Woohoo...!

Snow!  

I love snow!!

This is the Monday before Christmas.

The princess

Have I mentioned that three years ago we were blessed with a little princess?

No, seriously.  Here's the proof.  

Brynley snacking on whip cream.  

It doesn't get any better than that.

All hands, brace for impact...

Last week I had one of those "oh, crap" moments.  I was heading home from work and while checking traffic around me I found that the traffic in front of me had come to a complete stop.

OH, CRAP!

This is when I slam on the brakes, the car barely feels like it is stopping and the car in front of me is getting closer and closer.

Then you reach the point where your mind realizes you aren't going to stop in time and you start praying it doesn't hurt to bad or do to much damage.

And queue the CRUNCH!

As you can see it really didn't look that bad and I actually drove the car for a couple of days until I dropped it off at the repair shop.  Of course, between the insurance and the shop it takes forever to get to where the car is actually being repaired.

Hopefully we will see it done by the end of this week.

Hmm? What's that?  The other car?  Sorry, didn't I mention anything about that?

That would have been the nice gentleman in his 2007 yellow Porsche Cayman.

This is about all I saw of his car.  Squished those little bumps around his license plate nice and flat and left a few scratches on the bumper.  Yeah..........

Why go for a small domestic car, when there's a nice exotic right there in front of you.

I like to do it right if I'm going to do it at all.

Oh, and thanks to the nice highway patrolman who helped us off the freeway so we didn't add anymore problems the ones we already had that night.

Mmmm, rhubarb

We finished cleaning out the garden this weekend. Goodbye all you crazy tomato plants and cauliflower. Afterward, we trotted over to our neighbors house and dug up a few rhubarb roots to start our own plants.

Can I tell you how excited I was for that. She has given us some the past couple of years and it makes the best pies! Love that tartness. Looking forward to next summer.

Happy Birthday, Braden!

Braden celebrated his eighth birthday on Monday. He asked to have a friend party this year, so we rented Lego Batman for the week. He had six of his friends over and they had a great time playing that and Jenga and Dominoes. They kind of rotated between the games. We were glad they had so much fun.

In the meantime, I was out working the truck. We've been experiencing a coolant leak and decided it was the water pump. So I picked up the parts for that along with a new serpentine belt. I had to call Cheyne to find out how to get a fan clutch off these days. He suggested a tool rental from Checker Auto. It worked great! Whew! Three hours and it was all back together and I was ready to eat. (Oh yeah, they gave us a half day off for our software release celebration. Sweet!)

The rest of the week was spent playing Lego Batman with Braden in between responsibilities. We managed to get to about 62% with no cheat codes. Woot! I asked him at the end of the week if he liked it and if we should still buy it. It was a definitive "YES! It's awesome!" That's a good thing. ;)

He is really looking forward to his baptism on November 1. He is also excited about his new scriptures and was so happy to take them to church today. To bad they were practicing for the Primary Program coming up.

Ahhh, that new carpet feel!

Jubilations! The carpet is here, it is in and it is awesome. We are ecstatic!

We have begun to move in. Everyone will be sleeping in their full bed tonight.

No more cat hair and pee, no more dust and what not from previous owners. It is all ours and it is nice and clean and soft.

We took pictures, but those will get posted later. It's late, we're tired and we're overjoyed to be done with buying paint supplies and carpet and moving furniture around over and over and over....

Woohoo!

5 weeks today

So, Yvonne and I were sitting around last night after tearing the carpet out of yet another room and moving some more furniture out of our room and we got to thinking about how long we had been on this project and realized that Friday is our 5 week anniversary.

5 weeks!  Wow, how time flies!

Tonight we finish pulling out the carpet and getting everything ready for tomorrow.  We finally get our new carpet!  It feels like it's been forever.  We are so pumped and ready to have this done.

Yeehaw!

Second to third week of painting...

This blog is going to be pictureless and short, but more will come later.  We are on the verge of putting our new carpet in this weekend so life remains busy.

So, the second/third week of painting went well.  We finally finished all our remodels.  The recessed lighting looks great!  (A big shout out to our electrician friend!) I patched all the holes left from removing the kitchen light and the swamp cooler vent. Texturing was a bit of a pain.  The cooler patch went okay, but the kitchen was frustrating.  For some reason I kept making the mud to dry and thick on that one.  We actually went back and sanded it down and retextured it after we had painted, it looked so bad.  Now it's at least passable.

Now all the paint is on the walls and ceilings, which leaves doors but those are going to be a separate project later on.  We've started hanging things back on the walls and trying to plan a few updates as well.  I think we picked really good colors for us as we don't even notice the paint unless we stop to look at it on purpose.  I love how fresh and sharp everything looks now.  I'm excited to enjoy it and if a move should come down the line, then at least it all looks good for that too. (Not that we are looking, but we are keeping our eyes on the market as a bigger place would be nice some day.)

