New Tower of Fun

Ginger Cat's immense ass finally killed the $30 wal-mart tower of fun we had in the bay window. There was a huge crash and there it was on the ground and Ginger Cat was all wide eyed and freaked out. We went out the next night looking for a replacement and found one that was really nice and not as expensive as the $400 tree like structures they were selling.

Here you can see Oreo and Ginger Cat checking it out, the best feature is the holes in the top and bottom shelf. They love twocking each other in the head between them. It's also in the window by the fireplace which means the big bay window is wide open and the living room looks much bigger now.

It's curtains for me!

I put up 30ft of curtain this weekend. Finally our living room and den has curtains. To try and keep the heat in we got velvet curtains and they all look great. They cover both the windows and the doors and are nicely out of the way when they're open. I really don't like the curtain rods you get at the store (the ones where one rod slides inside another rod) and custom made curtain rods are super expensive so I made my own out of 1/2" iron pipe. It cost $100 for 5 rods one of which was 12ft long. I cleaned, metal etched and then spray painted them black and they look great! I'm super happy with how they turned out.

Macro Photo Time!

I borrowed some extension rings for macro photography from my camera geek coworker, hoping to get some good pictures for the field guide. Well we lucked out, we didn't see anything new, but our first find was a ringneck snake who was stuck in the pool (and cold and slow) He was a great study for a lot of pictures. On Sunday we found two more ringnecks one may have been the pool swimmer. I added pictures in their own ringneck gallery.

We also got a few pictures of a Western Fence Lizard.

Using the extension rings was a pain, there is such a small distance from the lens that is in focus, I really need to learn more about using them.

I got wood

I've spent the last two days hauling wood up the hill from by our well up to the wood pile. I'm pretty sure we have enough wood for the rest of the winter and maybe beyond. This is for the only source of heat in the house, the same fireplace insert Tricia had in her house growing up. Since the ground was all overgrown and I was using a wheel barrow I laid down the old pool solar panels. These provided a very smooth ride for the wheel barrow but were very, very slippery. I'm guessing I moved about 10 cubic meters of wood, my hamstrings are tighter than a fat lady's g-string.

Field Guide Update

I spent some time updating the infrastructure behind the field guide. Now it's even easier for us to add animals to the field guide. This new system also allows me to publish an rss feed so you can see new additions easily. If you use google reader you can add it here.

Rain update: 18.99"

A Blustery Day

On Sunday we had 6.62" of rain in 24 hours, the previous day we had 1.32" bringing our season total to 12.53". I expect it to be even higher tomorrow and it looks like rain for the rest of the week! Right now there's lightning and cars crashing outside. Nothing appears to be leaking, so that's good news. How do we know all this? We have a WMR968 weather station.

In other news, Tony finished painting and staining the windows inside the house and I'd probably give him a C- grade on the job he did. The color of the big bay window isn't close enough to the woood around it to make me happy. The guest bedroom looks great though and the windows he painted look o.k. too.

Pimping it MTV cribs style

Here's our new TV on a shelf I built (with my biscuit joiner). It was a super cheap Costco deal (27" LCD for under $600), it looks a little cheap, but the picture from DVD's is awesome (to us plebs).