Never too old to learn?

Now that I'm not slaving away at the car dealership on nights and weekends, I (and Karen) have signed up for some classes through the local community college. Class #1: Intro to welding. Ever since I started tinkering with cars and trucks, I have wanted to learn how to weld. For one reason or another, that has never happened. A lot of people say, "just go buy the equipment and teach yourself." Since my ultimate goal would be to build parts for my vehicles, and either restore an old car or build a kit car, I would rather have someone teach me the proper way to do it. Plus, I will be able to play around with someoneelse's equipment before I have to get permission from the Chief Financial Officer to buy equipment. I've also always been interested in metal yard art that people make, but (of course) I'd rather make my own. This should be interesting.

Class #2: Intro to golf. This is the class that Karen is taking as well, which will add another twist to learning. Will one of us be better than the other, possibly. Will it get competitive between us? Probably will. Surprisingly, she can get pretty competitive when it comes to games, so I foresee this being that way too. In case we decide that we really like it, I have already identified locations in the backyard for a putting green and chipping pads to hit from. I know I'm jumping the gun on that, but hey, we have a big back yard with lots of room to fill up.

As my previous post stated, Karen's parentes were in town for the weekend. Lots of good food (restaurants and cooked up by yours truly) and many rounds of Karen's current favorite game, Marble Pursuit. Here is a link for those of you who might be interested: We were introduced to it by one of Karen's friends and we've spread that interest on to others. You can often find the couple who makes the game selling boards with "defects" at discounted prices on ebay. That is what I bought and the board just had some minor scratches on it. Well worth the savings.

To top off their visit, her parents brought me frozen Chick-fil-a chicken biscuits! I know, it sounds sad and somewhat twisted, but I really miss Chick-fil-a! We learned this trick from one of my college friends who lives in Boston and misses the food as well. Her parents developed the frozen chicken-n-biscuit trick and we have passed it along to Karen's parents. Sure, it is thawed and re-heated, but it is better than waiting until our next trip south and 10x better than what micky d's can do fresh.

The Change Up

We just went to see the new movie, the Change Up. It was a funny movie, but the content wasn't ideal for sitting next to my mother in law. AWKWARD!

Sorry for the short post, just had to get that off my chest. I will have to see the movie again just so I can fully enjoy it.

Do bike rides attract storms?

Since I had the afternoon to myself (Karen returns tonight), I decided
to ride my bike to the office to check out the route. It is sometimes
hard to judge how bike friendly a route is going to be by car, so I
thought Saturday would have less traffic, so it would be a good test.
We don't have a shower at work (like I did in Athens) so I am not 100%
sold on the idea of riding to work.

They were calling for a 30% chance of rain and it looked pretty clear
at the house, so I hopped on the bike and headed towards the office.
About halfway through the ride to the office, I noticed that the wind
was picking up and it was starting to get dark. The closer I got to
the office, the darker it got. Ah, crap. I beat the storm to the
office by about 5 minutes, so I am sitting here typing at my desk in
the office. It is now thundering, lightning, raining and (just to
make it more interesting) hailing. Great, frozen precipitation in the
middle of August. The good news is that It looks like it is going to
pass through as quickly as it blew in... if it doesn't, I guess I'll
just take my company truck home.

I was about to hit send when it started to seriously hail outside.
The sirens haven't gone off, so I guess there isn't a twister near by,
but it is coming down hard... Seriously? If I had known that me
riding my bike would create a storm, I would have done it weeks ago.
The yard really needed some water, I hope it rained (but no hail) at
our house.

Check out the hail coming down outside the front door:

Home alone again = another project!

To those of you who aren't married and do not work in education: "DO NOT MARRY SOMEONE WHO IS IN EDUCATION." It really isn't fair when you don't have as much time off as your significant other. Karen went home to visit her family again last Friday, so I've been on my own for 7 days. I can't blame her for taking advantage of the time off, but that doesn't mean that I'm not jealous about it.  Time to myself always ends up with some sort of project to work on.

This time, it is operation deck lighting. I have been wanting to add some subtle lighting to the deck ever since we moved in and I just happened to have a 12volt outdoor light controller sitting in a box for that specific purpose. We bought it a year ago at a Lowe's open box clearance and it has been waiting for us to find some lights to hook up to it. Not finding any lights that I really liked, I went into my usual "do it yourself" mode.

I ordered up a handful of bright LEDs and fired up the soldering iron. I did four strips of 4 LEDs and mounted them in a simple wood holder that I attached to the underside of the handrail. I also wanted to light the stairs, but I didn't want to create a trip hazard. I decided to flush mount one LED at the edge of the stair tread, shining down on the step below it. I only did every other step, I thought doing all of them would be too much. Here are a few pictures of the results:

Here are the LEDs in the wood housings. The LEDs are small, only about 1/4" diameter.

