- February 12, 2012 -

The finished (mostly) upstairs bedroom! I've moved a few plants in and Bradley has been bringing a few items over to finish off the rest of the room. We still need to figure out a bed for it, and the DLP TV will probably come up here once we get it fixed.

- January 24, 2012 -

Week 2.5- Teresa and I came home from work, I sanded some of my mud spots, and dusted things off, and we primed the upper walls in record time. Shug gnawed on a her bone on a towel

- January 22, 2012 -

Week 2 of the upstairs renovation! We got all the painted wallpaper off, primed, then realized we needed to get down to the bare wall cause the prime was reacting with the wall in a way that wasn't going to be pretty.... Yikes. That added hours and hours to the project needlessly.

- January 16, 2012 -

We decided to start on the upstairs bedroom last weekend; we got paint and a couple smaller ceiling fans- the main room has a tiny white fan already, and then a second light that has just a pull string to turn it off and on, and lights with pull strings can be very lame, so I two nice fans, and having one set to the wall switch and the other so that you pull it off and on seemed like a much better solution without digging into the walls to rewire it..  I then discovered that the room had been wallpapered and painted over- it was very difficult to pick out the seams, but they put a 1" boarder around the top that was very easy to see, so I got out my multi-tool and was able to cut it off- it worked really well, and I probably should have stopped and mudded that area smooth and left it at that... but in a couple placed the painted wallpaper chipped away too, and it didn't seem like it'd be difficult to take it all off, so we took to scraping it off... and under that was a brown material that seemed to be on really good... so I tested a spot with primer, and it went on great, so we sanded that surface down and got it all ready, and primed, but half way through we realized that it was starting to bubble up, so we started to scrape that all off, along with $10 of wasted primer... so now we're down to bare wall on most of it.  We still have more to do, and to clean the walls a bit better, and then we'll be priming again.

- December 26, 2011 -

Christmas in Arkansas- I made origami for Sue on the way up, I'm not sure if it was me being so occupied or if I've gotten use to it after four trips now, but it seemed to fly by. This was my Christmas to buy people magic pans, I got one for Mom, Carrie and Sue; it's not teflon, nothing at all sticks to it, it's just magic. We had a good time, played games and watched movies, and played out in the backyard some collecting bamboo and rocks.

- December 17, 2011 -

Yesterday after work we went to see Bob in the hospital- he had had a tracheotomy done and a machine was breathing for him, they had hoped that after having the surgery he'd bounce back, but he hadn't, and now they seem more uncertain about how he'd do.  He was rejecting blood they were giving him about two days after they gave it to him, and had no explanation why it was happening.  We got a call this morning that he was now bleeding into his lungs, and that he would probably not have long.  We were all at the hospital when he passed- it's upsetting they couldn't do anything more for him, or understood why his body reacted the way it did.  I have Bob to thank for my job, he told me when the position in the library opened, that, and my subsequent job, and all the people I have met from that are so important to me, and were important to him too.

In the afternoon Brad and I went and picked up his last glass fusion piece along with our own that were done being fired.

- December 14, 2011 -

Today for work I took Rigel, a 30 terabyte storage server, I rebuilt down to the Wichita data center, and brought back Optimus, which I'll probably rebuild.  It was raining all morning, but luckily it paused while I was loading the car, and right when I got there to unload- so I can't complain too much about it.  They had powered down the data center yesterday to work on the electrical so it was a good time to wait to take the server out since I had to push a couple power buttons on other things too.

- December 11, 2011 -

I'm all ready for Christmas!  It was a big weekend of shopping.  We got our tree up last weekend and now it is flush with presents.  I got Bradley an assault shotgun and he got me a mountain bike that's way better than the one I got from Walmart that I rode a couple times and blew the brakes and gearing on.  Hopefully this one will last better- it's a lot lighter too.  Kitty and Teresa are the only last ones left I need to get something for.

Past blog posts...