A Can of Worms...
Uh Oh!!! It's begun. We have opened the can of worms that will probably never end. What can is that you say? The can of Home Improvement. Yep you got it, we actually opened "that one". 
It started with my wife getting me to pull the carpet and padding up in the front bathroom, as well as the linoleum. We started this project because the caulking around the linoleum and the tub was messed up and it seemed that water had leaked underneath and had cause mold and mildew to grow. It was time to rip it out and tile, and if we were gonna do that, we just needed to tile the area in front of the sinks as well...
So anyway, I get in there and the carpet/padding wasn't a problem. I then popped the tack strips out without much difficulty... This should have been a sign that something awful was coming... The linoleum from... well, you know where. I started pulling it up and encountered a pungent odor to say the least, as well as an even older, stinkier layer of linoleum.
I ended up being able to pull both layers of flooring and scraped up what was left. Now there's just a little of the adhesive and paper backing left... I must not have realized how bad the smell had gotten, though I was feeling a bit sick to my stomach. My wife opened the door to bring me some sweet tea (that's how we do tea in the south) and nearly threw up and had to immediately turn around and leave. After that episode... we sanitized the bathroom and I'll begin laying tile today with the help of a friend...
Yeah I know, doesn't sound like much. It's only 51 tiles in one bathroom... Yeah, but next is our bathroom, then my wife would like to redo the floors in the living room. She'd like to acid stain the concrete slab.... WOW!!! That means moving all the furniture, pulling all the carpet (it's nasty and needs to go anyway) and tack strips, then etching the slab with lines to make it look like marble slabs, then cleaning up the slab of all the dripped paint etc. from construction (May take muratic acid) then staining and sealing the floor... Not too bad right? Well the living room is about 30x22... not a small room... After that will be our bedroom, maybe a different stain or hard wood, and then of course nothing willmatch the paint so we'll have to repaint alot of the rooms, probab le our room, and both bathrooms... Any way, the deed is done. The can is opened and there's "no turning back, no turning back." (Old Baptist Hymn)
posted by Patrick J. Mehaffey at 8:48 AM
7 Comments:
SWEEEEEEEEEEEEEET TEEEEEEEEEAAAAA!
oh man! i love me some sweet tea. i had TOTALLY forgotten about that wonderful elixir until i came back to BTR this past spring. they dont have anything like that here in the desert...just some sugar packets on the table. and i dont even bother, because do you KNOW how many of those packets it would take to make acceptable sweet tea???? too many, plus about an hour of steady stirring time...
anyway, good luck with the home improvement project(s)....theres always SOMETHING to do around the home, even if it's brand new!
post pictures!!
you can only sweeten tea (the right way at least) when it's still hot, and it can only be done with real sugar. About 5/8ths a cup of sugar to be just right...
Pat- you are dead on. The ONLY way to sweeten tea is with real sugar... while it's still hot... that way the sugar melts and actually becomes part of the tea.
BUT - 5/8ths of a cup? My friend... you are short-changing yourself!! For a gallon of the best tea ever, anything less than a full cup of sugar is unacceptable.
At least... that's what I said to myself at 3:00 this morning while I was doing 1,000 push-ups.
mmm-hmmm, totally! which is why i dont even bother ordering tea over here....no way to get it sweet.
although you CAN sweeten iced tea by using a simple sugar syrup...betty crocker that i am. ;-) this, of course, isnt available in restaurants however, so i usually stick to a coke.
yes. well. here is where the statement "any good restaurant should have a simple syrup...
i dare you to ask next time you're out" breaks down for me....
1. you assume i am going to "good" restaurants...i'm thinking like Burger King doesn't count, right?
2. you assume that next time i go out will be sometime in the near, foreseeable future...
lol. luckily i can make sweet tea at home...or even better: lebanese tea!
my husband came up with a copycat recipe for it...basically we just make iced tea in our automatic tea-maker (the whole 3qts), and then add 1/2 cup sugar, 1/3 cup lemon juice, 1/3 cup rosewater. you, of course, can tweak it to suit your tastes (in fact, i may have tweaked his original findings already with these amounts...so maybe start with less of everything and then add more to taste).
the trick is getting rosewater...if you know where to get that in btr, then you're good to go, but otherwise you may want to scout out your local lebanese grocer (sometimes the restaurants have a store attached)...and if you have no idea of where one is you can always order rosewater online by just asking jeeves and following a couple links.
ooooor, maybe ask the friendly guys at Albasha's (my all-time fav restaurant) if they could steer you to where you can find some (who knows, they may just give you some!).
oh yes....and don't forget to sprinkle the drink with whole, raw pinenuts....YUM!
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