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After a little bit of begging and a short lecture, I bought myself a new toy today. It’s a Bostitch nail gun. Well, actually it is 3 guns and a compressor.

It is bad to the bone. If you have ever taken the moulding off the frame of a door, it is stapled on with the same type of staples that the staple gun shoots. The brad gun is for building small projects like picture frames and attaching light moulding on furniture. The finish nailer is for attaching base boards and crown moulding and building furniture. Plus the compressor, although fairly light duty, will be able to handle a few other tasks around the house like inflating tires and basketballs and such.

I’m looking forward to framing in that mirror I hung yesterday so that I can test out the brad nailer. And now that I’ve got the stain right for the moulding, that should go up in a snap.

Oh gosh, I love a good toy.  Especially one that makes life easier

I’ve been working on my in-laws bathroom. I tiled the floor last week, my Mother-In-Law wallpapered the walls and started stripping the cabinet and sent the drawers off to be stripped. This weekend, I’ve put in the new switches, outlets and plates, hung the hand towel ring, the towel bar and an extremely heavy mirror.

The part that is giving me fits is the stain for the moulding and cabinet. I wanted a deep golden brown. By deep golden brown, I mean I want it dark brown with yellow undertones. I tried this stain and that stain and all I got was a bunch of washed out black spots.

I finally discovered this pre-stain wood treatment for porous wood (the moulding is pine) and it has helped a great deal. I am now getting the deep color that I wanted, but now I’m having trouble getting the brown with the yellow undertones. I made an extremely deep, very beautiful bombay mahogany color which would look great in any number of applications. Except, unfortunately, that bathroom. It’s way too red. I’m doing a traditional mahogany now, but it just doesn’t seem to have that warm golden undertone that I want.

My In-Laws have been wanting me to give up and move on for 2 days now. I refuse. I’m gonna make the color I want. Period. I don’t care how many pieces of scrap moulding I have to stain to get it right. Or how long it takes. This is something that is going to be in place for another 20 or 30 years, I think a few more days to get it right isn’t gonna hurt anything. And the more I know about what I’m doing, the better this and future projects will turn out.

Besides, the cabinet hasn’t been stripped and the drawers aren’t back yet.  So really I’m waiting on them, not vice versa.

My lovely wife and I went out this weekend on a little date.  During said date, we went to the movies and saw Tyler Perry’s Daddy’s Little Girls.

I have to admit having a few reservations about going to see a Tyler Perry movie.  If you don’t recognize the name, he is the cat with the Madea character featured in Diary of a Mad Black Woman and scores of other melodramas all written and directed and starred in by him. I also have to admit to finding the Madea character absolutely noxious.  Just as I don’t like Martin Lawrence’s Big Momma character or Eddy Murphy’s Mama Klump character.  They all end up being these big balls of stereotypes that completely turn me off.  And because they are just a jumble of stereotypes, they don’t ever achieve any real depth because they can’t get past the limitations of those stereotypes.

All that was to say that the name Tyler Perry automatically induces a cringe in me.

Daddy’s Little Girls was an excellent movie.  And Tyler Perry himself was nowhere to be seen. Well written, well acted and well directed.

A quick synopsis of the movie:  A single, lower class father is trying his best to raise 3 girls and make something of himself, despite the hardships of near poverty and the mother of his daughters being a drug dealing crazy woman. During this struggle he meets a rich, powerful woman lawyer and they fall in love.

It touches on subjects that are often ignored in mainstream media:  hardworking Black men who care for their kids, self-reliance of Black communities, and class differences in the Black community.

It is a well-constructed movie with no wasted parts that I can recall. I highly recommend it.

I must be missing something about the brilliance of our latest strategy in Iraq, so I’m gonna need someone to explain it for me.

We win when we can get the various factions to stop killing each other.

So we are sending more guys over there in order to kill the guys that are killing each other.

Is that because we don’t want those guys to die?  Or is it because they just aren’t getting killed fast enough?  How many dead people = victory?  Are Americans included in that tally?  How about women and children?

Maybe the idea is just to give the Sunni and Shia militias a common enemy so they unite to attack us.  If so, how do we know that we are being attacked enough to declare victory?

I guess that I’m just not smart enough to understand the metrics of winning. Someone please explain it to me.

The other day Emily asked her Nannyboo for a glass of juice.

Nannyboo jokingly asked her if she had a dollar.

“Oh, I have money,” says Emily.

She goes to her little pretend cash register, pulls out her little fake $20 bill and hands it to Nannyboo.

“I’m going to need my change,” says Emily.

Which begs the question, what am I going to do when she turns 5?  or 10?  She will be smarter (and more mature) than me in a few months.

Barack Obama has officially declared his presidential ambitions. I can’t wait to watch him in action. I find him to be the most exciting of the candidates thus far.

I really like John Edwards, but on more of an intellectual level.

Clinton just doesn’t turn my crank. That and if she were to win 2 terms, there would have been a Bush or Clinton in the WH for 28 years. That’s too much for any two families. Let’s try something new.

Barack Obama is definitely something new. He’s young, he’s smart, and apparently he is clean. Which has always been a plus for presidential candidates, I hear. He may not win the nomination or the Presidency, but he is going to change America no matter what. And I welcome the change he will bring.

I’m so wickedly tired right now.  It’s all of my own doing, of course.  And most of it involves helping the in-laws remodel a bathroom which is turning out really nice, so it is well worth it.

But tired is tired and, wooh boy.