Alicia flew in from Medellín last Friday. I drove over to Orlando after work to pick her up.

She had to get up very early to catch a 7:30 a.m. flight to Bogotá on LAN, claim her bags and turn them in at Delta, take a five-hour flight to Atlanta, go through Immigration and Customs, recheck her bags, and fly to Orlando.

Everything went well until her last flight. At the gate in Atlanta, she was in group 3 and was the last to board. A uniformed lady at the gate grabbed her carry-on, tagged it, and gave it to a baggage handler at the door to the plane.

"No!" said Alicia. "I'm carrying that on. It's fragile." (It contained several buildings from a Christmas set, and after the fiasco with my carry-on that got sent to the wrong country, we had made sure it wasn't overfilled so it would fit in the test rack.)

The baggage handler hesitated, looking at Alicia and the lady as they argued. The lady insisted it had to be gate-checked, and ordered her to board the plane. Alicia refused. "I'm not moving until I get my bag back," she said.

No one within earshot spoke Spanish, but it was obvious what she was saying. The rep got more and more furious, finally yelling, "Get out!"

"You get out!" Alicia responded in accented English, not even knowing what it meant.

Finally one of the pilots came out to see what was going on. "Do you speak English? Italian?" he asked Alicia.

"No English. Español," she said.

The pilot said something, and the lady, clearly irate, took the bag from the baggage handler and gave it to Alicia, while the baggage handler grinned ear to ear. It appeared to Alicia that he was delighted to see the pushy rep get her comeuppance.

Taxis in Colombia are tiny and yellow and look like Minions from Despicable Me:

Unlike cars sold in the US, their doors are light and flimsy. The drivers wince when they carry North American passengers, because the average tourist will slam the door, each slam cutting its lifespan significantly.

I don't slam taxi doors. It doesn't take that much effort to pull or push the door shut gently (or to notice the sign that says, "Please don't slam the door!"). As a guest of Colombia, it's my responsibility to adapt, just as we expect foreign visitors and immigrants to to follow US laws and customs.

Some of the cultural adaptation has stretched me. I'm an introvert by nature, but Colombian culture requires that I greet people with a handshake, a hug, or an airkiss; that I thank them profusely for any kindness; and that I participate in conversation even when I'd just as soon sit quietly in a corner.  When I leave the country,  I need to call the people with whom I spent time to say goodbye and thank them again for their hospitality. Not to do these things is considered rude. It would also reflect badly on my wife, who is the most gracious person I know.

The other day Alicia and I went to San Cristóbal to visit my old friend Alvaro. On the way we passed this dog, who looked like a memory from 1977.

I spent Sunday afternoon and evening tiling my dining room. The first decision was whether to put this medallion at the entrance. I had this great idea of using half of it at the front entrance and the other half at the back door. But when I folded it and set it in place, it didn't look as spectacular as I had imagined. The height would be a problem for a welcome mat. And it would be a dirt trap. I regretfully put it back in the garage. Maybe we'll use it on the stoop, where at least it can be hosed off.

Tearing up the old vinyl and getting rid of the adhesive was a huge amount of work. I used a solvent I bought at Lowe's. Did you know that in a pinch, shopping bags make good shoe covers? I wear size Publix. After I got the floor clean, I painted a concrete adhesive where the glue had been so the mortar will bond better.

I tiled the entrance first. The trickiest part was the curve.  (Yes, the mortar has dried out at the top. I worked it over with a fresh trowel-full before putting tiles there.)

I did it by dead reckoning, cutting off a corner so I could hold the tile in place and using my speed square (propped up by the glue bottle) as a point of reference. Then I drew on the underside of the tile with a grease pencil. Cutting a curve like this with a tile saw requires a lot of cuts close together to get a ragged semblance of a curve. It's a lot easier with wood.

In order to tile diagonally instead of the usual horizontal/vertical, I measured 11' along the wall, 11' out across the room, and calculated the hypotenuse, which was something like 186.68". When the three measurements all work together, you get a right triangle with two 45-degree angles. Occasionally geometry is helpful. With my first bucket of mortar, I tiled the entrance and followed my chalk line over to the kitchen door.

By the end of my second bucket of mortar, I had about half the dining room done. The rest will have to wait until after my Colombia trip, which starts tomorrow and ends December 9.

