Zongker Family Blog

I decided a few weeks ago that once we got a nice day I wanted to go on a hike and take some pictures so that’s what I did today. I got up a seven this morning and was able to watch the sunrise from our backyard and then headed out to Sequoyah State Park for a couple of hours first. I saw quite a few deer out there, but unfortunately they saw me too and wasn’t quick enough to get any pics.

Next I drove to the J. T. Nickel Family Nature and Wildlife Preserve which is just off the Illinois River by Tahlequah (right by all the float trip places). It was my first time out there and it’s basically just 26 square miles of land that has never been developed apart from a road through it and some hiking trails. It’s partially hills, partially plains with a few springs and streams. I spent most of the day out there. Below are some pics.

Unfortunately on the way home I had a tire blow out on the highway. It pretty much shredded it before I could come to a stop and I think it may have bent them rim. Other than that it was a great day out though.

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We went up to Woolaroc today and had a great time.  We didn’t actually go in the museum at all, just around the grounds to get out in the sun a bit.  Scroll down for some pics.   (yes I’m too lazy to fix the WordPress template)

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We bought a three shelf paper holder for the new house last time we were at IKEA and Jeanette put it together tonight. Here are the (full) instructions that came with it. Easy as ABC. Sort of..

A. Screwdriver!

B. Huh? Call!

C. Step 1 – Assemble it!

The other side just has a picture of the holder. No step 2.

Katrina pulled her first tooth yesterday. The first one to come out naturally at least, she had to have her two front bottom teeth removed by the dentist several months ago and wasn’t awake for it. She had been wiggling this one for about a month now and it was ready to come out.

I told her the night before while putting her to bed that her tooth has been ready to come out for a while now and she could probably pull it out tomorrow if she really tried. The next day while I was working she came back and asked me if I really thought she could pull it out today. I told her, “yes” and asked if she wanted me to help. She said, “yes”.

We went back to her room and I let her work on it at first and alternated turns. She was excited but also pretty scared so after about a minute of trying each time she’d start getting nervous giggles and tearing up, so we’d take 5 minutes for her to calm down. During each one she asked me “What if a new tooth doesn’t come in!?”, “What if I swallow the tooth when it comes out!?”, “What if my mouth doesn’t stop bleeding!?”, “Does it hurt when the new tooth comes in!?” and about every other potential problem she could dream up. She also made up a complex set of hand gestures to indicate when it was and wasn’t ok to proceed with various tasks.

I tried to answer all her questions and explained to her that Dad is a pro at this and has done this 20 times before. Then showed her all of my teeth and explained I had to pull out a baby tooth for each one to come in. She was really brave and wanted to press on even though she was clearly scared.

With all the breaks it took us about an hour and a half to pull the thing out, but we finally got it. She was SO excited when it finally came out. Probably more so relieved. She wanted to rush out and tell mom, but I made her hold some tissue on her gums until it stopped bleeding first. I was so proud of her for sticking it out. She kept thanking me for helping her every 10 minutes.

Afterwards we showed mom and celebrated with some soup for dinner and ice cream later. That night the Tooth Fairy brought her $1 and Junie B. Jones: Toothless Wonder. Notice the similarity on the cover picture. That wasn’t intentional.

What a difference a week or two makes. Our new house is just about finished. It’ll be a few more weeks for cleaning, touch-ups and last minute items like laying sod, but for the most part the house is complete. Here’s some pics.

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I have been getting the greatest kick lately from being able to see things I drew several months ago finally be created. I used Google Sketchup to create all of the images below. Here is what the (almost) finished products look like.

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We picked out living room furniture for our new house a few weeks ago. We have the usual couch, love seat and recliner setup. Our living room is wider than deep so we want the love seat and recliner to be at 45 angles from the couch so that each of them are facing towards the tv. We want two end tables to go in between the three pieces, but square ones won’t really work out because no matter how you turn them, one of the seats have a corner of the table pointing at them. We didn’t really want a round table either, so we decided to go with an octagon.

Octagon tables are pretty hard to find, and it wasn’t looking likely that we’d be able to find one that matched anything else in the house so I decided to try to make them. I’ve never attempted anything like this before so I was pretty nervous. I drew it up first on Google Sketchup to figure out the sizes for everything and went to buy the wood. I had originally planned on just cutting everything with a handsaw and miter box, but very quickly realized that wasn’t going to be practical.

Fortunately, my dad has a table saw that can do the angled cuts so I went over there to cut all the pieces. Actually, he ended up cutting most of them for me. The assembly wasn’t too bad other than trying to figure out how to get it to stay together long enough to get enough pieces assembled for it to support itself.

The tile and stain match the floor and cabinets in our new house and were a bit of hassle to track down. I borrowed a wet saw from my step-father to cut the tile. This was my second time tiling, I put down tile in the master bath of our current house shortly after moving in. It was much easier than I remembered this time.

