My thinking is that trying to force Arts and Crafts stuff in here will look clumsy, but going in another direction entirely will look stylish and intentional. Really though, have you priced any of that modern design type stuff? It can get astronomical. I like Eames reproduction (in the sense that it is a new production chair, and not an original run) chairs, but I’m not sure I’ll ever be prepared to spend $4,000 on one, either financially or emotionally. There are some cheaper options available, naturally, but I don’t know if I can get close to the quality I want at the price I want to pay. The problem here is that I need to be rich.

We are getting a new air conditioner put in here, and while that may not be all that interesting to you, it is something that is sure to change my life substantially. Luckily, we are getting financing from SMUD at a rather attractive rate, otherwise I have no idea how I would come up with all that money at one time. It could be done, I suppose, but it would mean at least another hot summer without, so I’m happy it exists. We are putting in a high-end Lennox system, so I hope that turns out well. I imagine there will be rather regular maintenance issues to correct to augment the out of pocket expense to me, but it must be done. We got four estimates before deciding, but now I don’t really know why since we picked one that was far from the cheapest. I have a hard time picking something when I know there is a better attainable option out there. Did somebody just say iPhone?

For my upcoming trip, and for general use, I wanted a new, relatively inexpensive, camera. This way wife and I will each have our own. I want mine for taking hundreds of pictures of mundane things like bathrooms and building facades, while wife will want to take better pictures of family and friends. We have the Cannon SD500 which is pretty good for the point and click crowd. It has 7.2 MP while my new Kodak EasyShare has 10. The thing is, the Cannon takes far better pictures. There is clearly much more going on than mere mega-pixels. The Kodak’s images come out much grainier. Still it was cheaper by far, and should work fine for my purposes. I’m planning to step the resolution back to about 6 MP anyway as I only need my images for the web, and don’t plan on cropping or printing.

Our free cable finally gave up the ghost, so we were forced to come up with another option. After looking at my options (sadly SureWest doesn’t offer service in the downtown area with their fiber-opticness) I decided to go with DirectTV. I would rather have cable, but for the features I wanted the price difference was rather steep. There are a couple of problems with DirectTV though. Their DVRs require a land line to work, though I can’t tell why they would need it. My existing TiVo won’t work well with the new system and will only record one show at a time. So all that kinda sucks. There are also some features about the user interface that I am not a fan of, but I suppose I will get used to it shortly, as with anything else. Their much touted HD capacity still lacks any real punch, though that will probably get better over time. I got the HD package anyway to play on the big TV, but it offers only a limited number of extra stations.

I got my first iPod for father’s day. It is a Nano, and it is pretty cool. I am only using about half of the 8GB capacity though. I marvel at people who routinely fill a 20 or 40 gig drive.

In other sound news, I have added a Sony home theater in a box to my big TV. It is alright for an entry level system, and certainly trumps just listening through the television speakers. This dingus also has an iPod dock so I can plop my device there and listen to all of the music through the system, and control the iPod from the TV screen.

From this post it seems like all I ever do is buy things. Perhaps it is true. Not all of it is high-tech though. I recently purchased an old-fashioned push lawn mower and a manual edger. I also got a broom and rake instead of a blower or something. My lawn in pretty micro-sized so using any other kind of mower seems like overkill, and also less time efficient. I have yet to use it though. I will probably have to go over the lawn one more time with the electric equipment to get it to a place where manual mowing is less than a deathwish. Then I plan on doing it every four days or so to keep it well managed. I’m sure the neighbors will appreciate that as well.

Speaking of exteriors, the carpenters we hired are finishing up on the front of the house soon. They are sheathing the brick pillars on the porch with wood, thus bringing it back in line with how it might have looked at its origin. Or at least kinda close. We will then get on the schedule for exterior paint for later this summer, and the house will start to look like a real place fit for real people.

This post has been brought to you by the treasury department which urges you to keep the economy strong by buying everything you can think of.

