Once again it appears to be December, I can tell because I can't seem to gain a decent amount of headway on any projects. Between Christmas shopping, Christmas parties, the snow, getting sick (cold), being sick (digestive problems)I have thus far managed to only get the bases done on the bookshelves this month. They aren't really even done, I still have to run the electrical through them. It's not that I mind the distractions, it's just that they're are so many of them in December. This year I at least have gone into it knowing that I wasn't going to accomplish much on our current project, the Library Jeremy Clarkson voice The Longest project in the world /Jeremy Clarkson voice. But they are starting to come together.





Still got to perm. attach the shelves together, and attach them to the walls, and put up the last of the trim on this side. Oh, and build doors for the corner cabinets. Then I get to do the other side. I imagine I will be re-posting this next year, only with different photos. It is just the way Decembers are for us I guess.

The majority of the Christmas shopping is done. Unless Amazon screws up; all will go smoothly. I'm kind of excited about Melissa's gift, It's something completely different from anything I've got her before, though it was hard to top the etched ipod touch. When you factor in the practical use she has for the tough doing the calorie tracking, and how much weight she's lost, I don't think I can top it. I'm fookin gonna try!

Have managed to stay relatively focused on the bookshelves project. Ran into a snag last week so have to redo a cabinet. No big deal. It'll end up looking better and be easier to clean anyhow. Melissa wasn't too keen on me spending an obscene amount of time hand planing 140 feet worth of trim. (it may be more when you include the other cabinets/shelves, doors etc.) She talked me into buying a Jointer. At this point I think we may be 50/50 tools/Materials. Not good. Not bad either. It does set us up for more speed on the future, if I'm going to continue these larger projects, and we have many more so...I just hate spending a lot of money.
I ougt to up load pics of the current status, but it's getting late and I've been up since 2am.

I've been feeling a bit better the last few days now that I'm eating a bit more. I've been tying to figure out what I haven't been able to lose weight, and actually have put a bit back on over the last few weeks. So rather than go out and buy more pants, I kept track of what I was eating and marked down the calorie intake. This is serving Melissa VERY well. (still very proud of her) Going buy what I marked down the first day (which was fairly typical of food intake) I was ingesting roughly 1500 calories. I've also taken to wearing a pedometer. I'm getting between 5000 and 9000 steps during the weekdays, and 12000+ yesterday and the same today. I didn't have it on the whole day either day. Not only does this make me moderately active, it also translates as over 4 miles a day. (not bad for a desk job.) It also means I am (was)WAY under eating. (By about half). I was barely eating enough to sustain myself. It's no wonder I've been so damned tired. With my current weight I need to have a 3000 calorie intake to lose a pound a week. So far I haven't been able to hit it. I get pretty damned close. (Well Friday I probably hit over 3000.) I just can't come up with enough stuff to eat, that I want to eat. Do you know how many fruits and vegetables you have to eat to come up with 3000 calories! So we went to Costco today and I loaded up with all the stuff I used to eat before we quit smoking and I put all the weight on. I can at least get the calories without having to stuff myself. Gonna give it a go for the next couple of weeks. I'm thinking (hoping) I may even get enough energy to actually exercise again.

So with tracking all these calories and whatnot a conversation came up and we were wondering how many calories are in semen. Melissa looked it up day and ran across this:



This is also the site she uses to find the calories in a lot of her food.
I love the "I ate this" button.

It about killed me to do it, but yesterday we purchased an end table.

I am (up until today hopefully) still not getting anywhere on the Library and with a visitor coming up, we needed a path for him to get through the loft area and downstairs which has been a really big case of the But first's. Downstairs is almost to the point that it's acceptable and you can almost walk through the loft without killing yourself. Yesterday was rearranging components and furniture so that the new PC for downstairs would fit. The old pc from downstairs will be moved to the bedroom. But first we had to get a TV that could accept the VGA or HDMI input. Spur of the moment last weekend we did. Now I gotta get the POS 27" F'n heavy TV out of the bedroom and give it away on Craigslist. But first I gotta make room in the garage to put it somewhere. That requires finishing the bookcases for the library. But first we ended up getting a new sliding Mitre saw. The old one didn't have quite enough reach to do what we needed it do do. and since we keep running into situations that it was coming up short, we broke down and bought a better one. After getting to a certain point I realized I was starting to run out of time, and have an annoyed wife, so in order to speed up the process I changed the design a bit. But first I had to order a jig to drill the Billions of shelf holes that are going to be required. Conveniently it'll also set me up to build European style cabinets and other 'box' furniture. This is todays project, and my project until another But first comes along.