Last night I cleaned up  the grout lines, and tapped the tiles to see if they were well adhered. One at the foot of the stairs sounded hollow. When I looked at it a few minutes later, it had cracked across the hollow corner. So I had to pry it up and scrape the slab clean under it.

The family room is looking really nice, now that the bookshelves and baseboards are back in place. I love the look of the oiled cedar.

If you ever have a section of carpet that won't get clean no matter how you steam or shampoo it, it's probably because it has an accumulation of sand underneath (at least in Florida). This is the bottom step of the staircase when I pulled up the carpet. No amount of vacuuming will pull that dirt up through padding and carpet.

When I was putting a cover over this phone utility box, I discovered this remnant of the original wallpaper. Truly horrible. The paper they covered it with was much classier.

Tomorrow afternoon I fly to Colombia, and then Thanksgiving Day is Alicia's concert. Her sister and niece will also sing. I'm looking forward to it.

Have a most blessed Thanksgiving.

(One more trick for installing laminate)

Tonight I tackled the floor around the semicircular end of the bottom step. I put a piece of flooring up against it next to where it will go, and figured out where the ends of the semicircle would be by sliding the second piece up against the semicircle on each side. Since it happens that the previous row of flooring came up right against the circle, theoretically I only needed to mark one of the two ends of the arc.

I clipped a clothespin just outside the mark and flipped the board over on the semicircular step so that the clothespin touched it and the front edge of the board was flush with the step edge. I traced the arc I needed to cut on the underside of the board.

My cut didn't come out perfect, but it was close enough. The tile I'll use to cover the step is thick enough to cover the gaps.

Okay, neighbors, I'll stop using my power tools in the driveway now. Two rooms down, four plus a hallway to go... and that's just the  ones that get laminate flooring. Three other rooms will be tiled.

This has been the most challenging laminate floor I've installed, with several tricky parts, but so far I've been successful in figuring out how to deal with them. One of the very first challenges was the bracket holding this cedar column to the floor.

I cut a piece of flooring to fit around the column, cut a notch on the edge for the upright part of the bracket, and hollowed underneath for the horizontal part by dragging the piece crosswise under the miter saw. 

It worked pretty well, as you can see here. The wood lies flat on the floor and fits snugly to the column. Note that by having the finish edge of the right end flush with the column, I can go on from there with a whole piece. I could have notched the middle of a whole piece to go around the column, but it would have been trickier dealing with the bracket and the narrow strip would be very fragile.

Doorways pose other problems. The first thing to do is cut off the bottom of the trim on each side with a flush cut saw, after flipping over a piece of flooring to use as a spacer.

On the other side of this double pocket-door, I notched around the wall. Here it's not as easy to do that, because there isn't room to back in the snap-lock connection. So I used the same strategy as with the column and brought one piece up flush to the edge of the door (on the right). I trimmed off most of the interlocking lip and left enough to slide into the space between the door and the flooring. I also shaved the raised bead off the lip because we won't be able to interlock here, just overlap.I cut an L-shaped piece that will slide under the casing and connect with the piece on the right. I also ran glue along the lip on the right so that the two pieces will have a permanent connection. To tap the piece into position, I created a tapping block from a scrap of flooring. It has a male edge so that it will interlock with the female edge instead of damaging it.

Whoops... my cut is too short! Gotta tap the piece back out and run to the saw again.

There we go. That's close enough. There are a couple of flaws in the finish where it chipped, but I'll drip a little wood stain on them and no one will notice.By the other end column, we have this doorway and threshold to deal with. As you can see, I used the same strategy with the column, cutting a piece to come out flush. It would look classier not to have two cut edges together, but most people won't notice that.

To deal with the doorway, I cut another L-shaped piece to tap under the casing. I made it just narrower than the door, so I could interlock it and then slide it up to the column.

The threshold is curved, so I made the cut beveled to match. Most circular saws and table saws have an angle adjustment. I used my circular saw because my table saw is hard to adjust.

It came out as close to perfect as you could want. Man, I love being my age! I have skills!

On the left side of the doorway, we have a similar problem, but we can't slide the piece in from the left because it gets wider at the doorway. So I decided to try sliding the piece straight in and working it back to see if I can get it to interlock. 

It slid in easily enough. The size is perfect. (Man, I'm good!)

