when you bite off more than you can chew

the only thing you can do is keep chewing.

After a few trips to Immediate Care the wife and I decided it was time to get serious and find some primary care physicians.  This lead to a whole list of "adult" to-do items, including projects around the house and lots involving paperwork or insurance or retirement funds.  It's funny how having a kid puts a whole new level of pressure on feeling like you've got to have it together.

I'm completely onboard with this line of thinking (is almost the exact same wording I just used in a work email to respond to a condescending professor who I was not at all in agreement with), but the good news was I could pick a project to focus on that didn't require any paperwork or advance research, just the time and patience for several Home Depot trips.

Decided to spend Labor Day installing a backsplash to get the first item checked off our list.  The HD trips nearly ended, me, I won't lie.  Spent a lot of time looking at this:

Partly because we were doing two walls and the little accent tiles we decided on ended up being spread out over 4 stores in a 10 mile radius.  Good fucking times it was not.  But the project as a whole ended up going pretty well and after a day and a half it's 99% done.

Out of everything you need to work with tile, this tile cutter is your best friend.  It's only about $10 more than the smaller hand-squeezer model we started with that broke immediately.  Lesson: always get the bigger tool.

But cutting was a small part of the project, most of it was shopping then getting things on the wall.  And it feels like shopping took more time than getting things up.  It went from this

to this pretty quickly.

What's still not done?  There's no grout up and the open ended wall needs a cap, and halfway through fitting things around outlets I realized I need to space the outlet boxes to get them flush with the new tile, about a quarter inch higher than they were.  Of course, I can't find the spacers anywhere, so I have to wait until they get delivered.  Oh well.  As long as they're done by our BBQ in two weeks it's fine.  Always good to have a deadline.

Current beer-scale: a weary 6.5