Car, not house, no pictures

. . .because I'm lazy.

But until I get some pictures of the fixed foundation cracks, this is what I'll write.

Back before Christmas, I got myself a slightly early birthday present - a new car stereo. My prior one had ceased ejecting CD's, and pulling them out with tweezers doesn't help them not to skip. I had thought better of Clarion - the thing was only 2 or 3 years old. Oh well.

So I ordered a new one from Crutchfield (not the cheapest, not the most expensive, but wonderful stories about their service and warranty from my friends/coworkers). It's a brand that I had never heard of, but it had good reviews, and the price was right. A Dual XHD6425 (I think that's the model number), for $129, free shipping, free mount kit, wiring adapter, etc. For an extra $50 I got a Bluetooth adapter to go with it.

HD Radio, Bluetooth, CD (mp3s), and mp3's from USB stick. Cheap.

This is the first car stereo I've ever installed myself, and sadly, the 4th in my Saturn in < 10 years. The one thing I've learned: the car/car stereo industry doesn't give one whit about standardization.

I had to disconnect the battery first. They suggest the negative terminal (easier to get to in my car), so I tried. It was like it was welded on. So I went to positive, and had no problems.

Then I had to remove the Clarion, and of course the folks that installed it didn't give me the "keys" that came with it. They screwed some stuff up too, but more on that later. Since I had a space mount kit, I just pulled the whole thing out.

The mount kit is basically just a plastic piece that fits into the dash. It originally had 2 plates in the middle of it with holes for the old tuning knobs (analog?). Those were supposed to be cut out with an razor knife - I ended up using wirecutters. Then the metal sleeve slides in, and of course, it doesn't slide in. So, Dremel to the rescue! You know it's a good project when you get to use a Dremel tool on something.

After that, just matching up colors on wires, and I amazingly got it all right the first time.

My only complaint is that I can't have the time on the display and any other useful info (station, song title) at the same time.

About a week later, the eletrical system in my car starts acting funny. . .it kind of just shuts down. And this get progressively worse over the next week.

I finally take it in, and apparently the negative terminal of the battery was crossthreaded and torqued in, actually loosening the connection inside the battery. They had to destroy the batter to remove it. My fiddling must have made it a little worse, but luckily, in the end, it wasn't a major problem.

So now I have a cool new stereo in my car :)

One small house add on

On project that took me a couple of months to get around to was hanging the dart board. I needed a good place to hang it, and a good thing to hang it on (backing). I had one I purchased from Walmart years ago, complete with the wooden case, but it was falling apart, not really a good board, and the case was more hassle that it was worth.

So looking around the house, I dug out some scraps leftover from the construction and made a new backer for it.

1 piece of 3/4" plywood, a matching piece of fairly thick carpet, both cut in something kind of like a square (probably more of a rectangle), a couple of pieces of corner molding and some finishing nails, and a couple of long screws, and I had somehow manage to build something that didn't suck and almost looked decent.



The only thing I purchased special for it was the molding and finishing nails. I tried to miter the corners of it using a saw (with no miter box), and when that got to be too much of a pain, I went to mitering with a dremel tool. Probably a good thing you can't zoom in on this image too much; the corners look better this way :)

A few small screws hold the carpet to the plywood, plus the finishing nails go through the molding and hold it around the edges. It's attached to the studs in the wall behind it via 4 2" screws. It's not going anywhere.

The carpet is fairly thick (Karastan if anyone cares - expensive stuff), and presses tight against the board, so it doesn't rotate too easily either.

Off white Christmas

With all the snow we've had (basically 3 days in a row of it), it got to where I had nowhere for the snowthrower to throw it.

Then of course, it warms up (and rains). Almost all of the snow (over a foot) is now pretty much gone. Our once invisible Christmas lights in the yard out front are now visible again.

Santa brought me Guitar Hero World Tour (Wii) this year. It's the set that comes with the drums, mic, and guitar. I've only played Guitar Hero one time prior to owning it, and was somewhat hooked, but could never convince my wife that we should buy it. We played it for 4 hours straight the first night we had it, mostly swapping out between guitar and mic (because drums are a little loud, though obviously not as loud as the real thing). It's an interesting setup. . .

I was kind of surprised that there was a base drum pedal included, but more surprised to see a MIDI input on the drum kit. As far as I can tell, there's a piece of software for PC that you can use a USB to MIDI connector and adjust the sensitivity of the drum set. From what little I know of MIDI, that's kind of odd, but I guess I don't know that much.

Of course, another odd thing I discovered was an RJ11 (telephone) jack on the guitar. I haven't even googled to find out what that's for yet.

It's got a pretty good mix of songs, though there's a bunch of european stuff that isn't in English, so it's a bit annoying on the vocals. I'm still playing on guitar on beginner, working up through medium, but we've played through most of the career part already. There's a couple of things you have to "buy", but we have to earn a bit more money for that.

You can also use Wii points to buy individual songs (supposedly due to the way the Wii download stuff works it can't get groups of songs, which means some stuff that's available for XBox 360 isn't for Wii, since some bands apparently want to force bundle songs - according to the message forums for GH. Stupid limitation. They could have basically made it a tarball and untarred it on the receiving end).

And you should see a 2.5 year old on drums. . .and mic. . .and guitar. . .all while we're trying to play those instruments as well.

Hell Freezes Over

And the Eagles are back together. . .of course, that was years ago.

On Dec 12th, we joined most of the state in a terrible ice storm. It started late Thursday (when I got this picture), and went on through the night. Most of the night, my wife was kind of worried due to what sounded like gunfire. The next day, we saw that it was branches of trees throughout the neighborhood finding their way down into the street.




We had the power flicker a couple of times, then the dogs woke me up just before the final power outage at 6:30am.

