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.

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.

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.

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!

Contrux dug our trench to bury the sump line on Thursday, but we have no idea why they stopped there and didn’t finish the job. So now we have a trench about 30′ long, 1′ wide, and 1.5′ deep (something like that) on the side of our house running to the easement in the backyard. With all the rain we are getting, it’s really looking like a moat.

Ana called on Friday morning asking why they didn’t finish, and the secretary didn’t have any notes on the issue and told Ana that she had no way of finding that out. WTF. The lady said they would probably be there that day to finish it up. As soon as I got home and found it in the same state as Thursday, I decided to give them a call. Again, same thing – they took our name and number and made a note to find out what’s going on with it. I haven’t heard back so I’ll probably be calling again today, just to be a pain in the ass to them.

I should toss some pictures up of it, it’s a real mess and the sod they dug up will most certainly be dead once they finally get back to finish things.

Continue reading “Rain, Rain, Rain”

Yesterday, Ana called Construx (the company that built our house) about two outstanding issues. #1) We still have a ‘temporary’ sump line running out of the house, dumping water into what is now a small moat between us and the neighbors. #2) about a month ago the doorknob on the door going to the garage stopped working with our key.

The sump line was gauranteed to be buried in the spring so I wasn’t too worried about it. But when Ana talked to a rather uninformed individual on the phone yesterday, she was told that they didn’t know about the sump line. Hmm… at this time I’m wondering if I should be worried. Luckily we have it in writing that they are going to fix it in the spring, that should help if need be.

The doorknob was supposed to have been ordered a good two weeks ago, but this lady on the phone didn’t have a clue on its status. Supposedly the person that usually takes care of that stuff was out of the office.

Continue reading “House stuff”

We have finally finished cleaning the apartment. It’s spotless and we will be turning in the keys at the end of the week. Next up will be to go through the large pile of stuff we transported into a corner of our basement. There’s no real rush to do that though.

While we had Ana’s parents’ truck, we decided to make a run over to the recycling center with some of our cardboard boxes from moving. I initially thought we just had two or three laying around the house and garage, but ended up with a couple dozen filling an F150. The garage has a lot more free space with that taken care of.

As first reported by David, Ana and I turned on our TV during No TV week. Ana woke up and flipped it on for her typical Saturday morning viewing, and we lost. Better luck next year!

We went to the apartment today for more cleaning. I sanded down the patched drywall and you cannot tell we had a large hole for ethernet to the living room. Unfortunately, we couldn’t take any more stuff to the house because it started raining and didn’t stop all day long.

So today was a pretty lazy day, Ana did take another shot at cutting the mats for two new living room pictures. It was a unique idea and they turned out great, you can see them here, here, and here. I had the Date mode on on the digital camera so just ignore that.

Finally got the lawn mower out of the box tonight. Since I had gotten that far I figured I may as well cut the grass. The front yard went very smoothly, but the side of the house where our temporary sump line deposits was a pain in the butt. Part of the problem was the grass which had flourished and grown a good 8 inches, the other part was that the ground is super saturated and felt like a swamp as I ran the mower over it. It killed the mower four times it was so thick and wet. We’re calling the contractor tomorrow and inquiring about when they’ll be burying the line.

After mowing, Ana and I went out to Lonestar for some steak and then to see The Ladykillers. It’s a pretty funny movie, albeit strange.

I just looked up the status of my laptop shipment and it seems that Fedex has just now (at 6pm!) sent it on its way. I made the trip over to the distribution center last night thinking it would actually make a difference, but I was wrong. Expected arrival date in Vernon Hills is the 26th

Went over to my parents’ house after work to help them setup a new entertainment center. It’s a very nice piece of furniture and looks great in the room.

I mentioned to them about the whole No TV thing and yet again I was given looks of confusion. Personally, it’s been two very pleasant and quiet evenings and I’m enjoying it.

Ana and I were discussing dinner for tomorrow night and we both have a craving for some BW3s. As a substitute for driving to Champaign, I found that you can order sauces online! Ordered 3 and found there is free shipping, such a deal.