is a geek

I slapped in 2GB of RAM in the lappy and upped the process to 2.2Ghz. :-) It's nice and fast now. I can even play UT2004 on it (@1280x800) at ~ 35FPS. It's not a screamer, but its doable. I ordered a spiffy mobile power plugy thing for the airplane as I didn't want to lug around a big car adapter power thingy (sorry... the name is not in my brain right now, if you leave a message I will be sure to call you back at an unreasonable time).

I got my first non-drugged-up allergy shots after my rush procedure last week. I had 2 shots in the back of my left arm and 1 in the back of my right. I had to sit for an hour for them to ensure I didn't blow up. When I got home, the entire back of my upper arm (elbow to shoulder) was red, puffy and swollen (and horrible itchy). It stayed like that through yesterday (when it was itchy, sore, and bruised feeling). The Dr prescriped some steriods to help it tone down a little. Still itches abit.

Work has been interesting yet still busy. I'm working at a 8:30-5:30 schedule and rarely do much work out of those times, but between those hours its a marathon. It's like cat hearding in a way. We finally (and concurrently) finished many big projects yesterday all at the same time. It was somewhat relieving as they had been looming over me like a dark cloud for awhile. I'm close to clearing my plate for my trip to Japan / Taiwan in a little over a week. Yay!! (Un)Fortunately, a new employee will be coming in while I'm out, so he will get training from other people. Oh well.

I finally decided to venture out in the yard last week in hopes of not killing myself with 'The Outside' and it's allergies. The yard needed TLC something seriously and I was the designed person to do it. A few hours later the yard was mowed, edged, weedeated, weeded, fertilized, pesticided and generally spiffier. I decided that since I was horrible dirty and not dying of allergies, I'd deal w/ the compost bin. The compost bin contains: 75% texas clay, 23% bugs, and 2% compost. Needless to say, using the tiller attachment to the weadeater, it took another few hours to break the clay into reasonably sized pellets and till it into the garden. The garden is already sprouting basil and a HUGE amount of catnip. I brought a freezer bag full of catnip to work today. The first hit is free!

My dad was in town all last week and this week so he could visit one of the companies he is consulting for in the DFW area. It was nice having him around, but he usually ended up going to work before we woke up, getting home at the same time as us and going to bed 3 hours later. So, we didn't get to hang out as much. :-( Their new house in New Bruenfells is coming along... The process of building any house is fairly stressfull and draining, but I feel they will get there one way or another. They look to be moving in around the same time we are out of country. I have mixed feelings about that. :-P

Plan for this weekend: Train neighbors on fishtank care, find a doggy motel for the pups while we are away, tidy up the house so we dont feel bad about having neighbors in it, relax, sleep, pack.

Posted by chris at 09:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My yard was nice and green... then I pulled up all the weeds. It seems weeds like 5 days of rain and 70+ degree temperatures. A few even came up to my knees!

Posted by chris at 04:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well, I'm still sick.. All plugged up (painfully so) and I also have a deep cough. :-( Its getting better... but slowly. It feels like my ear drums are going to burst.

Steven is in town for a few days of Spring Break. He is probably bored out of his mind. To entertain him a little, we had him help us paint our living room and put in a wood floor (to replace the perpetually soggy carpet). This is what happens when you let your wife choose the flooring. Yes... dolphins. Atleast it will look neat when its all under water next time.

Posted by chris at 01:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Friday night, we recovered from the week and watched Batman Begins. It was surprisingly good. I would recommend it.

Saturday, we woke up late, found a fish on the couch :-(, and cleaned house. I also finished assembling the frame of the fish tank stand. Every piece is glued with gorilla glue, and screwed in several times. I also spent an hour getting all the legs the exact same length (serious PITA). That night, I headed out to my hocket game with Luci. We did really good. We played one of the best teams in the league and won 4(or 5)-1 !!! What was cool was the fact we only had our team members (no ringers) and even though the other team played good, we played better. It was really exciting! One guy on our team (who isn't a regular scorer) scored 2 goals himself! Yay! It really makes me look foward to next week.

Sunday, we headed off the Walmart to pick up a smoker that I had my eye on. Someone very very very special went ahead and let me get it. :-) After we cramed that into the car, we headed over to HomeDepot and picked up two 48x96 pieces of sanded plywood for the fishtank stand canopy, a 48x96 piece of thin wood to act as a veneer, some stain, some paintbrushes and some moulding. We had all of it cut at the store... 27 cuts... and it JUST BARELY fit in the car with the smoker. Hopefully, this week I can assemble it all and have it ready to hold water next week..... Hopefully....

In other news... it got COLD here last night.... 40 degrees... BRRRR We decided not to throw another blanket on the bed last night and we were very much regretting that decision this morning. The situation wasn't helped by my cats, who were having some sort of cleaning licking orgy on my chest as I slept and preventing me from scooting over in the bed to get closer to my personal heater, Christine.

Posted by chris at 03:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Urgh... I got home and my fish tank pump was sucking water. So, luckily I had gotten the water filter installed and had already made up 15 gallons of saltwater. So, I stopped the pump and added 10 gallons. Then I tried to get the pump started again.... it took awhile... then I started doing a small water change. Lets just say, I ended up with 10 gallons of water on my kitchen floor (literaly). I sucked it up with the steam vac that was still out from the dog mess from the previous days. The worst part is that the fish tank has a solid wood bottom and is sitting on tile. When water gets at the base, it is sucked under the stand via capillary action.

I tried caulking the bottom of a fw of my window screens (on the outside) shut so the cats can't push them out and go on adventures. It seemed to have worked, but only time will really tell. When I opened the windows, it was 78 inside. 2 hours later, it was 73. I slept nicely.

A few weeks ago, Christine was recruited to be a last minute bride's maid for one of her friends / coworkers wedding this weekend. The original bride's maid was not being cooperative, so Ting was asked to step in. It is going to be a Vietnamese / Chinese wedding, so it is going to be very long, involved, etc... Luckily, it is close to our place.

I did have something good happen to me the other day, kinda... I won the snack machine lottery. I got the hunger, so I visited snack land. I wanted a ding dong, but the machine said 'sorry please try again'. I screamed in agony. It beeped at me. As a consolidation prize, I chose a bag of sun chips which were prompty and slowly dispensed directly on top of a candy bar that had ultimatly met it's demise lodged between the apple pie and the glass. I screemed in agony. In a moment of desperation, I gave the machine a whack and it responded with a count down. beep beep beep beep Beep Beep BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP whirl whirl whirl whirl whirl whirl! With each sucessive whirl my eyes got larger and larger with delite. It had rewarded my moment of voilence with a cornacopia of TOP SHELF selections!!! Cheesy poofs, Cheese ruffles, BBQ Ruffles, and other chips fell down upon my treasure chest from the sky like chips from the top shelf of a vending machine!! I squeeled like a little girl in a candy shop! Then, to my surprise, the machine beeped at me twice and displayed... please make a selection!! I chose a snickers bar!! So, with one quarters worth of work (and several moments of agony) I reaped 4 bags of chips and a snickers bar!! NONE of which I really wanted!! Awesome!!

Posted by chris at 09:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Once again, its been one of those weeks. The good news is, I'm kinda getting used to it.... which is kinda unfortunate.... you don't want to get used to bad things.

In short Friday was a big watery mess coated with dust. Saturday started off with a bang, progressed to piss poor, followed by a long jog, then Do It Yourself and wrapped up with beer and BBQ with friends. Sunday was cleaning, breaking, lonely lunch, training and sushi. Monday was 'I got no work but I still have a job' followed by leftovers and an exercise in clean water futility.

Continue reading "..whimper..." »

Posted by chris at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

We skipped dog training last night and we don't regret it at all. If we went, we would have been caught in a pretty nasty, yet fast moving, lightning and thunderstorm. Three or four houses in Murphy got struck by lightning! We took the opportunity to play around with the 5 stage RO/DI water filter we just received. It's a little bigger than we expected, so we are trying to figure out where would be the best place to mount it. The trick is, for drinking water (no DI), you flip it one way, for fishtank water you flip the switch the other way. For every 1 gallon of water it produces, it creates 4 gallons of waste water, so it needs to be within 4 feet of a drain too. We were thinking about putting it in the cabinet next to the fridge and running the drinking water to the fridge and keeping the line for the fish water coiled up under the counter. So many choices... Another interesting note... it makes 4 gallons per HOUR. Slow..

We also worked on the stand some more. I cut all the legs and started to get them ready to be mounted. That required using a pocket hole jig that I picked up from Sears. Unfortunately, the bit broke after only drilling 24 of the 66 holes that I needed. Back to Sears today for lunch to exchange it.

Right as we were getting ready to go to bed, we let the dogs out. When we let the dogs in, they were COATED with mud. Spunky had very obviously stucks her snout in the mud cause it came up to her eyes. Ugh. So, I got to take a shower with 3 dogs! Fun!

While I was waiting for Ting to finish her shower, I was watching TV in bed. The dogs kept on growling at something outside the slightly ajar master bedroom door. So, I got up and walked around checking things out and didn't find anything. I did notice that my brother had forgotten to lock the front door, so it got me worried that perhaps someone had gotten in. I tried getting the dogs to come with me as I walked around the house, but they were too skittish. It wasn't a great feeling walking around the house in underwear at midnight checking for robbers. I didn't find anything, but it didn't stop me from waking up all night anytime I heard a wierd noise.

Posted by chris at 05:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This weekend was wierd. It all started with a call from my old bosses. They remembered me asking about the New Orleans office, and knew I had a little bit of extra space in the house, and asked if one of the lady's from that office could stay with us for a few days. She had started in a N.O. but after their street flooded and they didn't have any electricity and a huge tree fell on their shed (where all the camping supplies and tools were stashed), she decided it would be good to leave. So, she left to Beumont, TX, which, incidently, was in the direct path of the then oncoming hurricane, Rita. So, I talked with Ting, and we said sure. She drove in around 3pm on Friday. She met me at work and followed me home. I forgot to mention something, she has 2 dogs and 3 cats. The dogs weigh about 100 pounds or so each!. We put the dogs in the backyard and the cats inside. After showing her around, I notice two dogs running around my front yard. Apparently, her dogs knew how to open gates. So, we put the dogs back in and locked the gate. After letting her get settled and showered, we decided to introduce my dog (1 at a time) to her dogs. That didn't work out too well. Her dogs were a little more aggressive (and seriously bigger than my dogs) and I think they were very very protective of their mother. So, the dogs had to stay seperated. When I went out later that afternoon to get some more fishtank water, I picked up the 2 remaining crates at PetsMart. They were almost COMPLETELY sold out of all of their crates. They said a animal rescue group came by and bought all the crates in the store.... several thousands of dollars!! Anywho, we got the last two, took them home, put the together and tried to relax. As Ting and I were tidying up, we went looking for our guest and found her asleep on the porch. We figured she fell asleep while relaxing outside with her dogs (I think we were wrong). So, I gently reminded her we had a nice clean bed upstairs for her to use. So, she got up, went upstairs and we watched some TV. When it was time for bed, we closed up everything and went to sleep. Since her dogs were in the back yard, we took our dogs out front on leashes to do their business. So, we did that a few times the next morning and eventually I got up around 10am. As I'm walking past the back door, I see her standing out there and I try to open the door to talk to her. The door was locked? She had spent the WHOLE NIGHT out there!!?!?! She didn't want to wake us to be let back in. Urhg.... The next night, she slept out in the van with her dogs?!? I think her dogs are her babies and not used to being apart, but this was getting kinda silly. Anyways, Sunday, she randomly mentioned she was leaving to go back home... to New Orleans. AFAIK, it was still flooded there and the roads between here and there got 20 INCHES OF RAIN in the last 24 hours. Anyways, we helped her pack up and sent her on her way. It just was so akward because she was trying sooo hard to be unobtrusive and not 'bother' us that she became obtrusive and made us feel horribly bad because we felt like we were being bad hosts. Ugh.