I did manage to build a cradle for the baby. I also got the wood to build a crib, but haven’t gotten around to that yet. Cradles are easier. It is really a Cratel anyhow, as I have made it to resemble a fruit crate for fun. I’ll go and take a quick picture for you all to enjoy.

There is a mattress that goes in this already, and I just have to shellac it to finish it up.

I also have finished the laying of the hardwood on the second floor, with a couple of spots left to be filled where an irregular piece is required. I’ll get to that soon though. It looks really good already, and I can’t wait till it is sanded, stained, and varnished. Those steps will likely wait a little while though. It looks like the next item on the agenda is the exterior painting. I can’t wait because this should have the greatest impact in the smallest time of anything we have yet done. I hope to be starting on the kitchen remodel by mid-summer.

There have been numerous things I have wanted to write about over the past weeks, but I can’t think of them just now. I hope to get back in the habit again. So many dreams.

Also, have you looked at the selling prices for Last Days of Disco? Absurd.

First of all, how are you? It’s been a while since I have said anything here, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been thinking of it.

Now that we have the pleasantries out of the way, on to business.

I am currently working on the hardwood floor on the second floor. There is much of this to do, and it takes far longer than it seems like it should. I’m sure professionals would look at my work speed an laugh, but that is how it is, and I am doing it as well as my deteriorating body will allow. We are about a year and a few months behind on this, but that is how it goes sometimes. What is in now looks really sharp, and I think the whole project will be a success at the end, even if we did do the baseboards a little wrong. I’ll keep you updated on the project.

I am still as fat as ever, so no progress on that front.

My next project that I am just starting in on is the Wieland Archive. This will be housed at the appropriately named website and will contain a database of archival information. This will consist primarily of items my father has collected over the years, as well as pictures and letters. I think at the end the archive will contain in the area of 100,000 items or so. It may well be the most complete collection of anybodies life. Entering the information will take years, I suspect, so all the better to get started. I was thinking about using regular blogging software to handle all this, but have instead decided to create my own content management system to run it. It should be pretty lean, as few bells and whistles are needed, at least on the back end. I’ll still try and keep the front end pretty. I’ll let you know when the first version is up and running.

We got a 2005 Prius, and are quite happy with it in the first couple of weeks.

Over at EatMe I have put up the first part of my Thanksgiving dinner menu. I will try and get to the rest of it as soon as possible, for those of you who are interested.

I am currently running Firefox 3 alpha (which installs with the ominous name “Minefield”), and haven’t really have any trouble yet. The pages seem to load very fast, but aside from that there don’t seem to be many immediately noticeable changes, but of course most of my extensions failed to work. I am also running the new Thunderbird 2 Beta1. There are some front end changes in this one, and it seems to work well so far, but I am still very new to it. It is prettier for sure. They have also added tagging, which some people will love, but isn’t a feature I use all that much. I think Mail for the mac had it, but I don’t think I ever used it. My testing of MS Word 2007 continues, and I love it. It is really nice to use, and I may actually buy it when the beta runs out. I am going to download the new version of Open Office today, so I’ll be better able to compare.

Must watch more Christmas movies.

We finally finished another room (except for the floor refinishing which will wait till all are ready to go) in the never-ending house work. What has been called the angle room before and is now destined to be the nursery is now pretty much finished up. Hold on a second while I go and look for before and after pics.

Here is one of the before pics:

I also made a whole set of the before pics.

Hold on, and I’ll go take an after pic from approximately the same angle.
And here it is:

You can see that there is still plumbing showing where that old sink was, and we are going to put a new one in there later, but I am pretty happy with how it turned out. Sure it isn’t perfect by any stretch, but it is about as good as we can do with our limited ability. I wish I was the type who worked easily with his hands, and has an eye for the way things should be, but it is not to be. Still, I’m not unhappy with the work, I just recognize it for what it is.

We are pushing to get ready for the flooring for early December and to be finished laying it before Christmas, and possibly even have it sanded and refinished in January, but that may wait a little longer. Since it is just us, we need to set arbitrary deadlines to help speed our work along.