Thankfully all the trim pieces fit together nicely around the tile in the end. The only part I’m not real happy about is the stain. I had a hard time getting it consistent across the whole table, but all in all, not too bad for an amateur. I’m going to finish up the second table and if I’m not too burned out afterward, work up a design for a coffee table.

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Edit: Crud, just realized we changed our tile selection in the house and I used the original tile on the tables. Oh well, they’re pretty close to each other.

The sheet rock is about to go on our new house, but before it does I wanted to get a series of photos of the house without the sheet rock so I’d know exactly where every pipe, wire and 2×4 is after we move in. It could come in handy.

I took pictures of the whole house, but they’re not really organized very well.  I remembered after I got home about Photosynth.  It’s a web app from Microsoft that lets you recreate a 3d scene from a series of photographs.  I uploaded photos from the living room and game room to create a Photosynth.  You can view it by clicking the image below.

You start out in the game room.  There are complete 360 views of the living and game room and you can walk between them.  It’s a really cool app, but it’s kind of hard to get use to navigating.   Here’s a few tips to help you get around.

1. Put it in full screen mode so you can see what you’re doing.

2. It’ll only let you spin around so far from the image your currently viewing.  To move further in one direction, click on another image and you can keep going.

3. It’s easy to get stuck.  If this happens, use the arrows to navigate or look down and the floor or ceiling to keep moving.

4. You can use your mouse wheel to zoom in.  A LOT!

5. It’s easier to walk backwards from the game room to the living room.

I didn’t get much done with the home repairs this week.  There has been a single project that consumed the majority of my time.  When we moved in there was a good size bird feeder in the back yard.  During the ice storms last winter a tree limb fell on it and snapped it in half, leaving a broken 4×4 sticking out of the ground and a cement base.

There is also cable box in our backyard behind a bush and I wanted to just move this cement platform 15 feet or so to be next to it.  There are already smaller stepping stones leading to it, so it would have looked ok there and stopped grass and weeds from growing up around the cable box.  Now I knew this thing would be heavy, but I wasn’t sure how heavy.  My plan was to dig up around it, use a shovel to tip it on it’s side, roll it over to the cable box and cut off the 4×4 sticking out of it.  Figured it would take an hour or so.

After digging up the dirt around it, I discovered it was a lot thicker than I expected.  I thought it was about a 1″ thick prefabricated disk.  Turned out it’s poured concrete, 5″ thick.  I tried to pry it up with the shovel anyways but it was clear the shovel was going to loose that battle.

I had to come up with another plan now, so I got to wondering, “Exactly how heavy is this thing?”  I first looked up how much concrete weighs and it varies base on the mix, but it’s roughly 2,700 lbs per cubic yard.  There are 27 cubic feet in a cubic yard, so about 100 lbs per cubic foot.

I went outside and measured it.  It’s 5″ thick and has a 5′ diameter. I had to look up the formula for calculating square feet in a circle.  It’s:

A=(Pi)r^2
A=(3.14)2.5^2
A=(3.14)6.25
A=19.63 square feet.

Then multiple that by 5/12 of a foot for the thickness and I came up with 8.18 cubic feet.  So this sucker is about 818 lbs.  Seems a little overkill for holding up a bird feeder if you ask me..   Anyways, at this point I’m thinking forget it, I’ll just break it up and throw it away.  But.. I’m guessing that’s not quite as easy as it sounds either and I doubt the garbage man was going to take 800 lbs of concrete.

I wasn’t ready to give up yet.  I figured I just need to tip this thing on it’s side and I can probably roll it from there.  High school physics, don’t fail me now!   I tried a lever already and that didn’t work out too well.  I didn’t have anything tougher than the shovel to try again with.  I thought about a car jack, but I couldn’t get it under the block to start with and I figured it would just sink in to the mud.  The only other two options I could remember were a pulley and an Archimedes’ screw.  It didn’t look like Archimedes was going to be any help so I figured a pulley was my last hope.  I didn’t have anything over this block to hang a pulley from, but there was a tree to the side of it, so I figured I could turn the whole thing sideways and use a pulley to get this block tipped onto it’s side.  I went down to Wal-Mart to go pulley shopping.

Once I got there I quickly discovered the best pulleys and ropes money can buy (at Wal-Mart) were only rated up to 500-600 pounds.  There went that option.  I found a towing chain rated up to 5,000 pounds though so I grabbed it and it gave me the idea to head over to automotive to see if they had any better options there.  I found a winch! Perfect! Only $30 too!  It’s really designed for pulling your boat onto a trailer, but I’ll make due.  It was rated to 1500 lbs, so I found some hooks that were also rated for that so I could attach the winch to the chain and wrap the chain around the tree.  The plan was coming together.