The rest of the weekend was spent on fishtank stuff. We got wood for the stand and started putting it together (I'll take pics tonite). I finished the overflow boxes by cutting teeth it using a table router. I also picked up a bigger protein skimmer from a guy on www.dfwmas.org forums.

We also went to Home Depot and picked up a Black and Decker 18V cordless drill / saw / dustbuster / sander kit. I already have a B&D 18V drill and 2 batteries, but I lost the charger. A new charger costs $50. A new drill costs $50. The drill / saw / buster / sander kit comes with 2 batteries and a bag AND a charger for $100. Now I can have a drill for drilling and a drill for screwing things together.

I also played with the rocks for the new fishtank that I'm soaking in water to get all the junk out. Lets just say that muratic acid and limestone rocks can be really fun.... It also can change the color of your driveway.

Posted by chris at 09:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A few nights ago, we created a wonderfull batch of brownies. We used 2 mixes: 1 fudge and 1 w/ peanut butter 'topping'. I mixed in pecans, coconut, chocolate chips, almond extract and Godiva chocolate liqour. They are really yummie. The almond extract really adds alot to it.

Tonite, we take the dogs to 'training' again. I'm not looking foward to it as much as I should. It's fairly stressfull most of the time and it takes up an entire evening. The classes dont seem as usefull as I had hoped. We learn some stuff, but spend the rest of the time practicing it and trying to get our dogs to behave. If I had known this, I would have gotten a book and read that instead. Oh well. It's already paid for.

I'm trying to motivate myself to go outside and clean off all the rocks and wood I had gotten from my parent's lot this last weekend. I need to hose them off to get all the dirt off of them, then I need to soak them in a container with a powerhead in it for a few weeks. It just seems dirty and abunch of work... things I am not super motivate to do right now.

I thought I got my winXP64 computer working a few nights ago, but was dissappointed. I got a neato soundcard (Turtle Beach Montego DDL) and already had a Dvico FusionHDTV-3-QAM HTDV tuner card. Unfortunately, they STILL do not have 64bit drivers. This sucks abunch because I can't use my media room computer much for anything untill they do. Grr.

I figured that since we are between seasons in hockey, I'd go play drop in hockey on Thursday. Unfortunatly, today it dawned on me that I still have a few Friday games left in 1 league and practice on Saturday. So, hockey 3 days in a row should be a blast. I hope my body holds up.

Last night we made a rack of beef ribs. I had marinated them in a beer and BBQ mixture for a few days, then cooked them on low on the grill as I randomly brushed on extra sauce. It was really really good. We finished the whole rack (and didn't even save the bones for the dogs!) Afterwards, Ting went shopping as I washed the pups. Washing them in the shower isn't that bad except for having to bend over abunch to brush them, apply shampoo, etc.. My back was very tired by the time I was done. I figured that since I was already wet and coated in hair, I would wash Ashy too. Ashy is actually one of the more pleasant animals to wash in our house. She just cry's like a little baby, doesn't really try to get away, and most importantly, doesn't extend her claws either. Half of the time, she will try to hold onto you gently with her paws so she feels more secure. Anways, 1/2 of my animals are clean now, I didn't want to deal with the rest.

Posted by chris at 04:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Hockey game on Friday. We lost. :-( We only had 2 people on a bench and a 13 year old goalie. He was actually pretty good, we were just really exhausted and getting out of position big time. Saturday, I finally got all the materials to complete the overflow boxes for my tank and Ting and I spent some time glueing them together. It was kinda funny cause I had to go through an interview w/ the pharmacist in order to get a few syringes to apply the acrylic solvent (very very viscous stuff). Then we played our playoff game (for 7th) on Sat night. We played pretty good, but lost 2-1. Luci managed to whack her head on the ice too, so I got to drive her mini cooper home. I wonder if Austin is getting pissed at me. Originally, I scored w/ his wife, and now I drove her home at 2AM after she got knocked up. :-P Next season starts in 2 weeks.

Sunday, we spent cleaning up the house. That was fun!! That evening we went over and hung out at Judy and Evan's house and chatted the night away. Monday, we did more of the same (cleaning) and in the afternoon, Christing's family came over to make sushi w/ us. It was really good!!! Yum! Her had had this cool gadget that made rolling the sushi really easy. We had eal, shrimp, salmon, egg, cucumber, carrots, cream cheese, and some other odds and ends to put on the inside. Yum!!! Christine's mom also made some miso soup, which was delicious as well.

Posted by chris at 09:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Yesterday was one of the most stressfull days I have had in awhile. I slept bad, tossing and turning all night, my heart was beating on my ribcage like a serial killer on the door on a dark stormy night. My ride to work was filled with cars zigging and zagging and stopping and going and not going fast enough. This was even more harrowing than usuall becuase I was transporting some fish to put into my fishtank at work. The second I walked into work, before I got to my desk, I got accosted about a annoying ticket that would not die from the day before. There were problems w/ it and it was super high proirity. So, I spent the next hour or so working on this while the fish were frantically swimming around in circles in their temporary soup transportation container. What made this ticket sooo annoying is that my fix was correct. However, since it added something heavy with javascript, and the page had pre-existing javascript, I had to go find the preexisting problems fix those, find some other preexisting problems, fix the problems that popped up from fixing the preexisting problems and the code that depended on the bad behavior... 3 hours later I was finished. Anyways, the entire day continued on like that. My bloodpressure was sky high. Eventually, I added the fishies to their new home and went back to mine. I decided I would try to be cheerfull, when I got back home. That didn't last long.

I pulled up to the garage and it wouldn't open. The battery was dead in the remote. I opened with out outside keypad. Like a bag lady, I stumble inside carring handfulls of crap I decided to take home from work and punch in the alarm code with my pinky. I drop everything and get ready to release the hounds. When I got in my room, I noticed a random large piece of plastic (looks like its from something expensive) that has teeth marks all over it. It wasn't there when I left this morning. I guess my brother let them out and didn't watch them. So, I let them outside and get the mail. In the mail I recieve a letter from animal control informing me that that I need to get Teddy sterelized. This is difficult considering he already is and we already sent paperwork many months ago. I realize that it's 6:30 and Ting isn't home. She called at 5:15 and said she was about to leave. I call her and get voicemail. Then, I call the pound and leave a message explaining the situation. As I finsihed, I get a voicemail: Christine. So I call her back and the power goes off. I rush over to the aqarium to turn off the lights (so they dont get flipped off / then on) and the power turns on right before I get there. Its bad to turn the $1K light set off then on. Last time it happened it broke one of the ballast($$$). So, then I go about checking my computer, turning them on, fixing them etc... The funny thing is, the order of 4 backup batteries that I put in the day before was not soon enough.

... tired

Posted by chris at 05:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I was laying face down on the ice, trying to figure out how I got ... there ... were little red spots on my glove.

Continue reading "Workout Weekend" »

Posted by chris at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

We spent all weekend w/ yard related improvements. Saturday, we coaxed my Dad and his truck over to make a trip to HomeDepot. We got a bunch of mulch, 6 dwarf holleys, 2 rose bushes, some purple things, some flower things, 1 live oak tree, and plastic trellace stuffs. When we got home, it started to POUR. We emptied the truck in the rain and cleaned up a little. Later that evening we went to Sadaf's wedding. It was super cool. I had never been to an Indian / Muslim wedding. We learned bunch and got to see Sartaj too! Yay!

The next day, Sunday, we spent the entire time in the yard. First we planted the oak tree on the front corner, then we ripped up all the bushes (except for 3) and tilled up the clay that was our flowerbeds. As we were doing the yard work, I left the gate open for a second a few times and Spunky always darted off when I wasn't looking. What pissed me off even more is that she didn't stop running when I yelled at her to sit. Anyways, back in the barkyard with her and back to work. I was being very very careful of the sprinklers and the control lines for the sprinklers. However, the dufusses (dufi?) who did the sprinklers, put the control lines significantly higher and further out than the water lines (which were already too close to the surface). All the sudden, my tiller is bogged down, and all 10 control lines for the sprinklers are cut. I turned off the tiller, and knealed down to take a look at the damage. While I was doing this, I put my hand on the tiller's muffler. I heard it sizzle. It hurts. :-( At that point, it was time to call it quits, so we gathered up all of our crap and started to head inside. Then I noticed that Spunky had dug up 1/2 of our vegetable garden!!! I was not happy, not amused, and my hand firking hurt. We got cleaned up and visited the Archer family for a wonderful dinner.

Monday, I woke up a little early and started the brisket on the grill. I tried stealing some ideas from the Virtual Weber Bullet to use on my propane (*gasp*) non-weber (*gasp*) grill (not smoker (*gasp*)). I got a bag of hickory chunks, put them between the bottom grate and the flames, filled a aluminum pan with water and placed it on the bottom grate, and placed the brisket on the top grate (directly over the pan). I set the grill on low and the water in the pan kept the temp down as well, and let it cook all day. I also used a wet rub on it too. It was da bomb! It contained: brown sugar, honey, worchester sauce, paprika, ground cumin, salt, ground black pepper, onion powder, and that hot sauce in a red bottle from chinese restaurants. Yum. As it was cooking, we finished up the yardwork. We put down weed blocking fabric, put in more lights, replanted all the plants (we moved the big ones to the side of the house). We finished just as my parents were pulling up (for dinner)(45 mins earlier than we were expecting them!). Ugh.

Anyways, dinner was super awesome and the yard looks better. However, the dog needs a beating, my hand need some love, I'm sore all over, and my holiday weekend wasn't the most relaxing. :-\ Ho Hum.

Posted by chris at 03:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

...want to buy my parents house? It's nice! Think of it as an investment in the future. When I become rich and famous, you can ride my coattails and give tours of one of my childhood homes easily turning a tidy profit! Act now! Quantities are limited!

Posted by chris at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

When we arrived in the garage this morning to start our morning commute, we found our garage door to be open. This botherd us greatly because we didn't remember leaving it open and there were 20 or so construction workers parked around our house getting ready to start their work across the street. What I figured happened, was that Spunky in a fit of spunkiness hopped up onto the bed thereby hitting the overly sensitive keychain garage door opener button and opening the garage door. The issue is, we don't know when she did that. So, our garage door could have been open for 5 mins or 12 hours. Ugh.

While we were away, it got friking hot in Dallas. Temperatures over 100 degrees were reported. Being a good homeowner, I mowed my yard the day before I left, fertalized the week previous and I had my sprinklers set to come on. All these things combined to add 3 inches of grass to my yard. Unfortunately, it's still hot as heck and I should mow. In related news, all of our herbs and vegetables are really growing! We can't wait!! I admit I've already nibbled on a few pieces of basil. This weekend, I think I will rip all the bushes out of the flower bed, get some new ones, and plant everything again. Or, I may just sit on my butt. .... decisions....

A few nights ago, we gave Spunky her weekly (atleast) shower. She got the usual: 2 shampoos, 1 conditioning, and a nice brushing, followed up by a rowdy towel drying, some air drying, then some touch up with the hair dryer. After all was said and done, we had a clean and smelly free dog. We then let her out to do her business and 30 seconds later she comes to the door with dirt all over her again. Darn dog is digging a hole that I may just use for her grave! Punk.

Posted by chris at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The green things are coming, the green things are coming!!! Actually, nothing to worry about, just the tops of the stuff we planted in the garden are finally starting to poke out. I feel like a dad all over again.

Speaking of family, the dog has been a real bitch recently. Get it? She is a female dog?! Anyways... we tried taking her on a walk at the end of last week and ran into our neighbors. We talked to them for an hour and 1/2 and in that time, Spunky chewed through her leash twice!! Ugh. Then, yesterday, as I was working in the yard, I felt I could trust her to stay nearby as I worked. I was wrong. I saw her, then I blinked, then she was gone (didn't see where). So I was yelling for her, and saw her 1/2 block down the road playing with some other neighbor's kids. She was showing off, running at 300000000000 miles per hour and practicing her long jump into the street. Anyways, she was placed back in the confines of the fence immediatly after that.

