Post #99

It's a little distracting trying to type this while Wendy plays Mario Kart, but here goes:

Happy Birthday, Wendy

We celebrated Wendy's birthday this year with a trip to Mackinac Island. If you're not familiar with it, it's in Lake Huron between Lower Michigan and the Upper Peninsula, and there are no motorized vehicles allowed on the island. Horses, hiking, and bicycling are the only options once you're there. It's a very popular tourist spot, but we managed to avoid the crowds by going during the week, and towards the end of tourist season. We'll post some pictures and more details in a later post, but for now I'll just say that it was way more fun than I thought it would be, and if you enjoy riding a bike, the place is heaven.

Happy Birthday, Car

My car turned 14 years old this month. It was purchased in October of 1995. "You've had your car longer than you've known me!" Wendy pointed out. It's been a pretty good car overall (a Chevy Cavalier). These days it doesn't have to do much except get me to work and back.

Booksale books

There was another employee book sale at work recently. I got 49 books total. Here are some of the more notable finds:

• M is for Magic and Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
• Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origin of the Internet
• Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld
• The Saga of Solomon Kane
• Batman: Year One
• Statistics II for Dummies
• Spinning Flight: Dynamics of Frisbees, Boomerangs, Samaras, and Skipping Stones

Nerds 'R Us

Speaking of books, we measured the length of all our books on bookshelves. It came out to 75.8 feet (910 inches), and, since we've cataloged them with librarything.com, we know there are just over 900 books, which works out to about an inch per book. Why did we do that? Because of this.

Noisy Frame

We bought a new bed a while back (mattress, box spring, and frame), and while the mattress is really nice, the frame was a disappointment. Any time you moved slightly or rolled over, it made a metal squeaking sound that would often wake you up. It felt like it just needed to be tightened, but the frame was designed to not have any screws, so there was nothing to tighten. We took it back, thinking it might be defective, and got another one, but it had the same problem. As usual, Google came to the rescue: someone online recommended putting rubber washers between the loose frame parts, and that worked perfectly. Thank you Google and anonymous internet person!

And finally...

Mario Kart is pretty cool.

The Sweet Stench of Victory!

The SpongeBob SquarePants Marathon

A few weekends ago Nickelodeon aired a 50-hour(!) SpongeBob Marathon, culminating in 10 brand new episodes. Our Tivo nearly died from exhaustion. It pulled through, though, and we've been watching new episodes whenever we have some free time. Congratulations, Mr. SquarePants, on your 10-year anniversary!

Wii Sports Resort

I got Wii Sports Resort for my birthday, along with new MotionPlus controllers that enhance the accuracy of the remotes. It is lots of fun! The jet-skiing game is far and away my favorite; it makes me want to try jet-skiing for real. The flight simulator, bicycling, and swordplay are very cool as well. One neat feature is that the game will import characters created by other people, and they'll show up as your opponent, or as fans in the background. At one point Wendy was playing the Air Sports game and realized she was skydiving with Barack Obama!

New carpet

We got new carpet in the upstairs bedrooms last month, after a few setbacks. We originally ordered from Home Depot, and they said it would be installed in 5-7 days. So we spent all of Memorial Day Weekend painting all 3 bedrooms (and ceilings) in anticipation. But the date got pushed back again and again and again, much to our frustration, and finally was going to be 2 months from the time we placed the order. So we canceled it and went to Flooring Discount Warehouse. They had similar carpet for about the same price, and about a week later (on July 4th), they came out and installed it. We are quite pleased with the new carpet and with the new paint in our bedrooms.

Furniture shopping

We devoted an entire weekend last month to furniture shopping, mostly for bedroom furniture. Our first stop was Plunkett Furniture in Vernon Hills, because we heard on the radio they were going out of business. We got there to find they had already closed down. Bummer! We couldn't believe how quickly it happened. It turned out they had other locations in Chicagoland that were still in the going-out-of-business phase, so we visited one the next day, but the "liquidation" prices were still way out of our budget. Then we visited Georgetown Furniture in Antioch (which is where we bought our sofa and loveseat), only to find that they, too, were going out of business. Bummer again! All they had left were a few mattresses and a rummage sale. At this point we weren't feeling so great about the state of the economy. We also hit a couple of places in Rockford, and one place in southern Wisconsin (Steinhafel's Furniture). We saw a few promising things, but nothing great.

