Category: Family

Weekly Updates Suck

September 16, 2006

I wish I could update this more frequently, since I really got into it for a while. But I just have so much less time now.

My days are about half filled with working on the course I am TA’ing (TA = Teaching Assistant). Which means testing the labs (circuit design and operation), doing the homework and labs, preparing downloadable solutions for the website and doing the grading. The rest of the time I am preparing my oral exam (topic: Patterson Methods) which has a tentative date of October 19.

Our Holly is in fruit, which is the first time I remember since we bought the house:

< Holly

Just now as I was taking these photos our front garden was overrun with a plague of flying ant-like insects. There were so many we could see them eating the leaves away on one of our plants. We blasted them with evil toxins from a can (which I didn’t enjoy doing, because I expect the collateral damage to spiders and the like was high).

KLS got an early birthday present today – a ‘Rose Coral’ DS Lite:

Which is timely, since she only just started playing her new favourite game, Cooking Mama! This is a game in which you cook (mostly Japanese) food by completing various minigames (such as cutting vegetables or measuring rice). She enjoys it a great deal and has been playing it constantly since I bought it for her. Since it’s a mere $20 here in the States, if you have a DS you may want to pick it up.

I just told her I blogged Cooking Mama, which she is playing as I type, and she said she was just ‘making a spring roll’. She was at the stage where she was ‘ripping the heads off the shrimps’ 🙂

Nintendo finally announced the street date (November 19) and price ($250) of the Wii this past week. I’ll be there launch day to buy one (and Zelda, and an additional controller). The idea of a pack-in-game (Wii Sports) is a great one, and I think it will be very successful for them. Not that they were going to have any trouble selling the Wii in the first place…

New Carpets

September 1, 2006

Our carpets were replaced Wednesday. It took two installers about 6.5 hours to completely remove the old carpets and install the new ones. In total we had about 800 square feet of carpets replaced, which was all the carpet in the house save the ‘fireplace room’ downstairs.

The old carpets were worn in the heavily trafficed area’s, and were a bit too deep pile for our liking. They also had 20 or 30 years of use in them:

< Old Carpets

Tearing out the old carpets revealed a disgusting amount of very fine, silty dirt beneath them. Once that was vacuumed up, the hardwood floors underneath were in pristine condition:

The last shot above shows the stairs. My guess, based on appearances, is that initially the stairs were left as hardwood and only the upstairs was carpeted (with a blue carpet; traces remained). And then at some point the orange carpet was installed over the stairs as well.

In the middle shot above, mildew is visible on the piece of padding thrown across the padding still on the floor. The staircase shot above shows the new padding. The new product is mildew resistant, and apparently such technology wasn’t available back when the old carpets were installed (estimated to be about 20-25 years ago).

The total cost was quite expensive, but we had a good feeling about the company we chose. The installers (who averaged about my age) were professional and friendly and – I’m glad to say – worked with care and finesse. They did an especially good job with the detailing on and around the staircase.

And here are some shots of the finished product. Note that we hadn’t finished reorganizing everything in these images:

And yes Bernard, that is a Morning Musume calendar visible through the door at the end of the hall in the last shot 🙂

Day Three: Touring

August 30, 2006

Our first stop on day three, after a delicious breakfast at a local diner, was QVC studios, for a tour and some shopping in the studio store.

QVC is a 24 hour cable shopping chanel, and both KLS and Joyce buy many things (especially makeup) from them. KLS and I have also developed a bit of a fascination with the mechanics of the sell, and I’m pleased to say the tour (which was about an hour long) was extremely interesting, showing us all around the studios – and even let us watch a show in progress (QVC is live 24 hours a day).

Photography was not permitted, hence the lack of images. But I can say that even if you have no interest in buying from QVC, I doubt you’d be disappointed in the very well organized tour.

After QVC, we were about six hours from Albany. We had one last destination, which was on the way back, and that was a tour of an old coal mine. Not knowing much about this destination, we let Giles guide us through the wonderful scenery (including a tunnel through a mountain) to Lackawanna Coal Mine:

Not much to see from the outside is it? At Lackawanna (which is near Scranton, PA), a disused mine is open for tours. Imagine our surprise when we learned we would actually be riding a mine car deep into the earth, and that the tour (which was about an hour in length) occured underground!

These pictures are a series, looking backwards as the car entered the mine. The descent along an at times steep slope was 1.3 miles in length, and ended 300 feet from the surface.

< Mine entrance

Photography inside the mine, due to the darkness, was obviously difficult. The guide took us along a series of tunnels, showing us how the miners worked, what the conditions were like and just what coal veins (and a coal mine) looks like from inside. I think it’s safe to say this tour was an unexpected treat to say the least, and perhaps one of the most entertaining aspects of our trip!

< The Underdark

With Lackawanna behind us it was time to wave goodbye to PA, but not before a stop off at a rest stop to buy some fireworks (which are illegal to sell in NY state)!

Here’s a couple of random shots from the trip:

< Advertisement on the diner placemat

< Sign in the Burger King mens toilet

And last but not least, KLS and I had to wave goodbye to Giles, who was on his way back to Joyce. He served us very, very well, and one of his final salutes was to provide us with a log of our trip:

< Trip statistics

750 miles travelled, on about $100 of gasoline. Not bad…

Robot Claw