We have actually been making some progress on the house. Work in what will be the nursery is proceeding, though slowly. It took us a long time to finish the paint prep, but we are now halfway done with the painting, and will finish soon. It looks pretty good. I also put up a new light fixture.

The biggest thing that happened recently was an impromptu reunion of sorts. Tlcnyc came all the way from New York, and Commander Plaza, Babs, and Tojo all made the trip up from Las Angeles. We saw other people from the past too. Some of them were just gathered for a bbq, and some were here to bid farewell to Oldboy, who is now in Korea. We all went to Kcan’s house for bbq in the afternoon and then came back here to hang out for the evening. It was all big fun. So good to see so many people that I haven’t seen in so long. I am the worst at staying in touch with folks. LilChaCha was there with her baby that must be about a day short of a year now. My nephew’s birthday is today.

On this coming Sunday I will have been married for one year. It doesn’t really seem like all that long, but I guess stuff has been happening. Pregnancy and all.

I actually have some things I have been wanting to write, but I haven’t yet sat down to do it yet. Will it ever change? I doubt it!

I think that a resurgence of non-crappy music is about to begin in a larger way. It seems that there are suddenly enough good things coming out all at once that it may be signifying the new sound for this era. About time too. I don’t know what is supposed to be hip, but I do know that all of the stuff I have been hearing for years has been pretty bad. Pop, the so called alternative music, and hip-hop have really been sucking for a while. Maybe as long as eight years. It is only now that there seems to be a little innovation. I just hope this creativity doesn’t get swallowed up by the existing crap, as has happened in the past.

In addition to Tally Hall, I also like the newly popular OK Go, though it may be for their clever videos, more than the quality of their music. Either way, I think that they are on the right track.

In other news, we have started to work on the house again after an extended layoff. There is still a substantial amount to do, but hopefully we can get all of the upstairs finished, at least in general, by this winter. There are still walls and stuff to finish, but the largest job is still the hardwood, that has now been sitting, piled up, for more than a year. At least it had time to acclimate to the environment in the house. Other major things still include the Kitchen and the exterior, though for the outside I think most of the work will be done by someone less half-assed than we. I think we will have to wait until at least next spring to start on those things, mostly due to the larger costs they represent.

This goes out to Tojo, who will undoubtedly follow in this guy’s footsteps.

The upstairs still has much to attend to. The hardwood flooring is only about one-sixth done. We have laid the floor in one of the bedrooms, but we still have the other bedroom and the hall to go. Then there is the sanding staining and finishing. We probably should have gone the pre-finished Bellawood route or something, but we are too stupid for that, so we had to go with a more traditional product. This is something that is usually, and probably rightly so, done by a professional, but we are trying it ourselves. Just so you know about Bellawood, there is always a way to tell if it is being used. It has a slight bevel edge on each side of the board. The way I understand it, there are slight differences in thickness when the planks are milled. Normally this would be evened out in the sanding step of hardwood flooring, but since this is a pre-finished product, there is no sanding step, so the bevel edge makes it harder for us to notice the difference between the boards. Neat trick, but we didn’t want it just because we didn’t like the little grooves in the floor. I think it looks dumb.

There is a gang of work to do in the front, or what will be the master bathroom. We got a really cool tub with champagne bubbles and shit, but we have yet to install it. We are still waiting on the grouting of the tile, and the finishing of the plumbing. It should be pretty cool when it is all done. It is closed now with entry only from the bedroom attached. I did some ok work on that.

There are some other plumbing issues with the upstairs bathrooms too. There is a somewhat major leak from the main bath to the dining room, and that ain’t good. It’s going to be a nightmare to repair, but what are you gonna do, right? We will be relying on professionals for that one. When they fix it, we can finally get the king of all tubs reattached. It is the coolest bathtub in the world, but until it is attached is just a really odd towel hanger.

There are some other more minor things to take care of, then it’s off to the kitchen and the most extensive project yet! We’ll put my carpentry skills to the test as I try to make something that is virtually level.