We've been busy doing house related things. I really cleaned up the garage the other day, then I helped my parents clean out their garage a few days later (giving 1/2 of the stuff to me) and thereby requiring me to clean out my garage again! :-P Free stuff is still good, though. A few days ago, we went to HomeDepot armed w/ our Discover card (%5 cash back on home improvement) and a 10% coupon. We bought paint for the media room (grin), painting supplies, more dirt, a few floodlights for the yard and some lowvoltage lighting for out front. The cool thing on the lighting... it was on a 20% sale at the point. So, $500 later, I have enough things to do to last me for several several months.

We've been carefully manipulating our compost bin. All the clay in the bottom (from the excavated dirt from the garden), seems to not be doing anything. I've gone in there with a tiller several times but just end up with gunked up blades. I ended up adding topsoil, manure, and organic humus to the mix and tilling all that up. The results were promising. I think I'm going to add earthworms to it (and stop tilling it). Hopefully, they will take care of the clay.

Christine (Alpha's) wedding is coming up and Christine (Beta) and I can't wait! We are looking forward to a little vacation time and sharing a wonderfull event with our friends! BTW, I havn't done sittups or pushups since I 1st did them several weeks ago.

Posted by chris at 11:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

When I got home last night, I added water to all the vegetable seed we got in order to help them germinate faster. I had seperated them out in all the small containers I could find. So every chinese tea cup, measuring spoons and a few shot glasses held a different flavor. I eventually ran out of cups and decided to add some large seeds with small seeds (cause I figured would be easy to seperate afterwards). I was wrong. After the seeds got wet, they developed some sort of super snot substnace that cause them to stick to whatever you dont want them to stick to. Also, while adding water to 1/2 the containers, the initial splash caused a few of the seeds to hop out of the containers. Ugh..
Then we had an electrician come by last night to give an estimate on adding flood lights to the backyard. The builder used a $2 light fixture that can only light up the backyard's patio on a good day. We asked about changing that one out and adding a flood to the far corner of the house so we could see the garden after dark (and so we don't hit every doggy landmine on our way to the trashcan). We got some good ideas and will have him come out again soon to actually do the work.
By the time we finished dinner, it was dark outside. Nevertheless, we grabbed some flashlights, a desklamp, extensions cords, and our seeds determined to plant them once and for all. So, we were outside in the dark with a desklamp attached to a 200 foot extension cord trying to plant seeds the size of ticks. It was interesting. Eventually, after 3/4 the seeds were planted, we kind of gave up and threw the rest of the seeds into the bed and mixed the dirt all around. Hopefully we will be able to tell the difference between spinach & catnip and carrots & oregeno. Overall, we planeted 8+ kinds of basil, oregeno, cilantro, catnip, spinach, carrots, luffa gourds, some sort of bean, some other gourd, and some other things that we will discover in a few months.

Posted by chris at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I forgot to mention, Sam's club has Serta mattresses on clearance, so Christine and I picked up one on Friday night. We got a King sized set for ~$300 out the door. OMG it is soooo much better than our 2 year old queen sized mattress that cost over $500.

Yesterday, I got tired of Spunky sticking her nose where it doesn't belong (aka... the garden), so I decided to put up some temporary metal fence posts that I can hang orange construction fence on. As I was stepping on the convienent feet wedges at the bottom of the post to force them in the ground, I noticed that 1/2 of them actually punctured the bottom of my brand new tennis shoes until they hit my sock. I commend the designers of such fence posts for deciding to make the part that people stand on in the following shape (top) ------>-- (bottom). Perhaps you could design a roadway out of nails (think of the improved traction!!).

This morning I awoke to the sound of rusting plastic wrap and a cat running from under the bed. Considering it was only 7:06 and Evan would show up at 7:30 for carpool, I went back to sleep. A few minutes later, Christine noted that the nifty touch activated light on our headboard didn't work anymore. Around 7:23, I awoke and decided to investigate. I found that some furry, tail smoking mammal had completely chewed through one of the lamp cords!! I'm surprised that it didn't catch fire or short out the rest of the lights. Anyways, bad smoking cat! GUILTY!

A few moments ago, I excused myself from me desk to go to the bathroom. After successfully completing my objective, I decided to wash my hands. I turned on the water, placed one hand under the soap and gave the soap dispenser (like a ketchup one) a little wack. The soap dispensed some lovely clear gooey mass onto my shirt (which was 2.5 feet directly horizontal to the tip of the dispenser). Not wanted to re-enact a scene from "There's Something About Mary', I decided not to do that again after I attempted to clean my shirt.

After the failure with the soap dispenser, I decided to cheer myself up with some Pringles from my lunch. I pulled them out and munched away until I noticed that the Pringles had writing on them!! I thought I won something super cool until I realized it was a new cross promotion they had with Survivor where they put trivia on the chips with a red dye of sorts. Anyways, it made the chips significantly less appealing, but I ate them anyways.

I other news, Star Wars Episode 3 tickets went on sale yesterday. Most of the sites were being severely pounded, but I managed to secure 6 tickets for the 12:05 showing at the local uber theater (Cinemark Legacy). After I filled out EVERYTHING and was about to hit submit, I decided to double check the date for conflicts. Good thing I did. I am going to be at a wedding in Jamaica! Do they have movie theaters in Jamaica?

Posted by chris at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

No matter how hard we've been trying, we can't actually commit to planting something in the vegetable garden. Every night, we find ourselves playing in the dirt and then too tired to plant our future harvest. Sunday, on our way back from APO's activiation retreat at Eisenhower State park (Lake Texoma), we picked up 600 pounds of dirt, organic humus and manure. As we emptied the bags into the garden, we noted all of the snout holes from our guilty puppy. It seems she had been up to no good again! After emptying the bags, we discovered that we needed ABUNCH more dirt. So, we headed to HomeDepot and picked up another 1000 pounds of dirt (we took 2 cars) and picked up a tiller attachment for our weedeater, a rake, and some tomato plants. We dumped the rest of the dirt in the garden, tilled it to mix it up, then went to tilling the compost bin. The compost bin is 80% filled with clay chunks that were attached to the grass we pulled up for the garden. Anyways, after 20 mins of backbreaking tilling, I stopped after not being able to control the machine anymore. Then we noticed a skiny 8 inch long brown snake chilling in the side of the compost. After a futile attempt to capture it with a old sour cream container, it slithered away to safety.

At work, I swapped cubicals again. The other guy's name is Chris, so it caused some confusion for everyone else.

On Friday, I proposed that I clean up one of our products to the vice president of operations. The program is written in perl and in the base product they dont have strict turned on, the leave in their debug STDERR prints, and considering that apache doesn't fail to the screen they were missing tons of mysql errors. So, I offered to clean it up and I got the go ahead today! Yippee! Now all I have to do is fix it once and not everytime I release a site.

Posted by chris at 06:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well, we closed on the refinancing last night. It was a whole bunch easier this time around. We got the paperwork a day early, fixed the mistakes, went in yesterday and got out within 30 minutes! It saves us over $100 / month and $40,000 interest for the life of the loan.

Afterwards, we headed over to Home Depot and picked up some dirt. They were having a sale, so the dirt was dirt cheap. They also had good prices on cow manure. Holy crap it was cheap as shit. So, enough of the jokes, I picked up 9 40pound bags of topsoil, 3 40pound bags of cow poop, and 3 40pound bags of organic humus. We split the bags up between mine and Ting's cars. Afterwards we headed over to Costco (1st time evar!) and shopped around. They had a cool sale on Black and Decker drill, sander, and circular saw combo for $50 after rebate. Unfortunately, it ended the day before. :-( So, we shopped around anyways and finally got a wheelbarrow to cart all of my yard stuff around in. The w.b. came in 3 parts: medium sized box, big red tub, and 2 long metal handles. Seems simple enough, right?

Then we got home. Apparently you need a PhD in order to assemble the wheel barrow in less than 30 minutes. Further studies are required to do it without feeling stupid (or looking stupid). Ugh! It took forever, with tons of re-do's to get the darn thing together right (even while looking at instructions). They had all the screws and washers and stuff in a shrinked wrapped sheet of paper. They were labeled '.8mm x 40 bolt' and 'large washer'. Unfortunately, the instructions were like 'Insert #15 through #4 then #3 into the shell and into #6 & #12 and secure with #45'. It really sucks cross-referencing washers and screws to the parts list when you are balancing a wheelbarrow on its end. However, it did an excellent job in carting all of my crap around (and the topsoil and humus too). After all that darn work, the dirt only filled up the 3 square beds. So, I will be participating in a dirt hauling competition again.

After all of that, we headed upstairs to watch 'Closer' as we munched on leftovers (assembled into fajita form). The movie was definitely depressing, but overall good. I kinda felt uninterested at times because you kinda have to be 'in the mood' for it. It probably didn't help that I still see Jude Law as the robot from AI. Also, it was very painful to watch as I really feel uncomfortable for the characters when they did certain stupid things. Good movie, must be 'in the mood'. Then, I slept and it was good.

Posted by chris at 09:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

DFW had a nice severe thunderstorm warning and a tornado watch yesterday afternoon. Around 6pm, God started throwing hail at our house. Boom Boom bang clank Boom. There wasn't tons and tons, but they were big enough and frequent enough (rements of crawfish table) to make you really not want to go outside.

While I was uploading the hail pics, I found some pictures of Spunky and her stalking the cats (is that a catfish?).

Posted by chris at 09:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

We are finally wrapping up the garden construction and I finally took pics too! Basically, 3 square beds with a L shaped bed behind them. I think I will use all the beds for vegetables, herbs and spices (instead of shubbery). I'm not sure which vegetables, but I'm pretty sure I will try some of this guy's basil. I work with the guy who runs it and apparently he does quite a bit of gardening himself. So I'm sure we will be swapping tricks of the trade. Anyways, back to the building... almost done. The 3x5s are held to the board underneath them with 6 inch nails. Then, in each corner, we predrilled a hole and stuck 4 feet of rebar through it and into the ground. Hammering 1/2 inch rebar 4 feet into the ground is something that I really dont want to do again. We went through 2.5 sledge hammers in the process. When you wack the rebar with the hammer, is the rebar vibrates something fierce, thereby increasing your chances of missing on the next wack. I missed a few times, but one of those times I missed with the hammer head and hit with the handel instead. It took out a 1/2 inch hunk of the wood. Considering I was swinging around a 4lb sledge with all my might, I though it would be best if it was in optimal working order. So, we picked up a few more from Harbor Freight and broke some of those too... Ugh.. Anyways, all we have to do is nail in the top boards and fill in the beds with another million pounds of dirt and we are done! By the way, dry dirt is ABUNCH lighter than wet dirt.... just in case you didn't know... Also, my hands hurt.

Sunday, we had 20+ people come over for our annual crawfish boil. We cooked 60pounds of crawfish, 10 pounds of chicken, 5 pound of potatoes, and some corn, carrots and celery. We asked everyone to bring a side dish and their own beer. All of the dishes were excellent and we had a darn great time! Katrina and Trevor brought over Hobie (their dog) and my brother brought over Skyler (his dog). The dogs ran around the yard for hours on end. Needless to say, I think all the puppies got abunch of sleep that night. Thankfully, Austin brought over his turkey frier, so we could have 2 batches going at once (1 spicey and 1 normal). Anyways, I definately want to do it again next year. Hopefully, I'll do 90+ pounds! I think I have a really good idea of what I need to do to make it go a little smoother. I can't wait!!

Last night, my brother stopped by with abunch of his friends on the way home from an unsucessfull fishing day at the lake. We force fed them leftovers so we could get a little extra room in the fridge! Tomorrow we close on the refi. Hopefully, everything will go smoothly. Wish us luck!

Posted by chris at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Well, its been awhile. Work has been keeping me busy, and I really don't want to stare at a computer when I get home, but I seem to have caught a break for a few minutes this morning. I got in at 6:50 to make some last minute changes to a site before it was frozen for QA to test, so I'm tired.

