Basement project: framing completed

After buying $500 in materials for the basement last week, Doug and I started finishing my basement tonight, framing up the wall for what will become my office (and will include the sauna in it) as well as the walls for the bathroom. It took the two of us maybe four or five hours, breaks included, to get that far. Next up, we'll need to tie the walls into the concrete, then I can do the electrical as time permits (good luck with that) and we can start on the plumbing.

Andrea and I have discussed how we're going to do the bathroom, and I think we've decided it will be an Asian theme with some deep colors (burgundy?).

The plan is to have the bathroom and office finished by the time Eric and Jacek get in town (probably Thursday, July 3rd). We're also hoping to have the utility room somewhat complete for a bit of storage and to keep all components out of sight.

Wii boxing

Nate and Lonnea came home for the weekend, and they brought their Nintendo Wii for us to play. So tonight, we had all of the Shireys over for dinner (kabobs on the grill with brown rice) and played the Wii for a while -- bowling, tennis, baseball, and, of course, boxing. Nate and I played, then Andrea and Lonnea, and finally Mom and Dad. While it did take a bit of coercion to get them to play, they definitely seemed to have fun once they got going.

Nate leaves for Wisconsin tomorrow, but Lonnea is staying here for two weeks, so I expect she and Andrea will be hanging out a fair amount. Oh yeah, and he's leaving the Wii here in the meantime, so I'll probably give Super Mario Galaxy a shot and see how that is.

It's like a very slow moving merry-go-round moving at 0.00069 RPM

Doug busted out his telescope tonight to look at various celestial bodies, including Saturn and various stars. I brought my camera with and took some pictures: Two of Saturn -- one with a yellow filter and one without -- but they're fairly blurry due to the fact that I actually held my camera up to the telescope without any sort of mounting adapter. Next time, maybe.

I also brought my tripod with me and took some time exposures to get star trails. There's a three minute exposure, the same shot in a six minute exposure, and a different shot with a seven minute exposure. FYI, these are ISO 800, f/16.

These pictures have been placed in my night photography album.

That's a bad place to park your plane

Today was our road trip for photography. We thought about going to Elk River, but instead we drove up to St. John's in St. Joseph, through Avon, Holdingford, St. Stephen, St. Wendel, St. Anna -- noticing a pattern here?

We were going to walk around St. John's University campus a bit, but it was a bit cold for Jake to be outside. Besides, I think I ended up driving on a walking path, so I figured I should back it off a bit and stay on the main roads. Let's just keep that one between you and me.

Near the end of our trip to the middle of nowhere, we saw this plane in the middle of what apparently was an airfield. Andrea said she saw a hangar, but I was so amused by the plane that I didn't notice. You know me.

There are a few other pictures I took in the album for today's day trip. We're going to try doing this regularly -- partially for the photography, partially for some family time on the road.

Two of 21 gears work about half the time

After many months of wanting to get back on the bike, I finally was able to do so today; the problem is that the gears are so hosed up on my bike that it was way more difficult than it should have been.

I went down CR7, through some really soft dirt roads, back over I-94, onto CR75 and made the loop back home through Clearwater. I figure it was between 12 and 13 miles, which isn't bad; I used to bike to and from Becker (between eight and nine miles each way) when I was 15. The annoyance came from the fact that the right gear shifting mechanism didn't work at all, and I could only get the left gear mechanism to go between one and two (so I essentially had gears 7 and 14). Occasionally, I had to actually stop the bike and move the chain onto a different gear in order to adjust the ratio. PITA.

On the really soft dirt roads where I went (which are especially hilly), I simply couldn't get enough torque to move, so I did end up walking a little bit here and there. I can't say that was very fun, but overall, it was awesome getting back out there. I'm thinking I may either replace the bike altogether or simply have some work done on it.

I decided to take our point and shoot camera with me, and I took a few pictures here and there. There wasn't anything too exciting, but I was able to get a few side-by-side frames and stitch them together into a panorama (using the free program HugIn).

Andrea, Jacob and I are planning a trip tomorrow afternoon to drive around and do a little photography. We're tentatively planning on going to Elk River (a spot we randomly picked on the map within a reasonable distance from home). That evening, we'll be going over to Mom and Dad's house for dinner and to take a look at how the new hardwood flooring is coming along.

Boys' night at home

Tonight was Andrea's fire department meeting followed by a safety meeting (a get-together at the bar with other firefighters), so it was just me, Jacob and Charlie at home for the evening. Despite the fact that he was exhausted after our ECFE class, Jacob wanted nothing to do with sleep after our normal bedtime routine. Rather than try to make him sleep, I thought I'd wear him out, so we went into his room and played for an hour or so. Most of that time he spent climbing around in his closet or trying to get at the power cord to the CD player we have in his room.