Finally, a coworker recommended Crest Furniture in Arlington Heights, and man, it felt like we hit the jackpot. The sales guy took us on a whirlwind tour of all the major furniture brands, showed us the difference in quality between them, and explained the pros and cons of each. Finally he gave us stacks of catalogs to look through, and we got a much better sense of what we want. We have yet to purchase anything, but we left with much more confidence in our ability to make a decision. Thanks, Crest dude!

Selling on Craigslist

We had to move everything out of the bedrooms for our carpet installation, and the futon proved to be the biggest, heaviest, and most unwieldy thing of all. After struggling to rotate it vertically (without hitting the ceiling fan), angle it through the narrow doorway (with barely an inch to spare), line it up with the stairs (without hitting another ceiling fan), we got it halfway down the stairs when we set it down precariously for a break, and Wendy, exhausted, said "Let's sell this f***er". Being quick to recognize good, common-sense ideas, I agreed. Thus, we put it and a computer desk up for sale on craigslist.

The computer desk went first, after about a week, but no one seemed interested in the futon. This basically made our living room unusable, as it was crammed full with a futon, sofa, loveseat, coffee table, and piano. We lowered the price, which got a few people interested, but started to despair when still no one bought it. It felt as if our house was in a permanent state of disrepair. The posting expired several times, I kept reposting, lowered the price again, and finally, this morning -- hallelujah! -- we sold it! Our living room is once again back to its normal state.

To mark the occasion we ate a celebratory pizza lunch and watched more new SpongeBob episodes!

Wild Kingdom

Spring has officially come a close, astronomically speaking. Here are some noteworthy events from the season past:

We were eating dinner one evening, looking out the bay window, when a small fox trotted out from the side of our house. We'd seen him once or twice before, always disappearing around the front of our neighbor's house. This time he stuck his head into the neighbor's wood pile and came out with a big egg in his mouth. He took it to the opposite end of our yard, buried it among some flowers, and went right back to the wood pile for another egg. This one he buried in the yard across the street and then came back for egg number 3, which went in a different neighbor's yard. He went back and forth, burying eggs in various yards (I think we wound up with 3 in our yard). We counted 10 eggs in all. At this point Wendy connected a few dots and remembered we always see a duck with about 10 ducklings in the pond each year. Probably not this year, we thought! It turns out we did still see a mama duck with 9 or 10 ducklings this year, so who knows if they were duck eggs the fox found.

Another annual event we always see is the migration of a giant turtle across our yard. Apparently she lays eggs in a neighbor's back yard (not one of the same ones the fox buried eggs in), and then in a painstakingly slow process, migrates back to the pond, always across our yard. And somehow we manage to see her every spring. The neighbor always comes out when she gets close to the road and shepherds her across. This year I shot some action-packed, jaw-dropping video of the event:

Finally, we bought some patio furniture a few days ago, and today spent part of the afternoon sitting out on our deck reading (and playing Nintendo DS). This is something we never considered doing with our old deck, so I take it as a positive sign that our home improvement projects are headed in the right direction.

I Heart Weather Data

Anytime we have interesting weather I love to pore over the data my weather station is collecting. The past two days have given me lots of chances to do just that.

On Friday we recorded our first 80 degree high of the year (84.4, to be exact):

The WGN Weather Blog reported it had been over six months since we last saw temperatures that high. Now that I've recorded about 10 months of weather data via WeatherUnderground, I pulled up a chart of temps for the last 6 months:

A quick scan verified that stat. Early October (the 12th, the be exact) was the last time temps were as high they were on Friday. The chart also reminded me just how cold it got in mid-January!

And then Saturday's weather was even more interesting. Here's a chart of temps:

We had two big temperature drops during the day: a 15-degree drop from 12:30 to 1:30, and a 10 degree drop between 4 and 5. These drops coincided, as you might imagine, with a change in wind. The first temperature drop happened right as the wind shifted suddenly from the SW to the NE:

While the second drop occurred right when the wind picked up again, after having died down for a couple of hours:

And, finally, we got about half an inch of rain over the afternoon and evening:


Wendy and I spent the first half of Saturday working in the yard, removing dead bushes, transplanting hostas, and pulling up weeds, so we got to experience the 15 degree temperature drop firsthand. Eventually the rain, and our stomachs crying out for lunch, forced us indoors.

After the 10 degree temperature drop in late afternoon we were forced to close all the doors and windows, because it was just cold with the wind blowing through our house.