In an uncontrollable fit of re-occuring stupidity, I made an error in my last post. My parents bought land in New Breunfels and not Hillsboro. We went to visit it last weekend, but first stopped by Larry and Natalie's nice and cozy house and visited my sisters 50's style interesting house in Austin.

Larry and Nat's place was pretty cool. If a house is a picture, theirs is almost done. Ours is still a light pencil sketch. It makes me want to decorate, paint, etc.. Larry showed me his Tivo-like MythTV goodness. I remember going down that route awhile ago and loosing several days of my life before giving up. I'm impressed with his results. Tivo in every room!

My sisters places was very close to their house, but google maps didn't think so. I eventually had to call them up to find my way to her place. Her house is pretty small (compared to today's larger houses) but very warm. I get a feel that some artist lived there becuase there are some really neat styles. The bathroom had cool tiles, with an old but still in good shape sink, with neato handles etc... Basically, its nice old fashioned craftmanship vs. the cheapo labor that many homebuilders seem to be focusing on now. Anyways, I spent most of my time there fighting a fricking horrible spyware HSA (home shopping assistant) that my sister somehow got on her machine. Her machine wanted to use 160+MB idle (and only 128MB is installed!). I eventually had to use msconfig to boot into diagnostic mode (==super safe mode) and it used 50MB idle. So, I then removed the service that reinstalled the spyware when you rebooted, removed the corresponding spyware driver, then removed the extenstions from IE, and removed the registry settings, then the randomly named files where it stored it's info, etc... untill finally I got it working. Very tricky.

The next day, we headed to New Bruensfels (minus my mom... :-( she wasn't feeling well) and visited the land. It is located 1/2 between downtown Grueen and downtown New Bruensfels. It was gorgemous! I want! They have an acre of trees, brush, cactus, rocks, and grass. It was very beautifull and relaxing. While we were walking around, David (my sis's boyfriend) found a cave! It is big enough for someone to slide into. I tried shining a light into it, but we couldn't see anything at all (not even walls). As much as my curisoty was killing me, we decided to leave it be untill we can get a light strong enough to see the floor / walls / etc... to get a feel for the size of it (and how far we might fall). So, (jumping ahead) on our way back, from the whole trip we stopped in San Marcos at the outlet stores and I picked up a 2 bazillion quadrillion candle power spotlight. :-)

After visiting the land, we went to The Grismill in downtown Grueen. It was pretty yummie. We decided to eat outside overlooking the river while we ate. Just as we got our food, it started to rain! So, we all grabbed our lunch and ran to the nearest inside table. The other 30 outside tables did the same! I'm sure the wait staff was super happy about having random people filling up previously unfilled tables that they were trying to seat new customers at.

Anywho, after lunch, we drove through the typoon to San Antonio to visit Jimmy and Lilly. There we had a nice relaxing time. We went to a yummie sushi place and had all differnt kinds of rolls. That night we wathed The Village. The next morning, we went to El Bambino or something or lunch. They had really excellent food! So filling.

Anyways, we headed home and picked up Spunky from Evan and Judy (thanks!). Spunky helped Judy in the garden, unplanting bulbs that weren't perfect and running around in circles at 300MPH. So, I think Judy and Evan (and their cats) weren't too sad to see her home.

This week has been ok. We got the paperwork from USAA on refinancing. The person who set it up changed the forms to have a higher rate. We were like WTF?!? Anyways, we called it in and eventually, after several days and calls, got it all worked out. It was still annoying as heck because it felt like the guy was trying to slide stuff past me. I even check JD powers website to confirm that USAA is supposed to have the highest ranking for mortgage companies.. (they do). We had the house appraised and hopefully they will say it's worth more so we can avoid pmi without having to plunder our savings.

Ohh well, this novel is getting long... I'll post more later

Posted by chris at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

We decided to make this weekend a productive one. On Sat, we took the dog in to check her skin problem: it is from scratching and not a infection. So, we cut her nails. Then we lost atleast an hour of our lives by trying to pick up a package from the USPS. After recovering, I took down the Christmas tree (~200 pounds) and threw out my back. Then, Ting vacumed the tree reminents up and we put out a rug we got for Christmas (thanks Mark!) After that, we made the media room screen out of blackout cloth and a wood frame I made several months ago using someone else's tools (thanks Evan!). Then, we hung the screen and tried calibrating the projector a little. Overall, I lost 5 inches (diagonaly) but it looks clearer. At little more adjusting and it will be perfect!

I spent most of Sunday trying to recover my corrupt hpt374 raid array. Eventually, I found tools that worked and copied everything to a drive that immediately started having corruption. :-( So, then, I bought a new drive (250GB) at Frys and tried installing winXP on that. WinXP would only see 137GB (fixed on SP2) so I used the MaxBlast cd to format it to 250GB, then installed XP, then drivers, the SP2, etc.... and still only 137GB!! Ugh... So, today, I'm copying it all to another drive, then trying to copy it all back. Wish me luck!

Posted by chris at 08:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I got home early yeaterday and worker showed up and completed my window sills! Yay! It's like a huge weight is off my chest. I compensated for the weight loss by having my dad come over and bring some crispy noodles and orange chicken from First Chinese BBQ. Yum. I am rounder than ever!

Posted by chris at 01:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

When I make appointments, I expect everyone involved to be there. After canceling an appointment, I really really expect the people who canceled to be there on time. Lets just say, I am dissappointed when dealing with hr windows. Let me try to give you a brief bulleted version of my oddessy with hr windows.
Some background: When it got cold, all the windows started condensing and 2 of the windowsills swelled up and got disfigured because they weren't sealed correctly. At the same time, we noticed a window that was hazy because it's glass had cracked and let water in. Furthermore, one window makes a very loud racket when it is windy. Let the list begin!

• We call the people who built our house
• They called the window people
• Window people called me and scheduled a appointment
• Ting takes off work for appointment
• Window people show up, glance at problems, say it was condensation (no shit... what about it being sealed correctly), and tell us they will be back to replace the cracked window
• We wait all evening... they don't show up... they don't call...
• On Monday we call builders
• They call window people
• Window people call us and schedule an appointment
• I take off work on Friday for appointment with window people and to fix the window sills
• The builder comes and rips off our window sills but doesn't replace them because of odd sizes. Schedule for Tuesday at 4pm
• Window people call 3/4 through appointment window saying they can't make it till 2 hrs after appointment
• I tell them that is unacceptable and end the conversation so I don't say something impolite
• I relay the circumstance and info to builder on Friday morning asking them to schedule the window people for Tuesday at 4pm.
• Builder calls window people
• Builder calls me and tells me they would fix it Friday instead.. I didn't have to be there (I wanted to be there). I agreed so problem would go away.
• Window guy calls on Friday afternoon wondering where I am.. I tell him that he is supposed to do it without me
• 4 minutes later, I recieve a call from window people... they had accidently broken the replacement window... would I like to reschedule?.. I reply Tuesday at 4pm
• Monday at 12:45, I receive a call from the window people. He is wondering where I am. I tell him that I have an appointment for Tuesday at 4pm. He sounds confused and says he has to call the office
• I write a email to the builder asking them to fix the friking problem with their crappy contractors
• I whine about it on my website
• You laugh at my expense

I'm about to reach my limit of restraint. I've taken off several days of work so I can be at home and babysit the repair people to ensure they don't screw it up even more. They keep canceling, coming up with excuses, and not fixing the damn problem. Combine their shit with the crap I'm dealing with at work, and I'm about to seriously loose my cool.

Posted by chris at 01:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I fiddled with the projector some more last night with Ashey's help. I watched a little HDTV monday night football. It was pretty sweet. I made Mark and Christine pose a little to give you some perspective... 8ft * 4.5ft! You can also see the mess from all the work I'm doing on it. Very soon, the cables draped over it will be going through the ceiling and it will have its lid on it too. I control most of it using my computer utizing a ATI 9600XT and a Dvico FusionHDTV3-T on a not very powerfull 2.4 Ghz P4 machine.

I also tried to redo/finish the screen. I took it all apart, cut the pieces of wood at Evan's using his spiffy saw, spent an hour making sure it was square (against the TV), etc.. Then I tried streaching the cloth correctly and instead managed to rip the cloth. Luckily it is pretty cheap. So, I have to go buy some more after work today and put it on the frame so I can watch "The Day After Tomorrow", which I wanted to see in the movie theaters but didn't for various reasons.

Anyways, I decided to goto bed when the fuse on it blew. Hopefully it was becuase it was 10 years old and the bouncing around from moving it weakened it somehow. I'd much prefer to replace a $1 fuse versus a $200 power supply.

Posted by chris at 09:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My projector is hung, finally! It took 3 ladders and 3 people and some pullys and cussing, but its up there! A unexpected bonus is the lack of ceilings crashing down on my head. After I align and tweak it in the coming days, it will be perfect (and usable)!

Since I had a ladder and it was cool outside this weekend (therefore making it cool inside), I put up a ceiling fan for my brother and cleaned my fishtanks. By the evening, my body was deteriating due to the unusual activity ( like looking almost straight up for a few hours ), so I called it quits. Overall, I had a good weekend.

Posted by chris at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We noticed that when you kneel on the carpet in the master bedroom, your knees get wet. The carpet is dry, but the padding wasn't. After calling the builder, they sent out people and found out that whenever the bath is used, that a bad solder joint on a water line caused water to spray everywhere. So, I spent most of the day at home making sure it gets fixed. They are going to replace a 4ft x 12ft section of carpet padding tomorrow. Overall, it looks like the damage was minimal, so that is good.

Posted by chris at 04:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Larry pointed me to a site that had the EXACT same layout as me. Oh ya, it had the exact same content as well! It looks like someone borrowed the design that I borrowed and tweaked. Hopefully, they will change the content eventually because my stuff is pretty drab anyways! If you are reading, I don't mind... just change the links so Ting doesn't think 2 people are gunna marry her!

In other news, I did some more with the cabling last night. It involved me being coated head to foot with insulation! It itched alot! I had 1.5 visitors when I was in the attic. Kamakazi visited me, but she figured out how to go down the ladder (pretty cute actually), and Zepher tried his paw at it too. He only got 3/4 the way up and took his lazy time trying to figure out how to get down the ladder.

On a much much much more yummie note, I made spinach mushroom ham cheese quiche last night from scratch. OMG it was good!! Pretty easy too! Heat the oven to 425. Get a pie crust or make it like I did. In a seperate container, beat 6 Eggs and 2 cups of cream / milk (I used cream..mmmm) thoroughly. Add some salt and pepper.
Clean and chop fresh spinach (or use frozen). Cube the ham in salad topping style. Chop the mushrooms into slices/chuncks/whatever. Saute ham, spinache and mushrooms in butter or oil. Shred 24oz (Im just guessing... maybe 1/2 to 3/4 of the larger prepackaged cheese blocks from grocery store) of your favorite cheese(s). I used cheddar, moziralla and swiss. After the spinache has reduced in size or everything is nice and warm, add them to the egg/cream mixture. Add the shredded cheese to mixture. Mix it up some more!! Add to pie crust and cook for ~ 20 mins. The top should be a light brown/orange. The middle might giggle a little bit. As it cools, it should solidify a litte more. Enjoy! I just looked at abunch of recipes on the web and mixed em all together! Yum!

In other news, Happy Birthday yesterday Katrina!! Next time, remind us BEFORE lunch! Hehe! Yay Katrina!

Posted by chris at 08:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I ordered a Belkin bluetooth GPS a few days ago. I got it all hooked up and used it to get me to work this morning. It includes street maps for every state and the software issues voice prompts. So, I punched in my work address and it told me when to turn left or right. It was fun! The unit is really small too. It is about the size of a cellphone. It actually uses a cellphone battery too! The power adapter is pretty cool. Its a normal sized DC plug and a usb adapter on the other (so it can get power from laptop). You can also plug the usb end into a car adapter or a wallwort to get power from various sources. Very neat!