We are really excited about how good the paint looks and feel we did a pretty good job keeping our lines straight and putting enough paint on everything.

What a relief to be able to finally put the rollers and brushes away.  What a chore painting is.  We did the remaining walls and ceilings in about a day each.  That is a LOT of rolling and brushing!  My body aches just thinking about it again.  Whew!  

And on to the next stage, CARPET, which is what started all this in the first place.

Color - the first week

This week we dug into the biggest project we've undertaken on our house, new paint and carpet. I was okay with new carpet, but the whole painting thing had me on edge. It didn't help that Yvonne wanted color in the house. See, I've lived my whole life with white houses. Color was for carpet, rugs, curtains, etc., not for walls. I was nervous, to say the least. But Yvonne has pretty good color sense so she finally talked me into it and that really helped that I felt I could trust her judgement.

Of course, we had to add to the project. We were tired of some of the lighting that was left over from the 80's it seemed. (We've found some of our lights still for sale at Lowes and Home Depot. Scary!!) I also wanted to add a ceiling fan to the front room because it has just been stuffy this year.

So after a couple of months of research and procrastination we dug into the project last Friday. Progress has been good. After one week we have painted three rooms and installed half of the new lighting. Woohoo!

We started with Brynley's room and the kitchen's over-the-sink light fixture. Friday night we started emptying her room. Saturday morning I replaced the light fixture and we headed to town to get the rest of the parts we needed and the first cans of paint, ceiling white and light yellow. The rest of the afternoon was spent taping and prepping and painting the ceiling and base boards. Monday, Yvonne followed up with the walls and that night we moved Brynley back in.



What difference light makes! The darker one is actually more accurate.


Tuesday, we moved Braden out and Yvonne painted the baseboards and followed up with the ceiling that night after I got back from Elders Quorum visits. Wednesday, Yvonne painted the walls and we moved Braden back in. It's kind of hard to see his color, but it looks really good.



Thursday night we started the lighting in the front room. I don't have a picture of it yet, but we really like the change. Our home teacher, Scott, helped us put in four cans and wire them in, which required a couple of visits to the attic to complete. Not to mention we had to put all the insulation back that fell out while we were cutting the holes for the cans. We had plastic all over the front room.

We knocked out the old 3-gang switch box and put in a new 4-gang box, added new rocker style switches and a new and improved dimmer switch for the recessed lights. Another great improvement. Since it took so long to do that we will finish the lights in the kitchen this week, hopefully, as well as the attic vent/fan that we are adding to move the air better up there.

We then moved on to the bathroom on Friday and Saturday. We had to cover up a few things and repair a few spots on Friday so we could paint on Saturday, but we still managed to get the ceiling and baseboards done on Friday. Saturday morning our friend Will came and took our mirror off the wall so we could paint everything. He is bringing us a new mirror Tuesday that will cover the entire width of the counter. I can hardly wait as it is about 60"x40". Saturday's painting went pretty well outside of a few jovial mishaps between us. Yvonne couldn't keep her roller on the wall while painting around the shower head and I couldn't keep my hands off the wall, not mention that little oops of trying to improve a corner and painting on the wrong wall (aka, ceiling) with our pin roller. Ooops!

Needless to say, there were a few touchups we had to take care on ceilings later that day. As a side note, always buy 2" tape when painting. The smaller stuff isn't worth it!

I'm afraid the color doesn't show well here, but it turned out nice and we like it.


So, tomorrow we begin work on our bedroom. Ugh. The worst room in my opinion. Not the hardest, but the worst. I detest moving our room around as we have all the heavy furniture. But, we'll deal with. We hope to go looking at carpet as well, but we'll see what the holiday does to that goal.

Now to get used to having color all over. I think it is really going to hit me when our room is finished as it will be the first room I have to spend any amount of time in so far. I'm just in and out of the kids' rooms and the bathroom, but not the bedroom. Oh, well. There's no stopping this freight train now!

a pet peeve on the web

There you are casually browsing a website, relaxing and checking out the content when your computer starts blaring this horrendous noise out of its speakers for apparently no reason and you swear your speakers must be turned up full blast.

You know what I'm talking about: embedded music players! Uggh! I can't stand them!

The concept should be banned from the internet. Don't force people to listen to your "favorite" music, you know it isn't. You just make a best effort based on what they have available. Not to mention the player slows down website browsing and has you making a mad scramble for your speaker volume controls before something shatters, like your ear drums or your windows and that's because you can't click the Pause/Stop button because the stupid thing is still loading so it won't respond to your mad click, click, clicking on the mouse button.

