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Yesterday was quite a busy day for us, we put the order in for the bathtub and all the bits and parts for it. After that we put the blinds in that we bought last saturday (they arrived thursday) from Home Depot.
It’s so hard to find blind information online, i’m posting all the details incase somebody else is looking for Bali Diamondcell cordless blinds. So anyway….we ordered blinds for 3 windows; Living room, Dining room, and Family room. The measurements were:
107.5 x 60, 107.5 x 60, and 71 x 60
Keep in mind that’s full dimensions, we didn’t take any off for clearance, travel, etc. Apparently they do that automatically at the factory when you put in your order, so your not supposed to otherwise your blinds will be to small. So the blind are coming in two colors, Popcorn for the Dining and living rooms, and Glacier for the Family room. And they are double 3/8″ cells, which will hopefully help them retain their shape longer than a single cell….also should block light better.
So….cordless eh? Yeah, basically what it means is they go up and down like garage doors (which have big ol counter weight springs up top) and you don’t pull on cord to do it. The thought here is that with no cord, the cats won’t play with them, kids can’t choke on them, they look cleaner, and you won’t be putting concentrated preassure on one part of the assembly when raising them (which is where a lot of drywall cracks appear). Also, instead of going for one giant cell were recommended to split them per window. That way there’s less of a chance of a total failure for the spring or anything….I guess we’ll find out, they’re kind of a test honestly to see if we like them enough to use them upstairs.
At the end of the day, everything ran a little under $800. We managed to get 25% off using 15% price matching and stacked a 10% coupon we had by putting it on the Home Depot credit card.
Installing them was pretty much easy. The only real problem we had was in the Family room, and that was because it looks like picasso did the drywalling around the windows. But a creative use of fender washers resolved that pretty easily actually. Honestly, when we took down the original ones there were like 5 fender washers up there, and I only needed to use one.
Here’s how they arrived

And here is a close up of the mounting bracket, they just clip to it

So here’s the Dining room before (when we bought the house), before and after:

Once we got going, it was super easy. Here’s the Living room before, before and after:

And last, here’s the Family room before, before and after:

I think when we get some time in the future to put up some tabbed curtains with a bit of a valance that it’s really gonna look great. However, since it took about 2 years to get this far I wouldn’t stay up waiting for that post

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Is there anything more enjoyable then spending you days analyzing Ethereal packet captures for work? Seriously though, it is a lot more fun to work on unique issues like this than just doing the standard network turn up stuff. After last week, maybe it’s a chance for redemption.
Moving on…been a busy week. We finally met with a photographer for the first time, and I think we’ve settled on a new bathtub for the master bathroom (pretty much we couldn’t do anything until we settled on one) and it should look pretty much like this, except with satin nickel instead of brass:

I’m pretty excited, I think when it’s done the bathroom will probably be the most impressive thing we’ve done to this house. There’s still so much to do, but picking the tub really means we can get started on the rest now because we now know where everythings going to go.
That reminds me, we ordered blinds from Home Depot last week. We got the Bali Cordless double 3/8″ honeycomb ones. It’s cool because cordless ones don’t have any exterior strings on them you just lift/pull them to where you want. Since we don’t plan on moving them much it sounds like a perfect choice for us. I guess we’ll see tomorrow when we finally find some time to install them. Hopefully tomorrow.
Also Jen picked up a little surprise for me yesterday, a chicken cooking pot. Looks kinda like this:

We’re gonna use it to make beer in….cool eh? Now I’ve got pretty much everything I ever needed to do a 5 gallon of home brew except the ingredients….and those are on their way as we type. Really was a great value for a 30 quart pot, only $40 bucks.
- Kids playing Grand Theft Auto, one of them “accidentally” points a shotgun at one of their heads and pulls the trigger. Instant pink mist is made. Of course let’s blame the video game and not the alcohol or weed they were smoking….yeah, it was the game.

Brecht argued in court Tuesday that the teen should not be jailed because of the unintended consequences of the gunplay. “This is not a person who needs to be returned to a custodial setting,” he said.

Are you fucking daft? Of course this is the type of person that should be locked away…he willfully took a loaded gun, pointed at some body’s head and pulled the trigger. It’s shit heads like this that are teaching kids they can get away with murder and there are no consequences. They want to blame the game, how about we blame the retarded moron who pulled the trigger?

