All posts by tim

Reusable Bags Update

I agree with a lot of people that $15-20 for a reusable bag is way too expensive. That’s $45-60 just to get all your groceries home. Walmart’s going to be having these reusable bags for $1. No excuses now.

Today’s Conservative Talking Points

Just in case you haven’t been tuned into your radio (I hadn’t), here are your conservative talking points for today:

  • Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize even though he is a liar.
  • The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to people for their (supposed) work on the environment. Not peace. How is that a peace prize?
  • Al Gore’s “Inconvient Truth” is devoid of truth. Feel free to improvise a pun.
  • Yassir Arafat was also awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, and that hasn’t worked out so well. So obviously it’s not really a very prestigious award.

Let’s get out there and send this to everyone in the MSM and post it on every comment section in the blogosphere!

Running in the heat.

Update: Apparently Chicagoans aren’t so wimpy after all.

Am I the only Texan runner who thinks those Chicagoans are wimps? Granted I don’t run marathons (because, they have side effects like, you know, death), but 88 degrees? Balmy.

On Saturday I ended up walking 4 miles with my mom. She wanted to run with me, but she really can’t run. She runs really fast, then gets winded and has to walk, then runs really fast, etc. Then I ran two more miles with Stella so I’d actually get the run in. This pushed me into exercising for about 2 hours in the late morning which is not when I normally exercise. I went home and drank a 16 oz glass of milk. Then 3 16 oz glasses of water. Then as we headed out to Fredericksberg I got a 60 oz soda (it was only .30 more expensive than 32 oz), and drank most of it. Then I downed two beers. I was a little worried about water poisoning at that point. But, what the heck. In any case I didn’t feel great again until about mid-afternoon Sunday after a 2 hour nap.

Fredericksberg was fun though. We had a nice time with the kids. I danced a waltz with Stella, and a polka with Julie. The polka was horribly romantic. I do miss social dancing with Julie. Just not enough opportunities to do it these days.

The beer was actually German at Fredericksberg’s Oktoberfest and the sausage was far better than Wurstfest. We capped the evening with dinner at our favorite biergarten there (I got their mixed sausage plate appetizer because I must have as much sausage as possible), and I got a Dilly Bar from Dairy Queen on the way out of town. All in all, a very nice day.

TV. TV. TV.

If you’re one of those people who don’t watch TV feel free not to read this entry. And bask in your moral superiority. Also consider making out with yourself in the mirror. That intellect makes you so hot…

Kelli was talking today about the new fall TV season. I’ve got to say that Julie and I are a bit more interested than usual. We like to unwind to a show before we go to bed at night. Since we moved in with my parents we haven’t had cable. We could have gotten cable, but decided not to. My parents have a cable modem and no cable TV. We were afraid that if we added cable TV to their bill it would never get canceled and result in shenanigans and drama. Erroneous bills, collectors calls, bad debts, we feared it all. This is just an extension of my mom’s ability to come in during the only objectionable part of any TV show. She hates TV and TV likes to prove her right. I’m sure the cable company can oblige with their patented incompetent business processes.

So we’ve been doing without. Hasn’t really been too hard. Although, Julie joneses for HGTV shows something fierce. Their website is lame. They have House Hunters, but they only have the reveal. You don’t get to see the three houses they’re choosing from. Bah! We also really enjoyed “Tori and Dean in Love” while on our vacation to Port Aransis, but their streaming appears to be technology from the Netscape Navigator 4 era. Seriously. It’s bad. Seriously. Check it out.

So what have we been watching? We had been watching Top Chef Season 3. Which rocked. We were buying them from iTunes. That shows how much we liked it. Buying episodes. But that’s over now.

We also got hooked on Scott Baio is 45 and Single on Joost, but they only have half the season – BECAUSE THEY ARE EVIL!

The Office still seems good. 30 Rock seems like it might have jumped the shark. And Pushing Daisies has promise. Anything we should be watching that’s available (legally) online?

Scary driving trends.

Picture of Stella and I waltzing that I should have posted yesterday:

We took Stella to the Town Lake park to run in the sprinklers again. It was fantastic. We let her just run around. There’s really nowhere she can go that we can’t see her, so rather than following her around like we normally do we just let her roam. She had a lot of fun. She really seemed to enjoy the water jets this time. Actually getting into them. They didn’t seem to frighten her that much. She made a friend too. And then proceeded to take her hand and lead her around the park showing her all the things she had been doing. It was super cute.

But on the way home we encountered a crazy driver. This is the second time this week I’ve seen someone do this (different cars), so I have a fear it is a trend. Basically we were the lead car in the right hand lane. The lane could go straight or turn right. We were going straight. There was no one in the left hand lane. The guy behind us honked at us. Then pulled into the left hand lane and turned right from the left hand lane – directly in front of us! I saw this earlier in the week at another stoplight. What’s up with this?

Dry-wall! Dry-wall!

We have our pre-drywall inspection scheduled for Monday. According to the salespeople it’s 4-6 weeks from that meeting to our close. Wow that could potentially be the first week in November. Craziness. We find out our close date on Monday supposedly too.

Rock and Roll!

Man They’re Quick

So three days later we went back out. We brought our inspector with us:

They have put in electrics, the house numbers, finished up the siding, finished up the windows, added railings to the stairs, and finished all additional framing. It was amazing.

Most exciting for me was the garage door pre-wiring. We paid something like $75 for garage door pre-wiring. I was expecting this to be like our last house with their ceiling fan “pre-wires”. You paid the protection fee, and they made sure they actually bothered to put electricity in your ceiling. Then they put an ugly little plate on top of the electrical box. The box was probably not flush with the drywall, and they probably didn’t use enough staples to install the spanner bar, but you got the electricity.

The garage door prewire in this house is awesome. There are electrical boxes for the two motion sensors at the front of the garage. There is a box for the electrical and for the control switch connection in the ceiling, and there’s a box by the back door for the actual control. Amazing. Now it will only take me 4 hours to install rather than 8. And it will look fantastic. I’ll be able to have tours of my wire-free garage! Sign up now!

If I’d known that we’d have this long and that we’d have our 20% down payment saved I would have insisted that we pay to have them install the garage door opener. That has got to be the worst job on earth. Seriously.

Running in the Dark

So, I get up to run at 6:30. It’s gotten to the point where it is dark for the first half of my run. The other day I was running and a guy ran onto the trail in front of me. I was slowly gaining on him, and I figured he could hear me behind him.

Cuteness

Stella was having a rough morning. She got up at 6:50. This really sucks because I’ve already gone out running at that point and that means Julie has to get up with her. Her grandparents were stirring so I think all the wandering around woke her up. We went through our usual morning routine. Including the “Daddy does not have time to feed you breakfast/gnashing of teeth/winging routine”. I took her back upstairs and told her to go see mommy. She wandered down the hall, but detoured into her room. There she picked up a book, and her blanket and headed back down the hall to Mommy’s room.

It was super cute.

Kids are smart

This story on CNN is great. Here’s an excerpt:

State Rep. Matthew Barrett was giving a civics lesson Tuesday when he inserted a data memory stick into the school computer and the projected image of a topless woman appeared instead of the graphics presentation he had downloaded.

Barrett said there were a few snickers from the approximately 20 students in the senior government class at Norwalk High School when the image appeared. He said he immediately pulled the memory stick out of the computer.

So what did we learn? Kids can handle an image of a naked lady in their high school civics class. Chances are those snickers were at his complete lack of computer skills. But seems par for the course for the PowerPoint types. I’m surprised this doesn’t happen in more of the meetings I go to at work.