New Living Room?

We are fast approaching the 2 year mark from when I first mentioned getting some new living room furniture and it seems as if we are fast approaching doing something about it. Today we stopped into the local Badcock furniture store and bought a coffee table (looks something like this.) We have also provisionally picked out a sofa (looks exactly like this.)

We are waiting on actually redoing the living room until the real dusty (demo & sheet rock) kitchen work is over. We bought the table because we didn’t want to lose out, they had only 3 left in the warehouse and that model has been discontinued. The couch we could wait on because there were 20 in the warehouse and 20 more inbound, so the only way we lose out is if Badcock sells a hundred of them a week for the next 4 weeks or everyone reading this blog goes out and buys 133-1/3 sofas each.

Started up, went down, still down.
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Redneck Networking

Note camo duct tape to hide the wire.In preparation for the Big Kitchen Remodel (another acronym coming right up) we moved the computer workstation/office from the front room next to the kitchen to the middle bedroom in the back of the house. It took about two hours to remove all the separate pieces of computer gizmos, the 18 miles of cables and dust everything off. Another hour to disassemble the desk it all sat on and move it to the new location. Then about another hour to put everything back on the desk and hook it up.

Because we had cable TV in this spot prior all I had to do was use that wire for the cable modem, right? Wrong. No signal. When we originally installed cable internet they insisted on running a separate line directly to the modem. Not knowing just how many splitters this cable ran through, but knowing it was at least two, I figured this might be the issue. Called the cable company’s support line and they ran a check from their end and could see the modem, but barely. When I explained what was going on they said they would need to run another line straight to this new location. Forty-five dollars. We’ve got the high speed monkey on our back, so I said, “We’re in.” He said, “We can get somebody out there the day after tomorrow.”

Made it only a couple hours before I had a junkie style brainstorm. Put the modem & router back in the original room and buy a wireless adapter for the desktop. Off to Staples we went. For $25 I bought this little tiny USB wireless adapter and we were back in business. For the first few days it was fine, a little slow and occasionally flaky. As the days wore on the connection seemed to get a little worse each day. Instead of keeping the adapter plugged into the PC, I elevated it using a 6 foot cable. Didn’t help much.

When the connection was so poor that I couldn’t even reliably stream RP I needed another solution. I asked our IT Guy, John Smith (his real name) if we had any long pieces of Cat5 cable around. I was going to crawl under the house and run a piece of wire from the router to the back bedroom. When John asked how long, I said, “About 100 feet.” He said no, but he did have some surplus long cables in the computer room. Turns out he had about a half dozen 50’ cables all tangled up in a box and I could have 2 for the cost of untangling them.

Donna really didn’t want me crawling around under the house stringing cable just for use for a couple months, so she said we can just run the cable behind and under things for the duration. After all, the house is going to be in a shambles in much greater magnitude during the BKR, so how could a bit of Redneck Networking hurt. (Note the camo duct tape to “hide” the cable.)

We took the $25 refund from Staples in cash and turned it into a meal of Dragon & Phoenix at the Red Bowl tonight.

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Shores Of Tripoli

The Marines, the few, the proud, America’s premier fighting force, were not afraid on the shores of Tripoli nor the Halls of Montezuma but they cower before the specter of Beyonce.

Earlier today Master Sgt. Kristin duBois,a spokeswoman for the U.S. Marine Band, said the band was notified at the last minute that Beyonce would use a pre-recorded voice track.

Later in the day, Marine Corps spokesman Capt. Gregory Wolf statement included this line, “Regarding Ms. Knowles-Carter’s vocal performance, no one in the Marine Band is in a position to assess whether it was live or pre-recorded.

A Walk in the Woods

Memorial Gate

For the first time in quite a while we went for a walk in Hitchcock Woods. From slightly chilly at the start to just right at the finish, it was a great day for one. For the drive home we even got to drop the top on the Emperor. It was a busy day in the woods too; we saw 5 folks on horseback, 3 fox squirrels, 2 people entering as we were exiting and 1 lone jogger.

Friday we ordered the cabinets and counter top. Yesterday we bought a pendant light for over the sink, the white subway back splash tiles and picked up our online ordered faucet. Today we meet with the contractor and set a date, he starts demolishing our kitchen on February 4th. I also wrote him a deposit check of 30% of his fee and it took two tries. I ran out of room the first time when the figure was X thousand, X hundred, X tens, X ones point XX cents, so we rounded up to X thousand & X hundred dollars.

This evening we spent our $200 microwave allowance on a really cool retro looking microwave, a 4 slice toaster and a new electric teapot.

The only thing left for us to buy for the project now is the under cabinet lights and it is turning out to be harder than I thought. The little puck lights I first picked out were going to be like $80 for both sets. The contractor poo-poo’d them as they were more homeowner DIY and not really set up to be hardwired in like he planned. So I started hunting the web for something more appropriate and mostly found stuff the pushed the $400 mark for our set up. Gotta find a sweet spot somewhere in between those two.

Started up, went down, still down.
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Seasonally Appropriate Weather

Today was the MMC breakfast for January. Unlike last weekend’s top down all day weather for the trip to the Microcar Museum, this morning’s temperatures were about half of what they were then, so tops were up at all times. Fittingly this weekend we only had half the cars of last weekend. Still there were five cars for the drive to the Swamp Fox in Aiken from the starting point in North Augusta. And when we got to the restaurant there was one car waiting for us.

We had told the folks at the restaurant that there would be around twelve of us and it turned out we were right on the money. Ten made the drive and one was waiting. The twelfth man was a friend of a member who worked at the Aiken Train Museum and came to tell us a little about it and offer up a tour of the place afterwards.

We could walk to the museum as it was only about 4 blocks away, but with the seasonally appropriate weather and being a car club and all, we would probably drive. As breakfast progressed and we heard some history, almost everyone thought a trip to a transportation museum for the second Saturday in a row didn’t sound like too bad an idea.

At some point our guest received a phone call and when he hung up he had some “good news” for us, there was a kids birthday party at the museum and we could help out by doing a little instructional skit for the kids. Four of us would be the train engine wheels and make chugging noises and one lucky person would be the smoke stack and get to make woo-woo sounds. One other would get to pretend to be stuck on the tracks and another would get to rescue them.

Our guest had to get to the museum in a slight hurry, so off he went, telling us to meet him there. As we all settled up our bills, most of us decided that visiting the train museum would be a better idea on a day that didn’t involve a kids birthday party, I think a couple cars did go, but the majority scattered in other directions.

Started down, went up, still up.
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Heavy Lifting

Floor Tiles

We went to Lowe’s tonight and picked up the kitchen floor tiles. Nine boxes with 18 tiles in each and three loose ones. To even out the load some we put four boxes on the back seat and 5 boxes in the trunk of the Purple Whale. The car was still un-level enough that I had a couple people flash their lights at me thinking I had my high beams on.

After lugging everything into the house I went and got a bathroom scale to see how much a box weighed. 60lbs! Yikes, us old folks ain’t used to toting that much stuff.