The Johnson Blog

Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…

  • One Year

    Ana and I celebrated our 1 year anniversary tonight. I’m still astonished that she deemed me good enough to want to be around for the rest of her life. Thank goodness though, I don’t know what I’d do without her.

    On an unrelated note, well hopefully anyway… Ana’s heading out of town on business to New York. Hmmm, spend one year with me… get the urge to flee the state… hmmm, maybe it isn’t so unrelated ;) Anyhow, it’s a short trip and she’ll be back on Thursday. Looks like it’s back to my college training of eating TAPR and Ramen until then.

  • Art, Furniture

    It has been a busy day for us today. It started with us visiting The Old Capital Art Fair in downtown Springfield. Ana has gone numerous times in the past but it was my first visit. We both saw several pieces that would look great in our dining room and reading room but our upcoming furniture purchase is taking precedence. Even without buying anything, it was nice walking around and viewing the wide variety of art.

    Next on our agenda was furniture shopping. I have no idea how many couches and chairs we sat in today, but it’s a lot more tiring than either of us expected. So far we think we know where we will be purchasing from and, suprisingly, we are leaning towards a very bold red set for the family room. The biggest problem we are having is figuring out how we want to set the room up: one couch, two chairs, no end table? one couch, one loveseat, end tables; would an ottoman fit?

    A relaxing evening at home with a movie is planned, probably with a side of C#.

  • Unexpected Day Off

    This morning someone from Construx was to show up and repair the chipping paint above the shower. He showed up ontime this time, and said he was also going to be working on the sump line.

    Because Construx can’t communicate for squat, I had to tell him what needed to be done. Easy enough, right? I call into work and say that I’ll probably be in at around noon. Noon has come and gone, there are quite a few holes in the yard due to the approach used to find the end of the line (dig hole, look for pvc, dig another hole, …), and I have called into work to take the rest of the day off.

    Here’s a nice arial view of the worker’s ‘debugging’:)

    If you want a detailed description of what has transpired today, feel free to ask. I’ll spare everyone else.

  • Cool Again

    We have Air Conditioning! When we bought our house one of the things that still needed to be done (aside from the sump line, arrr) was hooking up the A/C. The heating and cooling company wouldn’t do it until the temperature consistently stayed above 70 degrees, which we didn’t really have until the 85ish days last week. Today they came and hooked us up, and Ana and I are enjoying the bliss that is Air Conditioning once again.

  • Ice Cream

    As I was standing outside grilling the meat for our fajitas this evening, I heard faint musical notes in the distance, accompanied by the occasional ringing bell. This goes on for ten minutes at least, growing louder and louder until I finally realized what it was… we have an ice cream truck driving through our neighborhood selling treats to all of the neighborhood kids. I laughed to myself, then heard a chearful gasp from above me. I looked up and saw Ana poking her head out a second floor window – “Ahhhh! It’s an ICE CREAM TRUCK!” she exclaimed. Yes folks, I think the Ice Cream Truck driver will be making some money from us this summer.

  • Waterproof

    Finally I was able to get a weekend not surrounded by rain so I could get the deck and driveway waterproofed. Took about 3 hours to do both with the added bonus of now having a sunburn and waterproof hands!

    Ana and I made a grocery run today and made use of Chef’s shopping list feature. I found a bug where you can’t print if the machine doesn’t have any printers defined, imagine that! I think I need to handle that case a little more gracefully than just crashing. Maybe an error message instead. As I tried to enter the bug into Bugzilla I was denied because I had forgotten to move the database to the new server. Pretty sad that it took me a few minutes to realize why it wasn’t working.

  • Waning Gibbous

    Last night I got a picture of the Waning Gibbous phase of the moon. What’s funny is I went to bed thinking I was going to miss the shot because the moon had already set for the day. I woke up at 3:48am and noticed bright moonlight shining through our window and realized I had misread the Virtual Moon Atlas software I use. So I got up and spent about an hour outside then went back to bed. I now have 2/8 of the pictures I need for my project.

  • Where’d the evening go?

    Tonight flew by. We went to the grocery store immediately after work to pick up dinner (filet on the grill…mmmm). As soon as we got home I mowed the grass and Ana proceeded to clean up around the house. Before we knew it, it was 7:30 and I hadn’t started the fire for dinner.

    I used my new Cordless String Trimmer by Black & Decker after mowing. As I hoped, it worked great. I highly recommend it, and you can’t beat the price.

    And in an unexpected turn of events, No TV Week is still having an impact on our lives. For over the past week we haven’t had the television on as we are sitting in bed at night. Even the evenings have remained remarkably quiet!

  • One down

    I did get to go outside tonight with the telescope, and it was fairly clear. I ended up taking 30+ pictures, and only one of them looks like it’ll be a keeper. At first glance, alot of the ones I took look good but with closer inspection the edges are blurred.

    One moon picture down, 7 to go.

  • Full Moon

    I’m starting a project aimed at getting 7-8 pictures of the moon, with the telescope like these, at its various stages. It will probably take me a while to get done because of the timing and weather but I think the end result will be pretty cool. Once I have them taken, I plan on utilizing Ana’s newfound mat cutting abilities and arrange them in a nice frame.

    Tonight just happens to be a full moon, so I hope it stays clear so I can mark that one off the list.