San Diego was too cold so I flew north. Virgin is a pretty sweet airline. I played Doom all the way up, no credit card required. On the subject of video games I'm considering this one for the chilly January nights.

The North Bay is the same as I left it. It has an xr now so I took a quick tour of the empty lots near the new property. Apparently Tuesday nights are for the Petaluma poker tournament. I managed 10th out of 60-ish and payout of fifteen duckets. Jon and I grabbed Dad on the way out as he flipped quad kings.

The rest of the blinds went up in a few short minutes - the difference being that they mounted inside a sill. That left enough time to put a few base boards down. I threw a few videos up for comparison.



They're not too far from the, er 'simulation'.

		why is he jsamo?		Connie
		he's suppose to be tsamo@...
Chris	I think maybe he used to go by James back in high school.
	'Ty' is a pretty silly name, so it makes sense.
		don't make me go on the rant about how some dumbass probably thought that, upon seeing my name, ty is not a real name and thus used my middle initial.		Ty
		well thanks a lot uno, looks like i ranted anyway. since we're on this subject, how come you're not uno.d.ritchie@... isn't there like some precedent for false identification here? and the "d" is for dumberson.
		haha ! dumberson.. haha!		Connie

I framed my door.


Upstairs west bedroom.


Upstairs south bedroom with a couple base boards.

Impressed: My blinds came in yesterday - a pretty quick turnaround from whenever it was that I ordered them.

Impressed: But there was no time, as James and I were off to Lei Lounge for celebrations. Word is they do a good happy hour every Tuesday.

Disappointed: I ordered a Singapore Sling because, you know, the late Raoul Duke would drink them. But there's two things that can befoul a drink in my eyes: excess sugar or excess gin. This had both.

Impressed: We watched the cgi Ninja Turtles movie after Lei. It provided the nostalgia and familiar references I was expecting, but offered a few unexpected highlights. The lack of a clearcut antagonist was refreshing. Raph's alter ego is an enjoyable homage the another great comic/movie. And most surprising was the outcome of the Raph-Leo spar, being a departure from the highly formulaic plotlines of the franchise.


Horizontals are all there.

The mirrors add light and space to the bathrooms. I can get away with the panels for the sides of the upstairs bathroom and all of the downstairs. I shudder to think of how much a custom 5' x 3' is going to run me for the main, upstairs piece.

Also shown is the untrimmed switchage. A big feather in my cap is knocking the switch count from four to one (but really zero since the light and fan are on motion). A black eye is the annoying drywall work needed to cover the unused box components and the wire spanning them to connect the light and fan leads.


Another column will be good once I find my drywall anchors. The frameless door can be seen in this one.


I yanked the door to the storage nook in the media room. Then sent the electrical from under the tv to said nook. The end result should be clean stowage of the cable box, xbox, wii, and perhaps a dvd cart.

Rebroadcast without expressed, written consent:

Never mind. Found yer seat. I'm booking 13B, although one usually does not want to sit in aisle 13...

I will never speak Singaporean to you! Never. Even if I were pissed drunk.

I'm pretty sure I'm the only one out of the 4 of us that can get hammered off of 8 tasters.

And you'd best not be moving the bear skin rug. It really ties the room together.

Oh, and there's a Sephora in Omaha!

I ventured into Ikea today. It's far from being my favorite place, their products are about the opposite of what I'm looking for. That is, stuff there tries to be uber-modern and rather low quality. But I was striking out on some things - mirrors in particular - and had to take a chance.

Despite the Christmas music I survived the journey, bagging a rug and curtains for the media room. The curtains are necessary because the couch does not allot space for blinds. There may be a better solution in the future, but this one works for the moment.


The next stop was Expo (Home Depot's furnishings branch) on Convoy. The selection was impressive and I managed to at last find a light fixture for the upstairs bathroom. (And it turns out my only remaining bulbs are a very cool tone and I haven't yet installed photoshop to color correct). I wired it up, the fixture and fan are run off of a motion sensor with a switched light above the tub.

No luck on mirrors at either location.

My last stop was the zoo - er - Costco to put in an order for blinds.

So the ol' 1.6 Athlon setup finally choked. Hard to say what it was, I've failed to diagnose the problem hardware having independently swapped everything out. I'll revisit when I'm setting the box up as a terminal in the garage.

The new stuff:

• ASUS M3N78 Pro mobo. $100. Supports all the nice things, particularly sli and 1066 ram.
• AMD Phenom X3 2.3. $110. Three core, their second tier.
• PNY GeForce 9800GT. $160. Listed for a whole lot more. The gig of video memory should help with photo editing.

Of course, Fry's gave me the X3 2.1 and I didn't realize it until they'd closed. I had to stop by the following day and recover the 200,000,000 hz they owed me.

The near-term purchases include a sata disk, another two cheap gigs of ram, and maybe a new display.

And, well, I'm borrowing Curt's monitor, the power supply is sitting on the case, and there are boards sprawled about my desk area. But at least everything is functional.

The hiatus is explained, now rewind.


Thanksgiving was good. The new house accommodates well.


I snagged Madden '09 for entertainment purposes. My dad picked it right up and Jon wouldn't be separated from the game, save for by real football. There's not much to say about it - being an EA franchise - except it's generally enjoyable, graphically unimpressive, and Cris Collinsworth follows Madden's act very closely.


Taboo was a riot, particularly the last round where Mom, Connie, and I netted several points from Mark, Jon, and Erik.



The hallway floor went in fine. 'How did you overcome the itis?', you might ask. Well I peered in the fridge and made a glorious connection:

• Red Bull
• Orange juiceIced and stirred together, pure genius. It's like Sunny D with stimulants.

The stairs are the only remaing hardwood to be done. You've come a long way, baby. The constructon tiredom led to my second genius (derived re-)invention: post-Thanksgiving pizza.

• A fresh pizza from Round Table: the canvas.
• Leftover turkey piled on top.
• Mashed potatoes piled on top.

Delightful.

Thanksgiving weekend also saw d'Chris's d'Brickapult claw its way from the grave to a winning record and fourth seed in the Medieval Gridiron playoffs. Similarly, Santos surmounted the impossible and overcame a large point differential to knock James out of contention. It's been a white knuckle end to a unimpressive season.

This weekend I'm up against Potats' team, which is predicted to beat mine by 25 points even after his tight end netted zero on Thursday.

Sunday also featured the long-awaited return to the water. It was pretty good-sized, but rides were characterized by straight drop-bottom turn-close, so not exactly elegant. It's phenomenal how life on land maintains absolutely zero of the muscles required for paddling.

A few quotables:

Schooled three little college guys. They seemed not happy to lose to a girl.

Go Raiders! ... We're horrible. Marty! Marty! Marty!

I heard you put Rob and Dave against the glass.

I am ridiculously addicted to yr blog. Will you please update it more often?

Epilogue:
I'm a firm believer in giving the people what they want, so I'll break you off one more piece of culinary revelation.

• Sirloin burger with ample Dorchestershire sauce. You probably don't have that, so you can substitute Worchestershire sauce instead.
• Leftover turkey.
• Fried onions.
• Sourdough.