To pry it back into its notch, I used a prybar. The left side went in easily.

The right side was trickier; remember that beveled edge? Yeah. But I pulled and tapped on the prybar and sort of got the edges to interlock.

In the middle, the floor had slipped under the Sheetrock, so I used a narrow chisel to grip the edge and lever it back. 

Good enough. You can see that the seam hasn't closed completely; there's a line of yellow where it should be all black. But I don't think it's likely to separate, wedged in as it is. I may go back to it and see if I can get it tighter when I do the baseboards. 

Another big challenge will be this little semicircle on the bottom step. Cutting the flooring around it won't be that tough, but when I put flooring on the staircase, I'll have to get really creative.

When I pulled the carpet off, the padding made it look like one of those weird pulled taffy candies.

The edges are lined with tack strips. I hate those things! They always stab me when I'm working with them. I pried them off with a chisel.

Somehow I need to figure out how to cover this thing with laminate flooring and tile. When I do, I'll post about it.

On Veterans' Day I got half of the floor done in the two living areas, thanks to help from my brother-in-law Diego who worked with me from 7:45 a.m. to 3:00.

The flooring is a thick snap-lock floor I got from Lumber Liquidators. (I bought the foam padding online because it was $10 a roll instead of $25.) It ended up being a tricky job, mostly because it's hard to keep a straight line when you're connecting two rooms through a doorway. We have found a tapping block to be an invaluable tool.

The first thing we did was reinstall the cedar beams around the fireplace. They look considerably better now that they have been sanded and oiled. There is more scalloped trim to be added once the floor and baseboards are done. I also need to put up the mantelpiece.

Here you can see the cedar up close. There were big plugs in the holes. I need to reinstall the plugs, cut them flush, and oil them.

Working through the doorway required adding flooring in both rooms out as far as we could, then notching a piece of flooring around the wall, trimming off the little lip that provides the snap-lock, running a bead of glue along that edge, and tapping the piece back into place where it connects both sides of the wall. The two rooms are a little different so we had to lever the flooring out from the wall on one side to try to square it up with the other one.  It's still tricky trying to add flooring in this area of the room, because there is still a tiny bit of an angle. (We undercut the door trim so the floor edges don't show much at all.)

I had fun notching around this piece by the chimney. I cut a little curve to fill in where the cedar has splintered. (The hole to the right of the column  is maybe 1/8" or 3/16" but looks bigger in the photo.)

I have done all this work without a tape measure; I just hold the piece I'm going to use against the space or wall or beam, and mark with a pencil. If I need lines I use a scrap of flooring as a square or ruler. I'd use my square but I can't find it. So far I'm very happy with my level of precision.

In 1981 I spent the summer in Aspen, Colorado, for an InterVarsity Christian Fellowship evangelism program. About 40 students from all over the country lived together in a lodge and got jobs in the community. It was one of the best summers I ever had.

I was fortunate enough to get hired by a carpenter named Rock Mason. He and his son (let's call him David because I can't remember his real name) were building a house for a local restaurant owner, a few miles down the road to Glenwood Springs. It was located on a hillside with a gorgeous view. They had been working for a contractor who got paid $1000 a week to come by for an hour or so a day and tell them what to do, so they persuaded the owner to fire the contractor and let them finish the job for decent carpenter wages, which at the time was $20 an hour. (I got paid $6.)

The house included a number of energy-saving innovations. There was a glassed-in sun porch that collected solar heat, which was pumped by a fan down to the crawl space. The crawl space was insulated outside the foundations, so that the concrete foundations would hold heat, not cold. At night the warm air filtered back up into the house to provide warmth. The roof was pine siding covered with thick polyurethane foam and topped with bituminous sheet roofing.

The first floor had a radiant heat coil under the flooring, but according to Rock, it would rarely be used. "The sun porch keeps the house in the 50s even in winter, on sunny days," he said, "and the wood stove does the rest."

My first day, I helped attach the fascia. I had to hammer hanging over the side of the roof while Rock and his son held a heavy piece of lumber in place, and of course I missed the nail a couple of times, leaving visible dents in the nice redwood. Rock spat on his finger and rubbed the saliva into the dent. "Sometimes it will swell back out when it gets wet," he said. It didn't work, although I've had a few small successes with the technique since then. (I'll bet I could locate the dents if I went back to that house now.)