Last night, I borrowed Judy and Evan's stud finder so I could mount my rear speakers to the wall in my media room. Even with the stud finder, I have about 10 extra holes in the wall where I pre-tested the location of the stud using an icepick. I guess using a stud finder on an outer wall isn't as accurate as one would expect. Anywho, I got the speakers mounted nevertheless. All I need to do is to run a custom made subwoofer cable using quad shielded RG6, patch a few holes, and clean up or put wall plates on the remaining holes. Everything is going so well!

Luckily, one of my buddies in Houston, Chris, was able to pick up Adam's color laser printer from the Enron warehouse even though he was getting sick! Thanks Chris, you rock! He said he put it on the porch with a plant on it so nobody will steal it. Good thinking, Chris!

Posted by chris at 09:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

So, I won a couch and color laser printer from the Enron auction. I placed some bids on other things. They said they would notify winning bidders by noon on Thursday. At noon on Thursday, there was no email in my inbox. Around 2, I received an email notifying us to wait just a little bit longer till later this afternoon for notifications. Being very sure that I won atleast 1 bid on another color laser printer (for Adam), I rented 15foot truck in Houston, and got a ticket to fly down there on SouthWest the next morning. I printed all the directions, etc. By 11pm on thursday night, I still had not received an email... so I felt like I made the wrong descision on the reservations and it was too late to fix it. I found someone to take me to the airport, then slept. Before I left for the airport, I checked my email again (to see if I won anything) and there was no email. I guess I didn't bid high enough. So, I still flew down there, rented a truck, found the Enron Warehouse, picked up a couch, 4 armchairs, and a 150 pound laser printer all by myself at noon, signed some forms, picked up a motor scooter for a friend (and almost got killed 3 times), drove back to Dallas, emptied the truck and then checked my email at 10:30pm. There was an email that had been sent at 2:54pm on FRIDAY, letting me know I won the other laser printer!? !@#$%!#$! Ugh! I did ALL of that and I was soooo close and they sent it out 3 hours after I picked up everything else. Sooo pissed off. Still pissed off...

I played around with the laser printer for awhile. Remember... it weighs ALOT. I cleaned it, adjusted it, etc... and finally got some pretty good pictures out of it. We decided to finally print our wedding invitations and we started setting everything up. We clicked print... paper jam. I try it again after fixing the jam... paper jam again! The darn invitation are 1 inch too short to use on the printer!! NOOOOO

I finally had my aunt and uncle and their 2 kids and my grandmother over for dinner on Sunday. I made brisket (didn't even need to use a hammer this time) and it was tasty! We took everyone on the tour, and when it got time to go upstairs, I was perplexed on what to do regarding my grandmother who is wheelchair bound. So, I ended up scooting her as far back as possible and pointing at where the rooms were upstairs. So was very happy for us!

In other wedding news, we talked with the cook at the church. She has decorations, food, etc... She praticaly has everything! So all we have to do is decided what we want where and what we want to eat! This is so much easier now! Also, my sister offered to help with decorations too! I'm hoping that soon, all I will have to do is to show up! Less than 3 months! Wow!

I finally took the plunge and started poking holes in the walls to expose the speaker cables that I ran when the house was being built. Two nights ago, I went upstairs to find the coduit that had been run, and when I turned around, Kamakazi was upstairs in the attic with me!! I have one of those fold-down ladder things, so my jaw dropped in surprise. Needless to say, she was very scared! I finally gently got ahold of her after a game of chase, and tried to take the very scared kitty back downstairs. I have several scratches for my efforts. I spent last night soldering cable ends and finding out which cable is which. In related news, I found a guy in Houston (go figure) who has a CRT projector (ampro 2000) he will sell me for cheap. So, I will probably be heading down there once again to check it out and pick it up. I can not wait!

Anyways, sorry for the long delay in posting. Atleast it isn't as long as some other peoples posting vacations (hint hint hint).

Posted by chris at 08:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Yes, I'm still alive and super busy!!

The first week was fun... unpacking boxes, rearranging furniture etc.. Then we installed a few ceiling fans and a garage door opener (sucked because it was soo hot and humid outside).

I had some people over for the 4th o July to thank all who provided support during moving day. I cooked pork ribs, beer can chicken, hamburgers, bratwurst, hotdogs, onion potatoe wedges and various other goodies. It was nice to have soo many people over with more than enough room to cook and talk. Christine and I adventured out they day before to get a grill to cook all the meat on. After looking around, we realized we wouldn't be able to find a natural gas grill in such a sort time, so we got a normal propane one. We searched for a long time for a non-assembled one (Home Depot likes to assemble all of their grills and they are too big to fit in a normal car) after after much searching, found one. I man-handled it into my car and we started assembling when we got home. We quickly found out several pieces were missing. Ugh! So we packed it all up and went to go get another with all the peices. Long story short, we waited for 45 mins for the people to get their act together and eventually get a lift to take the grill off the top shelf 15 feet above our heads. We got home, assembled it, and then realized we needed a full propane tank. No!!! Luckily my dad had a spare, and brought it over. Whew... Later that night, we piled into Alpha's shiney new SUV and drove around searching for the fireworks. My neighborhood is in a sweet spot where we would see 5-6 different shows at once!

Last weekend, we tried mowing the yard for the first time. Mowing and weedeating were easy. Edging was a whole different story! It took over an hour to edge, but hopefully it will be much easier next time. Afterwards we headed over to my parents to weedeat their sideyard (we are 'borrowing' their yard equipment). We got home, cleaned up, and then found out Christine's parents got into a car accident on their way to check out a new casino in OK. Christine's brother provided much less information than we would have liked, but we found out her parents were in the hospital to run some tests on her mom to make sure she was ok (she said her neck and back hurt). So we went over to her parents' place and waited for updates. Eventually, Christine's dad called and said that everything was ok but they are still waiting on a cat scan and it would be several hours, so he was going to come home for dinner (he hadn't eaten all day and it was 7pm). So I cooked up some food (fish w/ capers, baked potatoe, greenbeans & frenchbread) and had it all ready when he got home. We found out that they got T-boned at Hebron & Old Denton when as they had a protected left hand turn, a person on the other side of the road misstook the green arrow as a green light and ran into them. The impact was right on the passenger door (where Christine's mom was) and they had to cut off the door in order get her out. They took her to Parkland to make sure she was ok. An hour later, they called and said she was discharged, so Christine and I went to go pick her up. We found her waiting in the discharge area of the E.R. We waited for 3 hrs for them to call her name. As we were waiting, we heard faint callings for "C. TaSings", "C. Zens", "C. TaZings" over the intercom. We would run up, and before we could say anything, they would say, no... its not you. Eventually we got fed up and asked them when they hell they are going to call her and they said that they called her several hours ago and that there was a shift change since then and they would have to go find the paperwork. Ugh!! We finally got out of there around 12:15. Anyways, Christine's mom is fine, a little bruised and sore, but otherwise ok. Christine's dad's car is currently missing a door and not sure if it is 'totaled' or not according to insurance.

If that wasn't enough excitement, I got my alarm all hooked up at home finally. I didn't want a land-line so they had a gadget called skylink that is basically a cellphone for your alarm system. The first time they tried, it couldn't get a good signal (no surprise.. I can't get a good signal anywhere). The second time they came out and tried (with a different model), they got a signal and installed it and everything was peachy keen. That night, after my brother left, I turned off all the lights, set the alarm, and went to take a shower. After 5 mins in the shower, I started to hear banging. I assumed it was the cats. However the banging continued and eventually the phone started ringing. So, I figured it was my brother who forgot something, hopped out of the shower, grabbed a towel and lunged for the cellphone. I pick up... dial tone. I call the unrecognized number back... its ADT (security company). "Hi, this is Chris. Did someone call for me?". Security people: "Yes, are you being held hostage?". Me: "WTF?!?!? NO, everything is ok here". Security people: "Tell the police banging on your windows that". So I run to the door wearing bubbles and towel and assure the police man that no, I am not being held hostage. Apparently, when the alarm installer finished installing the skylink, he needed me to repunch in my arm/disarm code. He hit a sequence of 30 numbers, turned around and had me punch in my code. I'm guessing he messed up and pushed the wrong 30 numbers and ended up programming my arm/disarm code into my "oh crap, I'm being held hostage" code. What is so great about the OCIBHH code is that it is meant to act EXACTLY like the arm/disarm code. Except for the little detail of it calling a SWAT team to your house. Urghh... So, they are supposed to come out and fix it soon. I guess my cats will have to keep watch untill then.

Posted by chris at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We made it! Thanks for everyone's help! We had some excitement before closing. The day before we were informed that the closing costs would be 4K more than was originally estimated. It was for real reasons, so we scrounged it up but weren't happy about it! The day of closing, we spent an hour in the bank getting a cashier's check for the closing costs, then we ended up going to the wrong office of the title company. We had to drive another 7 miles down the road to get to the correct branch. Ugh! We finally signed everything and the lady at the title company mentioned in passing that she wasn't sure when we would get the keys... sometimes it takes a few hours to a day.. it depends on how fast the mortgage company send the money and how fast the builder accepts the money. Christine and I were extremely worried at that point (because it was 4:45) and that didn't give much time till they close for the day. So, we hauled butt over there and, much to our relief, recieved our keys.

That night, we moved a few odds and ends over, then dissasembled a workout machine at Sartaj's house and moved it over and reassembled it at our house (our house.... --grin--)! That kept us busy till 11:30pm.

Let me take this momentary pause in the action to mention that it rained 18 days in June this year. It was the 2nd highest volume of rain for DFW in a month too. All the lakes went from 9 feet under to 4 feet over. There has been many floods, etc... (This means that 1/2 of the time we were moving it was raining, and the other 1/2 was very soggy).

The next morning, I picked up the truck and managed to give the trees infront of my apartment a very nice trimming while backing the truck up. The front door to my apartment kinda sucks, so I eneded up having to take the sliding glass door completely off in order to get my couches out! We packed up and scooted over to the house.... just in time to meet the cable guy and the blinds installer people. By the time we finished unpacking, I had cable, blinds, and furniture and boxes everywhere.

Anyways, a few more trips, 15-20 scratches on the paint and countless dirt tracks over the carpet later, we were done... moving. Now it was time to clean the apartment. 8 coats and several days later, my previously blue bathroom was now a off white color. The paint they gave me was like milk... it had noooo pigment. Ugh!

Last night, we went to Lowes and bought alota stuff: 2 ceiling fans, garage door opener, water line to the fridge, compact flourecent lightbulbs, garage floor paint, etc.... We used our Lowes 10% off coupon (included in the USPS's moving packet) and signed up for their 12 months no interest no payment credit card. To top it all off, we also found out there was a $25 rebate on the garage door opener! Yay!

Anyways, moving is complete. I've changed my address countless times, hooked up so many utilities that my mind is numb, moved enough boxes that I can't stand straight, painted so much that my right arm cramps up just thinking about it, and hemorage enough money in an one week period that it would make Bill Gates cough. It is worth it though!

Posted by chris at 08:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Well, we close today at 3. Im about as excited as I can be considering I'm so tired and exhausted. Spent most of last night packing all my crap up. I have soo much stuff. Ebay seems like a good option right now. I'll try to move the refridgerator tonite so that it can be running tomorrow to provide cool drinks for all the helpers. Saturday, I'm moving, having cable installed and having the blinds installed, so I wont be around (and the site may be offline) till Sunday or so. Wish us luck!

Posted by chris at 08:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We went to the 'Engaged Encounters' retreat this weekend (one of the requirements to get married in the church). It was good but not as enlightening as we were hoping. Christine and I had already covered 92% of it and it was on a really bad weekend for us. I wish we could have taken a 'placement test' that allowed us to skip the first 10 hrs of it. Ohh well... we did learn some good things though and it is one thing crossed off our list of things todo.

