This month in review...

So, the kitchen is almost done (only took 5 months). I haven't quite been around, and the plumber was on a vacation, so it took a little time for my appliances to get hooked up. Its not like I spend any time at my house anyway....

Other big accomplishments in the last month: I bought a desk (not pictured), and got lots of house stuff off my Christmas list (often referred to as a bridal registry) and am almost done hooking up the home theatre system. Being that it has only taken 4 months to hook this thing up, is one hell of an accomplishment. It only took three separate orders (roughly 2-3 weeks apart each time) to figure out exactly what and how many I needed. A little help from Kevin my brother, and Kevin my friend (while my brother is my friend, these are two different people), and John - the wiring is essentially complete. I can't wait until I can watch Top Gun, The Last Samurai or one of the Pirates movies on Blu-Ray!!!

If slow and steady wins the race, I'm definitely winning the race of home remodeling... Unfortunately I think new siding will have to be included in the 2009 budget. On a nice windy day, sitting on the couch, one can feel a chill emanating from the wall, or maybe even a breeze through the living room. Step out of the warm shower on the the cold tile, I get fears of turning into Flick from A Christmas Story: "ITHS STHUCK" Evidently in 1954, they deemed exterior insulation to not be necessary... Oh the joys of home-ownership. As I always include pictures in my post, here's few cool pics from the last month:


On a flight from Pahonix to Newark I snapped this pretty cool picture of the sunset over the wing. It was much more phenomenal in person though.



So, on December 19th, I flew from Pahonix to Detoilet. It just so happened that there was a huge snowstorm from the midwest to the east coast. In roughly 4" of snow, we landed 20 minutes early at DTW (thanks to a ground halt, and us being the only jet inbound, we were allowed to land). My coworker Rich was stranded for an extra 5 hours at the lovely Pahonix Sky Harbor airport with absolutely nothing to do, waiting for his flight to take off. Who'da thunk that flying to Detoilet in the winter, during a snowstorm, would be better than flying to NJ. So back to my flight, since its MY blog, we landed early. Evidently we had Ray Charles as our pilot and Stevie Wonder as the copilot. Approximately 40 minutes later (20 minutes late of the original arrival) we parked at the gate. The first gate was not plowed out, the second gate had some airport machinery stuck in a snow bank, and we parked at our third gate. I think Ray and Stevie just wanted to do donuts in a 737 in 4" of snow.

Rochester, Michigan, Home to Kevin Kassa, and the Rochester Mills Brew-Pub, had roughly 11" of snow. What is there to do? Well a 3 block walk to main street, see all the cool Christmas Lights, and another block to a fine establishment which serves food and beverage... mmmmmmmm beeeeeeeer. So the impending weather made certain people panic, and after some nagging, Kevin and I decided to leave Michigan on Saturday and head to NJ. A majority of the trip was without precipitation, and with good road conditions. The Ohio Turnpike on the other hand, seemed to have some icing issues. We went through a 6-mile stretch where we saw a spinout/jersey barrier induced Car-Be-Que, maybe 7 other cars off the road, and an 18-wheeler with flaming brakes. If you imagine that there is no sun glare in the picture below, you see some of the ice on the trees somewhere in Ohio. Look really closely!

So, after order # 2 came from Monoprice (needed more wire) I employed Kevin my friend/neighbor and John to come over and help finish up the installation of the home theatre system. They helped out a lot, and I was almost done. Just needed to order some more banana plugs (things you put on the speaker wire to plug into the plate and stuff). I made sure I had all necessary working tools. See man-fridge below.

Thanks for keeping up, and see you in a few weeks!