1.1.2005 - 1.31.2005
January 27, 2005:
So we got more snow this week, and it got even colder than last week. Isis
and I went on our walk the other morning at -7 degrees. I know that my
face was freezing and can't imagine how cold she was. Her face was all
frosted up after only going on a 15 minute walk. It's supposed to be even
colder tonight too. Work has been real busy, I get to work a little
overtime this Saturday morning, which is actually pretty cool, couple hours of
work to fatten up the old paycheck a bit. Hopefully we will be able to go
snowshoeing at the state park up the road from our house after I get home.
Its tough to get any exercise this time of year so this will feel awesome if we
actually get to go. We'll do our best to get some pictures, as long as the
camera doesn't freeze up. I'll be going back to Rochester next weekend to
visit some friends and get some work done on a tattoo, hopefully I won't run
into any weather like my last trip. Lisa has been hitting the books hard
as always, she will be studying for a couple of real tough exams while I'm out
of town next weekend. Sometimes it works out better when I'm not around to
distract her from her studies, other times I drive her crazy while she's trying
to get work done. We sure have appreciated having the garage these last
few weeks, the cars warm up so much faster when they are parked in the garage,
and not having to scrape them off is awesome too. Anyway, have a great
weekend, stay warm.
January 23, 2005:
Well, we lived through "The Blizzard of 2005" as they are calling it. That
shows how bored the TV news crews get, after all we do live in New England and
it is WINTER so they shouldn't be all that surprised that it snowed. The
part that stinks about the whole thing is that I drove to Rochester Friday night
to meet an old friend that was flying in Saturday afternoon. Well, I guess
I don't need to say that his flight was cancelled and I had nothing to do but
enjoy the snow. It started at about 10:30am and by late afternoon about 8"
had fallen. I decided that if I got back on the road I could get home
before it got real bad. I left around 4pm and got back after 11pm, it took
a couple hours longer than it takes in good weather. There were hardly any
cars on the road, I drove sometimes for 20 minutes on the thruway without seeing
a single car. The Element rocked the house as always, as sure footed as a
mountain goat. Anyway, other than all that driving it was a pretty quiet
weekend, I did some shoveling today and ran Isis around the yard, its still
really cold out, hopefully it won't warm up and rain like it has the last couple
times we got snow. If it lasts the week we will finally be able to try out
our new snow shoes, the snow needs to settle a bit before they will work well.
Well it's time to crash, gotta be up early for work tomorrow. Stay in
touch.
January 20, 2005:
Sorry it's been so long since I did an update, it's been a very long week.
I ended up working 12 hours Saturday and another 6 hours on Sunday. We
were helping to convert to a new email system, it wasn't the most fun I have had
at work for sure. Lisa and I didn't have to go to school or work on
Monday, we just caught up on things around the house. That's a good thing
too because during the night sometime the pump in our well went out. So no
showers or using the toilet in the morning, bummer. Normally we would just
let our landlord know and she would take care of it, except she left for a two
week vacation in Florida just two days before. Luckily we were able to get
a hold of a local well company and they were able to come by just before dark to
take a look at it. It turns out it was those damn mice again! Isis
and I have been slacking on our mouse hunting duties lately and I guess this is
what we get. We did get one the other day in the garage, it tried to make
off with the trap too, we'll have to step up our efforts. A mouse got into
the well head and chewed through the 220 volt wiring, which shorted out the pump
and turned the mouse into vapor. They were able to get it working in no
time and after running the water we were back in business, it's amazing how the
lack of a shower in the morning can ruin your motivation for the day. It's
been very cold here so we have mostly stayed around the house, we did go out for
Lisa's birthday on Saturday (her birthday was Friday but she was beat after a
long week of studying for her first exam). We just went to the pub we like
so much here in town and had dinner and a few beers, it was awesome to spend a
little time together, school keeps Lisa so busy we don't get to do that very
often. Sunday afternoon I defeated the MAN, that's right, the Record
Company MAN. About a month ago I picked up Velvet Revolver's new Album,
"Contraband" and quickly found out that it came with copy protection. Not
only does this copy protection keep you from making copies of the disc, it keeps
you from ripping the tracks to be put on
an MP3 player. I have to say, I haven't been that angry for a long time,
in fact I was so angry that I just put it away and tried not to think about it
until this weekend. If I'm breaking a law or rule and someone comes up
with a way to stop me, fine, but I wasn't breaking any law, aaaaaaaahhhhh it
burns me up! I picked up a couple of other new discs and while ripping and
putting them on my player I decided that I would spend some time on the "interweb"
trying to figure out how to defeat that damn copy protection. Well it
turns out that when you put it in a CDROM drive the thing copies a secret driver
onto your machine that scrambles the music when you try to copy or rip it.
It took me about 3 hours of searching to figure out that the company that built
this protection, MediaMax, had sued a student at Princeton for publishing an
article
showing how to break the protection, it would appear that they didn't win
because the article is still up on Princeton's website. So with the help
of J. Alex Halderman I was able to get the tracks onto my MP3 player and
actually listen to the music I paid for almost a month ago, defeating the MAN!
Stay warm everyone and we'll talk again soon.
January 9, 2005:
Well, Winter arrived in full force this week. Thursday morning we woke up
with about 8" of fresh snow on the ground with it still falling. Lisa
drove in to Worcester for her early class only to find that they had cancelled
the afternoon ones. She was pissed to have driven almost 4 hours total for
one class. The roads were horrible and the other drivers were worse.
