Sam, almost rolling over

Well, Sam has been keeping us on our toes lately... running for the camera every time he almost rolls over. Here is a sample. I don't know if he is just playing with us or if he just hasn't quite figured out what to do with his arm to get all the way over yet.

Funny... but you might have had to be there.

My wife, mother and I had a good laugh with Sam tonight. Here is the video. Too funny, but really not sure why it is so funny. He was doing this for the whole time we had him in the new booster seat, about 15 minutes or so. He must have some energizer bunny genes in him... he keeps on going.

Update...

Well, since my last post, I guess I have been a bit busy with projects getting ready for my first child, who came on Dec 1, 2008. I got the nursery done, with paint, curtain rod, shelving, and a stand for the changing table to accommodate my bad back; raises it 3 inches so I don't have to stoop to change diapers.

There have been many, many diapers, spit-ups, play times, books, snuggles, and buzzing ear drums since Dec 1, and it has all been worth it. You could say I am quite the proud Dad. I am still learning to gracefully take a seat full of after-bottle spit up that has inconveniently missed the 2 sq feet of burp cloth laid out in front of Sam and soaked my only pair of jeans from knee to rump; luckily I feed him in a slick leather chair. He is very good at thwarting my efforts to keep this from happening and I think I am more frustrated with myself for not anticipating it better, or being ready for it. You would think I could learn by now.

My wife has many pictures of Sam over the past 4 months of his life posted on her blog , since she keeps hers up better than I do. Check it out if you are interested and I will try to post some here that she hasn't posted; maybe some of Sam and me that are special to me.

More to come

I know it has been a long time since I posted last.  There has been a lot going on and I haven’t taken the time to write about it all here.  I do have a lot to identify as past projects and new ones I am currently working on that need to be finished in the next month before my first child decides to come into the world. 

There is a lot to tell and I will make an effort over the next several weeks to post the past and future entries with pictures, but painting the nursery comes first this weekend.  Things will be a little more relaxed once Aimee can start putting together the nursery finally.

Oh, and I am trying out a new way to post that doesn’t require me to bring up blogger.com directly.  Microsoft Windows Live Writer (Beta) is part of the Windows Live offerings that I came across when posting my work schedule to Office Live and trying to get access to it from home.  Anywho, I will let you know over the next several posts how this goes and if I like Writer for blogging.

That’s all for now.

Another weekend

Well, this weekend I have a few other things I wanted to get done and ended up doing a lot of other little things, but it feels good to have a list of finished projects:

• Nailed the loose baseboard in the Office to the wall so we wouldn't keep kicking it across the room
• Put some fold down door stops on a couple doors that like to work their way closed; Master BR, master bath, and Office. These seem to be way nicer and easier to use than the wedge door stops we were using.
• Vacuumed, to clean up the drilling mess from previous task and catch oversize hairballs in the office and bathroom
• Tried to patch hole in roof over garage that is leaking; but didn't quite get it completely, or the roofing sealant didn't completely stick.
• Hair cut; done by Aimee - really short
  
• Tried to patch up the small holes in Aimee's car trunk that are letting in water when it rains really hard; but with little success.... I think the bondo I got was not the right stuff to use, so I have to go back to the store to see what else I can find.

Power's out

Wow, we were sitting here and the power just went out. I think this is the first time we have actually used the UPSs that I got for our computers. Granted Aimee's laptop and my work laptop aren't affected too much since they have batteries of their own, but my desktop and the router and cablemodem allow me to keep writing this in the dark.

Evidently there was some problem with the transformer on the pole in the backyard of our neighbor that needed some attention by the power company and they decided to just cut power to about 10 houses fed by it witout letting anyone know. There is a guy perched on the pole out there working with redoing what looked like the main connection to the distribution point.

Hey, maybe this will fix the light flickering that has been going on since before Christmas. If I remember correctly the lights did that brownout thing earlier tonight. Well, that would be cool cuz it can't be good for all our appliances and electronics for the power to dim like that.

Wow, they must be finished with whatever they were doing, cuz the lights just came back on. End of the excitement for tonight; although it is also good to know I knew where the flashlights were so I could see where I was going. It is amazing how dark the house is when there is no ambient light.

The Weekend

While Aimee was volunteering at one of her clubs, I decided to do some stuff around the house and ended up just doing odds-n-ends:

• Mowed the Grass
• filled the pond; I had taken a little too much out when I was lowering the water level from the winter buildup
• Christmas lights taken down off the house
• Plum Tree hole got filled the rest of the way
• Sprayed the first application of Round-Up on the yard to kill off the weeds that have started to spring up
• Put back up and fixed the black-out shade in our bedroom; it needed the brackets put back up and some adjustments to make it work right
• Weeded and cleaned out a flower bed in the front yard that needed attention since last fall when the gladiola greens had browned and almost rotted away.
• Put a padlock on the tool shed; have been meaning to do that since we got it because of guidance from "It Takes a Thief" on Discovery channel.
• cleaned up some of the dead stuff in the flower beds by the front walk and driveway
• Noted that I need to cap the ends of the deck so cats can't get under our deck and make a mess

Well, that is about it I got finished this weekend. Will post some pictures if I have a chance later.

starting February

Starting off February, I got the last lower cabinet disassembled and wrapped up with all the extra shelves. This is the last of 3 lower cabinets.

I am using the new "adjustable" saw horses my sister's family got me for christmas and my oversize I-beam supports.

I just have one more upper cabinet to wrap up that I will do later today. I have quite a stack of cabinets now, hopefully my dad or someone on CraigsList will be able to use them.


Now I have some space to put away some stuff that has been sitting out in the middle of the floor and space along the other wall to put up the cabinets that have been sitting there since early last year. My rolling lumber cart is going into this space, once I move that other stuff along the wall out of the way. I hope it fits.


Oh and there are a couple things I left off the list from last post:

1. Got my trailer lights working; ended up being that it didn't ground until it was laying flat. When it was foldeded up, the lights mostly don't work.


2. Installed the tank and faucet of a hot water tap for the kitchen sink; I still need to rewire the electrical to add a plug to plug it in and connect it to the the water pipe.
   
3. Installed shelving for storing lumber out of the way... on the outside wall of the garage. It is storing the 2x4s for my mobile workbench table top right now, but with the added space due to getting the cabinets out, I may have room to finally put that workbench top together. You can see the stack of lumber at the top of the last picture above.
   
4. Installed a key lockbox so that our extra keys are safer than just leaving them in a basket by the door.
   

Over 3 months

It has been over three months since my last post. (That kinda sounded like confession, but none here, except that I haven't been too busy during that time.)

I do have a list of projects I have worked on during that time though... I had to get out the pictures to help me remember what all I did and I am not sure I have pictures of everything.

Oct 2007 end: Celebrated Nephews birthdays

Isaac turned "1".


Tyler turned 4.


November:

Fixed sprinkler pipe


and partly filled in hole from plum tree


Dug up a wheelborrow full of irises which had overrun the front patch next to the driveway


Put up shelves above Aimee and my desks.



Put up Christmas lights


Spent Christmas with Family, I may post some pictures later.

It snowed Christmas Day!


Dec 31, 2007:
Had a really weird freeze that left this frost forest on my car roof.


Jan 2008:

Then less than a week later it snowed a little.


got the power strip attached above where my new workbench goes.


Then finished the first part of my workbench, that has a set of yet-to-be-finished pullout extensions to support large sheets for sawing (and evidently no picture.)

Watched as the local water company flooded my front yard for the 4th and worst time in 18 months


Celebrated my and Aimee's grandmother's birthdays with family in Seattle.


Removed old white melamine cabinets from the garage wall, took them apart and plastic wrapped them for someone else to maybe use. oh, and game myself a nasty blood blister in the process.




And it decided to really snow, about 4 inches, which stayed around about a week.

And that brings us to Feb. which just started.

Stump removal

Well, I finally got the plum tree stumps out this weekend. My dad was kind enough to lend me his chainsaw and after some effort I was able to saw off the first stump about 16 inches below ground level. When I went to work on the second one, the stump was so hard and twisted that the chainsaw wasn't making much progress on it. It just kinda sat there and burned the wood. I don't really know what happened or if I was doing something wrong, but I ended up leaning against it in the process and found it to be kinda loose after the first one was out.

Since it was loose, I decided maybe it wouldn't be that hard to just dig it the rest of the way out... the bottom part of it tapered down a lot so I kept digging and found it was only being held by a couple big roots. After cutting these, it was really loose. It would rock back and forth but not side to side too much though. The key was the big root on the bottom that was still holding on. I will let you watch the video for the rest of the details.

Anyways, as you can see it came out quite well and wore me out to panting trying to get it all in one video. The cracking and breaking sounds you hear are not my back, but the root at the base of the stump. The video doesn't show it but we did get the second one out of the hole... twice. I lost control of it while trying to move it and it rolled back into the hole... doh!!! But as you can see in the picture below, they both were successfully removed.

I am glad to have it out and now all I have to do is put some stump rot in the left over stump, fill in the hole and then get the rest of the large trunk pieces cut up to either make wood to burn or get some pieces out of it to make something out of it. Plum is actually a really nice wood to work with and can be expensive to buy. It should be fun trying to get some usable lumber out of the trunk sections. I may look into seeing if one of the lumberyards around here would process the larger piece for me though.

I was joking around. :)

Fall Projects

Well, with the onset of the Fall rain, I have had some time to just relax for a couple weeks. With work getting a little more hectic as projects start for the quarter, there has not been much additional energy anyways.

Since I was going to take some down time from projects anyways, I decided to take care of a painful little toenail that has been bothering me lately. It is the only toenail I have had a problem with fungus growing under and have been able to deal with it for a long time until now. The doctor said I could take a drug that was hard on my liver to try and kill the fungus, but it would be best to just remove it since it was loose and would be much easier on my liver. I opted to have it removed on Saturday.

The numbing was the worst since it required two injections on either side of my little toe. The subsequent removal was only uncomfortable because I could feel the pressure from him prying the toenail off. It was painful for about a day, but has been manageable since. It currently is trying to form a scab, but is a little oosy still. On a side note, while I was at the doctors office, I found that my cholesterol levels were much better after 5 months of eating better and exercising. I went from being very high/high risk to boarderline in my LDL and cholesterol, and my triglycerides even went into a normal range.

The result of my hard work over the past 5 months was a real blessing because if there was not marketed improvement in my numbers, the doctor was wanting to put me on medication. At 33, I really don't want to start on medication I would have to take the rest of my life, especially at the risk of side effects that are almost worse than the benefits. Since cholesterol was my only risk factor, I think I can stick with a healthier lifestyle and help reduce my risk of developing other risk factors.

In trying to relax from outdoor projects, and stay off my toe hasn't helped, I have been forgetting to get my regular exercise and it has been affecting me more than I realized it would. My back has started complaining about being parked on the couch so much. And evidently I have been pretty tied up after working with the Plum tree stump cuz yesterday I was stretching and twisting trying to relieve the tightness and slight burning pain I was feeling in my upper to mid back and my mid to lower back gave way in a really harsh way. I was almost thinking I did something bad, but after my breathe came back, I decided it was just relieving something and layed down and iced my whole back for about an hour; working the small icepack we have down my spine every 20 minutes. It does feel better, but it is still a little uncomfortable.

Fall raining in

Well, Fall is definitely out there. With the cooler temperatures, leaves turning their usual fall hues, and the rain, it is definitely here.

Aimee and I ended up helping a friend move out of her appartment since it was quite last minute and she had a hard time finding anyone to help her. Luckily she lived in a small one bedroom and we got most of it in the moving truck on Friday night in two hours, with only 4 of us working on it. The rest was packed from 8:3- 10:30 Saturday morning and unpacked at the new house by noon.

Elaine went back to finish cleaning her appartment and turn in her keys and then the she took the three of us out to dinner to thank us for helping. Well, since I wasn't diligent in getting back to the plum stump that afternoon while we were waiting to go to dinner, and watched the football game with Aimee instead, I figured I would have Sunday to do that work.

Well, the rains came Saturday night and it hasn't really stopped yet. This is the trouble with living in the Northwest; once it starts raining in the fall, there are usually few breaks. Hopefully it will clear up sometime this next week and I can get out there and cut out the stump finally. I am going to borrow the neighbor's chainsaw tonight so I am ready when the rain lets up. Or in true Northwest mindset decide to just go do it in the rain.

Stumping along

Well, to update on past two weeks activities with the Plum tree stump, I have it dug out about 3-4 feet now and have all the roots cut down to that level. The picture was taken on Tuesday, the day after I got it dug down to it's current depth and all the roots sawed or chopped out. The three biggest roots are sitting in front of the hole in the picture.

I took off Monday - Wednesday of that week to support Aimee figuring out how to get around now that she has started college again. Good thing too, cuz I ended up driving her to school once and picking her up twice.

I actually used a hand pruning saw to get the big root out and an axe to get the other two out. The second one with the axe was much easier since I sharpened the axe in between. I bought a yard tool sharpener that is basically a handle with two sharpening blades in the center of it, one for single edge tools, like pruners, and one for double edge tools, like an axe. With one hand on either side of the handle, you pull the tool's sharpening blade along the edge you want to sharpen and it basically scrapes the metal away on either side of the edge. It took many passes on the axe, since it was quite dull, but now I could probably shave with it since it has a very honed edge. It seems like the angle of the edge is a little steep so we will see how it holds up over time.

Here are some other progression pictures, you can click on them to see the bigger picture.

As you can see from the first two pictures here, the hole got deeper quickly. You can also see the big root I had to saw out in the bottom of the last picture. I will probably have to dig out more of that root when I regrade the ground in that corner for the shed that is going in there.

Now all I need to do is find a chain saw to cut the thing out of there and bury the rest of it. Should probably put some root rot stuff in what is left of the stump or will eventually get suckers growing up out of it.

Yard update

Well, I haven't been doing a whole lot the past few weeks, but I decided to finish picking up the debris from the plum tree on Saturday, which resulted in another 1 and a half of the yard debris cans we have from the garbage company. The rest of the other can was filled with grass clippings, since I also got the lawn mowed, and the corn stalks, which I took down due to the fact there wasn't much corn on them. I harvested what corn I could salvage, but the majority of the corn had the top 2 inches eaten away by some kind of caterpillars, one per husk. The rest of the husk was fine after I cut off the eaten part and we have been eating on the 10 or so pieces since then... it is rather good corn.

Then Sunday for some reason, I was out there trying to figure out what I was going to have to do with the stumps and started digging out around them so I could get a stump grinder in there. I want to grind them down below the ground level as far as I can. I need to talk with my brother-in-law and find out what his experience was when he did the same thing to three very large pine tree stumps in his front yard. The second picture is the left over large wood pieces I had to move to get to the stumps. They are all irregular sizes so they ended up in a pile. Aimee had to help me with the one in the foreground that is like 5 feet long.

Anywho... I have about half of it dug out and the rest loosened up before it got dark tonight. Need to finish digging out the loose dirt and find a grinder to rent for Saturday. That is unless I figure out I can get the two small stumps out of there this week without too much work. My little hand axe just may be the limiting factor, so I anticipate needing the grinder.

Surprisingly my low back hasn't bothered me since I started digging on Sunday, but I am being quite careful with bending over a lot. I have been twisting a lot to throw dirt behind me, but that hasn't seemed to bother anything so far. Pray God spares me from any further injury while I work on this.

Oh and this weekend we also made a small lemon curd filled lemon cake with triple chocolate chip frosting, yum!!! We got these cool small cake pans that leave a "dent" in one side so you can fill the "dent" in two of them and smoosh them together to make a filled cake. Click on the picture and you can kinda tell the middle is gooey.

Labor Day Project

I put up the light in Aimee's studio/craftroom. It now has a nice new 58 watt flourescent light with brushed nickle base and frosted globe. Aimee was quite happy to help me hold tools and get others I needed to make sure it got done it one night. Well, at least I got one thing accomplished during this long weekend outside of molding the couch cushins to my back side.

That being said, we did get in a long walk on Saturday, about 3 miles, and a bike ride down the the college campus on Sunday morning, 14 miles round trip. At least we did get some exercise, even if we did spend the rest of the weekend wasting time.

Plum Tree progression pics

Here is the full progression of the Plum tree removal, as captured throughout the 5 hours they were here.


and after I cleaned up the grass and stacked the remaining trunk pieces off of Aimee's flowers and ferns. I wish I would have taken a picture before I had cleaned up, but you can see in the last couple pictures above where the ground is litered with debris.

The brown spot in the grass is covered with plum carnage and mud from plum juice being stomped into the ground. It was amazingly muddy for being a 90 degree day.

Sprinkler controller rewire

So, the deal with the sprinkler controller rewire was that I needed to move the controller and rewire the sprinklers so I would have enough wire to have the cable neatly routed along the ceiling or in the walls, or at the very least, so it didn't drape in front of the garage doors and restrict access.

When I first installed the sprinklers before the 4th of July, it was to get it ready so we could leave to go out of town, so I just barely got it wired to allow us to leave when we wanted. In the following months it became apparent that the controller was not in a very convenient place since I was adjusting the watering time weekly.

**Side Note**
The local water and electric company displays on their site the suggested percentage of water that a lawn will need based on a calibration of your watering system of 1 inch per week or water for lawns and .5 inch of water for shrubs. So for example the setting for this week is 1.1 so I set my seasonal adjustment to 110% and my timer automatically increases the times for all the zones by 10%. When it is not as hot or wetter, the value may be less than 1 meaning my setting would be less than 100%, giving my lawn less when it didn't need additional watering.
**End Side Note**

It would probably help if I had my system calibrated, but I am working on that a little bit at a time, as I have about 20% of the lawn measured for my current settings. I will eventually have a reading for several places around the lawn and can average them to see if I need to increase or decrease my default zone times.

Anywho... I digress as this is about the re-wiring. I decided to move the controller by the inside people door of the garage so it was easier to get to when changing the seasonal adjustment. I bought some additional 14awg electrical wiring for the irrigation pump relay switch connection so I could wire the pump separately from the irrigation wiring. This which allowed me to use the one length of cable for the front yard valves in the garage and the existing wire from the backyard valves was plenty long.

For the backyard wire, I ran it along the house to the back people door and up the side of the door into a hole into the attic space. I pushed as much as I could into the hole thinking it would be easy to get to from inside, but I ended up needing to crawl into the side attic space, where there was barely room for me to crawl in on my belly. It was quite cramped and upon getting back in there I found that my efforts to push as much cable as I could to make it easier had resulted in a ball of wire that I would have to fight to untangle... then my flashlight battery decided it was done and I was in almost pitch black with a little light coming in from various places from the garage.

I used my cell to call Aimee who was inside the house... and called, and called, and called for about 5 minutes when I started to get a little claustrophobic. I started pounding on the rafters and finally got Aimee to come out to see what was going on. Unfortunately, my being in a tight space for that long doesn't lead me to treat her with very much patience and I end up yelling at her to hurry up.

At this point, not only is my wits at their end being up there, but my back is giving me very specific signals that it needs to get out of the contorted position I am forced to be in. Aimee helps me get to the line with fresh battery and helps pull the cable through from the garage side of the attic so I can get to it when I crawl out. I finally get backed out of the attic space a little at a time and am covered in dust and sweat from being up there for about 30 minutes.

So the actual wiring part was quite easy comparedly, and got completed by the end of the night. I am glad to have it finished and as soon as I get the one side of the garage cleared out when I put up the next set of cabinets, I will be able to finish tacking up the wire for the front valves so it isn't just hanging along the wall.

past three weeks

Well, the biggest thing that has been done over the past three weeks, is the plum tree in the back yard getting taken down. Granted, I didn't take it down since it was under power lines and the electric company sent out a crew to cut it down after we waited almost 6 weeks. You can see the pictures on Aimee's blog.

Other small things that have been done are:

1. Trimmed the evergreen shrub outside the front door
   which let more light into Aimee's studio.
   
   
2. Got another dose of fertilizer on the lawn
   to kill the mass of little moth-type insects that were coming in the windows at night.
   
3. Cleaned the pond last weekend
   and Aimee trimmed the pond plant to manageable size, to the fish's dissatisfaction. They now spend most time together under the little bit of plant still there. I guess it has at least brought them closer together. :)
   
   
4. Got the center speaker inside the middle section of the entertainment center
   this required me to unscrew the stand the TV sits on, put the speaker in and the screw it back down.
   
   
5. Moved the sprinkler controller over to by the inside door and re-routed the sprinkler wire so it was not hanging across the garage doors
   I didn't have enough cable to run it along the ceiling when I first installed the controller (and I had clotheslined myself a couple times bringing things into the garage). But, I will go more into the effort involved in this one in a later post.
   
6. Finished varnishing the inside the garage cabinets and got the first coat of grey paint on the outside of the cabinets
   still have to put second coat of grey on cabinets and sand and put final blue coat on doors.
   
7. Assembled the kit trailer I bought before I went on vacation.
   still working on getting the lights wired and found out I have to license it for the same price it costs to license a car.
   
   
8. moved the office into the bigger bedroom.
   this was done over two weekends and is still not completely finished. Parts of it were sped up by the 2 day visit of my mother-in-law which required us to clear the guest bed off so she could use it, and hastened the moving of part of the shelving from the other room to hold said clutter from guest bed.
   Existing Office:
   
   Old Office After:
   
   New Office:
   LOTS OF SPACE!!!!!
   
9. Fixed the shower in the master bathroom
   which had an extra spray direction out the back of the shower head which would hit the wall and was also hastened by mother-in-law visit so we wouldn't have to share the main bathroom with her.

The main big projects I want to get finished soon, and may get tackled this Labor Day Weekend are:

1. Finish cleaning up plumb tree mess in yard.
2. Fluorescent light installed in Aimee's studio.
3. Trailer wired and ready to accept license before use.
4. Paint French Door I had installed last winter before it becomes a problem.
5. Plant new tree in back yard, after Aimee picks it out.