How-To take out your own stitches video

It's almost 2 weeks and I needed to take out my stitches out.

So we're in NJ. I didn't have time before we left to get the stitches out at a walk in clinic or the Emergency at St Josephs.

But last week we saw my brother Lou to check out my knee and the cut. He basically gave us some rough instructions on what to do and what scissors to get.

Tresa got the suture scissors from the hospital so we could do this ourselves. It reminds me of those Holiday Inn Express commercials. No...I'm not a surgeon but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.

So we have two out already since I asked Teen to run up and get the camera.
This is a kodak moment you know.

I'm going make a How-To take out your own stitches YouTube video.The three of us with the kids in the background are doing this procedure. I'm holding the camera and the tweezers pulling up the sutures and Tresa has the scissors and Teen has the flashlight.

So there were only 9 stitches. Not the 10 or 12 that I originally counted. Unless the skin grew around the other 3 somewhere.

Thank God there were fewer than 12. It actually wasn't as bad as I thought. My brother Pat scared me a bit when he said don't wait longer than 2 weeks to take out the stitches or else it'll hurt more taking them out. What was hard was lifting up the sutures enough so that Tresa could get the hook underneath to cut it.

I even recorded a How-To take out your own stitches YouTube video. Once the suture is cut, pulling the stitch out wasn't painful at all. But really you should go probably go to the doctor to do this, but it's not hard to do. Lou just said make sure the skin is fully healed and won't separate. Which is why he said to wait 2 weeks instead of 7-10 days.

Windows sucks

I'm not just talking Microsoft Windows.

We were heading to NJ on Saturday when out of the blue, the driver side

window on our civic malfunctioned. It wouldn't go

down any more. I could hear the motor whirring. But the window wasn't moving. This was all happening as we crossed the border.

I swear anything that George W. comes near just goes to pot. You know the old saying... Fool me once shame on you, ....

I thought the window was just stuck so I pressed down the button and when there was a bit of a gap I used my other hand to apply some force and help the window down. It went down but not much then it went back up. At the next gas station I was tinkering with the window more and then there was a clank and the sound of something metal had fallen inside the door. Great. Now I couldn't even raise the window, something was busted.

I got some fuel and then parked the car and took the door panel off. It was a good thing I had some tools. I always bring my tools if I'm bringing the bikes around just in case. So I was checking things out. I didn't really know what to expect or what not to expect.

I thought the cable was off, then I saw a part had come right off, then I saw a reel and then a broken cable. This was going to cost me. And the door panel isn't exactly the roomiest area to work in. We'd spent an hr trying to get the window back up. It was better up than down in case it was going to rain, plus I can't wind stand buffeting in my ears. It's tiresome.

I tied the cables so that the window was closed. It was up 99% of the way. There was a slight gap. Then it was tropical storm Danny. Great. Wind buffeting and lots of rain coming down. On top of the window being busted and there was a bit of a gap and rain was dripping on my forearm, there were gas stations out of fuel and the station on the turnpike I was going to gas up was closed and my fuel like was on. I was worried. We weren't going to make the next station after that which was 47 miles. I was shaking my head like this was just bad timing, everything happens in 3's. Luckily Tresa told me to just exit the next turn off and look for a station. And like the Gods were smiling our direction finally - there was one right there off the turnpike. Thank you God. The signs leading up to the turn off didn't mention any petrol station, only lodging. And thanks again for a service station with a working restroom, man I had to go pee bad.

So we were fueled up, I could floor it the rest of the way to Teen and Chris'. The sooner I got there the sooner didn't have to have wind buffeting in my ears any more. It was driving me crazy.

We got there at 9:20pm. Nearly 12 hrs after we left. Man, I don't get it. It always takes us forever. No matter what we do.

I then got some plastic from the trunk to put in the door to ensure the rain doesn't come pouring into the car.

I wasn't concerned so much about the window. I figured I could just find the part and replace it. I just needed to find out from where and how much and how soon I could get it and hope it doesn't rain long enough for me to do the job.

So I checked online and the civic forum suggested MajesticHonda parts dot com and there were these other places that were selling the power window regulators for $50 to $77 USD for OE fit ones.

