The Johnson Blog

Where the heck did the long weekend go?? Painting, that’s where. Ana and I decided to brighten up our house a little bit by painting the family room, kitchen, and foyer. It took the better part of 3 days to get it all done, with the help of Jay and Katherine, and we are exhausted and not looking forward to getting up for work in the morning.

Photos are up in the gallery. You may notice that all of the house related pictures are hidden from view. Just didn’t feel right essentially having an entire blueprint and inventory online for the world to see. If you would like the login, shoot me an email or IM me and I’ll send you the information. Sorry for the inconvenience.

If/when you get a login, the photos are here.

I typically don’t comment on current events, but I have just been astounded in the past 48 hours at the breakdown of society in New Orleans. I never imagined I would be seeing a disaster in the U.S. unfold on television where the rescuers and authorities were essentially paralyzed out of security fears.

I can understand people taking food, water, and other necessities (I’m certain I’d do the same in that situation) from stores – but the rampant theft of everything else is insane. Electronics? Sports jerseys? WTF? I have viewed crime as something done for personal gain. But in this situation, what the hell is to be gained? Every one of them is in the same cesspool.

And the stories of murder?? Rape?? Growing up, and until 2 days ago, I often wondered about why the National Guard was called in after natural disasters. It’s vividly clear now – boy was I naive.

Our prayers go out to all those suffering, hopefully the pain will lighten.

Today my department has a day off, with a picnic at the lake starting at 11:30. I was excited to learn that this coincided with the annual Perseid meteor showers which peaked at predawn this morning. Unfortunately the clouds didn’t cooperate this morning so we weren’t able to see any and were forced to head to bed at 4am.

Today we went and purchased a pair of Schwinn Suburban Sport Comfort Bikes (men’s and women’s)! Also picked up a few accessories for riding like water bottles, bike pump, etc. Our first impressions of these bikes are very positive. The seats have springs underneath (as you can see in the pictures) and are made of gel which make for a pretty comfortable cushion.

In an effort to lower my blood pressure (along with eating less garbage), we’ve been trying to become a little less sedentary in our free time. Often this has taken the form of walking and racquetball at the courts at work, but there have been a few times when we didn’t feel like driving all the way back across town to play. So having bikes will allow us to quickly get some exercise. We live very close to the Lost Bridge Trail (map here) which is a paved bike path between Springfield and Rochester, so I imagine we’ll be making quite a few trips on it in the future.

I have the NASA TV internet feed up, just about 23 minutes until launch. Here’s to hoping the shuttle gets off to a successful flight.

Retired the Myth TV box tonight, and it is the new webserver. Its processor is a couple generations newer than the old one, so things should be a lot snappier.

This is gonna be a long one…sorry.

Paul Tarr’s wedding was this weekend in Columbia, IL so Ana and I decided to take the opportunity and spend the weekend in St. Louis. Before heading down there on Friday after work, we made a stop at the Annual Chatham Sweet Corn Festival to listen to the band Jay is in, Cinnamon Toast Funk. After some delicious corn and great music, we hit the highway and were on our way to St. Louis.

Our first stop was to Busch Stadium to see if there was any chance of us sneaking in late in the game when they open up the gates, but we were a few innings to early and just had a nice walk around the outside of the stadium. We did get to see the new stadium so it wasn’t a total loss. At around 9:30pm, we decided to head over to our favorite restaurant in The Hill, Zias. As always, the food was awesome. After a short stop to check into our hotel in Clayton, it was off to the Waldenbooks in the Galleria… for the midnight distribution of Harry Potter. Oh the joy 🙂 Ana’s been reading the book on and off all weekend.

On Saturday we spent a good portion of the morning shopping in the Galleria and the afternoon in the St. Louis Science Center. It has been a long time since my last visit…. wow, I had forgotten how much fun it is! I even had my first visit to a planetarium. We had to cut our Science Center visit short and head to Paul’s wedding and reception in Columbia.

Today was a lot of fun. We went to a Cardinals store in the Galleria and treated ourselves to several new Cardinal jackets, shirts, and sweatshirts. After that, and a trip to Crate an Barrel for a few things, we decided to head to the grocery store Viviano’s on The Hill to get some great Italian food. But, somehow we forgot/didn’t know that they were closed on Sundays and left empty handed. This really confuses us because we swear we’ve stopped there in the past on our way back from St. Louis on Sundays. Shrug.

After that disappointment, we decided we would just head home. On a whim, I decided to swing by Busch Stadium and see if I could procure a pair of tickets. (this weekend has been a sold-out series with the Houston Astros). We ran across someone a couple blocks from the stadium and the price was right…score!

Or so we thought. Busch Stadium this year is doing something new with their tickets, they are scanning them as you enter the park. When we tried getting in, we learned that the tickets had been used already, but the gentleman suggested we just go to a different gate and say we had exited the park and needed back in. We tried a few gates and kept getting turned down, but finally had success. The game turned out very well, got a lot of sun and got to see a good pitcher’s duel.

We headed home after the game and I mowed the lawn. As I was sweeping up, a man and his wife (from the neighborhood) were walking past and stopped to ask what I do to get the yard to green. Woo, go Scott’s Turf Builder!

So that’s it, we’re really tired from all the sun and Ana is reading Harry Potter as I type this.