipated outing to Brazilian steakhouse Estancia Churrascaria, where servers wander the restaurant with a dozen different types of delicious meats and cut off pieces for you whenever your card is flipped to green. I have been to Fogo de Chao twice before, which is the exact same premise, and both times have left stuffed to capacity and then some. One time I hallucinated. So needless to say, this was not just another Friday night dinner out with friends, but an all-out event! I managed to eat all but one of the kinds of meat, and had seconds of most items too. I knew I had reached my limit when I had trouble swallowing a bit of bacon-wrapped-chicken.

Saturday I ran lots of errands and was delighted to see the Impala pass the annual state inspection without issue. That night we stayed home and watched the all-time greatest chick flick known to man, The Notebook. Dammit, that spunky Rachel McAdams gets to me every time.

Sunday I went to work on the dining table in the garage. The one really tough part was the diagonal cross brackets, and that was Step #1. Maybe there is a better way to go about assembling this, but I just tried holding the diagonal board in place by hand while screwing it into the vertical board. If the four boards aren’t precisely exact down to the fraction of a millimeter, it doesn’t work. I wound up assembling and disassembling those boards time after time, and completely rebuilt them twice with new wood. Eventually I just had to saw 1/16th of an inch off here and there to make it fit. After that it was smooth sailing. A Kreg Jig is a must on projects like this. I have a couple more boards to attach before I sand/stain/finish this beast. Only then will I attach the four 96″ surface boards.

Not to be outdone, Lauren is going around the house replacing every outlet and light switch–even the three-way switches and dimmers–doing all the wiring herself. It has been a challenge as we’ve found our house was apparently wired by a third-world drunken ebola monkey. The breaker switches control the most random assortment of rooms; sometimes a switch will control an outlet in one room and several in another room on another floor and something outside. To make it all the more complicated, the wires inside each light switch box are terribly inconsistent from one to the next. I believe Lauren can do the job though. She’s a smart one!