The finishing touches are being done on the house... They keep it locked all the time, so we cant get in it anymore. :-( Last week, we went over to do the first walkthrough. We were supposed to but blue little stickers on anything we would like for them to repaint, clean, look at, etc... The house looks like a smurf exploded in it. Blue stuff on the walls, floors, ceiling... There was a little excitement we could have lived w/o though.... We were walking along upstairs looking for scratches, dings, dents, etc... and we noticed water dripping from the ceiling!! I looks as if the AC decided right to start leaking right at that moment. Brandon immediately got on the phone to get them over to fix it. I'm glad it happened before we moved in! Also, I called up the cable company to get my service switched over on the day I moved (I called last wed). When I went over that afternoon, they had already run the cable from the outside cable box to the house. I wish they were that fast all the time! finally, completing the trifecta of brokeness (House, Wedding & Accessories) we ordered some blinds for 27 of the 29 windows in the house. They will be installed on the day we move in too! Finally, I secured a rental truck for this weekend (Sat 7-7).

Packing has been a joy. Organizing your life into 1.5sq ft bricks is more difficult than I originally expected. It also shows how much crap I have accumulated. Cats have a wierd thing for boxes. My cats took turns playing hide and go seek in the boxes as we were trying to fill them up with stuff. I even tried scaring them out... ie swing the box round and round etc... I think the cats liked that part the best... Ughh..

Posted by chris at 01:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

It felt like this weekend was a repeat of the last. I did manage to skip the 'lets go sweep the floor' step, but I replaced it with the seed to my own demise.....

Things with the house were going splendidly. We had an inspector come out one morning and give the house an once over. He found a few things related possible deathtraps and fire hazards and we put stickers on them! Now, if I'm feeling particularly dangerous, I can plug something into the incorrectly wired GFI outlets and while standing in a puddle and watching the arcing lights in the kitchen! Woot! Anyways, the next day, I hurried back to the house eagerly looking for things that have been fixed. I was not disappointed! The had painted, touched up and cleaned up many things.. leaving the to-do list about 1/2 of what it was before. I was so excited about the progress that I couldn't control myself. I just had to touch it. I knew it might cause suffering, but the devil inside shoved me forward and with a menacing tone hissed as my dream started to crumble. I cried out!!! NOOOOOoooo! Why couldn't I just leave it alone?!?! The key to my demise... was a key! I had forgotten about the pressure test they were running. The short hiss only confirmed my overwhelming sense of dread. It was the hiss of my dreams deflating and the pressure escaping from the gas pipes. I ran outside and confirmed my morbid suspicion... the pressure gauge was at 0. No!!!

Anyways, enough dramatics, I just talked with Brandon and he said it was ok... but it didn't stop me from worrying that I delayed the closing all weekend. Whew...

Anyways, back to the weekend story....

We went over to the house on Sat morning and talked with the shutter guy. The price seemed ok for installing faux wood blinds on 27 of the 29 windows on the house... but I couldn't get over the feeling that we were just hemorrhaging money left and right. We decided to think about it some more.... Having the neighbors see me walking around naked for a few weeks or having blinds installed and ready by the time we move in... its a toss up.

Later that afternoon, I cooked up a monster 7-bone steak, baked potatoes and asparagus on the grill. It was awesome! Sunday, we mowed Christine's parent's yard again. It was less of an challenge this time around, but with the recent rain and high temperatures, the grass was still a formidable opponent. After jumping in the pool to clean off, we went back to my place and made some banana bread (from scratch) to get rid of some brown nanners and strawberry muffins (from mix) for Christine's office party. I had two recipes for b-bread, my mom's and one from the internet. My mom's bread recipe is pretty good, but mushy at times. The internet one is good too, but too bready (too floury?). Anyways, I combined the two recipes and arrived at the utopia of banana bread goodness.

Monday, Christine's parents flew in from Taiwan. She went to pick them up from the airport as I stayed at home to prepare dinner. I cooked up some stuffed bell peppers and homemade guacamole. After chatting with them and sending them off to bed, we headed out to go grocery shopping. I was on a mission. After my orgasmic 7-bone steak dinner a few nights before, I was determined to find another deal on a similar cut of beef (we originally got buy 1 get 1 free). We went to 3 grocery stores trying to take advantage of double/triple coupons and find any good sales on meat. I came back with 6 pounds of meat. Grunt... meat good! Christine and I finished off the night by erupting into a spontaneous icing fight after successfully decorating the cupcakes. I got icing to the eye, arm, and hands while Christine was dripping icing from her glasses, cheek and arms. Hehe!

Anyways, we are closing on Friday the 25th at 3o'clock and would like any help that people are willing to give to get moved that weekend. Drinks and eats will be provided as well as a thank you 4th-o-july party at my house the next weekend! Lemme know if you can come!

Posted by chris at 02:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

On Monday, they started carpeting the house and turned on the power!! Things are really going quickly! I talked with the builder today and he said we will do a walkthrough next week, and be able to close on the 25th!! Eik!

Posted by chris at 09:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

grass!!! and trees!! and shrubs!

edit... I was soo excited, that I forgot to upload the pictures!!

Posted by chris at 06:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Pics of the mailbox

Posted by chris at 11:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Finished the fence, installed appliances, put in countertops, did more tiling, installed sprinklers.... Not too bad for a slowdown due to INS!

Christine made it all the way to Tokyo (I know cause I got a call at 5:25AM this morning)! Which is convient, cause I picked her dad and brother up at 6AM to drop them off at the airport. She has no more family in Dallas, so I might be able to get some sleep now... It was a little crazy for her dad though.. He works for a company that has one of those 99.99999% uptime deals for their customers... they get fined very heavily when they have unscheduled downtime. Anyways, their entire computer room went out last night due to some UPS problems. It took them several hours to get some of the machines back up, and they kept him on call till it was resolved. So he wasn't sure if he could go on vacation till a few hours before!! Reminds me of a place I work for. Heheh.

Posted by chris at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Much progress on the house .. tile, fence posts, etc... It is starting to look like a realy house!! They are supposed to put in sprinklers today and sod the lawn soon too! (good thing... it felt like walking on Mars when in the front yard) It might be ready for move in at the middle of June! While we were there this weekend, we met some of our neighbors. They are our age and really nice! We spent an hour or so talking about things they need to watch out for while building, etc.. we also got buzzed by a large bird that looked a little worse for wear. Yesterday, I met the neighbors behind us that had moved in that day. They seemed nice as well. Ughh... I JUST talked to the builder... He said there is a scare about immigration / border patrol in the area.. so many of the crews are nervious and calling in 'sick days'. No good.

While returning from Vegas, I was able to snap a few shots from the airplane window. Hoover Dam (thanks David), one of the large forrest fires in Arizona or New Mexico, and an view of Texas Motor Speedway. We got to the airport 30 mins early.... but our luggage didn't come out for about an hour becuase the machine got jammed.

I took Christine to the airport this morning for her flight to Taiwan. It really sucks because I just got in from a week out in Vegas, now she leaves for a week and 1/2. :-( But, she will be back just in time for the midnight showing of Harry Potter (I got tickets at lunch) I will miss you darling!!

Posted by chris at 01:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Everything went ok yesterday. Just running around fixing little bugs and making small enhancements. The time changes are still messing with me. I awoke at 6AM ready to go.... (it was 8AM in Dallas)... but the office didn't open till 9. Urghh. Then we worked till 5 and drove for a few hours out to Mesquite, NV where we met up with Joe for dinner. Then we left for St George, UT and finally got to the hotel around 10PM.. but since St George is in another time zone, it was really 11PM Dallas time. My internal clocked is soo messed up.

This morning (Day 3) we walked over to a nearby resturaunt for breakfast and ran into a tour group of German people. It was REALLY wierd, because I heard alot more German around the breakfast bar than English. Wack yo..

I also uploaded a few pics that Ting took of the house. Supposedly, they put on the garage door, brought in the cabinets (but didn't install em), spackled the walls, and maybe forgot the door bell. :-P

Posted by chris at 02:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So I'm in Vegas this week for work. I might be a little flakey on the posts till I get back, but I've kinda been flakey these last weeks anyways.

I spent most of this weekend catching up on sleep and chores. I had all of the tools, cables, etc.. in my trunk from last week's wiring and insulation escapade. I also uploaded some of the pictures I took of the house. It is completely brickes, sheetrocked, and mudded! I can't wait!.

Posted by chris at 05:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I uploaded some new house pics yesterday. I also included pictures of the van that drove up to my house, walked in, grabbed 6 pieces of sheetrock and drove down the street with them. :-P The house looks different today, though. This side is completely bricked and the back is pretty close. Also, all the interior walls have insulation in them now too.

In other news, we saw this car in our office parking lot yesterday. Drool....

Posted by chris at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just got back from finishing up the insulation & wiring installation (note... 2:35am... I started at 4pm). I am sooo damn tired and I hurt everywhere. Pointers: wear long sleeves, a cap, etc... Get the insulation in bats... not rolls. Measure the avg distance between studs and get the bat of insulation that has a slighlty larger width. Get friends to help. Many many friends.

Also, I want to thank my brothers Mark and Steven, Adam, Mark's buddies, and Evan and Judy for donating either time or materials. I could not have done it without you!! You rock!

Now for sleep....

Posted by chris at 03:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've been busy as hell!

I went to a wedding on Sat and took over 2 gigs of pictures! That got me started at 7am on Sat and I didn't get to sleep till 2:30am Sun morning. Coincidentaly, at 7am that morning, my aunt dropped of her kids for me to watch for a few hrs because everyone else was out of town and she had to go to work. Ugh... However, the wedding was beautifull! Of course, with any wedding, there were some snags here and there. The bouquets got locked in the foyer of the church right before she was supposed to walk down the isle. We had to pick the lock and remove the doors hinges to finally get it (after 30 mins). Also, the limo didn't show up to take them to their hotel, 1/3 of the place seating cards got lost for dinner (so people weren't sure were to sit), and someone got locked in the building we had the reception in (Petroleum Club in the Chase Tower in downtown Dallas) and it took 30 mins to find them / them find their way out. Seriously, even with all that, it was awesome!

Monday night I ran through my house drilling holes for the cable run which was supposed to happen yesterday incongunction with installing extra instulation. Let me make one thing very very clear. Installing insulation at 11:30 PM is NOT FUN. I think I'm extra allergic to the stuff because my arms swelled up like I got bitten by thousands of ants. Ugh. So, I got to bed at 2:30 last night, and I get to try again tonite because they drywall on Thursday. Good news is, they have 4 ft of brick around my house and they are ready to start finishing the interior!!

Posted by chris at 08:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The house is scooting along! I gave the plumber a pack of beer to run some pvc pipe for me from the attic to under the stairs (no way I can do it later)(and I checked with builder). The also finished all the plumbing, roofing, wiring, gas, and cleaned out the yard. Later this week, I will go add a few features before they sheetrock and all will be good!

I recieved a recall notice on my '02 Altima a few weeks ago. It was for a filter for the fuel line in cold weather conditions... they said if you were in the cold states or drive in them, then you can get it. When I went skiing at Loveland, Colorado, it didn't get above 0 degrees F!! Cold enough? I took my car in to get that fixed, as well as the well-known broken cupholder issue, and had them look at the inconsistent fog light issues I'm having. They called me up a few hours later and said it's done! Done.. except for the fuel filter (can't do that, only can be done in cold states), the cup holder (they need to order it), and the lights (it's not a bug, it's a feature!). So, I'm wondering what exactly they did?!? Whatever they did, it was free!

Christine and I are looking at a cruise for our honeymoon. We don't have enough time to go someplace overseas and enjoy ourselves, so we figured a 7 night cruise around the Carribean would be the the most relaxing. It's also 1/2 to 1/4 the cost! We will go to Italy or Hawaii later, when we have enough time. Last time we went on a cruise, we LOVED it. So, I'm not too bummed. Mmmm... midnight buffet!

Posted by chris at 09:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Well, they painted the bottom 4 feet of all the wood in the house green (to protect from termites) and finished the plumbing. Other than that, not much new.
I'm finally going to see Kill Bill 2 today after work!! Yay!
I also spent some time last night throwing a website together for my dad for some SBCs (single board computers) he has been working on. Supposedly, most eval boards for embedded processors are very basic and very expensive. So he made some with abunch more features for alot less. Seems like a bargain eh? Anyways, check it out if you are into that type of stuff. If you had questions on the domain name... arm is a type of processor. Other than taking new pictures, stylizing the entire site and rewriting everything it should be done! :-P
Anways, back to sleep....zzzZzz

Posted by chris at 08:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I jetted out of work early and hand delivered the check to them and everything should be good. Whew... Other than that mishap, the house progressed abunch today. Plumbing is almost done. They moved the kitchen island to where it should be. They completed the roof. They sorta leveled the lot. They added the sidewalk and driveway forms. Yay! It's so cool to see how fast things progress. I hope they keep it up. The house behind me had its' yard really leveled, and they starting putting in the fence. Neighbors!

Posted by chris at 09:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just got a call from Brandon the builder. He noticed some of the modifications that we added to the house (ceiling fans, a few extra outlets, etc) and didn't see a work order associated with it. So he called up an let us know that he wasn't going to do it untill he got a work order and that he needed it today if we were going to do it. WTF, we told them at the pre-build meeting that we wanted that, they said ok, its on the blueprints yet somehow they didn't know? Do we need to go to the people the pre-build guy was supposed to contact and make sure they know too? Why can't people just follow up on their damn responsibilities and let my blood pressure go back to normal? So, I called the sales guy... and sure enough, he doesn't work today. URGH! So, I talked to another guy who was going to call the sales guy .... blah blah blah... so I have to leave early, pick up the checkbook, and run over there to pay them so they build the house the way we asked them to. GRRR. No wonder people said building a house was soo stressfull. You need to checkup on everyone to make sure they are doing their job right.

Posted by chris at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

They added windows, finshed up the siding, and completed the roof yesterday!! The electrician is supposed to go out on Thursday and hopefully I will be able to meet with him to make sure everything is perfect. The next 2 weeks will be darn busy. We are abit ahead of schedule (the one in my head), so I'm thinking I will be in for the 4th o July!! They messed up again, though. We had asked for the kitchen island to be moved 8 inches into the kitchen (so stools at the coutner wont be on carpet), and they didn't have the brace in the right place. Funny thing is, it was written in red on the blueprints and we had gone over it with him as well. Ughh.

Posted by chris at 08:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Saturday, Christine and I went over to my parent's place to cook up 32 pounds of crawfish. Albertsons, at this time of year, has 1 pound of live crawfish for $1. So, I called ahead on Friday and reserved some. Saturday, I got there and they didn't know anything about my reservations, so they just decided to give me one. The seafood department guy put a sticker on it behind the counter. When I got home, I found that he charged me for 36 pounds when it was only a 32 pound bag (someone had thrown 2 other bags (36 &l 35) in the box as well), and about 1/4 of the crawfish were already dead. I wasn't too happy about that. Anyways, we spent an hour or so, cleaning, sorting, etc.. the crawfish and I soon realized we were without 1 major ingredient: beer. So, I ran off to Walmart and ran into my highschool AP Spanish teacher, Mrs Klein. It was pretty akward, because I was abit of a troublemaker in highschool but she let me off with a 'its expected from children at that age'. Ya, I was still annoying as heck, though. :-) So anyways, I got the beer and cooked up more than enough crawfish for 5 people. We spent another 30 minutes afterwards just shelling the leftovers. Soo yummie!

Sunday, we took Christine's mom to church and to the house with us. Even though it was raining very hard this weekend, they managed to put plywood all over the roof. Soon they will shingle it, and the inside will start. We are thinking of having them make part of the driveway level, so when young-uns play basketball, it doesn't go rolling down the street. (which is why I never really enjoyed basketball, hit or miss I would have to chace after it). Also, soon (within 2 weeks) I will need to do some clandestein wiring and isulating. Everyone get their all black outfits and staple guns ready!

Posted by chris at 08:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yay! They found the floor!! And we met some soon-to-be neighbors who are building down the street as well.

Posted by chris at 07:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Anther day drips away...

We went by to see the house yesterday evening... It seem as if they forgot the game room option that we are paying for.... Atleast we caught it early!

Spent some time with Christine last night deciding when we wanted to take all the wedding related classes. I'm surprised how few weekends I now have free between now and Oct 30th. It's not all that surprising, I suppose, when you factor in the moving, classes, preperation, everyone else getting married, etc... But it is still scary. Basically, I won't be able to sleep in till sometime after Christmas... 2005! ;-)

I had some excitement at work yesterday morning. It seems that the MySQL DB died after our nightly backup. It was a mixture of a little too aggressive configuration, the number of people on at 3AM and the queries they were doing, and the compressing on the DB dump immediatly afterwards. It was interesting, becuase I setup some graphs for system load, etc... System load was at 116 ... the previous high was just 14!

Posted by chris at 09:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So, yesterday morning we talked to the priest, filled out a scantron-based questionare to determine compatibility (FOCCUS) and got a list of 10 or so dates that are available this year as well of a list of things to do before the wedding. For lunch, we went to a small sandwhich shop in downtown Wylie and our waitress looked surpirising like my aunt in Montanna. The food was great! (L&L I think...). Later that evening, we went over to my parent's place for dinner and talked about which day is best, then went over to her parents place, and talked about what day is best, and after ALL that, it came down to what Christine's Mother's Friend said was the best 'energy day' for having a wedding. :-P That day is... Oct 30th! So, this morning we checked with all of our wedding participants for compatibility, and fired off an email to the church! Yay! As for church restrictions, no strappless or spagetti-strap dress and no alchohol. Ohh well, I guess I'll wear a tux.

On another note, I was awoken at 12pm, 4am and 6am by Zephyr playing with things. I couldn't find anything to throw. Grrr... Anybody want a cat?

On an up-beat note, I got a check for my deductable from my insurance company from when that Jaguar-lady ran into my car and claimed she had no insurance! W00+!!1 (that 1 is there on purpose).

On a off key note, I re-discovered Infocom games (completely text based games (Zork)). I played them as a kid. I fondly remember calling up my dad's friend all the time to get help! hehe! I'm using Frotz. What rekindled my interest in the game was a AIM frontend to classic Infocom games, that I saw off of Slashdot. This all ties in nicely with a project I'm working on at work that uses an perl/AIM bot to notify agent's of special events on the system. I found Net::OSCAR to be WAY better than Net::AIM as it uses the more feature rich protocol for the AIM network.

Finally, they started framing the house!! I went Sat/Sun and it was foundation. I went Tuesday morning and they had almost finished the 1st floor. I went this afternoon and they are almost done with the 2nd floor! Awesome!!

Posted by chris at 05:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

We tried again to carve our initials in the foundation, yesterday. As I was pulling into our new neighborhood, I noticed several cement trucks leaving the neighborhood. My hope soars! Untill, I round the corner and see no changes for our house. I wait for 30 mins for Christine. Just as she pulled up, a cement truck stops next to our lot, the driver pops out and starts taking down the fence. Our hope soars! Untill, our builder pulls up in front of him and directs him to pour the back porch for the house behind us. But..... he did say they will pour ours today!! Yay!! Finally!!
Later, we stayed up late after making a brocolli / mushroom / caseroll, watched 'Kill Bill' for the first time (it was awesome) and talk about our wedding plans. We are kinda wanting Jan 1'st (just so its easy to remember), but we shall see whats avail. As I was getting ready for bed, my cats were being silly. Ashey jumped from the bed to atop the TV (which is ~2 ft from ceiling), and then Zepher took off, running around the room for awhile untill he suddenly stopped behing the scratching post. All the sudden Kama comes in from from the side and wacks him and the make a fw circuits around the room. The Zepher jumps to the top of the couch and sits, untill Kama comes running up behind him and rams her head into his butt, pushing him off the couch. The for the next few mins I see Zepher's head pop up behind the couch for a split second as he repeatadly tries jumping to get over it. I finally got to bed around 1am and slept like a rock.
I awake to my alarm clock. I hit snooze. I awake to my alarm clock. I hit snooze. I dreamed that all the emails we send for our company's website are bounced back because of server misconfiguration. I awake to the alarm clock. I hit snooze. I dreamed the it was pouring rain and I was on a median between a several lane highway and a several lane railroad track. It was urgent. The trains were flying by, and suddenly one derails and slides right past me. The another train does and I have to hop to miss it as it slides by and into the highway, causing a series of wrecks. It progressivly gets worse as more trains derail and get progressively closer to killing me. Finally, one comes too close. Its headed towards me, carnage is everywhere and I awake to my alarm clock. I get up.
I take a shower and notice how I'm sore all over from playing soccer. I find the cleanest smelling clothes and forget my lunch as I head out the door. Someone rear ends me on the way to work. They don't even bother getting out of their car. I get out and see no damage on either car and leave. I hate talking to people before I've had coffee.

Posted by chris at 09:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

On a side note, yesterday got worse before it got better. Christine was working extra late so I had to wait a long time for my hug. I tried changing the bed and ended up bending one of the overhead fan blades. I tried washing the sheets but found out my drier is dying.... it takes several times through the drier to dry anything (and it's on the correct setting). However, Darcy did enlighten me to the way of the cowbell. "I have a fever and the only prescription for it is cowbell." (SNL skit)
Today, they pour the foundation. We are hoping to run out there this evening and scratch our initials someplace... mabye the front porch or the driveway. I went our yesterday and they had just passed the first plumbing inspection. Yay!
After the defacing of our foundation, we are meeting with the priest to talk about the wedding. It's pretty cool, becuase I found the church (Saint Anthony's) online, looked through the site and sent off an email to Father Morris. A couple hours later he responded. It's great that churches have online presences, it makes it abunch easier for geeks like me!

Posted by chris at 08:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Well, Brandon the Builder called today and told us that he can't put a safe in the foundation. :-( Not super happy about that, but what can you do? He said that they stopped doing that after liability issues arose from owners in similiar situations. Ohh well. We talked about a few things and he said he hopes/plans/expects to be done in June. Only 1 month after my current lease ends. So that means I will only be violated for 1 month instead of the 2 I expected. He was a pretty young guy but he seemed to know what was going on, so everything looks good I spose.

In other news, I'm playing with a script to make a calendar, that lets me browse my pictures based off of the exif date. I'll let you know when I have something for you all to play with.

In other other news, I got my first chance to take pictures 'professionally' for a group.... Sartaj asked me to be an event photgrapher for a camp this weekend, but unfortunately its 3 hrs away and its all day Fri and Sat. I work Friday, and I feel uncomfortable driving 3 hrs there and 3 hrs back and unsure if I get paid (they pay for what they like). If it was alot closer or I was guarenteed more payment than cost of gas.... Hopefully another opportunity will pop up soon.

Posted by chris at 06:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

They put pipes in the ground!! W00+ w00+

Posted by chris at 01:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, Christine (Alpha)'s last day was Wed, and Adam was out on vacation.... so I my boss and I were the only one in the office on Friday... Thursday was eventfull. All the problems and issues and pressure that had been accumulating over the last few months finally exploded. It wasn't a friendly. I felt pretty crappy but fed up as well on Friday night, so I called my boss late in the evening and suggested we grab lunch together and talk things over. We took a nice lunch and didn't even talk about work till we were finished. I explained to him that we weren't happy at all. So much so that we were looking for other jobs off and on. I think it realy caught him by surprise. I explained how I want it to work, but previously not enough improvements have happened after our complaints. Instead of reacting to our knee-jerk reactions, they should be proactively avoiding them. We talked about various things... basically why I've been an ass at work and why I feel the way I do. I tried giving my thoughts on ways they might try to fix things on their end.... Overall, I felt ALOT better and hopefully it will be the begining of some major improvements. I told him though, that I didn't want to look back in a year or so and think this was a major mistake (staying around). He seemed very receptive and open to what I was saying. Wish me luck!

On another note, in regards to the house, they put a short black fence around the lot (I'll post pictures here). I guess to keep midgets out...? Hehe. Hopefully, our builder will CALL US before they pour the foundation... cause its really hard to put in a safe after the fact...

Saturday, we moved alot of Ting's stuff over to her parents.... very tiring. Uneventfull mostly, just missed the rain!

On sunday, we woke up long before the crack of noon and headed over to church. This time we were only 5 mins late!! ..maybe next time.... I noticed they were having a blood drive so I went over after mass and waited in line. The fellow signed me up for red blood cell donation (instead of normal whole blood). It was interesting... basically take a pint, filter out the red blood cells, give you back the rest.... repeat. They said it takes 4 people donating whole blood to get 1 donation of red blood cells, and it take a few more days longer to process the whole blood for donation. Anyways, I got 2 (yes TWO) T-shirts AND snacks!! Suckers!!

Work today was much better. I got alot done, didn't get irratated at all, things went smoothly! I let David play with my camera this weekend and he took some pretty good Ice / Roller photos with my Rebel + 50mm f1.8. I was surprised he was able to 'get close to the action', but it seemed to really work well. Later, he used my 300mm lens for his son's soccer game. Good shots again... I'm guessing I should have a bushle of children so I can have plenty of opportunities to take good pictures!! (Don't tell Ting)

This evening, we made corned beef and cabbage, and homemade mashed potatoes for Christine's family. Unfortunatly we had to use 1% milk instead of cream. If whole milk is 100% milk.... I'm guessing heaving whipping cream is like 300% milk. So we were missing out on 299% of yummie goodness in the mashed potatoes. They were still good though!

Anyways, braindump complete... gnite!

Posted by chris at 10:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I now know why Dallas County has higher car insurance rates than Collin. Two days ago, I drove over to my house to see what new had happened (they finished digging the trenches and put up a little fence). From there, I went to Christine's apartment to assist her in packing all of her stuff up. Anyways, its about a 45 mins trip in traffic and all was going great untill the last 7 mins. I all started in the left hand turn lane. It ALWAYS starts with a lefty.... Anyways, all the lights are red and we get a green left arrow. I start pulling out and the car across the way was hoping theirs would turn green too... so he rolled foward. I continue turning and he rolls foward more... this continues untill the dumbass is completely in the street and I have to swerve to avoid them. It wasn't a short amount of time either. Every second that passed, I assumed that the person would realize the error of their ways and stop. They were very hesitant on accelerating, so I assumed they had caught on to the fact. Anyways, they didn't, they are stupid. I managed to get by without them hitting me. So continuing on down the road, another fool cuts me off / pulls infront of me going 10 MPH below the speed limit and I have to go around them. Then I get stuck behind the guy who is going to turn right into a parking lot, but is going to take his sweet ass time doing it. You know, the ones who you almost run into the back of because they can either turn the stearing wheel or use the accelerator, but not both at the same time? (So far 1 mile: 3 stupid people). I continue further and there is a group of cars in the median waiting to cross the street. They wait till I'm almost there and car#1 pulls across the street so I have to slam on the brakes to not hit them and car#2 takes that opportunity to SLOWLY pull in the lane I'm in and coast forward. I have to swerve VERY sharply in order top not hit them. (1.1 miles : 5 stupid people). The next median turn lane and the car is inching foward into my lane taking up 1/4 of it. Swerve again. (1.2 miles : 6 stupid people). Anyways, I traveled 1.2 miles and ecountered 6 deathly stupid drivers who had I not done something drastic, I would have hit. Now I know why everyone in the area has crappy cars, why the insurance is higher, and I think I may know why the crime rate is so much higher..... I wanted to commit a few crimes myself after driving that gauntlet.

On another note, Christine (Alpha's) last day at PRE is today. I know she will enjoy her new job much much much much more than working here and I wish her the best. Hopefully, management will take a cue and get a clue and fix things before the rest of us leave.

Posted by chris at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

My brother Steven was in town for spring break all last weekend and he hadn't seen the lot / house yet. So The Ting and I, and Sartaj and Steven all crammed in my car to go see it. Much to my surprise, they had already started!! They had laid out some wood to mark where some of the pipes will be going and there was a guy there riding a dirt-throwing machine digging the trenches. Yay!! I hope they finish early too! We also showed them the church in Wylie that we were looking at for the wedding. It is very nice...Cathedral like on the inside...

The weekend started off alright. I made 6 pounds of mashed potatoes for Christine and Greg's party. Greg had a birthday!! Christine got a new job!! Yay both of you!! Over the last month or so, I have been fixing several people's laptops for them. One of them brought over a black shirt that said "Beta" in rainbow color along the front. While preparing for the party, I grabbed a black shirt and trew it on.... and really didn't notice how ...um... 'flaming'... I looked. Anyways, it was actaully pretty funny. If you are wondering about the 'Beta'... Christine fiance and Christine soon-to-be-x-coworker were friends and in APO together. To avoid confusion, Christine soon-to-be-x-coworker was named 'Alpha' (shes older) and my Ting was named .... you guessed it...'Beta'. Anyways, I guess me wearing the shirt is like someone writing their name on their underwear: people chuckle about it and wonder 'who in the world would accidently take that?'.

So, we got to bed at 2, and awoke at 7am for APO's annual Scouting University (Boy Scout merit badge). I was the 'photographer'. I was also tired as heck... Have you ever had to tell 170 boys that they can't have 2nd's on pizza (untill everyone has eaten)? It really sucks. We had about 5 gallons of leftover milk and orange juice which we dropped off at a food pantry on the way to see the house.

After all the fun and games, I was pooped. I went to bed at 7 on Saturday and got up at noon on Sunday. I didn't even really get out of my bed clothes all day. It felt nice (except for the sore throat I was getting).

Posted by chris at 12:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Today my Dad stopped by on his way to work to drop off Christine's wedding ring. Gordan's has this scam going where if you don't get your ring looked at every 6 months, then it doesn't have a lifetime warrante anymore. So they want you to come in with the ring and have it inspected and cleaned.... feel free to buy more stuff while you are at it... ugh. Anyways, the ring was due for an inspection, and I leave the ring at my parents' house for safe keeping. Anyways.... he dropped by at 5:55 in the morning. No need for comment on that one. It didn't help that Zepher kept me up part of the night by throwing himself against the doors and ripping up parts of carpet.

Who the hell is Zepher anyways? It's a slightly used cat from one of Christine's friends. (Allergic boyfriend). I'm keeping him till he finds a better place to live. We have had it (him) since Saturday and the cats are starting to get to the point where they can be in the same room w/o hissing at each other... except for Ashey. But Ashey and Koma were like that when they first met as well.

After getting another 2 hrs of sleep, I met Christine at the model home to talk with Kevin, the Senior Construction Manager, to discuss the final details of the house. Expected start date is March 29th!! Unfortunately, the 6 month time frame starts then as well. So, sometime between July 1st and Oct 1st we should move in. But wait, there is more!! Our sold sign is up!!! Yay!!

Posted by chris at 02:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Christine sucessfully returned from her cusiness trip to Denver on Friday morning!! Yay! To celebrate, we threw all the leftovers in the fridge into a big pan, mixed em up, and called it fajitas. It was good. Mmmm. While we were cleaning out the fridge, I noticed abunch of apples we had gotten a few weeks ago and never eaten. So, I made apple pie. More mmmm. That same evening, we had a craving for lasagna and so we decided to make lasagna for her parents sunday night. That requires a paragraph all unto itself. Or something like that...?

Saturday, I woke up a little early (10am) and dragged Christine over to take pictures of some figurines that somebody wants me to sell on Ebay. Lots of Don Quixote stuff.... After that we headed to HomeDepot to look at things for the house, but ran across this odd looking bird at a nearby pond. Very long neck, beak slightly hooked at the end. Anyways, lemme know if you know.

Sunday morning, we went by the church in Wylie for the first time. It was very nice, traditional, and big. We stayed around afterwards and talked to the priest about registering and possibly holding the wedding there. He suggested starting ASAP because they like to have 9 months! Hopefully, everything will go smoothly. On our way out, we took a picture of the lot. I'll try to take atleast 1 each week from the same vantage point to show progress.

Sunday night, we went over to Ting's parents and made lasagna from scratch. I think it was my first time. It was pretty good too! Lotsa cheese! We ate dinner and ended up talking about the house and the wedding. This is good. Last time I talked about the wedding, everybody left pissed off or crying. This time, no tears were shed!! :-P We chatted about the reception mainly. Trying to get ideas of how to allow abunch of Irish and Taiwanese people to intermingle easily without going bankrupt. Wish us luck! :-)

Posted by chris at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The permit to start building the house came through!! Hopefully, they will start within the week. I'm busily trying to decide what cables I wan't to run in the house. So far the plan is: In each room:

• On 2 walls:
  • 2 cat5e ( 1 ethernet, 1 phone)
  • 3 Quad Shielded RG6 (Cable, Satelite, OTA)
• Then at the main light switch:
  • 2 2pair speaker wire (2 channel)
  • 1 cat5e (home automation)
  • 2 2pair speaker wire from the light switch to the ceiling / wall for above speakers

So 6cat53, 6coax,2speaker per room.

The den, master bed, gameroom and study will have speaker wire run to upper walls for 5.1 to a central location in that specific room. The media room will be wired for 8.1 at the ceiling and baseboard. The meida room will also have 4 coax per drop instead of 3 and it will probably have condiut from the front of the room to the back (projector). The kitchen will also have a few cat5 drops and speakers.

The goal is to have house wide music, eventually controlled over cat5 as well as having a central wiring for all other video distribution needs. The extra cat 5 per light switch is incase I want to get fancy later on. Much cheaper to run all of it now instead of later. All of the cables (except the 5.1 speakers) will be run to under the stairs to a big switch plate.

Now all I have to do is get ahold of the blueprints so I can determine how many miles of cable I need. :-P

Posted by chris at 01:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well, I'm back. I've been busy as heck.
A quick run down of whats happened in my life for the last 1.5 months:
Christmas was good, other than being told what days off we had 2 days before christmas (ever heard of a calendar or thinking ahead?). I had to pick up Christine's family from the airport on Christmas day. They decided to goto Vegas for a little pre-christmas relaxation. Aparently their 'warehouse like' companies give them more than 2 days off for Xmas and New Years combined. Then, my family and Ting went over to my aunt's house and had dinner.
Right before Christmas holiday, work decided to put the deadline for the stuff we had been working on for a few months right after Christmas break. I had planned a vacation, told them about it, talked about it during meetings with everyone, and yet, when I reminded them that I was going, they looked all dumbfounded and even seemed to play with the idea of of not letting me go. No fun.
Anyways, we went skiing in Loveland Colorado at the begining of Janurary. Christine, myself and Chris Sapp all drove up there in my car. We were virgins to the snow. It was great. No broken bones, no car accidents, no work, only 1 speeding ticket and ~2000 miles. Here are some pictures.
After we got back, it was hot and heavy at work to release the website. After putting in lotsa hours (~70 hrs last week), we finally released it and everything seems to be going good. A few bugs here and there, but... that always happens when your management refuses to go through the enginerring process or even give more than a few hours to decide how long it will take. We are slowly but surely coming to a good point where we can spend a few mins around a large circular table, pull ideas out of our butt and be expected to do them within a month. Of course those ideas will probably change many times in that month and the materials, data, etc that we need wont be there till long after the dealine has been passed and unfortunately, not forgotten.
Meanwhile, Christine and I have been looking for a house in the little spare time that I have. I found one I REALLY liked in Wiley. We took pictures(uploaded soon) of the model home and a house that had been recently completed that are the same floorplan. It's a big house (3500 sq ft) but well within our affordability range. We are looking at other used houses and builders in the neighborhood to see if we can find a better deal. I'll let you all know how the house search or signing goes this weekend.
Anyways, this is atleast a starting point. I can update from here w/o people being too confused as to what I'm talking about.

Posted by chris at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)