My iPod is working again.......I think

I tried a little experiment this weekend after I was done with my chores and build outs of things that needed assembly. I decided to dust off my iPod which I hadn't touched in 2 weeks to see if it would work again. By this time I totally discharged the thing so the memory was probably erased and reset. I hooked it up to my computer and it actually started to sync up my songs without freezing! The ultimate test was this morning though, when I hooked it up to my iTrip and tried it out to see if it would actually play any songs. It actually worked!!! I'm not holding my breath though, this is probably temporary but at least I won't have to listen to the radio for a little bit. I'm going to invest in a new iPod Nano most likely because it doesn't use a hard drive. I wish it came in a 20Gig version since i have 12 gigs of songs but eh, I guess thats asking too much from Apple.

I can't find the camera so I can't post pictures

I've been meaning to take some pictures of the new townhouse I'm in now but I can't seem to find the camera anywhere. I've looked sort of but not really. There were tons of boxes to unpack and then all the stuff that my wife and I bought to make the place comfortable. There are still lots of little things like pictures and stuff to hang on the walls and 3 ceiling fans that need to go up (although I need a really tall ladder to put these bad boys up) but all in all, its definitely starting to feel like home. My cats seem to be liking the new home as well with 2 different couches to sleep on and more rooms and such to explore and sniff around. I think they like the office the best when I'm in there or my wife is, they tend to hang out where we are most of the time and really enjoy the office chair.

I'm sure the camera is around somewhere and once I find it I'll take pictures and post it up on Flickr or something. It'll show up on the lovely little badge I have on my blog. I'd post one of those Slide Shows that a lot of people have on MySpace but I'm too lazy to do that. Besides, I want people to work to see my pictures and not have random people see it on my MySpace page which I barely maintain as it is.

A weekend of building and buying

This weekend was full of lots of buying and building and of course it was all for the townhouse. My wife and her sister wanted grills so they went out and got a couple of them at Sears so that we can start to grill stuff like fish, steak, veggies, chicken....... basically if it can be thrown a grill, they'll probably make it. I would say that I spent the better part of Saturday morning putting mine together here at my place trying to figure out how everything fit together. What should have taken maybe an hour took me around 2 instead but thats because I was trying to make sure I put it together right. I was pretty happy that I actually got the thing together correctly and didn't have a ton of extra parts as I sometimes do when I put things together. After I finished I went ahead and put it in the front courtyard near the kitchen so its all ready to go for some grilling.

After that was all done, I went over to my sister in laws place to put hers together. Her grill was much easier to put together since I just finished assembling mine and had a good idea of where everything went so it only took 30 minutes to put hers together. We actually used hers thats night for dinner to cook some salmon for dinner which was pretty nice. At least the thing didn't blow up which would have totally been a bad thing.

The townhouse also got a house warming gift as well courtesy of my wife. She got a beautiful 42" plasma TV for the bedroom :) We didn't have a TV in the bedroom because we didn't want to spend a lot of time in there while ignoring the rest of the townhouse but after living here a few weeks it became apparent that a TV would be beneficial. Next Saturday its going to be mounted on the bedroom wall, right now I have it on the dresser. Since its all high definition and all that jazz, our regular DVD players weren't going to cut it. I attempted to use the Sony DVD player that my wife bought me when we were still dating around 8 years ago and we found the picture quality lacking. So whats a guy to do but buy a DVD player that has HDMI outputs! I must say that the picture quality is much improved when you hook it up with HDMI. I didn't spring for Blue Ray or HD-DVD yet because the prices are just too steep right now and I don't see the big deal with HD DVD's when the regular ones seem just fine. Needless to say, I'm going to be enjoying this new setup for years to come :) YAY!

A productive weekend

This past weekend was very productive. I had a lot of help from my wife and father in law but a lot of things at the house were done. Since my father in law is pretty handy around the house he's been helping out a lot with the blinds by drilling holes and putting them up for me and my wife. In the mean time, my wife went out and bought all the ceiling fans and the chandelier for the house so I was glad about that.

Today I decided to take a crack at the office ceiling fan and the chandalier. I did the ceiling fan first in the office because it didn't look all that difficult to accomplish and the ceilings downstairs are decidedly lower than the ones upstairs which are about 15 feet high. It took me basically the entire morning just trying to figure out how to wire the fan correctly since I'm not that great with electrical stuff. The fan that my wife bought for the office has a remote so that made things a bit more challenging since the housing for the remote had to be wedged in with all the other electrical stuff near the ceiling. However, I have to say that by around 1pm I was successful and the ceiling fan is working quite well :)

The chandalier was a bit different because I had no idea how to get this one assembled. I managed to get it out of the box and I also attached most of the non breakable parts to it and even managed to string all the wiring to the ceiling but there was at least 10 feet of wire and that just wouldn't do when all I really needed was a foot and a half. My father in law helped me a lot with this one since he has all the good tools and the know how on how to put it up. I ended up just helping him while he rewired everything and screwed it into the ceiling. I was able to at least shorten the chain that leads down from the ceiling to the chandalier but I also broke one of the test light bulbs I was using so that was a drag since I had to go to home depot to replace it. But by the time I got back it was all assembled and ready to go. The light is way brighter than the little light the builder originally put in.

Now all thats left is 3 more fans and some more blinds and some of the bigger stuff will be complete! Man, can't wait! It's late as hell and I have work nice and early tomorrow morning, if I have the time maybe I'll make another post tomorrow or something.

MIA is dirty

I'm sitting here in Miami International airport waiting for my flight to begin boarding. I had a pizza for dinner and decided to lounge and make some phone calls from the waiting area. In my area I encountered a little furry friend ie form of a small mouse. I've been watching it pop out of its hole in the wall by the window and scurry around trying to find niblets of food. I'm sure most airports have their fair share of mice and all but this is the first time I've seen one scurry around near people. The little bugger is fast too and I was able to make it jump in the air by snapping my fingers at it. I can tolerate a dirty airport but the fact that I've seen this little guy out in the open moves MIA to the top of my shitty airport list, now that's impressive because I thought no one could top JFK and steal its crown. Man alive this town sucks! Give me FTL any day.

Putting up the blinds

This weekend I was going to attempt to put up the blinds in the townhouse and boy did I dismally fail! I tried lots of different wall anchors, some cement bolts because my townhouse is made of poured cement and drilled a few holes into the wall and didn't get one single blind up. My father in law was nice enough to come by with his friend Julio and he was able to put up 2 blinds after he figured out I was using the wrong types of anchors and screws. He also had all the power tools and bits I probably needed to do the job but just don't have because I'm not so big into power tools except my electric screw driver that I use to assemble simple furniture. After the blinds go up, it might be time for the ceiling fans, that should be interesting since the ceilings upstairs are around 15 feet high.......... Ah home ownership, gotta love it sometimes.

Some funny math

I was reading BetaNews this weekend just to keep myself updated on the movings and shakings in the IT world when I saw an article about Sony and their PS3. Link! It seems that they're popping the champagne about selling 1 million PS3's but if you read the article, they have maybe sold around 750K of them in actuality. Hm..... who the hell are their accountants? That kind of math is just way out there and I would totally look into their finances to see if they fudged anything on their balance sheet, last I heard 750K doesn't equal 1 Mil in any way, shape or form.

I'm still unpacking

It's been about 3 weeks since I moved into my townhouse and I'm still unpacking stuff. Most of the townhouse is done but the real disaster is the office at the moment. There are tons and tons of boxes in there. My wife and I worked on it a little last night and she was able to unpack a lot of the boxes and she was nice enough to put away my multitude of books that I own on our sole bookshelf that we currently own. Tonight I get to break down a ton of boxes since I didn't do it last night but thats not a big deal, I have a nice new box cutter to get rid of them :)

It's all coming together

So far I've spent at least a week and a half to two weeks at my new townhouse and I gotta say its pretty sweet. There's a hell of a lot more cleaning involved though because there is so much more square footage to cover. But thankfully, we have all the furniture that we ordered, the washer and dryer are set up, and pretty much everything is put together and unloaded........ except for the office which is primarily my space in the townhouse because of all my electronic doodads and whatcha-callits. There are lots of boxes in there to unload but I'll get to that in the next few days. I'm going to concentrate on the surround sound system tonight and maybe try and put up some blinds and hopefully not mess it up. Pics will be forth coming in the next MONTH, lol thats when I expect Claire and I to have things in working order.

Finally Moved In!

First and foremost Happy New Year to all the people that are reading this.  It's been a while since I've posted a blog but I've been very busy over the holidays moving into my new place and all that goes with it (including no internet access yet).  Basically I'll give a summary of what happened over the past week.

 

December 27 - The Closing

This is the all important day for me and my wife.  On this day we actually closed on our townhouse.  The meeting took about two hours to sign every piece of paper that was put towards us.  I didn't know that there were so many damn papers to sign when closing on a home.  I don't think I want to experience that again personally.  The good thing is that there were pretty much no problems with the documents that were prepared.  I'm told that is highly unusual that everything is in place for closing but I'll just take my good fortune and go about my business.  After closing, getting our keys, a bottle of champagne, and dropping a ton on closing costs, we headed over to the complex to get the gate transponders so we can come and go as we please as well as the garage door openers.  Unfortunately this took about half an hour because the person that was assisting us was moving at a snails pace.  It doesn't take half an hour to get us transponders for a gate.  Also for the privilege of using the gym facilities, we had to drop a little bit of money for a key, only one per household so they can control who goes in and out.

 

Next we decided to head over to the townhouse and go through the garage and unpack some stuff that we brought with us.  We also decided to make a trip or two to the storage unit to unload some of the boxes we had rather than have movers do it for us.  We ended up going out later and getting all sorts of cleaning supplies so that we could begin cleaning the place in the following days since there was a small layer of construction dust on everything.  Needless to say we didn't stay there that night because we had no furniture or bed.

 

December 28 - Another uneventful day

Not much happened on Thursday except shuttling boxes to the townhouse after work and cleaning up at my sister in laws place.  My cats were still in quarantine because they were declawed recently since they both have a destructive streak in them and love to tear into furniture and carpet.  The packing was basically completed and everything boxed up and ready to go so that we would be ready for our move New Years weekend.  Also we hired painters and they surprised my wife by calling her at work to say they were ready to paint.  We really didn't expect them until this week but since they had time she had to drive all the way to Pembroke Pines from Ft. Lauderdale to let them in so they could begin.  I went over after work to see how the paint was coming along and I was impressed how fast they did everything.  The colors my wife chose looked good, but the real fun was on Friday........

 