For the morning, we just chilled out without power, which is more difficult than you think when you have a 2 year old who wants to watch TV or play video games.

We eventually decided to go out to McDonald's to get something to eat. That in itself was a challenge. . .most of the roads were blocked with downed power lines and branches.









One thing we did do was build a gingerbread house. Something I've never done before. We ended up with something rather decent looking (I guess it's easier when you're working from a kit).








After not being able to get food from McDonald's (because the power was out), we just gave up and went to a hotel out of town. We ate McDonald's there instead :)

Most of the surrounding area has been without power since Friday. We were lucky enough to get it back Saturday morning, but most of the people in the hotel were there for the same reason, and numerous others I've heard this morning we out to eat or whatever for the same reason. Some people aren't expecting power for a while yet. I guess we're lucky in that it's a small town with municipal power.

Despite all of the destruction, I haven't seen a damaged house or car (lots of sheds though). 3 roads I could see from my house were blocked. It is amazingly beautiful, too. . .ice coated trees really sparkle in the sunlight. Here's a couple more pics.

Park Place

Owner collect $2000.

Not really. And I'm not even sure if the value is right for Monopoly.

And it looks a lot different with the fence.

My daughter loves playing outside, especially at the park. Slides, swings, sandboxes, that sort of stuff, makes her day. At our old house, we had purchased one of these swing set / slide contraptions, and at the new place, we needed a good place to put it. So we made one.

We picked out a 20' x 20' patch of land (which happened to be where the grass was growing best) that was fairly level. 400 sq ft of landscape fabric was rolled out and pinned down. We tried the kind of plastic border stuff that you simply hammer into the ground, but in the soil we have up here, that wasn't happening. . .basically, there's a minimum of 500 rocks per cubic ft of soil. Stakes work ok, but anything bigger is a pain in the arse. We ended up using the roll up plastic stuff that you see in the gardening section of Walmart, with a bunch of plastic stakes pinning it down. This worked remarkably well.

So the point of all that was to create an area in which to put mulch. Not just any mulch, but the good rubber mulch, made out of old tires (you can actually see some of the imprints from the tire on some of it). This stuff is expensive, but it doesn't decompose, you don't have to worry about splinters (unless there's some kind they make out of steel belted tires - ouch!), it won't float off in a heavy rain, and it's relatively soft. We probably should have a lot more in there, but it's kind of cost prohibitive, and it's not really like anyone's going to be falling very far into it.

"Hot town, summer in the city

. . .back of my neck getting dirty and gritty. . ."

When we made an offer for the house, we included getting central AC. And they agreed.

Due to the time frame for the house being built, they didn't install the compressor (we had a holdback of a few grand to cover the stuff that the builder had to finish in the spring).

Finally, summer comes, they've installed the compressor. We finally go to turn it on, and nothing. Not a sound from anything except a click in the thermostat. Look outside, and the compressor isn't moving. So I call the company that installed it, since it's under warranty. They eventually send someone out, who tells me that no one hooked up the power to the compressor, and that I have to get an electrician to do that. I think it's extremely stupid that they don't have an electrician on their staff just for that purpose. They never even told anyone that an electrician needed to come out.

So I get the electrician that did the original work on my house to come out, and he connects it up. He apparently stopped by and did it when I was out (there's a separate outside breaker box), so when I need the AC again, and start getting pissed, I find out that it's hooked up. I started it, didn't come on, call the electrician again, he comes out, and it turns out the the HVAC people screwed up some internal wiring. He gets it working, cursing them.

We turn on the AC, head out for a couple of hours, come back, and the basement floor is being covered with water, and the house isn't significantly cooler. So I call the HVAC people again. They send someone out, and he drills a hole in the slab of my house, and runs a PVC drain pipe into it, tells my wife that there's another thing that needs to be fixed and leaves. I find this out when I come home, get really pissed off because I've had to call them so many times, and they still haven't got the damn thing working right. And they didn't even clean up the extra pieces of pipe and cement dust off the floor. I find out that they installed the wrong size evaporator in the unit, so they have to get the new one and bring it. In the meantime, it will work, just not as effeciently. They installed the system, but didn't put the right part in?

I call my contractor to find out how bad an idea it is to drain under the slab, because it sounds stupid to me. He has them (the HVAC people) send someone out to install a drain pump. Apparently this guy is actually decent, says that it's an unfinished basement, so running this drain isn't a problem, and should have been done from the beginning. He also cleans up the mess left by the other guys, fills in the holes (there are actually 3 - guess they couldn't find a good place the 2nd time) with silicon. Since that, so far, we've had no problems.

A pain in the butt that took over 2 weeks to resolve, but in the end, it's worth it. It works well now, and I was shocked by how little it affected the power bill.

Food!

Actually, no, nothing at all to do with food. Maybe one day I'll post those squirrel cleaning instructions. Sadly, I don't personally have squirrel cooking instructions.

On the good side, the paraplegic dog is now fairly independent. This is very good, as now we don't have to walk down stairs and carry the dog around everywhere just so it can urinate/defecate. Also good since it's getting cold out.

So after the fence, the next project on the house was to section off the basement. We actually started this before the dog-stroke incident.

As you may have seen from the single picture of the house I posted previously, it's a split level house. The basement is completely unfinished.

The first "basement finishing" project we had was intended to target 2 goals: separate the upstairs/downstairs better for heating/cooling, and create a closet under the stairs.

Over the course of 2 weekends, my brother-in-law and I managed to mostly succeed. We built the door frame, installed a pre-hung door, put up some sheet rock. We had a few issues hanging the door straight, but we fixed it fairly easily the second weekend. We also sheetrocked under the stairs and hung a bifold door, and despite Mark's trying to screw up the measurements, it actually hung pretty much perfect the first time.