Here is the wiring that I did to get everything working properly, I won't get into the specifics here (i.e. bore you with how I did it)

Here is a strip of 4 mounted under the rail. They put out a good bit of light, considering their small size. I don't like being able to see the tips of the LEDs, I think it is too distracting. A shield will be coming soon so you won't see the LED, just the light.

Here is the table and chairs with two of the lights visible. It creates a nice level of light for hanging out and enjoying being outside. It isn't bright enough to read by, but you won't trip over anything either.

Here is a view of the stairs with the LEDs on.

I think this is turning out pretty well, hopefully the LEDs will last a long time.

New email notification system

This post is to test the new email notification system that Blogger
has added. If you put in your email address, it is supposed to send a
notification anytime that I update the blog. I'm not sure why they
didn't offer this earlier, or perhaps I just didn't notice the option
before... I put in one of my email addresses to test it out. If I
don't post again about it, it works.

The chairs in front of the house

The pink chairs debuted last weekend in front of the house.  They have
received a lot of positive comments from the neighbors because they
spice up the 'hood a bit.  A majority of the houses here are a shade
of beige, our real estate agent referred to it as "Bloomington Beige."

Please ignore the weeds in the front area, I was leaving them for the
fertilizer/weed spraying company to take care of. We are also needing
some more shrubs in the front, but that expenditure has not been
approved by the Chief Financial Officer.

This post is also a test for the "email to post" system that I just
realized blogger has.  Since I am now a smart phone user, I might try
posting a little more often without having to pull out the laptop.
Who would have ever thought there would come a day when a laptop was
"a pain" to pull out?  It seems like just a couple years ago we
thought we were cool for having wifi at the house with a wifi printer!

Just call me Martha Stewart

Ever since moving into our new home, we've been living without window treatments. Our house backs up to a field, so other than the farmer, no one is ever behind our house. Because of that, we have been very slow to do anything about covering the windows. The only problem with that is that the afternoon sun has been heating up the house... it kind of defeats the 2x6 framed exterior walls full of insulation.

The lady of the house has made it clear that she really wants to do roman shades on all the windows. I have no problem with the look of the roman shades, I just have a problem with the price tag, between $300 and $600 per window. The price is relative to the fabric that is chosen, and she always seems to be attracted to the high $$$ fabrics! Multiply that by 10 windows and we would be spending a large sum of money on window treatments.

Those of you who have spent anytime with me will know that I don't want to spend that kind of coin on something like window treatments. A new TV? Heck yeah. Plants for the yard? Sure. Window treatment? No thanks, I can live with miniblinds.

Of course, the do it yourselfer in me decided to do some online research on what is takes to make your own... There was only one big obstacle: Sewing. My wife isn't exactly the sewing type, and she isn't afraid to admit it. I can at least attach a button, but that is about it. Then I found the magic solution to our problem: double sided iron on adhesive. Heck yeah, WE can handle that.

After examining the display shades at Lowes, we decided to experiment with making a shade for one of the guest rooms. After hitting a few fabric stores, we found a fabric that Karen liked and some black out material for the back side. A quick trip to Lowes for wood dowels, cord, and other miscellaneous parts and we were ready to give it a go.

After getting the fabric cut down and glued to size, I was tasked with using the wood dowels to create the hobbles (spelling?) that give the roman shade it's shape. Everything was then tied together with the cord and attached to a 1x2 that we screwed into the window frame. There was a definite learning curve, but the end results turned out pretty darn good (if I say so myself). AND we saved a good bit of money, figuring that we have around $70 in it (that number will go down if we make more because some of of the parts that we bought were in quantities large enough to do multiple shades). That is much better than the $300 low bid and WAY better than the $600 high bid.

The only negative that I have been able to identify is that the pull cord has to be wrapped around a cleat to keep the shade open. There isn't the mechanism that a manufactured shade would have to lock it in place when you stop pulling the cord. However, I have seen some people butcher cheap blinds for the mechanism, that could be version 2.0...





After a Saturday full of interior decor/arts and crafts, Sunday was the exact opposite. It was a total "Man" day... I took Karen to her first NASCAR race! We got up early and drove to Indiana for the Brickyard 400 at the famous Indianapolis Motor Speedway. It was hot outside, but our seats were shaded by an overhang. Before the race, we were able to walk across the front straight and pit lane to the infield area. Here is a picture looking up pit lane:



As we were driving home Sunday after the race, I started laughing when I thought about the extreme difference between Saturday and Sunday. Could we find two activities that are more different? This trip got me looking into acquiring Indy 500 tickets. I signed up for the ticket waiting list last night, who knows how long it will take to be able to actually buy tickets.