December 29 - Furniture and Paint

Ahh Friday, nothing like a day off of work to end a week.  The painters were there nice and early at 8am (I wish could have slept in).  I brought more boxes with me and dumped them in various closets.  I let the painters in and they went right to work.  So it wasn't so silent I provided entertainment by blasting music from my Bose computer speakers that I hooked up to my iPod.  I didn't know much about what colors went where so at one point in the morning I called my wife to tell her the progress on the paint.  Apparently the guy in charge told them the wrong colors for the great room and the upstairs loft.  The entire downstairs was supposed to have green paint of various hues and the upstairs a brown paint of various hues as well.  The upstairs loft had green and the downstairs great room had brown.  I asked him for the color swatches since I didn't have them and told him the colors needed to be switched.  So a job that should have been finished by noon took the rest of the day which totally stunk for them and for me because they were in the house that much longer.  At around 1pm, I got a call from the front gate telling me that furniture was coming in.  Of course this is totally not good because I had painters in the place putting up new paint on the walls.  I was supposed to get 2 couches, a chair, 2 ottomans and a cocktail table.  Normally it should be easy to see the furniture when they deliver it because its just supposed to be in plastic.  The furniture came out of the truck packed in moving blankets so I couldn't tell what was what.  I knew that one of the couches needed to go upstairs but I didn't want them to unwrap it because of the wet paint.  Paint can be done over again pretty easily on a wall but paint on a couch would be terrible so I kinda looked at the couches and decided, hey the big one goes upstairs!  The furniture guys gave me this weird look and said, that big thing is going up there???  I was like yup!  Most of the furniture went upstairs because thats where the TV is, only an ottoman and a couch (sectional really) stayed downstairs.  I unwrapped them and looked at it and thought it was wrong but I couldn't tell one way or another because I forgot what the furniture we bought looked like.  After looking things over everything seemed ok but I wasn't really sure and needed to wait for my wife to come home so she could tell me one way or the other if they brought over the right stuff.  After the painters were done, my wife came home and looked over the furniture.  She determined that I told the delivery guys to bring the wrong couch upstairs but I couldn't know that since I had them bring it up while it was wrapped.  So a new dilemma hit us, how do we get the couch downstairs and put the other one upstairs??  HA, thats Saturday's problem...........

 

December 30 - More furniture....

The dining room set we bought at another place.  It's supposed to be square with a round glass part in the middle.  It looked really cool in the store and my wife liked it  so why not right?  Anyway, the delivery guys came in nice and early to give us our table and six chairs.  The chairs were just fine but the table was scratched up so it had to go back, I'll be getting it on Saturday along with my washer and dryer.  The cool thing was that my wife and her sister convinced the two delivery guys to switch the couches.  I hid off in the office assembling a TV stand so I wouldn't be roped into helping and to see if the TV reception got any better because so far its still all fuzzy.  Afterwards it was time to start moving!  I rented a UHaul that was the same size as the one I drove down to South Florida so everything fit just nicely.  My brother in law and a friend helped with the really big stuff by loading it and unloading it into the truck, I owe them a meal of their choice whenever they decide to cash that in.  The funny part really was the truck itself.  It was a bit old and had about 182K on the odometer so I knew it had been places already.  The gear indicator on the front was kind of deceiving and it was hard to tell what gear I was in.  Going to the storage place was fine, but going to my place on the highway was a bit of a struggle.  I couldn't figure out why I couldn't break 60MPH!  I had driven that kind of truck before and I knew I could hit 80.  It so happened that I was driving around in 2nd gear for about 10 miles on the highway.  The gear indicator said D for drive so naturally I thought I was in drive.  After I got off the exit and stopped, I decided to test and see what gear I was in and I did figure out I was only in second.  There was also a funny smell coming from the truck and the heat indicator was rising too.  I'm just glad I didn't blow the transmission on the way because that would have really sucked!  The unpacking was uneventful, there are tons of boxes everywhere and the cleaning has just begun.  The cats were still at my sister in laws apartment so they won't jump on everything or get in the way.

 

December 31 and January 1 - Unpacking and kitty comes home

Pretty much all of new years eve and new years day was spent unpacking and putting things away.  Since we donated our old dishes and flatware, we went out and got new ones so that was nice.  Almost all the dishes have been put away and I went to get the cats as well.  I put them in the second bedroom upstairs with their cage, carriers, blankets, food, litter box, and a whole boat load of cat toys but all they seem to want is to be pet and to roam outside.  They'll probably have to stay there for the next couple of days so we can finish putting more stuff away and I have a lot of office furniture to build as well as the coffee table for the loft.

 

It's now January 2 and I'm at the office working away (although I'm writing this during lunch).  I'm going to go blinds shopping at Lowes tonight and pick up some cat supplies.  Next week we get the table for the dining room and that should be it!  I think there's a rug coming too.  Ahh the joys of home ownership!