Listen to it if you dare by downloading the mp3s

Have to say, I’m about as nervous as this guy about the coming holidays and the number of people who will be travelling far and wide to visit families. I understand why they do it. It still makes me nervous.

• Step one: Super-heat. 500+ degrees with the lid down.
• Step two: Once food bits and drips have burned off and stopped smoking you’ll be left with carbon.
• Step three: Open the grill and using a Stainless Steel brush and a bucket of water, continually scrub the grill with regular dips in the water.
• Step four: once the grates are clean, turn off the flame, close your lid and let it cool.

That should be all you need to do to basically steam-clean or self-clean your stainless steel grill. No chemicals needed. Just the cleansing power of fire and nature’s best solvent: water.

After, we went to the Icardo Center at Cal State Bakersfield to see Katie’s cousin Hannah play basketball in her final season with Cal poly San Luis Obispo. After a frustrating three quarters, the game was delayed due to a leaking roof.

The basketball game was called in favor of CSUB with a bit more than three minutes remaining in the game.

We then returned home to continue the marathon binge watching festival of Downton Abbey. So far we have powered through four and a half seasons in four days.

We left with a plan. Tarps, sponge brushes, a large amount of blue shop towels, and two cans of General Finishes Brown Mahogany stain. A few weeks later, the table and chairs were delivered. I sanded with 120, then 150 grit sand paper. I sanded for hours. Every nook and cranny of ten dining room chairs and a large table.

We were told the chairs would be the most time consuming to stain and finish. We went to work on each chair. They came out with a nice brown look. It reminded us of driftwood — and not in a bad way. Sure we weren’t the superstar DIY furniture finishers. Sure we had a lot of staining mistakes. Most of them stemmed from attempting to use a water based stain in the summertime of the blistering Bakersfield weather. But we liked it.

Then we started on the table. It seemed a different color at first. We hoped it would dry differently. It didn’t.

We’re going to stain everything darker and hope it works out well. I’ve reached out to General Finishes on Twitter and privately on Facebook in hopes they will spot me a few cans of stain and topcoat or reimburse me for the $60 we spent on the products that resulted in this monstrosity: