Nov 172009
Nov 152009
What a wonderful birthday I had this year! It all started Tuesday when Patti dragged herself out of bed to bake cinnamon rolls for breakfast before I went to work. She also surprised me with a lunch pail that you could barely zipper closed that was filled with a nice thick sandwich and lots of snacks! After work, Erik and I got home to find that Patti had decorated the house and had ingredients to make manicotti ready to go for when she got home from school.
We enjoyed the wonderful meal and ice cream and Patti and Erik got me very nice LL Bean slippers and chocolates for me to enjoy at work. It was a wonderful day and very much unexpected!
Yesterday, we “finished” celebrating my birthday (as if Tuesday wasn’t 3 times more than I expected) by going to a Binghamton Senator’s hockey game and Texas Roadhouse for dinner. We realized that the Vestal Texas Roadhouse is half the size and half the quality of the Syracuse restaurant that we’ve grown to love. But, the food was still very good and we walked away stuffed.
The hockey game started off well with an early Senators goal, but soon the visiting team had gained a 4 goal lead to bring the score to 1-4. After that, the Senators seemed to be frustrated and had a greater interest in taking off their gloves and turning the ice rink into a boxing ring. Much the rest of the game was boring and we expected the Senators would loose. Late in the third period however, the Senators finally scored bringing the crowd to its feet. Then another, and another, and a fifth goal to tie the game with less than a minute to go! After 5 minutes of overtime and no goals, the game went into a best out of 5 shootout where the Sens lost 2 goals to 1 to bring the final score to 5-6. Even though the Sens lost, it was definitely the best game that Patti and I had been to yet and we had a blast!
So, my birthday this year was awesome and I couldn’t have asked for anything different. I had a wonderful time Tuesday with Patti and Erik, and had an amazing time with Patti on Saturday. It will definitely be a birthday to remember! Thank you Patti for everything you did! I certainly didn’t deserve half of what you did and I love you so much for it!
Nov 102009
Well, it’s finally here. Brandon is getting old. He is 26 today! Wow… 
So I want to wish him a Happy Birthday for the millionth time. But, he deserves lots of smiles, so it’s okay.
Our favorite picture...we've barely changed!
Nov 092009
On a lighter note, Husband’s birthday is tomorrow. *yayforhim!*
So a guy at work is planning an addition to his house and wanted to buy some nice windows off Craigslist for the addition. The windows go in the gables of the house and he needed to know the angle of the windows to see if they ere the same as the angle of the roofline. We knew the dimensions of the windows, but not the angles. Sounds like a textbook trigonometry example from high school to me. Ya know, the kind that your math teacher claims you’ll need in the real world after somone complains “why do we have to learn this crap?!”
So, here we are. Three intelligent, reasonably educated IT professionals, a white board, and plenty of computing power. After some head scratching we were able to remember “SOHCAHTOA” and what it stood for (Sin = Opposite/Hypotenuse, Cosine = Adjacent/Hypotenuse, Tangent = Opposite/Adjacent), but that was about it…
Next, came the power of Google! A simple search for “tangent triangle” and a click on the second result labeled “right triangles” and we had our answer about two paragraphs down!
The result? 5 minutes of head scratching followed by less than 2 of skimming a Google search result and we had our answer.
So tell me, why did I take 4 years of highs school math (including a year of trigonometry) and then a bunch of classes in college as well? Yea, I know we remembered that we needed tangent, but I’m sure Google would have given us the answer even if we didn’t know what we needed. Just kind of shows how times have changed in the 25 years I’ve been alive (almost 26 as Patti would point out).
Oct 282009
So the next thing we did after the living room floor was the stairs. We actually had no plan to do the stairs, but our dog Logan decided to have an accident on the new living room floors. An accident so big that it ruined some part of the floor next to the stairs. We were on the floor trying to fix the floor, and when we were done, it still smelled like dog pee. We didn’t understand how that could be possible. So we were touching around and Brandon noticed that Logan had soaked the carpet by putting his hand behind the part of the carpet that was soaked. When he did this we noticed that behind the carpet the stairs were amazingly, finished. So we sat there and deliberated for a minute, and figured what the hell, and started tearing up the carpet on the stairs. And this is how they ended up.
Nice eh? This was one of our easier projects. Only took around a day. We just had to pull up the staples from the carpet and clean up a little. Next, Erik’s room.
Oct 282009
Hmmm… It appears that there was a bug in the Albums page that was causing an error message to display instead of the albums. I’ve since fixed that and the albums should be up and running again! If you see any bugs or have any comments or suggestions please feel free to contact us.
[contact-form 2 "Contact"]
Oct 262009
So the first part of the camp that we worked on was the living room floor. Undoubtedly, the worst part of the house (next to the “closet/bathroom/whatever” room that was off of Erik’s bedroom). The carpets were urine stained – our dogs kept peeing in the same spot because some other dog had peed there before as well.
This is the floor before. I had tried everything I could to get it clean. But alas, nothing worked. So we started pulling it up.
As you can see, we found another carpet under the gray carpet that was there. When we pulled it back it was so moldy underneath that we all started to sneeze and feel sick. You can see the mold here, and this spot was actually one of the “better spots.”
The carpet pad that was under the green carpet had disintegrated. Mostly it was dust, but in some spots it was still semi whole. All of it though was stuck down to the floor. Brandon and I had to scrape every inch of the floor to get the carpet pad off.
We then ended up painting the floor with oil primer to seal in the smells, then latex primer so that we would be able to stick the tiles down, as you can’t stick them onto oil primer.
And here it is done. We had to pull the tack strips that were around the pellet stove up as they were for carpet. Brandon put new trim around there though so it looks great now. Our only problem is that the kitchen floor, and the floor in Erik’s room is higher than this floor. We are trying to work around it, though.
This ended up taking us around a weekend to do. As with every project that we have done something happens that we didn’t expect, and we are tied up fixing it before we can move on. Nothing is easy with us. It was fun having our living room in our kitchen for a weekend. At least this time didn’t require us to relocate Erik upstairs into our bedroom. That’s always a joy.
Next up will be the stairs. I should be studying though. I reallllly should.
Oct 252009
For those of you who have followed our lives at all over the past six months you probably know our house is home to more than just Patti, Erik, me and the dogs. We also get exciting visits from mice and, our favorite, bats. After a summer of being terrorized by the bats we decided it’s not going to happen again next year…
Our solution? More than a case of clear caulk, a couple cans of Great Stuff, and some excitement getting tangled in black berry (prickers) and burdock bushes. Today was a perfect day to do it. The sun was out, the temperature wasn’t too cold, and best of all the bats had moved out for the winter allowing us to seal all the cracks in the siding without fear of trapping them in the house (and giving them incentive to find their way INTO the house.
Undertaking this project should also help reduce the drafts we feel throughout the long cold winters! (Maybe it won’t feel so cold in here?)
So, only time will tell. Hopefully we reduce the drafts in here (we’re also winterizing where we can and adding insulation and such) and just as important, if not more, we’ll be rid of our bat problems!
Our next projects? Cleaning the shed and getting rid of the mice that seem to think our walls are going to make a good home!
Oct 242009
Awhile ago Patti promised “there will be something soon.” A little over a month later (that’s still “soon”, right?) and we’ve delivered on that promise!
As I’m sure most everyone has noticed we stopped using the website for the most part. Well, that’s thanks to iWeb and MobileMe (Apple’s web hosting “solutions”) sucking so badly. At first we thought it was great. A click here, a click there and you’ve got a website online! Then, we clicked some more, and added a bunch more stuff and all of a sudden, not so nice anymore… It finally got to the point where it would take literaly hours to update a blog post or make any changes.
So, something had to change, and now you’re looking at the results of that change. A brand new website hosted by GoDaddy using WordPress! I think the new system is great. It’s completely web based so anyone can make changes (not just from Patti’s computer) and it’s not prone to dying.
Tell us what you think! We’d love some input on the new site and hope you’ll come back often because Patti and I both plan on postin more often since it is so easy to do (we can even do it from our phones!)