With the move, I made a singular splurge. While I have cut way back on video gaming, I do have a humongous soft spot for racing games. From the first time I played the Pole Position arcade game back around 1983. I was hooked. My favorite game on my XBox 360 was the Forza series, and when the premier launch game for the XBox One was to be Forza 5, I knew I was doomed. I held out for over a year...
As we settle into our house, I will be writing about some of the work we have done. I have already commented on the plumbing work that escalated, now I will talk about the fences. One of the first observations we made when we initially looked at the house was that the fences sucked. Actually two of the three sides of our yard were in pretty bad shape (the back fence is actually OK and serviceable...
Been a bit radio silent this last week. The move has been in progress since Tuesday, and the time since then has been a blur. Each day was at least 12 hours of shifting boxes, packing, loading the van, unloading, and finally unpacking. There is no graceful way to move. If you have beaucoup bucks, you can pay someone to do all the hard stuff (packing, loading, moving, unloading, unpacking) but...
This morning, I had a doctor’s appointment in Mountain View, so I had a pleasant 70 minute crawl north on 85 to El Camino Real. I had plenty of time to observe the HOV lane. The HOV lane was a noble idea. Incentivize people to carpool, making a dedicated lane for vehicles with 2 or more passengers. A fast lane so to speak during the commute hours. Of course, here in California, they have...
As the sojourn of our house comes to a chaotic close, we are almost ready for the heavy lifting of the move. A good time to reflect on the travails to date. When we started, the house was ridden hard, and put away wet. The interior had some surface warts, including an odd paint scheme in the rooms that look somewhat haphazard, popcorn ceilings that were the rage in the 1970’s, a yard that...
As we are preparing to move into our new house, after all the work and changes we wanted, it is time to begin the migration of things like utilities. Monday, I called Comcast, our cable provider, and got a cheery person who assisted me. I explained that we were moving next week, and that we wanted to move our service, and to add a landline phone (at the Wife’s request). No problem, and in...
As we prepare to end our time in the apartments, I was looking for an icon of the life here. I have complained about the safety, the cleanliness, and even the character of the neighborhood. However … One picture wraps it up well. Here we have a piece of furniture that was dumped near the trash station over the weekend, a sign of a vacate and bail on the lease event. On Monday morning, as I...
I have an Xbox 360, I play only two games with any regularity, Forza Motorsports, and the Tiger Woods Golf franchise (actually, I play that with my wife, and we enjoy it). I haven’t kept up with the franchise lately, because the 2012 edition was pretty good, and we really didn’t feel the need to shell out money for the latest version. Tonight, I got an email announcing the next one...
Buying a house that is well into middle age is always a challenge. Appliances are old, electrics are often ancient, and not up to current code, and of course there is plumbing from the dark ages. Not that in the mid 1960’s was bad for plumbing, but back then a lot of sketchy piping was imported from a rapidly industrializing Taiwan, and the early plastic piping and junctions often had...
In 2003, shortly after moving to Tucson, we got a pair of Oral B 3D electric toothbrushes. I was hesitant of this new fangled technology, but since we had them I used it. Then a strange thing happened … I liked it. At first it had just the standard brush heads, the round ones. As time went on, there were other heads, ones that wiggled, rotated, gyrated, and the like Some had rubber gum...