If people want background music while surfing, they've got iTunes/Winamp/Media Player/etc. to do the job for them and they get to listen to the music THEY like.

Don't use embedded music players on your website! Be kind to humanity (and your friends and family who frequent your website the most).

Vacation - Take Two

Once again I'm home for "vacation" while Yvonne is off playing with the Young Women. This time it was for Girls Camp. She sure seems to be having all the fun! ;)

So while Yvonne is up playing in the mountains, what is Mr. Mom doing this time? Oh, let's try reorganizing a couple of rooms. Oh yeah, lots of fun. Nothing like grunting a couple of dressers, desks and cedar chests around by yourself.

See, I got a decent bonus recently and got to build a new computer with it. It's been about three years since I built the last one and I was due. I needed more drive space, a few more horses, plus it's just fun to do every so often. :) (Yes, I'm a geek.)

With that, Yvonne decided we should get a new desk and then we got to talking and decided it should be in our room rather than in Brynley's room. So, I got to break everything down and get it cleaned up. (Talk about some dust! Whew!! (Cough, splutter, cough...))

Tuesday night I built the computer after my case arrived and that took all evening, especially with the kids "helping". It took from Wednesday evening through Thursday to move everything around and get the basics in place and kind of functional again (not to mention laundry day, yes, I did the laundry (see rolling of eyes)). Friday morning was organize everything I could, finish cleaning house some and head for Batman - The Dark Knight!!

I love customer appreciation events. One of our vendors rented out a theater for two viewings of Batman - The Dark Knight. Very awesome. I had a great time. (Big thanks to Stacy for watching the kids again until Yvonne got home from camp!)

By the time I got back from that Yvonne had made it home and gotten all cleaned up. Ah, what a sight for sore eyes. It is so good to have her back. I love that woman!

And so another "vacation" passes....

Taking vacation time (?)

Can it really be called a vacation when you take time off to watch the kids while your wife goes off to play at Youth Conference? I don't know..., but I took last Thursday and Friday off to watch the kids while Yvonne did just that.

We started Thursday off with a shopping trip. We picked up a couple of cheap video games for the PS and then found the new LEGO Indiana Jones game. Let me just say that Braden was taken care of for the rest of the weekend. Sweet! We had a great time playing together and Saturday, he finished up the final story episodes with his buddy Cameron.

Brynley, on the other hand, was another story, which actually played out pretty well. Whew! I only had a couple of tantrum sessions with her over the weekend, thankfully. She enjoyed playing with Braden and doing puffy sticker art on her own. Saturday afternoon I discovered her hidden trash repository for the sticker backings. I guess it was just too convenient to resist. As I was picking up a few leftover scraps I discovered that behind the speaker cover on my sub woofer was a TON of backing pieces. I so love these little parental discoveries! At least nothing was sticking to the speaker. :)

Thursday was our play day with video games and a trip to watch Kung Fu Panda (Awesome flick!), Friday we got up and did chores and some yard work before settling down to some more play time. Saturday started with some good work, them some more play time.

And I just have to say, that I've got some great kids. They have their moments like all kids do, but they are so great and they loved playing with Dad this weekend.

So, we made it through the weekend with no major injuries or problems and even left the house in pretty good shape, got some yard work done Friday and served at the welfare farm on Saturday morning.

And Yvonne made it home in good time early Saturday afternoon. Soooo glad to see her. I love my wife and she was a sight for sore eyes. Yumm!

And so ended my vacation(?) this week.

The fence is finished! ...for now...?

So the fence is finally back together. Yeehah! It only took, what, like three weeks or so to get there. Well, I did have a twelve day work week in the middle of that which put a bit of a crimp in it. A week into the repairs I started a site move at work. Nothing like having to move several thousand square feet of server cabinets and computer racks along with all their equipment to a new site. Thankfully it all went pretty smoothly.

So, in the midst of that we have a fence that is in disarray. I'm very grateful for a neighbor and his friends that kept going on it without me and managed to get the majority of it back up so there was at least a fence between our yards again. Which, of course, can't be just that simple. No, after putting all the posts back in every section of fence doesn't fit right, but I mentioned that in the last post, so no need to digress further.

Yesterday I finally got another weekend and was able to get the rest of the supplies I needed and put my little side section and gate back together. Well, I wish it had been just that easy. Get this, we hadn't done anything to the three posts involved with this little section and gate, right? They just sat there while we worked on the rest of the fence. The south post was the only one we didn't pull out the first Saturday. So I haul my little section back over thinking all is well and go to put it in the brackets and just about quit right there. The darn thing had shrunk or something! Grrr! I tell you, not the way to start a day's work.