Springtime in Chicago

Channeling the Cold

For the record, it was -22 degrees at our house this morning. Yesterday the high was -2. My favorite weather site, the WGN Weather Blog, has had all kinds of fun weather stats lately:

• Yesterday was the first day in 13 years that the high did not break zero in Chicago.
• It was colder in Chicago yesterday than it was at the North Pole (8 degrees).
• As of January 12th, we've already received a full winter's worth of snow (and we're only halfway through the meteorological winter).

We also learned that schools around here do indeed close due to the cold. Most schools were closed yesterday and today thanks to extreme wind chills of -40.

On an unrelated note, I've discovered a whole batch of cable channels that I didn't know we got. My favorites so far are Toon Disney and History International. Toon Disney has all kinds of cool animated shows like Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, X-Men, and The Jackie Chan Adventures. It's being re-branded next month as Disney XD, which will basically be "Disney for boys," while the Disney Channel will remain "Disney for girls". Hopefully they'll keep all the animated comic book fun.

History International has had some interesting shows, too, ranging from the German Autobahn, to what our society learned from the Victorians and the Tudors, to a documentary called "How William Shatner Changed the World" hosted, of course, by William Shatner.

Happy New Year!

I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season. Ours was good - allow me to update you!

We visited both families this year for Christmas, and decided to drive instead of flying. This turned out to be a good and a bad decision - good because we avoided the major delays all the airports seemed to be having, and bad because the delays were due to weather which we ended up driving through. The day before we left, we got 9 or 10 inches of snow here, and areas south of us got ice. The roads were pretty much fine by the time we left, until it started snowing as we were driving through Iowa. Then they were not so great. What made it even scarier were all the cars we kept seeing in ditches from the previous day's ice storm. Luckily, thanks to some skillful and careful driving by Randy, we made it to Kansas City for the night.

The hotel we stayed at was recently remodeled and was, no joke, possibly the nicest hotel either of us had ever been in. The bathroom was gorgeous (I know! A hotel bathroom!), there was a beautiful built-in armoire/computer desk thing, and it had a 33" flat panel TV, which is both bigger and fancier than the one we have here at home. We kept checking the (pretty cheap) rate quoted in our confirmation e-mail to make sure there hadn't been a mistake. So, if you are ever looking for a hotel in Liberty, Missouri, I definitely recommend the Hampton Inn!

The rest of our Christmas was good, too. We saw both sets of parents, and had a lot of fun hanging out with Abby and her boyfriend Matt at my house, and with Joy and Cory at Randy's house. Both of our parents have "new" houses, and it was awesome to get to see all the changes. My parents' house was actually new last year, then they had a fire and were displaced for nearly 6 months while basically everything in the house was repainted, restored or replaced. So, "new." Randy's parents' house was actually new almost 20 years ago, but they've recently had non-essential (but nice!) things like trim and bathroom vanities installed. The kitchen's also been completely redone, and is gorgeous now. So, again, "new."

As much fun as it is to see our families and get nice Christmas presents, it is also very nice to be home again. It is less nice to have to go back to work, but such is life, I guess.

Here's what else we've been up to, in handy list form (now with bonus exclamation points!):

- This is our third winter in Illinois, and it is off to a rollicking start. Last winter was extremely snowy, and this one is already on pace to outstrip it! Um, great? Our mail box was damaged by a snow plow a few weeks ago, and the township road department brought us out a replacement box, free of charge. However, the ground is completely frozen, so right now it's sitting in a bucket of sand right next to our old, currently unusable mailbox. Classy! They've promised to come back and put it in the ground once spring arrives, which will probably be sometime around mid-June.

- We recently switched to VOIP for our home phone service. It's the T-Mobile @ Home service, and it's only $10/month, since we both already have cell phones with T-Mobile. This is especially exciting because apparently local and state taxes make it impossible to get the most basic of basic phone services in Illinois for less than about $45 a month. What a deal!

- While we were in Oklahoma, Joy and Cory asked us about our water softener. The water where they live is very hard, and they're thinking of getting one. We both recommended it, but I have to say, now that we're back home, I recommend it even more. A water softener makes for very nice hair. I guess it's good for other things too, but hey, shiny hair!

I leave you with these final words of wisdom from Jackie Chan, courtesy of an interview we saw on Toon Disney. Don't say you don't like something without trying it - that's not polite. "Try it before you don't like it."

I hope you like our blog, but please at least try it before you don't like it!