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Quick Renovations, Quicker Builds

I’ve been talking about getting a “fixer-upper” house for a while, mostly just as a project, but somewhat to see if my brother and I have what it takes to do the Real-Estate thing. So far, nothing, but we’re taking baby steps. We added some lattice-work behind my deck, so dogs couldn’t jump the fence, and we’re working on adding a wall and a door in the basement to separate the crawl space from the basement room. Angela is even planning on redecorating the kitchen; painting it and doing something with the floors. All fun projects which, all-told will take us a good three or four weekends if things go well. Let’s call it 100 “people-hours”.

I measure it that way, because I recently came across these two articles: The first, about building A Four Bedroom House in Three Hours, 44 Minutes & 59 Seconds by some Habitat for Humanity people. I was impressed, but looking at the details, the group did tons of up-front planning, and apparently lots of prefab work off site. An excellent accomplishment, no question, but was it cheating? How long did it REALLY take?

I probably wouldn’t have even thought about it except, serendipitously, I came across this article a couple of days later, about an Amish house that was rebuilt in 15 hours after a tornado destroyed it. That’s with practically NO planning, and no pre-fab (and, I suspect, a great shortage of power-tools and such). It’s not apples-to-apples, but I can’t help but feel that the nice people who set the world record were really outclassed in the end, by good old-fashioned skill. I don’t know what to do with this comparison, but I’m sure there’s a lesson to be learned.

I am looking into installing a shed in my backyard. I was curious about shed pad cost, so I called up Site Preps and they gave me a great, affordable quote! I can’t to see my new shed.

Back up, and faster to boot

Sorry the site’s been down. I use a local ISP for my webhosting (on a DSL line to my house): “IgLou”, if you were curious. Normally this is immaterial, but they recently decided to upgrade my service (AND charge me less — double win, no doubt). The problem was that this required a modem upgrade, which meant that I had to carefully plan picking up the modem and being in town when the service switched so that the website was down as little as possible. Since the website’s been up and down for the past couple of weeks, you can imagine how successful that was.

Anyway, we’re back up now — full speed (although BellSouth thinks there may be some line noise for some reason). If you notice any problems, just let me know!

Polar Bears and Tax Returns

Tax returns came back which is always a good thing. This year, it was enough to justify a new Dell 2405 FPW. I cannot speak highly enough of a 24″ widescreen monitor; particularly when you can fire up Battlefront II at 1920×1200 resolution. Seriously. Get one for yourself. Maybe two. If your tax return isn’t quite that nice, or (heaven forbid) if you owe the IRS money, the 2005FPW will do (it better — I got one for Angela: Happy Valentine’s Day). 21 inches ain’t that shabby, and Battlefront is still grand at 1680×1050.

Anyway, in order to increase my tax return again NEXT year, we have to get some charitable donations in order. May I recommend, sponsoring my 2006 Louisville Polar Bear Plunge team. Actually, it’s my brother’s team, but if I have to follow him into the freakin’ Ohio river (particularly before JULY), then I’m taking some credit. I’ve got a $500 goal, so c’mon people — pony up. (Special thanks to ma and pa who are so far my only pledges).

C-141 Retirement Party

If you didn’t know, I’ve been working in Dayton, Ohio (USA) for a while. The Wright-Patterson U.S. Air Force Base is here (they’re ultimately the people I work for), and as a result we get to see some neat things once in a while. Back on December 13th, while having lunch at a local Wendy’s, I took these pictures of some big airplanes flying in close formation over the city:58173

Now that was pretty cool, but it wasn’t until today that someone told me what was going on. Apparently the C-141 is retiring, and Lockheed was doing a photo shoot for it’s retirement party. Needless to say, they take better photos than I do, and someone sent me a few results… enjoy:60952

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Quite an Engaging Holiday

I took the week before New Years’ off, plus the surrounding Friday and Monday… made for a nice 11 day weekend. Most of the time off I spent cleaning and partially moving out of my house (which involved a substantial amount of chasing mice around with a sword to little avail). Oh, and I watched Serenity like three times.

Everyone else, it seems, was a bit more busy, occasioning the following announcements:

• Jennifer and Jason got Engaged (congratulations!)
• Heather and James (I hope that’s his name) got Engaged (congratulations!)
• Dallas and Devon got Engaged (congratulations!)
• Sarah and Dave got Engaged (congratulations!)

Wow. Busy holidays people. Looks like the busy wedding schedule isn’t letting up anytime soon!

Congrats!

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