"OE fit"? Pretty nifty description. It almost leads one to believe they are OEM parts from Honda. They are not. They are aftermarket. And you never know how they are going to fit let alone work. At MajesticHonda in RI, they have OEM parts. The power window regulator assy was $179.00 USD plus shipping.

I was just about to buy it and I thought I'd wait to speak to the parts guys to find out which part I needed. Because they had 3 parts that contained "power window regulator" and 2 were labelled the same and 2 that were same price. Finally he said that I needed the more expensive $179.00 part. Sure...when in doubt pick the higher price one. I had read in the forum that this place was 30% cheaper than the dealers.

Before I did anything my cousin suggested I call the Hamilton NJ Honda that just opened up. Good thing too. I could pick up the part and it cost $80.07. I couldn't believe it.

I picked it up after work today and installed it in about 1hr.

Woo Hoo....I'm GOOD. I deserve a treat!

I also checked Lakeshore Honda in Toronto. The same part they sell for... get this... $225.00 CAD. Nice. That's almost 3 times the cost down here. I don't get it that's a rotten exchange rate even if the dollar were .60 USD = 1 CAD.

Click me for more photos


I found this link to be pretty handy in my task to repair the window.
Civic Forum: how-to replace power window regulator assy

I found this link first which recommends a certain honda site to buy parts at a competitive price:
Civic Forum: Majestic Honda dot com is expensive

Lucky number 7

I woke up today at 27 past 5am ET.

I could barely open my eyes.

It was 7 to 9am when I finally got Kieran to Camp.

It was 7 past 5pm when I went to pick up Kieran from Camp and head over to Song and Jinn's to have a bike-play-date with Xander and Rachel.

It was 7 to 3pm when I decided to pick up a cake for us from my latest fav place to get dessert - DQ. Cake wasn't bad. It was an ice cream cake with a bit of cake in the center.

I started this blog at 7:07pm ET, well actually just the idea I had.

I drew a sign and took my camera and went to some of our neighbours that we spend most of our time with and captured some memories.

It's our 7th wedding ann iversary. And no itch.

Just lack of sleep. Mostly work related I think.

Time has flown. How can you slow the acceleration a bit. Just a bit.

And put into preservative jars things like the feeling you get when you go on your first date or you know you're about to become parents or the instant you hold a newborn baby or that baby smell, or the soft squeeze of a toddler's hand as you walk down the street to school, or the proud feeling of watching them take flight on two wheels.

You know stuff like that. How can you stop time?

It's been 7 years...

7 years of getting better at whatever we are doing.

At least it feels like we are doi ng it right.

7 years of creating bonds of friendships.

7 years of building a home and a fam ily.

Time has certainly flown by. But I see where it's went. And everywhere I look. It feels pretty good.

Click me for more photos

Bonus for those that don't read what I write: Cottage photos

Knee check end of week 1

I took the bandaid off today. Just to let it air out.
It's been hard to sleep, especially when there's a little person moving around in the bed hogging all the room.
(Man we gotta fix this. I think we are getting a bunk bed in that room we just renovated.)
Plus the area is a little sore. It looks much worse than it is. Tresa was worried about keloids but what can I do. Bike accidents seem to happen every now and then so...

So it's been hard to sleep because I tend to move a lot, and now I have to try not to. Compared to the other knee it's a little swollen, which is to be expected. What can you do? It's healing.

And I can't get it wet. So I've been showering with one leg out of the shower. I blame the wet floor on Kieran anyways. Tresa buys it.

I just noticed the sutures are blue, like Thomas. I have to get them taken out end of next week. Lou said I can do it myself. Wonder if I can find the how-to vid on YouTube?

A train is coming in 3D

We took Kieran to his first movie at a real movie theatre this past weekend.
Ice Age 3D: dawn of the dinosaurs was playing.
Not sure if it's 3D for all theatres but it was for the Queensway Cineplex Odeon.
To watch the movie we had to wear these glasses.


