The Phone Conversation...

Monday Chris' dad calls. Its his parents' anniversary. It wasn't even 9pm yet (off peak hours) and he calls. He said he didn't think Chris would call them so he called first. Didn't even give him a chance. Although whenever Chris does call, they're out and don't answer their phone and leave a message anyway.

Moving on...

So I'm washing dishes or whatever and only hear parts of the conversation. This is what I hear...
"Hi Mom." "You're going to the Philippines? When?" "Dad's not going?" (The laundry's going too so parts of the conversation got muffled. But then....) "WHAT!!! DAD'S STAYING WITH US FOR A MONTH???!?!?!?!" "MOOOMMMM!!! NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!" (images of a young darth vader come to mind). Don't get me wrong, we love having his parents here. But a month is a bit long. We'll love the help. We'll see how it goes.

Okay, so parts of that may be a little exaggerated, but the emotion's all there.

Our new goal: Finish the bathrooms before his dad comes in February. I hope we can make it.

At least we've got something accomplished. The guest closet is painted and closet rod installed. The door is even back on its frame. All that's left is some touch-up paint to fix the scratches that occurred during baseboard installment. No sweat. Since we had the semi-gloss out, we slathered some more paint in the laundry room. If you recall, we only painted the wall where the washer/dryer reside. We still had half the room to finish, and ceiling. Its about 75% done now. We had to wait for some joint compound to dry. But it should be all done today.

The TiVo's working great. Even though its just a glorified VCR, at least we don't need to know what time the shows play. It'll still record. And the rewind live tv thing is pretty neat too. Okay, so there's no complete commercial skip. But there is a shortcut to skip over 30 seconds worth of recording. I don't mean fast forward scanning, it completely skips over 30 seconds... like moving the needle on a record. (Yes, I'm old enough to know how to use a record player even though I'm not a DJ or anything.) Much faster than our VCR's 30 second fast forward. I think its worth it... Considering the unit was free for us through rebates and gift cards.

*sigh* Its cold in the house. Some of the insulation was taken out to fix the electrical stuff in the basement and it hasn't been put back yet. And our chimney supposedly has a crack so we have to get that fixed before we can use it. That's another project we're working on... getting bids. And we're too cheap to turn on the heater. I just wear a lot of clothes. =) Ahhh... Winter.

Pruner and the TiVo

We took advantage of the warm sunny San Jose winter and pruned the persimmon tree yesterday. Is this the right time of year to be pruning such a tree??? Beats me. But we did it anyway. Chris had fun with the saw and cleared some of the random shrubs that we didn't know what they were and had no desire to keep. There's so much more room now. He even started to fill the pond with some donated dirt. It sure is gonna take a lot of dirt to fill the hole. But at least now the persimmon tree has more room to breath and hopefully it'll recover from our pruning. I didn't know they drop their leaves, but oh boy, do they ever.

While Chris was doing all the gardening, I was puttying the guest room baseboards that he installed last week. The whole room is painted now and it looks great. Just a few minor things left there. I was also putting away some of our kitchen items that we packed from the apt last week. Fun. We need more cabinet space. Someday.

The other goal we had for the day was setting up our TiVo. By 9pm we decided to start. Items required: activation setup (online), long tv cable, long phone cable, and a working phone line. We got the phone box installed outside the house last week or something. But, we don't have any jacks coming into the house yet. So, to skip that part, we need a long phone cable to plug in from the box outside to the TiVo box. This is only needed for the initial setup and downloading part. The TiVo box needs the tv cable connected too. So here's the plan, I brought over a long phone cable and tv cable from the apt. We'd hook it up the phone from outside, do the setup, then, after we install a jack near the tv it would be all good. Here's what happened. Plan A...The instructions said to connect the A/V cables (provided), tv cables(provided), and the phone cables(provided). Uhh... all those cables won't reach from outside to the TiVo to the tv. We need a phone extension adapter but we don't have one. Plan B...The phone cable I brought was too short, maybe the provided one is longer. Uhh... still too short. Plan C... Run it through the window, over the fence, and into the box outside. Uhh... still too short. Plan D... Screw the A/V cables. We had 3 tv cables connected with splitters (cuz the cables weren't long enough by themselves) and the phone cable stretched tight from the box outside to the TiVo and had the TiVo sitting in the kitchen for the setup. And it worked. Who cares if it was 11:30 at night when we finished, at least it worked. Now we can get our rebate. Woo Hoo!!!