The one thing about driving in the winter, we have done it since we got our
licenses back when we were 16 and you would think the same about the people that
live here, until you saw them drive. People either drive 25 mph under what
would be appropriate for the conditions, or like 50 mph over what would be safe.
So either your trip ends up taking way too long, or someone crashes into you,
either way it sucks. About halfway through the day Thursday the snow
turned into freezing rain that built up to about an inch or so. It was a
real mess. Gregg, Kristen, and Matthew came down yesterday. We got
another few inches of snow and freezing rain yesterday, after the plow guy did a
really crappy job of cleaning up the driveway on Thursday, more snow made a real
mess of it. Gregg and I adjusted the valves and installed the new winch on
the Rincon. The winch install should have been an hour, two at the most
but even rushing it took more than 4 hours to finish. It was tough to fish
the 6ga wires from the battery in the back to the winch motor in the very front
without leaving them visible or having them rub on any moving parts. We
also had to find a spot to mount the solenoid that actually starts and stops the
winch. You don't really think about how much stuff is packed on that
machine until you start reading the service manual and see what needs to be
removed to access things as simple as the spark plug. With that said, it
was a hell of a job to find a spot to mount something the size of that solenoid.
We had to take it for a few laps around the neighborhood after we got it all put
back together, it goes pretty well in the snow too. After we finished we
fired up the grill and had some of the famous
Meat House steak
tips, with fries and saut
éed
asparagus Gregg style (with half a stick of butter and a ton of garlic).
Of course the grill ran out of gas as we were warming it up but we were able to
run out and get a replacement tank before we died of starvation, the 4 wheeling
around the yard got our appetites going. After dinner we were back in the
garage, this time it was to install a tonneau cover on Gregg's truck. That
went pretty smooth, especially after we heated up the material with the propane
heater, that helped it stretch over the frame a lot better. Other than
that stuff we had a pretty uneventful weekend. Lisa is already out
straight with homework, been at it about 8 hours so far today with no end in
sight. I found a really cheap mount for our USB camera so we can monitor
Isis while we're out, her "crazy" doctor suggested we use a video camera
to see how she is responding to the new drugs she's on. The cool thing
about the mount is the camera isn't on the counter or on the floor tripod
anymore. She had some good days this week and a couple not so good ones,
we have to adjust her dosage of Xanax. I'm setting up another old PC to do
the monitoring instead of using one of the laptops like we have been.
Today I installed a dimmer switch on for the new ceiling fan I installed in the
dining room last week. We went from no light in that room to way too much
light with the new fixture, now it's reasonable with the dimmer. I've done
a lot of nothing the rest of the day. It's about time for dinner now, I
need to run outside and try to shovel out the walkways after the mess of snow
and ice we got yesterday, that should be a good time. Have a great week, I
have to work some OT next weekend but I'll squeeze in an update.
January 2, 2005:
So married life is treating the two of us pretty well. We're just very
happy to finally be home and have a few minutes to relax together. Thanks
to everyone that emailed us congrats for what appeared to be a surprise wedding.
We had been planning it for sometime but mostly kept it to ourselves. For
the most part, if you are reading this you are one of the few people that know
we got married at all. With the holidays and all we haven't really spoken
to many of our friends about it, they will figure it out eventually, if not
that's ok, we are planning one hell of a party for our "wedding" after
graduation in 2006 and they will all be invited. I might make a trip out
to Rochester later this winter, when the quarter gets rolling strong for Lisa it
will be a good time for me to get out of here for a few days. While we
were up in NH for the holiday weekend we took Isis for a walk in the woods near
my parents house. It had rained the day before so the snow was glazed over
with ice real bad. I made sure that Lisa was very careful where she
stepped so she wouldn't fall. While making sure she was so careful I lost
it and landed on my left shoulder blade and knocked the wind out of myself.
It hurt pretty bad but cleared up by the next morning, three days later it came
back worse than before. So I spent most of the weekend on the couch
holding my chest when I breathe or laugh or talk. It felt better yesterday
so I went out and cleaned the Element in the afternoon, I had to move the Rincon
and when I did I pulled my lower back out. I'm telling you, I should
have stayed in bed the whole weekend! I've been laying pretty low since
then, but it still hurts pretty bad, bad enough that I might actually see a
doctor this week about it. We had my brother's dog Maddie this weekend, a
terror as usual. Isis puts up with her but you can tell that she is real
glad to see her go. We watched a few movies this weekend too, Starsky and
Hutch, Dodgeball, and Napoleon Dynamite. They were all pretty funny,
Dodgeball is probably our favorite, although Napoleon Dynamite is a close
second. I think if we watch it again though it might bump Dodgeball for
first. Santa brought me the winch I wanted for the Rincon and Gregg is
coming down next weekend to help me install it and to do the valve adjustment I
should have done 200 miles ago. I'll get some pictures of the install.
Anyway, Lisa starts school again tomorrow and I'm working so it's going to be
one of the first days that Isis will be alone in about a month. She'll get
her dose of Xanax, her peanut butter filled toy, a long walk before we leave, a
tape recording of us hanging out, and the camera set up to watch her.
Hopefully the week is uneventful. We'll talk again soon.