Having a filipino nose. ie. a nose bridge is optional genetically. The glasses didn't always stay up. So Kieran spent the bulk of the movie holding his glasses up. And since he was eating popcorn his fingers were oily. So every so often I would switch my glasses with his.

It was a great movie, lots of good liners for adults and slapstick for the wee ones.
We used the family pass that Kieran won during the 2008 Zoo Run. Imagine, 1 adult pass ($12.50) popcorn + regular drink ($11.49) = $24.00.
Imagine for 2 people it would have cost us almost $4o.00 to watch a movie.
I still remember $2.00 Tuesdays. Does anyone else remember this?
We also turned back the clock a few months and made Kieran 3 years old. Or at least 3.5 years old. Most people can't tell anyway. Kids 3 and under are free.

The next day we went to Richmond Hill Live Steamers (RHLS) up near Aurora. This was cool.
These guys build these 1:74 scale working models of actual trains (steam, electric, diesel). The steam train works on coal, it's got a reservoir in the caboose
There's piping that feeds the steam engine at the front.


These trains are basically smaller versions of the larger steam engines. Built from designs. From scratch. The detail on some of these engines are amazing.
This one was built in 1982. And he brought it in the trunk of his Pontiac Parisienne. I was surprised at how powerful it was. And that small tray of coal will last him 3 hrs.

The big diesel-electric model was using 3 or 4 car batteries to run it's engines. And the batteries will run for 3hrs. Enough to cover the afternoon.

Check out club site below:
Richmond Hill Live Steamers website

Click me for more photos.

Click me for another video of the Lone Rider train guy

Do you know what happened to my dad?

So I have to keep the activity down for the next 7-10 days to let it heal.

It was sore when I woke up this morning but feels much better now that I've been up for a few hours.

It's a 5-6cm gash. About 2 inches. It was a little gross when I think back to when I first noticed it was much worse than I'd originally thought.

I don't like going to the hospital. It's not the staff, just the whole environment. It's not exactly a happy place. Well except maybe for the delivery ward where all the new babies are. But that's about it. Everywhere else it's a sickly place. And no matter where. There's always one person complaining to the staff. I feel for the hospital staff. They work so hard trying to help people and one person can really make their day miserable.

If I were to describe the person, I'd be doing some profiling, so I won't go there. I'll go somewhere else.

I took Kieran to school and everyone we met, he would point to my knee. Then I'd have to explain that I got 10 or 11 stitches (hard to see in the freakin photo - damn Apple iPhone camera), from my bike pedal hitting me in the knee.

Then as I was leaving the Casa Camp area and one of the assistants was taking Kieran away, I overheard him saying to her - "do you know what happened to my dad?"
It's like they are so proud that there was something out of the ordinary that happened in his life that he could tell a story to someone and they'd be really interested.

I should a taken a pic before it was stitched for him to bring to school. That would have been cool.

A freak

It was a freak accident. Didn't seem like anything major at that moment except that I was bleeding from my knee.
Man, why do things happen when I am just about to get ready to call it a night.
I had the car keys in my pocket to put the car into driveway.
But I wanted Kieran to ride his run bike to try the hand brake that I had put back on it. So as I normally do I rode my bike beside him. I recently replaced the chain and cassette on my bike because it was slipping and I had just made a minor tweak to the rear derailleur to adjust the shifting.

I was riding my bike wearing my sandals, instead of my cycling shoes with the cleats, with Kieran and I went to put load on the right pedal by standing on it and the chain slipped on the cassette and my foot slipped and the pedal smashed my knee. It hurt a bit and noticed blood so I headed to the garage. It was almost 9pm so it was dark and I couldn't get a good assessment of the damage I had just incurred.

I saw a trail of blood from my knee to my foot and got some paper towel to wipe it up. I saw that the skin was cut pretty bad. Luckily that was it.

I ran in the house to tell Tresa I had to go to the hospital. It was late. Tresa was going to take me, but it was late and it didn't hurt that bad, at least it wasn't the clutch leg.
I headed to St. Joe's to Emergency on my own, because I knew I'd be there for a while so why inconvenience everyone.
How many stitches do you see?
I took it with my iPhone. Man does the camera quality ever suck.
I didn't get a chance to take a pic before because ... I dunno why. Should've. Tresa said it was gross. It looked bad. This was a 5 or 6cm gash.