Interestingly one of Melissa's friends had called IKEA furniture "Adult Legos". (a term I am really fond of, it makes me giggle every time) It occurred to me this morning that with the new jig, we'll be making our own 'adult legos'.

We may be getting out of hand with our did it ourselves obsession. One day someone is going to come over and say,"hey that's a nice frying pan, where'd ya get it?", naturally I'll have to explain how "we figured out how to smelt our own copper ore in the garage with a coffee can furnace, and wrapped it with stainless steel that we had to purchases because it's illegal to smelt without the proper costly equipment, we though we'd be pushing it since we made a batch of Teflon and the neighbors were complaining a bit. But I think the smell was the rubber that we made for the handle, but the guy next door came over when I was coating the pan so that's what he reported"

As some may know from FB my Grandfather recently passed away. Some of you are also aware (firsthand) of the infighting among his remaining children. My observations on the matter are thus, He led a full life. Only since Grandma died did things go south. Leaving him in the care of my mother was a mistake. My mother and her sisters are idiots when it come to this sort of thing, they are also pig headed and completely emotionally ruled. They put my uncle between a rock and a hard place. That all being said, that's not what I'm writing about, but it is the reason I tiptoed whilst in 'Detroit' (the suburbs).( more )

So I got tagged on facebook with '30 songs'. Interesting concept. Basically you hit shuffle on your ipod and list the first 30 songs that show up in your playlist. The idea behind it of course is to get to know people better as well as occupy a considerable amount of time. Kind of like asking a green Airman to look for the keys to the plane. (for those not in the know, There are no keys) This may just be my perspective as I do not have an ipod, or any other eyepod type device. (Melissa does and I believe she may have worn a hole on the interface) at home I have a PC hooked up downstairs to the TV. It plays mp3's as well as movies, games, as well as checks my email and surfing the web. all in glorious HD. In the car I have a laptop hard drive hooked up to stereo. It has the majority of the music I would listen to in the car on it. (no sense in putting Don Giovanni on there, the drive to work isn't long enough).

Having established the fact that I do not have an eyepod device, the concept still sounded interesting to me. My taste in music is extremely eclectic by many peoples standards. Pretty much anything goes, with the exception of a lot of this grindhouse churned pop stuff that has come out in the last few years. Even then, if it entertains me I won't turn the dial and may even buy an album or a single to throw in to break up the mix. My tastes severely depend on my mood, and what I've doing. I won't listen to Heavy Metal while I'm in the shop. A track or three is OK, but too much and my work suffers. Gotta have stuff I can sing along to out there if I have any music on. Basically I have a lot of varied music in my collection. Add Melissa's stuff in there (mostly the same) and it makes for a very wild mishmash.

So I get tagged with '30 Songs' while I'm at work. Like I said, the concept seemed really interesting to me, I wondered what would actually pop up for me. I figured when I got home for lunch I would launch rhythmbox (Gnome music player for Linux) hit shuffle and see. I then went about my morning workload. At lunch, I launched the program, and it gave me 'updating library'. over the last few weeks I have rearranged the files to be filed alphabetically by Artist name instead of genre, so all the files were in different places. After 20 minutes I had to get back to work so I left it running. When I got back after work I clicked random. Nothing happened. I clicked play. It played in a random order but doesn't actually display it. So I began my search for a player that would generate a random playlist AND display the contents. Not having found one I went to bed. at 4am I woke up with a few ideas. So far none of them have worked. One of them was not quite what I was looking for, but interesting nonetheless. It generates a html file of just your mp3's in a directory. It gave a bit of an answer to my issue. After 1 minute 22.55 seconds it generated a 4.4MB HTML file with only text, no pictures. It lists 9387 files, track length, and their directories. This has only made things worse. Now I really want to know what will show up in the top 30. Worse still, I discovered that iPods' shuffle feature is just completely random. it is an algorithm that not only makes shuffle appear more random (technically 'random' could reproduce the same list only backwards, think monkeys typing Shakespeare) but it incorporates files you play more often into the list as priority.

So now I am left with finding a player that'll make a 'random' playlist, and I'll have to wait a while to let it figure out what I play more often, knowing full well that it is a completely trivial and useless exercise, and that no good will come of it. :-)

Got my geek on!