Pix

As promised, some pix are up in the September and October archives. More to come. Patience is a virtue.

Moving along

Welp, the fish are still alive. We got a few more since last post. Some feeders, a black moore, and an orange fantail. Half the feeders didn't make it, but they're only 29 cents so we're not too heart broken. We haven't moved the gorami's yet. There's still a bit to do with the guest room first.

Speaking of which. The door is now gone and the wall has new drywall and texture. Its just waiting to be painted. Once that and the closet is painted, the fish can move into their new home.

We were out of town last weekend so we haven't done anything major lately. The tall chest of drawers arrived safely and we put it in the closet it. Since it takes up half the space, and our closet is pretty deep, I suggested we put two poles on either side going front to back in the closet and the long pole from side to side positioned higher up so its like 2 layers of closet rods. We've got the short rods in and its fitting in nicely.

Chris has also been working on the baseboards. 90% are installed, puttied, and painted. He just put caulking along the top edge of most of the boards to hide the gap between the wall and board due to inconsistent flatness. It looks pretty good.

For added security, he put in a latch lock on the sliding patio door. He had fun using his new drill bits. =) I guess we should install the dead bolts on the outer doors soon too.

Our cable and internet works great, except on Chris' laptop. And we had the phone guy come out yesterday. Since we're cheap and didn't want to pay SBC any more than we have to, we're going to wire the house ourselves. Shouldn't be too bad. Chris says he knows how. I said, 'okay, good'. So we've got dial tone but no phone jacks in the walls yet. Then we can get our TiVo up and running.

Holidays take up so much time. Dinners with friends, parties, gatherings. That's just less time for us to work on the house. And all these little projects take up a lot of time, surprisingly. Time management and discipline are key. I hope we can swing it so we can finish up soon.

Little Fishy

Sunday we moved a major item... The goldfish. We have a 55 gallon tank with one plecostomus, Rover, and two fantail goldfish, Spot and Tangelo. We used to have more but they have since departed. They have sacrificed themselves to fertilize our corn plant and money tree, which are growing nicely. We will never forget Blackie, Petie, Tiger, Simba, Santa's Little Helper

So Sunday afternoon be begin our task. In order to move the tank, we have to clean it, empty it, take out the fish, dismantle everything, load it all into the car, drive it to the house, unload the stand, unload the tank, fill it with water, install the filter, heater, lights, stabilize the temperature, and float the fish in the container to acclimate them to the water before letting them out into the tank. Start to finish was about 6-7 hours, including traveling time... although we did need to take a detour.

The heater was broken. We had to buy a new one. By the time we got to Walmart, it was about 8:15 pm. After being blind and having to ask the guy where to find the heaters, we went to stand in line. Oooh... the self checkout is empty. We go there and someone cancelled their purchase and walked away without getting it cleared. It kept saying, "Please wait for assistance." The lady was refilling the coins in one station and the other two had customers at it. It took her sooo long. We just ended up using a different station. We wanted to price check Petsmart which we imagined would close at 9 pm and by the time we got out of Walmart it was 8:45 pm. We drove by and it was closed. I guess we're using this one.

We get home and fill it and start setting up the filter and stuff. Uhh... Chris, where's the new filters? WHAT??? NO MORE?!??!?? Uh oh. What time does Walmart close? *sigh* We don't want to drive back and make the fish suffer in the tiny bucket any longer than we have to. So we used the smaller filters for the 29 gallon tank temporarily. It works okay but we'll get the right size for them.

Everything else went okay. We let them acclimate and put them back in. They seemed okay yesterday. We'll get them some new friends soon.

The gourami in the smaller tank will end up in the guest room but the room's not ready yet. We need another layer of joint compound around the used-to-be door and then some texture and paint. Maybe by the weekend that part will be done. Then install baseboards and paint the closet and put the closet door back on and then we can move stuff into the room. Slowly.

Oh yeah, the computer and internet is up and running too. Good job, Chris!