Oh, oh what a feeling when we're dancing on the ceiling

Somewhere near twenty years ago bunnyhugger and her starter husband tore up the beaten-up old flooring in the kitchen and put down do-it-yourself adhesive tile. She's hated it ever since, and all the moreso over the last decade as the tile's broken and torn up. Getting it fixed has been on the agenda for a very long time, although postponed most recently by my horrible unemployment experience.

But we are, at last, making real progress. Last year we poked around a couple hardware stores looking at tiles and discovering that real ceramic tiles aren't so much more expensive than disposable plastic ones as we feared. And they would be more period-appropriate to our late-20s house. And then, you know, everything and whatnot happened.

Last Friday, when I had a rare weekday off, we were able to go to one of the big flooring places in town and do some shopping around. We found a couple tile patterns that we liked --- one of them hexagonal! --- and they just gave us their display boards to set down on our hopefully-not-long-for-this-world floor and see how it looks in our light. And, from the rough estimate of what to expect for material and labor costs, it would be less than we feared.

Today while I was at work their guy (son(?) of the current owner) came out to do measurements. This came with some bad news. We'll have to take some height off the vestibule door, as the replacement tiles are just taller than what's there now. That's on us. Also we'll be responsible for moving everything out of the kitchen and breakfast nook, which includes pantry shelving, the portable dishwasher, the portable couch potato of a stove, the I-can-shove-it-easily refrigerator, and the pinball machine. That last one will be the biggest logistical challenge, although the fridge will be the one demanding the most prep work, in terms of eating the live load down.

Also sad news: our favorite, the hexagonal tile, won't do. The real killer here is that it turns out our breakfast nook and kitchen slope slightly different directions and that'll be impossible to tile over. But the top candidate for square tiles is fine and we're good with that. And, better, the underflooring seems to be okay; whether that would need to be torn up and replaced has been an anxiety-bringer.

We don't have an estimate yet, either in time or money. But it would be quite nice to have this done. Every time we've had some longstanding household annoyance fixed we've been very happy and wondered what took us so long. Think what a Christmas present it'd be to have a new floor in.

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Now we'll finish off the Gilroy Gardens antique car ride, 1950s edition ...

And one more tunnel on this ride, the one that leads us into ToonTown, right?

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... Oh. No, it just takes us back to the loading station but hey, look, a 1920s car coming the other way!

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And here we are, back where we started. Note the 50s-styled instruction sign in the upper left corner.

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And here's a view of the Oil Well Circus Tree from that side, so you can see how different it looks.

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And here we are back out in the main park again. Do you see what important thing has happened in the last couple minutes, though?

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Yeah, the park has reached closing hour and we're done for the day. But enjoy a view of the Basket Tree on the right there; it's still amazing.

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Trivia: Major League Baseball permitted pitchers to use a resin bag to dry their hands starting with the 1926 season. The American League, however, at the direction of president Ban Johnson, allowed the use but instructed managers to not allow their pitchers to request one. Apart from some exhibition games, pitchers did not, until the 1931 season, after Johnson had died. Umpires prepared resin bags for each game, regardless. Source: A Game Of Inches: The Story Behind The Innovations That Shaped Baseball, Peter Morris. (The controversy was about whether resin gave pitchers a competitive advantage, the way other adulterating substances might. Experience suggested it did not, it just let the pitchers dry their hands, but Morris says that just entrenched the American League president even harder in the anti-resin stance.)

Currently Reading: The Wright Flyers 1899 - 1916: The Kites, Gliders, and Aircraft that Launched the 'Air Age', Richard P Hallion.

PS: What's Going On In Rex Morgan, M.D.? Rene Belluso didn't really reform, did he? August - November 2023, as I give my reading of the action.