I took a short video with my phone of him playing. His demeanor in the video is, for the most part, what he's usually like -- happy and inquisitive.

Andrea took this picture of him playing with her phone. Incidentally, just a few days ago, I was with him for a few hours while he stood in front of the recliner trying to get to my phone. He's done very well in pulling himself up and standing for a while, though he hasn't yet figured out how to sit down.

Out with the old flooring

Mom and Dad are redoing the hardwood flooring in their dining room, so I went over there today and helped Dad pull out the old OSB and put new in. It took us several hours and a fair amount of heavy lifting, but it was pretty neat to get it all ready for the tar paper and new floor. (I have some more pictures and will try to upload them at some point soon.)

Sometime in the next week or so, I anticipate getting my bike out and doing a few miles, maybe even bike to and from work. That's dependent upon the weather and my bike's gear system cooperating.

Things have been picking up at work lately. I'm starting a new internal project to bring some of our back office work up to a reasonable state. We've got an old system using FileMaker that's showing some signs of wear, and getting a new system up will help out our FCRA specialists a bit. I expect this project will be anywhere from 25-50% of my workload, so it will give me a lot of variety.

On top of that, I've been doing a lot lately with Babbage Tech. Most recently, I've been working on learning C# and working on a serial number generation/validation scheme that works both in C# and REALbasic.

Back home

We finally got back from our Texas trip, and right now I'd be happy if I never had to fly again. I have to admit that our trip home was one of the more eventful trips we had. On the way down, it took us about five hours to drive from DFW to Austin, and that was on a Thursday morning/afternoon. We figured a Saturday afternoon would be even worse. Considering our flight was scheduled for 5:00pm and the rental car had to be back by 3:00, we should leave between 9:00 and 10:00. We ended up erring on the side of caution and left a little after 9:00.

It only took us about three hours of driving (plus a half hour stop for lunch), so we got to the airport around 12:30. Since we were very early (so early, in fact, that we had to wait for Sun Country's counter to open up), we were able to check in and get through security very quickly. Then we waited. And waited. And finally... waited some more, only to find that our flight was already delayed to 5:30.

So we sat around the airport for a few hours. Here comes the next thing I found interesting. The DFW airport has a number of LCD televisions all around, and they're all tuned to CNN. Travelers are therefore able to keep up on news around the country and world while they're waiting for their flight. However, every time a story came up that had to deal with the TSA (and there were at least two of them, and stories loop fairly often), the televisions would all -- amazingly -- switch to an inspiring story of an Iraq War veteran in rehabilitation. Then, oddly, only partway through that story, it would switch back to CNN at the beginning of some other story. In short, the TSA (or, though unlikely, someone else) was censoring all bad stories about the TSA. We have always been at war with Eastasia.

Our flight ended up leaving at about 6:45, which means we sat around the airport like suckers for over six hours. When we landed in Minneapolis, we had some serious wind gusts, and there was at least one woman behind us yelling obscenities, thinking we were all about to die. Then, when we got back to our car, the battery was dead, the clutch wouldn't pop, and we had to call the Park'N Fly to have someone jump it for us.

But, on a much happier and unrelated note, Jacob started crawling at Roger and Candi's house this weekend! He was very close before we left (he'd get on all fours and rock back and forth), but he finally made the connection and figured out how to move his arms and legs to crawl around.

Today's picture is from the DFW airport's Bennigans, which is where we attempted to drink away our six hour wait (though it turned out to be too expensive, so we only had one).

Congratulations to Mr. and Mrs. Ballman

Today was Aaron and Elissa's wedding in Austin, TX. Andrea and I dropped Jake off at Roger and Candi's house on Wednesday, left early yesterday morning for Texas, went through the annoying ordeal of flying to DFW and driving to Austin, and had the rehearsal yesterday. Today, we got the tuxes and had the ceremony at 6:30 followed by the reception, which was very nice. I had the distinguished honor of being Aaron's best man.

As usual, pictures are online, though I didn't take very many of them.

Here's a fun fact: the bow tie I wore broke about two minutes before I had to walk out. Luckily, there was a fake knot sewn into the bowtie, and I was able to secure the hook onto that and not look like a complete goofball.

Tobin Patrick, born on Pi Day!

Abe and Krista had their baby boy this evening: Tobin (Toby) Patrick was born at 6:14pm, was 21 inches and 7lb15oz. Today is also Pi Day and Albert Einstein's birthday. The few pictures I took are available in our photo album, though there are plenty more on Abe and Krista's website.