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Date night

DinnerWe are fortunate in that the grandparents are very involved in our children’s lives. They typically take them on Saturday nights to spend time which leaves Cathy and I Saturday nights for quality time and blueberries. Our 22 year old typically spends Saturday playing MMORPGs. Sometimes it is easy to forget he is in the house. So…

Awkward? Loudly declaring, "More handjobs!"
Funny! Realizing everyone on his voice chat probably heard it.

Context? Cathy complaining that she isn’t strong enough to squeeze the foil cutter enough to open the bottle of wine.

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Query of queries reports runtime error

So are you pulling your hair out because your query of queries is returning an error "Query Of Queries runtime error."? The solution is rather simple. In your query that is feeding your QoQ, you probably have a column that is of datatype nchar. Cast that to a varchar and life will be good. Do the cast in the source query not the QoQ. eg. "CAST(foo AS varchar) AS bar" You’re welcome.

p.s. Yes, you can cast it to the same column name eg. "CAST(foo as varchar) AS bar" Case doesn’t matter.

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From the mouths of babes

Me: "Noah, do you want to go to your aunt’s wedding?"
Noah, 16: "Uh, I don’t think so."
Me: "Ok. You’ll miss out on going to King’s Island."
Noah: "Why King’s Island?"
Me: "They live there."
Noah: "They do?"
Me: "Yes. You’ve been there."
Noah: "Once!"

Dad fail! Perhaps I have been a bit remiss in traveling my children. I’m thinking it’s time to plan a vacation.

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Lessons learned from staining

I just gave myself an 8-24 hour delay on the bay window by applying some "touchup" stain. It was a huge risk as it could ruin the uniform look where I applied the touchup. I also have to let it dry really well now before I can begin applying the polyurethane which I could have otherwise begun today. After 2 or 3 coats of poly, I can let the family have access to the window again and there will be much rejoicing.

My biggest lesson today was that despite my cramping hands and exhaustion, my laziness in cleaning up the caulk and my over use of caulk was my biggest mistake. I now understand why the guys in the paint department looked at me like I’d been breathing fumes too long when I asked them for stainable caulk. I really should have bought caulk died the color of the stain I’m using and I should have been far more conservative in my use of caulk (white) and far more prudent in my cleanup of the caulk. Have I mentioned, I have a love/hate relationship with caulk…mostly hate.

And, building the clean room was soooo worth it!