Hey, where's the hair dryer? How to remove tape and stickers...

When it comes to pulling down removing something sticky, a hair dryer can be your best friend.

Back when I was on sea duty I had this CO who specifically ordered the crew not to tape signs up around the ship. His rationale was the tape emulsified into the paint, and when you eventually took the sign down it would rip some paint along with it – what I call the “surface lifting” effect. This is pretty much the case with any type of sticker, tape, or backing that you find around your house, and if you are into home improvement like me you will eventually find a need to remove it from a surface without leaving a big mark.

When you are painting, painter’s tape is usually easy to remove. However, if you read the fine print on the label, it says you should only leave the tape up for a maximum of 14 days, otherwise you may get that surface lifting effect. Or like the time we were redoing our kitchen cabinets and drawers were lined with this really old, dirty, and nasty contact paper. Or perhaps when you are trying to ship something in an old box, but it already has a shipping label on it that will surely tear off a big chunk of paper if you remove it. Or if you are a parent (which we are not, but we have lots of little nieces and nephews) and you end up with stickers on your walls & floors.

I learned a long time that a hair dryer comes in especially handy in these situations. Run the dryer at high heat over the surface of the sticker/tape/backing for about a minute and then carefully peel from one side. The hot air will heat up the glue and let you pull up the material without “lifting” the other side.

Of course, you just need to remember to put it back when you're done. Otherwise you have to explain to your wife why her hair dryer is in the garage.

Removing a shipping label

Update on Crofton Wegmans

So when I first moved up to the DC area in 2006, I had it in my mind to start looking for a house in the Crofton area. Leah and I were getting married in a year and I knew we would want to buy a house. Why Crofton? Well, it’s close to DC but not as far east as Annapolis, it has decent schools, and it has some nice housing developments.

Oh yeah, and in May 2006 Wegmans announced they were opening a new store in Crofton. As I was deprived of Wegmans in college (apparently they have some deal with Price Chopper not to move east of Syracuse), I really have not lived near a Wegmans since I left home for college in 1996.

For the uninformed, Wegmans is a chain of grocery stores that started in Upstate NY and has slowly migrated south over the last decade. To say this place has a cult like following is an understatement. Apparently, there are towns and communities that launch letter writing campaigns lobbying Wegmans to come open a store near them.

So now you’re probably thinking - what’s the big deal? While you probably think it’s a little bit silly to talk so highly of a, well, grocery store, it’s kind of one of those things you won’t understand unless you’ve actually been to one. For years Leah heard me rave about this fantastic grocery store that I grew up with, and she never understood what the big deal was until I brought her up to Syracuse for the first time. Yes, she’s hooked now.

What makes Wegmans so great? Well, from the second you walk in, it doesn’t feel like a grocery store at all. In fact, their website says the try to be a “European Open Air Market.” Let’s start with the bakery. Lots of good bread, muffins, cookies, and my favorite: bagels (it’s SOOO hard to find a decent bagel anywhere South of New Jersey - except for North Carolina, which has Brueggers for some reason). Then there’s the massive deli and a restaurant section (to include Chinese food) in which you can eat. I can’t tell you the number of times my friends and I had breakfast/lunch/dinner there, to include a dinner before prom one year… There’s a relatively decent coffee bar (although I have to admit I still prefer Starbucks). They have this massive organic section. Then there is the joy of every high school kid who likes to snack on junk: the bulk food section. They also have an olive bar, tea area, and a really large International foods section. And this is in every store (I’m probably missing something, but you get the gist). Oh… and they have all the things that regular grocery stores do as well. Leah likes it because they carry all kinds of baking ingredients that are hard to find at other groceries… namely things like ginger blossom honey, or Special Dark cocoa powder. Also, Wegmans has consistently been ranked high in Forbes “Best places to work” list. I never worked there, but a lot of my friends did.

I remember one time in high school, I went out with my friends Kristy and Andrea too look for some comet at 1 am (it was a thing for AP physics), only to discover it was overcast (Syracuse, overcast - REALLY?)… we ended up hanging out and talking in the Wegman’s coffee bar until like 3 am (yes, on a school night). Kristy actually made it into first period the next day… Andrea and I did not.

Anyway, the reason I am going on and on about Wegmans – back in 2006, the original announcement said the Crofton Wegmans location would be opening in 2009 (along with a new Target and movie theater). But they ran into a snag. The proposed building site is on Rt 3 and Evergreen Rd (south of Waugh Chapel - incidentally the proposed name for the shopping center is Waugh Chapel South). For those in Anne Arundel County you may remember the flap over illegal fly ash dumping in Gambrills a few years ago. That dumping site is right where Waugh Chapel South is supposed to be built. However, It turns out that the one way to deal with fly ash is to build concrete over it to prevent rain water from seeping through the ground and contaminating the water supply – so building this new shopping center would actually be a good thing.

But… it couldn’t be that easy, because this guy who claimed to represent a group of local Crofton/Gambrills businesses starting lobbying the County to hold up construction for a variety of reasons, but mainly due to the fly ash. However… it turned out that not only did this fellow not own a business, he is actually a paid lobbyist for a grocers union that includes Safeway and Giant (two of the local grocery stores). Yeah, you read that right.