So I sucked it up and went next door to ask our neighbor how he had dealt with the other sections that had been short, and then returned to tackle the task. Fortunately, I was able to use some of the old 2x4's that had come off the longer sections that had been replaced last week. For a minute I thought I was going to have to make another trip to Home Depot already that day.

I measured and cut the sections down, then I had to sort out the slats and get them to hang level. Thank heavens for handy tools that give you a third hand. Those nice little DeWalt slide attachments for drills are great! It was great having it hold the screw so I could hold the slat with one hand and put the screw in with the other.

I also needed to add some anti-sag to the poor gate, so I put in the cross brace I had not managed to put in when I rebuilt the fence two years ago when it was sagging so badly it wouldn't even close. (I was interrupted by my father-in-law's stroke on that vacation and hadn't been able to put that in.) I also added an anti-sag kit with the braided wire and twist coupler to give it that extra boost it needed. And of course, that meant the latch needed adjustment so those pieces were moved around.

And at the end of the day, the gate now moves beautifully next to a nice solid fence and the kids can now be let out into the backyard without fear of their running into the street. Hooray!! (That's how my wife felt. Ecstatic!)

Another successful, if not typical, home improvement project complete! At least until we decide to refinish the poor thing... or something....

The southern fence

This was the week we decided to fix our southern fence line (I use the term loosely since the whole fence is only like 125 feet long, but hey...) which has been flapping in the wind for the last couple of years.

There is nothing like waking up at 2 a.m. to the snap, pop of the fence waving back and forth in the wind. Both our's and our neighbor's bedrooms are with in 20-30 ft. of the offending fence sections and this year we have both finally had it. Time for some home improvement efforts.

Thursday we started taking down fence sections so we could get to the posts. Even though the posts were wobbly it's still amazing how long it takes to knock one of those suckers out of the ground. I don't even want to mention the one that smacked me in the noggin Friday night and felt like it knocked a tooth loose, but I can't work a project like this without some kind of mishap like that. So I enjoyed a headache the rest of the weekend. That felt reeaaallll good Saturday trying to dig more dirt out of the holes so we could put down the gravel we needed. Pound, Pound, POUND!! Owwww....


Our neighbors sprinklers accidently came on Friday night and it was amazing how much water was still sitting in the holes that morning. Either our water table is super high or our dirt doesn't drain worth squat. I think there is a good amount of clay in the dirt. One hole had a full shovel's head worth standing in it still. At least it helped make the digging easier and added some moisture for the cement.

We decided we didn't like the cement's instructions to just pour the cement in and add water. What a joke. We tried it on one and just about pulled it all out and started over, but we managed to get it stirred up pretty decently in the hole. The rest we mixed in the wheelbarrow and poured in. MUCH more satisfactory. So we got all the posts in and cemented down. We were so proud! They looked so straight and perfect...!

Then we started trying to put up some of the fence lengths. Hah! Of course, none of them fit right now. The old fence posts had apparently not been leveled very well. Each section has three 2x4's holding the slats in place and each 2x4 was a different length on each section. We found a couple we could make fit with the judicios use of a slack line supplied by our neighbor's friend who was helping us out. (It's good to know rock climbers. They have great equipment!)

Well, with all that the couple of posts we were working on felt like they were loosening in their foundations, so we decided to call it a day and let the rest cure before attacking them. That's a good thing, 'cause everyone was getting pretty tired and a bit frustrated with the fence sections.

So after a decent day of digging holes, pouring cement, some frustration and lots of sun, we called it good. I was really glad since I think I was on the verge of heat exhaustion. I was feeling the sun I'd soaked up, even with all the sunscreen I'd put on. I went and grabbed me a nice cold BridgeHampton from Gandolfo's, crashed on the couch and watched some Narnia (LW&W) in HD. Ahhh! What a way to end the day!

Spring Break 2008

The family made it through Spring Break again. With our impending move at work I thought I'd take advantage of the time and take a day off since I may not get another one for a month or so.

Friday morning I went down and rented a rototiller and cleaned up the garden. We then went down to Cook's nursery and bought some veggies and flowers for the garden and yard. We have to wait a couple of weeks before planting since there is still a pending freeze.

That afternoon we went to "Horton Hears a Who" with the kids. That was fun and the kids had a blast.

Saturday I got up and fixed a couple of problems with the fence. It's only taken me like two years to get around to it. :0

That afternoon I was hankering for some Dutch Oven cooking. (I think that's a certain friend's fault. He was at a big DO convention this weekend. :) ) Mmmm, good stuff. We made DO potatoes and crumble apple cobbler. Can't wait to do more this year!