Got to the hospital and it was bleeding like crazy. Burned more than hurt. Got some Tim Horton's napkins to wipe it up and while waiting at the triage desk. I had a pool of blood in my flip flop. I tried hard to not spill it on the floor. But in my attempt to wipe the blood. It ended up on the floor and the bottom of my flip flop. At least the staff were nice about it. I was apologetic - didn't mean to bleed all over the hospital floor. To me it was a lot of blood, because it was mine, but to them it was nothing.

Lucky for me it wasn't so busy. So I was in and out in 2.5+ hours.
A half Filipino half Romanian and half something else European resident stitched me up. And he took good care too. Not rushed. Took his time. Got my 10 year tetanus shot.
Thanks Doc. Good to go.

I was home just after midnight.
In 7-10 days I got to come back and get the sutures out. These ones don't fall off.
Not allowed to bend my knee too much or it'll rip the sutures out, can't get it wet either. Awesome.
Oh well...s#!t happens.

You've got mail

After doing our windows, front porch (the repainted awning and blacked out railing and new house number), garage and the back bedroom. Our mailbox was starting to look out of place and neglected. It was still that tired old brown colour.

I should have taken a photo before I repainted it, but I just wanted to get it done before another torrential downpour was going to happen. It looked very similar to our neigbour's, the same dirt coloured panel, except that the slot was a yellowy brass colour.


I wasn't sure if I needed to take it apart from the inside too. There were two rusted old screws and that was it. So I took the slot out and masked off the box. And painted it a nice glossy black. I made sure I coated evenly and it came out really nice and shiny. No drip marks like I normally do and more importantly it came out even.

I did a pretty nice job, even if I say so myself. :-)
You can even see my reflection in the panel. That little blemish looking thing on the silver mailslot is a spider. You don't see it below cuz I squashed the bugger.

I then repainted the slot itself with the same paint I used for the range hood and the awning. Gave it a couple of coats replaced the rusty screws and this is how it turned out.

Only other thing I am thinking about is how to make the mail box a little tighter in terms of drafts. I insulated the inside door of the mailbox, and put a rubber flap on the inside of the slot to minimize the incoming air, but that's about as much as I can do with what we have.

We'll always have a draft. Even if we get a +$100 stainless steel slot from DWR it's still going to leak. This is an inexpensive compromise.

Now it matches the windows. All that's sticking out like a sore thumb are the doors and the front and side lights.

A Busy & Long weekend

It was a long and busy weekend for me. And lonely too. It was like I was isolation in Poland with seniors. At least I got to watch a couple of movies at the theaters. Saw Transformers 2 and Harry Potter. You know Harry does look like Derrick - and awkward too. Transformers 2 was ok. Story wasn't great but lots of battle scenes.

Basically this part I don't mind so much. It's not as dusty as the demolition part. Only thing is lugging around the 4x8 sheets of drywall.

So the drywalling is finally done, I had to do some soldering on those pipes to close them off in the wall. I was going back and forth to Home Depot so often, it felt like I worked there.

I even removed that unused outside faucet that we didn't even know we had until we replaced the window in the pantry. We never really noticed that valve. Well we didn't know where it went to, we just thought it was part of the 1950's plumbing standard. Just put a valve near a window and within proximity of something electrical in case there's a fire or something. It was actually the remnants of an old faucet that went out side near the front of the house. The previous owner had chopped off the outside part and never removed the plumbing on the inside.

The taping of the drywall and the first coat of mudding are also done. I brought a guy in all the way from Malta to do this. And good thing too. He did a job 10x better than what I coulda done. And cheap too. You just have to give him coffee and a smoke and he's good to go. I offered him beer, but apparently he doesn't drink.

I added more photos of the renos to that bedroom in the back that I demolished last weekend. See "Demolition Sukaboy" post and click the photos link at the bottom of the post.

Almost done...I can see the light. Through the dust on my glasses and up my nose.