So, seeing as there has not been much movement of the Crofton Wegmans site over the last few months (I drive by there once in a while) and Wegmans has been busy announcing new stores at a bunch of other Maryland locations (Columbia, Landover, Frederick, Germantown, and Abingdon), I actually e-mailed their customer service asking what the deal was. Only took a day for them to respond… here it is:

Thank you for your email. Here is the latest information that we have from our
Real Estate Department regarding the Crofton, MD store:

We remain unable to provide a definite opening date for this store. The developer
has additional work to do and will not be able to deliver a building pad to
Wegmans before 2009. Therefore the store cannot open before 2010.

Sorry I don't have better news. Have a
great day!

So that’s the latest on our Wegmans… sigh. 2010 will be a long wait.

Axes of Evil

This is just a funny aside....

Eugene has been chopping wood because we've had a downed tree in front of our house for awhile. Yesterday, he said that he'd like to get a wood maul because it would make splitting big logs easier. For all of you city dwellers (and people like me who have always lived in the woods but for some reason have never heard of a wood maul), a wood maul is like an axe, but specially designed for, of course, splitting and chopping wood.

Demonstrating, my sometimes macabre sense of humor, I said, "If we get a wood maul, you wouldn't kill me with it, would you?" I expected him to say something along the lines of "Don't be stupid. I would never hurt you." Or maybe that he would have just acted annoyed at such a stupid question. Instead, he said in a "don't be silly" voice, "Babe, I've already got like five axes."

Buy a house for $50 (seriously!)

So I'm at work today, and somebody is telling me how this guy in Edgwater (south of Annapolis) couldn't get his house to sell, so he's raffling it off with tickets that run $50 each. The website claims the house is worth around $1 million, although who knows what that means in this housing market. Part of the money will go to a charity, and the leftover I suppose goes back to the guy running the show.

It is a true "luxury" home - 6 bedrooms, 4.5 baths, 2 kitches... plus (if I'm reading the map correctly) fairly close to the Severn River...

$50? Hey, why not.

Sailors and their ships

When I started this blog, I promised myself I wouldn’t delve into the so-called “mil-blogosphere”… and I’m not about to start.

However – I will share this Navy press release. As a former boarding officer who inspected 60+ ships in the Persian Gulf a few years ago, I congratulate this team for a job well done. And as a San Antonio plankowner – I am happy to see her finally getting some good press. This ship and her sisters have lots of potential - and I'm proud to have served aboard her.

You can read more about San Antonio and Combined Task Force 151 here.

Never retreat, Never Surrender!

MIA

So in my last post – over a month ago – I talked about how I was slacking off in the posts… and then I let it slide again. So, what’s new? Well… I finally started my new job. The commute is a bit longer, but the work is definitely much more interesting and rewarding. Then of course there were the holidays, and reserve duty… Finally, as Leah mentioned, we declared war on the disaster our house has become. This literally has consumed every free second I have had over the last few weeks. Then there was more work… and yesterday Leah and I made the trek into DC for the inauguration (more to come later). Oh yeah, and we put in a closet (also more to come).

The previous owners, in addition to having 9 cats and seemingly using about 100 nails for every square foot of molding in the house, were kind enough to leave this huge pile of wood in the crawl space adjacent to our basement. Apparently, the pile started when the house was built (over 30 years ago) and has grown with subsequent home improvement projects. We finally decided last weekend that for various reasons it had to go.

One problem of doing any kind of renovation is dealing with the debris… either the stuff you are taking out, or the stuff that’s left over (or that you messed up on). Twice now we have just accumulated so much junk from demolishing things (original tile floor, old bathtub, toilets, etc) it’s too much to 1: either put out on the street, or 2: haul to the county dump. In case you didn’t know, Anne Arundel county has some very nice public dumps you can bring just about anything to. However, in this case, we decided to rent a dumpster. For those in the Anne Arundel/Prince George’s County area, the best deal I have been able to find for dumpsters is at Hatfields. $250 for a 10 yd dumpster for 7 days – not a bad deal, especially when you compare it to Home Depot.

It's finally gone!

Disorganization is expensive!!!

Eugene and I formally declared war on our house. We've been living here for almost two years now, and still hadn't unpacked a bunch of boxes until this past weekend. Our garage was full of boxes, and the basement was getting out of hand. We also have an office on the first floor, which we had gotten into the bad habit of using as a repository for random stuff that we didn't feel like dealing with.

The lesson from all of this? Disorganization will cost you! Over the past year or so, we'd been buying random household goods, and in unpacking and organizing, I realized that we already had a bunch of the stuff that we went out and bought. I would catalogue all of the ways that we could have saved by being organized and simply knowing where the heck all of our junk is. I've found that the same thing applies at my office. I'll print a document, which then gets buried under a pile on my desk, so that when I look for it, I can't find it and then re-print only to discover later on that I've printed the same document 20 times. Bad Leah, Bad Leah!

So, the next time you are tempted to let yourself become disorganized, remember that it will cost you!