On this house, I had my first experience with hanging and taping Sheetrock, and stapling up insulation and vapor barrier. I learned that the door between the house and the garage had to be solid-core and fire-resistant. (They had used a hollow-core interior door and it didn't pass inspection). I learned about headers over doors and windows, and that the rule of thumb is one inch of height for each foot of width. (A header made of 2x4s will span three or four feet, a 2x6 header will handle a six-foot wide window, etc.) I watched Rock struggle to solder a copper pipe that had moisture in it. (I had never dealt with copper pipe before.)

I was assigned the job of leveling out an area for a patio, raking a bed of sand over it, and laying cobblestones. That part went very well. What didn't go so well was trying to edge it with cedar 2x4s that weren't straight.

The house had well water which tasted great when it was fresh, but if stored in a jug, smelled nasty the next day.

We sided the outside of the house with lapped cedar, using handmade spacer tools something like this:

You tuck the notch under the previous piece of siding (siding is added starting from the bottom of the wall) and set the new piece on the top. If you're careful, the siding will go on level. I discovered that it was still a good idea to check it with a level every few rows.

The house was on a space cut into the side of the mountain. David and I were tasked with using boulders to edge the outer perimeter of the parking area. There were a number of egg-shaped rocks bigger than the size of a large watermelon. It took both of us to move them around. At one point, David was standing on the slope just below the edge of the perimeter, when the boulder we were rolling got away from us and rolled over the edge at him. It must have weighed a couple of hundred pounds. He tried to stop it, but it bore down on him while he shuffled and slid and skipped backward, pushing at it with both hands. Finally he managed to leap sideways. At that point I was laughing hysterically. Even though it had been a very dangerous situation, watching him hop backwards with that look on his face had been hilarious.

Another builder, Fred Alderfer (boss of my IVCF buddy Noel), was building himself a house on the outskirts of Aspen. Rock and David and I helped him pour his foundations. I learned that a gift of a case of beer was helpful in gaining the cooperation of cement truck drivers who don't like working in tight spaces.

A week or so later, we participated in Fred's building bee. Noel told me that another carpenter he talked to had been extremely skeptical. "You mean people are going to give up a day to build a house for no pay? I'll be surprised if anyone shows up."

As I recall, there were about fifty people there that day. The framing had been factory-built in sections, and arrived on a big truck.

Many of the other carpenters were using compressors and pneumatic nailers. Rock was dismissive. "You can get it done just as fast with a hammer," he said. He also doubted that having the walls framed at the factory saved much time over building them on the spot. (He was wrong about pneumatic nailers; it takes about three solid blows to sink a framing nail with a hammer, usually two blows for a decking nail, while a pneumatic nailer does it with one pull of the trigger.)

That day we installed joists for the first floor, decked it, got the first floor walls up, and got the second floor joists laid before it got dark. Noel and I couldn't work the next day because of IVCF activities, but the group that assembled got the second floor framed and the roof trusses and decking up, from what I heard.

A couple of times I worked at Rock's house. The Masons lived in a trailer park in Glenwood Canyon. The house was a rambling sequence of modules, each built independently and bolted to the previous one, following the trailer park code. As I recall, we worked on a small apartment for his son, who was recently engaged. There was a volleyball court in the backyard, with electric lighting.

Rock's house had a solar water heater, which consisted of a black rubber hose that was coiled on the roof of the trailer. By the time the water reached the electric water heater, it was something like 118 degrees, so the electric heater had little work to do. In the winter he drained and disconnected the hose. (I've always wanted to do something similar, but I think I would pipe the water through my attic, with a bypass and drain for winter. An attic in Dallas will get well over 120 degrees in the summer. I suspect Tampa would be only a few degrees less.)

Working for Rock was a great introduction to American construction conventions as well as energy-saving innovations. It gave me a discriminating eye for the houses I've lived in or worked on ever since, and the urge to find creative ways to save energy.

I left for Kansas before the restaurant owner's house was finished, and when I went back to Aspen in 1982, didn't have occasion to visit there. But I did get to play volleyball at Rock's house, along with Noel, who had also returned.*

*I spent the most of the following summer, 1983, in Europe. Noel and I agreed to meet in Aspen at the beginning of August, ride his Honda 750 to Miami, and spend the fall in Medellín, Colombia, where I would work on my thesis and he would get an English teaching job. Unfortunately, the day after I arrived in Aspen, Noel's fiancee called me to tell me he had run head-on into a truck four hours from home.

Alici called Friday morning to say her sister Angela had a sore throat and wanted me to do a lot of singing that night at the restaurant so she wouldn't have to do as much.

"Why don't you sing? You're the professional," I said.

"I want to stay home and hang Christmas lights," she said.

My wife is weird. She's also the most wonderful woman I've ever known. And she's nuts about Christmas.

So I sang most of what Angela and I have ever practiced, a hodgepodge from Jairo, Sting, Francis Cabrel, Bread, Simon & Garfunkel, Carlos Vives, Piero, Roberto Carlos, Joan Manuel Serrat. I wish we had had time to work up Neil Diamond's Solitary Man and Mary Black's No Frontiers, but they'll have to wait.

I sang a couple of songs the previous week as well . My current favorite is Sting's Until. I was weak on the first verse (I had been eating patacones) but the second verse sounded really good, thanks in part to the better sound system Angela acquired. It's much easier to sing well when you can hear yourself.

At some point I want to write a blogpost on recycled love songs. But I don't know if it's a good idea.

As I said, Alicia is nuts about Christmas. I've had to bite my tongue when she shows me some of the decor she wants to get. Clear glass Christmas trees and manger scenes illuminated with lights that change color do nothing for me. But if I wait until we can find decor that we agree on, it'll be years before the house is anywhere close to decorated, because 98% of what is out there is either tacky or beyond our budget.

So I suppress my inner Grinch and say, "Fine." Unless it's something I really can't stand.

I've made three business trips to Panama City, FL, in the past three weeks. When I was coming back last Wednesday afternoon, my boarding pass said I would be leaving from Gate 3. The monitor overhead said it was Gate 4. The actual gate turned out to be 5.

The Delta self-service machine said my flight was overbooked, and asked if I wanted to give up my seat in exchange for a voucher worth (check one) $50, $75, $100, $125, or fill in an amount. I said I would do it for $400. (Can you believe it costs $475 to fly Delta from Panama City to Tampa? It's only 400 miles. But you have to stop over in Atlanta or Nashville.)

They didn't call on me to give up my seat. Cheapskates.

Alicia left yesterday for Colombia. She has a concert Thanksgiving Day and another December 6. I'll be flying down just before Thanksgiving and will be there just a week and a half. Fortunately all this travel to Panama City has given me a little comp time.

The Thanksgiving Day concert is called something like "Una voz, una mujer" ("One voice, one woman") and is in honor of Alicia herself, who just retired from the Universidad de Antioquia. They will be launching her latest album (same name), which she recorded just before our wedding last year. (I hope they have it ready in time. They were still throwing together the cover design and notes just last week.)

Her sister Angela and niece Sara Elisa are going along, and will also sing in the concert.

Alicia's album was put together with songs for which the university symphonic band already had arrangements, because the budget was tight. Alicia is a mezzo-soprano, but some of the songs are arranged for soprano, and one or two for tenor. She did an amazing job (recorded all the vocals in just eight hours), but there's no way she would perform something out of her range in a concert. So her sister and niece (both sopranos) and a male vocalist will do some of the singing.

I hope you're having a great week.

Images of the past week.

One of our errands last week took us to Sam’s, where as usual we bought the frozen yogurt berry parfait. The young man who served us was wearing a beard net, the first one we’d ever seen. I sneaked a photo with my phone as discreetly as I could:

On our cat porch we discovered these copulating grasshoppers. The female was twice as big as the male. I don’t know what became of them once the cats came into the lanai.

Our cat Pumpkin was limping. He had  these odd puncture marks on his foot. We took him to the vet a day or two later, but the marks had disappeared. All he had left at that point was a fever, which the doctor said would go away in a couple of days. He is doing fine now.

This is me with some friends at the entrance to the Goodwill store. But Alicia doesn’t want me telling people that we shop there, so I won’t say any more.

Friday I got assigned a quick trip to Panama City, Florida. I flew up in the morning by way of Atlanta (nearly all the Panama City travel is through Atlanta) and got a rental car. There are gorgeous pine forests surrounding the city and airport. The trees are all the same size and planted in rows. You can see the rows in this photo.