I went home and got the whole contraption set up and started cranking.  Everything I had was rated for 1,500 lbs or more which should be more than enough, but it dawned on me, I’m not really sure what the tree I was hooking this all up to was rated for.  I was somewhat concerned about bringing the rest of the tree down on top of me, but figured the 4″ thick wood post should break before the foot thick tree did.

Even with the winch it was proving to be quite difficult to crank and the belt started showing some signs of wear.  A crank or two later, the fastener that was holding the whole thing together broke.  The threads stripped free and it bent itself open, more accurately.  I started questioning exactly how much this concrete pad really weighed again.  I also started having serious doubts that I would be able to roll this thing even if I did get it on it’s side.

Frustrated and tired, I thought to myself “You know what would look good there?  A bird bath!”.  I somehow managed to get Jeanette to go along and we spent the remainder of the week looking for a normal concrete or stone looking bird bath.  Apparently bright red and blue ceramic is the style now and that’s all stores carry.  We tried Garden Ridge, Hobby Lobby, Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Old Time Pottery and Atwoods and none of them had normal bird baths.  We finally found one at Lowes.

I sawed off the wood post to be even with the concrete base and put the bird bath out there.  I added some concreate glue to keep the dog from knocking it over on herself.  Finally that project is done!  Although, I may plant some flowers around the base.  After feeling how heavy that bird bath was, I’m really glad I didn’t get any further in my attempts to move the base.

A buddy of mine, Shane interviewed his kids and posted it on Facebook today.  I thought it was a great idea so I decided to do the same with Katrina.  Here are her answers.

1. What jobs would you like to have when you grow up?
“An art teacher because it’s easy and I like crafts”
“Build houses.  I’ve never tried it before and I’d like to try it and find out what it’s like”
“Paint houses because it’s almost like art”
“I want to own a restaurant”

2. What kind of restaurant would you own?
“The Funny O’Fridays” – “It’s only open on Fridays and it’s a lot of fun”
“Gummy’s” – “Would have gum for desert”

3. What is your favorite game?
“I like Checkers, Dominos and CandyLand.  I like CandyLand because you get a castle of candy for winning”

4. What is your favorite subject in school?
“I like art because I like crafts a lot”
“I like math too”

5. What is your least favorite subject in school?
“I can’t decide. I like them all.”

6. What is your favorite toy?
“Squeaky the Mouse”

7. What hobbies do you have?
“Clogging, playing, watching tv and eating snacks”

8. What is your favorite part about clogging?
“Starting to dance”

9. What is dad’s job?
“Taking care of kids”

10. What does dad do to make money?
“Go to the store and get change back”

11. What is mom’s job?
“Help teaching me to clog”

12. What does mom do to make money?
“Now this is a tough one…”
“Do they give you money when you go to the bank?”

13. What is your favorite book?
“If You Take a Mouse to the Movies”

14. Why is that your favorite book?
“It reminds me of Squeaky”

15. What is the hardest thing you’ve ever done?
“Make something stick out” (a paper spring on a pop-up card)

16. Who is the president of the United States?
“Barack Obama” (I’m surprised she knew this)

17. What’s your favorite song?
“It’s a big big house” (“Big House” – Audio Adrenaline)

18. What’s your favorite place you’ve been to?
“The train in Washington DC”

19. Do you want to get married when you grow up?
“Umm..  Maybe”

20. What do you want your husband to be like?
“Knows how to play a guitar”
“Be a little skinny”
“Have great hair”
“Brushes his teeth everyday.   I don’t want someone who doesn’t brush their teeth!”

21. What pets do you want to have when you’re grown up?
“Mice, birds, turtles, frogs, fish and butterflies”

22. What nicknames do you have?
“Kat”
“Katrina Beana”

23. What talents do you have?
“Singing”
“Crafts.  I know I’m good at crafts because every time you see one you say its really good”

24. What are you not good at?
“Things I just learned”

25. If you had $1 million, what would you buy?
“A rocket ship so I could go to the moon”
“A bird bath because I like birds” (We just bought a bird bath earlier today.  She later explained this was an indoor birdbath for her bet birds and she wanted to build it herself once she learned how to make houses)

26. If you had 3 wishes, what would they be?
“Wings so I can fly”
“Cheese for my pet mice”
“Good luck building the bird bath”

27. What are you afraid of?
“Tornadoes”

28. What makes you happy?
“When I get to see my friends who moved away.”

29. What makes you sad?
“I forgot everything I was sad about”

30. How old is dad?
“29 or 30?”

31. How old is mom?
“31!”

32. What is your favorite food?
“Macaroni and Cheese”

33. What is your favorite TV show?
“SpongeBob”

34. Do you want to have kids when you grow up?
“I might have some… and I’ll take them to my job on Friday and have my husband take care of them”

35. How many kids do you want to have?
“As many as you have.” (Me: “two?”) “yeah”