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Gizmo is the cutest cuddly little cat in the world…really he’s a total love bug and lap cat. The minute we sit down he’s all up in our shiz letting us know how much he loves us. Examples:

It’s horribly cute, but terribly annoying when i’m trying to work on the computer:

Thankfully there is a sure proof way to get rid of him. Turn on the ceiling fan….for some reason the minute it starts he takes off like it’s a helicopter full of ninjas out to kill him. I feel bad for doing it, but otherwise I just can’t get anything done some times. So I’ve taken the opportunity to show my impression of what gizmo sees when the fan is turned on.
Ceiling fan to us humans:

What Gizmo sees:

Amazing what cat’s heightened senses can pick up.

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So the good news is that we’ve settled on a lot of the wedding stuff. The location has been set, the date and time, her dress has been ordered, the place rented, the menu picked out and today we just signed the contract for the officiant.
Good lord, what a buttload of work this is.
We still have to meet photographers, figure out my tux, my ring, and flowers. But most of the important stuff is taken care of. We’re hoping that will give us the extra time to plan the little things to make it memorable.
Ya know, like picking a honeymoon and that crap I suggested that the best way to show our love and celebrate afterwards was to purchase a motorcycle…but that didn’t go over well for some unknown reason.

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We had some friend and their daughter over last night for dinner, and now the house is so clean I don’t have anything to do today
So I bought some 5w-20 oil (7 quarts) and a fiter for Jen’s car, in preperation of it’s first oil change. I think I’ll end up documenting it just for the hell of it. Not that it’ll be anything amazing since it’s just a normal car, but it really bugged me that I couldn’t find any advice for it online….hell even the oil fiter cross reference at walmart didn’t have the 2006 models in it yet….wtf?
here’s hoping the 2005 v6 ford escape and 2006 use the same filter. I’ll check before I do anything, but I’m pretty sure they do.
Last night the idea of the litter cam came up again. A streaming webcam on the litter box was a joke idea of mine about 3 years ago. Still thinking about it as a kind of social experiment to see why somebody would want to see that, but also it looks like somebody else is doing something similar:
- Grey and Blak’s litterbox cam

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Today was a very bad day.
I screwed up majorly at work yesterday, and didn’t catch it at all. So last night somebody spent 6 hours fixing my damage trying to get customers back up and I feel like shit about it.
Absolute fucking crap. I hate fucking up so much….oh crap, I swear that stupid “Bad Day
by Daniel Powter ” song’s been on the radio twice today. Once in subway and now again just on sirius…that my friends is irony.
The sad thing, is that I’m so quick to judge people, that I would have ripped somebody a new asshole for this. It was just stupid crap that should have been caught. If I had just thought about it more, slowed down, and done more thorough double checking this wouldn’t of happened. I would have called the person who did it a moron and dismissed them as a waste of space.
Ya know, I sit here and I think I’m so fucking smarter than everyone else, and then something like this happens and I realize that smarter doesn’t equal better. I need to learn to focus more, and realize that doing something slowly and carefully doesn’t always mean I’m being lazy.

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So I received a notice from Schaumburg Honda yesterday, to let me now that my car was due for an oil change.
oh. really.
Let’s not forget the outcome the last two times I brought it in for service at that exact dealership.
Time two
Time one
Well anyways, I’ve always know that today’s engines are designed and build to not need oil changes as often as we are lead to believe, but I’ve never taken the time or effort to actually check my manual. Well yesterday I did.
Schaumburg Honda thinks I need an oil change every 3 months.
Honda…you know, the people who actually built my car, recommend an oil change ever 7,500 miles OR 12 months.
That’s a pretty big difference wouldn’t you think?

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cron test

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Go ahead and watch this. Try not to laugh I dare you.
More Hampster Antics
Summary: Two cute hampsters, fighting over one wheel….so cute i’m gonna puke up bunnies and sunshine. credit goes to donna for the link.

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Saturday I got my invitation to the Windows Vista Beta and i’m so pathetically excited about it, that it’s not funny. Sad but true….
Somebody posted this on dslreports (ameritectech) and it’s a thread in the Something Aweful forum about a one eye’d guy and his blind friend. Very very funny stuff going on in there, you need to read this if you have any sense of humor at all. Trust me, this is quality stuff.

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