Friday had excellent BBQ at friends house, with possibly the most wonderful steaks; if not the largest; I have ever had. They were spiced a bit, and really large. I mean f'n huge. they were about two inches thick and roughly seven by ten in size. There were two of them. They fed five of us. and our friend still had leftovers the next day.
Saturday I pulled the chickweed out of the planter box, weeded out the little strip next to it and filled it with rock. Got further with the garage, most everything was put away by the afternoon. Washed my car, then saw Midnight Sun Brewery's new facilities with friends. It's very nice, just no longer walking distance. It is conveniently located a stones throw from Home Depot. "what took so long, I though you only needed one bolt?", "ummmmm..." Went to dinner at Spenard Roadhouse, had the best soup. I think it was mushroom based, but had green chilies, chorizo, and a dollop of sour cream. You gotta love a place that has 'Bacon of the month' on the menu. and you get 6 strips of bacon. It was a peppered bacon with 100% maple syrup. It was thick & sticky like when you get it from the farms in upper Michigan. (like melting cheese). There was a bit of a thunder storm on the way home, (after a beautiful day) Spent the the rest of the evening playing Dokopon Kingdom on the Wii, then Melissa pooped out early.
Today finished the rest of the garage after hitting Costco, and while doing laundry. Muli-task! Got the table saw taken apart to change the trunion out and to re-lube the thing. Since if was another bright day out, I decided to be outside again. I transplanted the peppers to a more sunny spot in the planter box, then Melissa got home. I decided to wash her van. I also ended up waxing it and my car. There was nary a cloud until a bit ago. I think I'm burnt, and need to eat a bit more before bed.

and because I should.

Rethinking Autism

It all started because of Text messaging. I text a sister and she says sigh up for facebook we're all on it. I'd been resisting for years, but though about it, I'd resisted texting too, (but have found it very handy as of late. Like sending dirty messages to Melissa, knowing full well she'll probably read this before she gets it.) So I figured I'd give it a shot, at the very least I could see what the sibling were up too since THEY NEVER CALL! :-) So that was an experience, It was like watching the theory of six degrees in action. I definitely no longer have a hectic life as I was completely dumbfounded by the shear chaos of the page layout at first glance. I got used to it quickly. I figured I ought to say something, but I have nothing to say in a quick blurb, so I figured I'd upload the photos here instead. So on to ( Yardwork 2009! )

We changed some more of the back yard. What was the rear courtyard fence now runs from the corner of the house to the back fence. It has made the courtyard larger, and the the gods toilet smaller. less area to clean up after her. Funny thing about the fence, it is almost entirely made from wood 'parts' we've had lying about the house. The rails are from two planter boxes that I made last year that we ended up not using, and the posts are the bedposts from the 4 poster bed we cut down. The only thing we bought was the plastic mesh, and one post steak. I sill have a lot of clean up work to do out there. It feels real good to be able to get a lot of this stuff done, and to be accomplishing something again. and I must say I really am appreciative of the help we're getting from J&N; our friends from down the street.

Got a new cell phone, and we finally dropped our old provider. WE CAN USE THE CELL PHONES AT HOME NOW! YEH! I ended up getting a E63 Nokia. We've now got text messaging, resistance was futile. Actually it was because of J&N, and how they use it. texting grocery lists, quick messages to say they're on the way etc. I was very glad for it yesterday when I got a text while holding up some trim and the nailer and balancing on one foot. My logic is this, if it's a phone call, Melissa could be stranded, or had an accident, etc. I need to stop what I'm doing and answer the phone. Text is something that can wait a few moments until I can get to it. I've also got so I really don't like talking on the phone. I do it all day long M - F. When I'm at home I tend to do a lot of things at once, and am easily distracted. This many times comes across as disinterested, or as a negative on the other end of the phone. With text a reply is nice and simple for simple questions.

I've also now managed to keep my to do lists, idea lists, grocery lists, things to get lists. Since they're all in the phone it a lot easier. Though it was a bit odd waking up at 3am and putting something in the phone. Since it reads pdf files, I've also downloaded a pdf of the printed copy of the book I am currently reading. Once in a while I have an extra 10 minutes or so at lunch, most of the books I read are trade paperback size or larger so I don't want to lug it around. with the pdf, I can leave my printed copy on my bedside table and IF there is time read on the phone. Not real sure how that's going to work out though.

The weather here is still absolutely brilliant. I wish we'd get a bit more rain though. the peppers are finally starting to come up out of the ground, the squash (or whatever we planted) has got big leaves. The chickweed (which we didn't plant, but have involuntarily transplanted over the whole yard and planter boxes, and the gaps in the side of the planter boxes) is also thriving very well. The "Alaskan wild flower" mix hasn't done shit. I am beginning to suspect that the "Alaskan wild flower" mix consists of various mixed sizes of dandelions.
On that note, it's getting to be late enough that I can start working outside.

With the recent article in newsweek on Oprah, and her loverly new promotion of Jenny McCarthy I present to you
Imunization facts
I've made it easy for you to find the information, now get your kid shots!

for the Herd!