Blue Christmas

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Originally uploaded by jasonhunter.

While Christmas cheer was in full spirit, there were hard times for others. Homer, Marge, and Mr. & Mrs. Smore took a tumble off of the Christmas tree. This story does have a happy ending. All pieces have been reattached and each ornament is ready for next year's holiday season

Red Reindeer

At the Door
Originally uploaded by jasonhunter.

I wanted to document our holiday decorations before Christmas passed by. We try to strike a balance between celebrating the holiday and going overboard with hundreds of decorations. Not think I think there is anything wrong with that. Sometimes, I wish these people would move to our neighborhood. Happy holidays!

Message in a (Tin) Bottle

ThankYou01
Originally uploaded by jasonhunter.

Our Boston buds Adam and Jill sent us this "Message in a Can". We watered the can as per the instructions. In a few days out popped the above bud with its secret message (it reads "THANK YOU"). We've continued to care for the plant and it's now almost 2 feet tall.

Halloween

Oh my it's been a while but that's for another post. For now enjoy some zany pictures from Halloween. Can you guess what we were for Halloween?

Pictures of You

Once again I was truant in posting something. However, this time I have something tangible to show for it. I spent two weeks working on this for my sister's wedding. They showed it at the rehearsal dinner. There was much fuss - the good kind - made about it.

The wedding was excellent. The sister looked wonderful and it's nice to have Dan as an official member of the family now.

Shadows & Tall Trees

My lucky (few) readers you are about to find out the answer to the age-old question: If a tree falls and no is around to hear it - does it annoy your neighboors? The answers is: Yes.

Sunday afternoon the wife and I went to get the bikes out of the shed and discovered our neighbors pruning the branches off a massive tree limb. A limb the fell on Tuesday; that we were just finding out about on late Sunday. That was partially reasting in thier yeard. Sigh. We were shocked that a fallen limb sat in our backyard for 5 nights. More so, we were shocked that it missed both our fence and our shed. So shocked that I forget to take pictures of the intial mess. Instead, I give you the aftermath:

Hunter household performs "Back to the Apple"

Now, the stunning conclusion to 'Traitorous Machines'....

We have resolution. Better yet, we have a new Macbook Pro. Apple decided that it was unacceptable that I wait until Oct. 11th for the replacement part to arrive at their repair facility. Finally! That's what I was saying all along guys!

To Apple's credit, they did right by me. This whole experience, with the crashed hard drive and misleading, contradictory customer service, was frustrating. The constant delays made the bad situation even worse. I just wanted my laptop back; but as my friend said to me, "If Apple wants to give you a Macbook Pro, you take it and run".

The return of a laptop in the house means a return to regular posts. I could have easily typed this up on our desktop computer but, eh - the laptop was so convenient; I can type this up while watching TV with the wife and cat. How ironic, then, that I'm posting this from the basement, using the same desk that the desktop is on.

The Sound of New Carpet

What does it sound like? It sounds like no more walking on cold asbestos tiles anymore.

Our new carpet arrived last Friday. It is similar to our old carpet that, for those who've just joined us, was destroyed during the great June flood. For the months that we were without I didn't think carpet would make that big of a difference. Oh, how I was wrong! The basement looks like an functional room in the house, not just some place that we threw a bunch of furniture in. Also, once the insurance money came in, the new carpet cost us $24 dollars. Certainly the price is right, however what is most valuable is the solace I get from seeing our home rebuilt and refurbished to its pre-flood condition.

Traitorous Machines

The last 30 days have given me a strong case of ludditism. First, the hardrive on the Powerbook died, taking with it photos, music, calendars and our ability to e-shop while watching Law & Order reruns. Then came various hi-jinks with data loss on the iPod, the last refuge for the data from the Powerbook. Today, I flip on the Dish Network DVR to find that it reset itself in the middle of the night. Where once was 65 Gigs of television, is now nothing. Its like someone stole our DVR and replaced it with one out of the box.

The farce of 'owning' things stored on computers has become apparent to me. I'm now scanning the Sunday advertisements for deals USB jump-drives and cases of DVDs. I'm also familiarizing myself with data back-up and recovery programs.

I want to battle robots; all colors, not just pink.

Alt.End

Our beloved Powerbook crashed last night. Sealed up inside it's corrupted hard drive are all of our photos from this year, music, and lots of work in progress. I'll shop it around for data recovery but I'm not expecting much. I'll write a make-up post this weekend, when I'm feeling better about the whole thing.

Weekend Warrior

With Dawn off in NYC helping with my sister's wedding shower, neighbor Tim and I ran some electrical and put up a kitchen ceiling. Most of the credit goes to Tim who did all the wiring and cut all the paneling for the ceiling. I stood around a lot and tried my best to be helpful.

The new recessed lighting is amazing. It's so bright! The first night with the new lights I kept turning off the lights thinking it would some how dim the lights, rather than simply turn them off (oh....that's how electricity works!). When Dawn came home from NYC on Sunday she was floored with how great everything looked.

The only advice I can give for anyone thinking of trying this is to have an electrician help you. Even with Tim's expertise it still took us 5 hours. If I had tried this by myself I'd either still be working on it or dead from electrocution.

Blog Note: Next week is a vacation week so there may not be an update. In fact, I'm almost positive there won't be one.

The Battle is Won, but the War Continues

Saturday Morning 9am









Protective covering for last week's efforts








The glorious finished product.

It's done. We finished the upper cabinet renovation on Sunday. We accomplished the same amount of work in one less day than last week. Overall, the second phase went smoother than the first. There wasn't as much grease and grim on these cabinets which speed up the amount of prep time before sanding. We bought more expensive brushes this time which made a huge visual difference with the paint. It was totally worth the extra $1.76 at the register. We still had some difficulty with putting the doors back up it. We concluded that it was the difference between the new hinges & the old ones. The new hinges stood off the doors by a quarter of an inch. Double that and there goes all the space between the doors. The doors do close, however they are pressing against one another to the point where the paint is coming off. SO...if you do try this at home please consider the difference between your hardware.

We are pleased with our efforts. The new cabinets make the kitchen much brighter. Dawn is already motivated with our fledgling efforts that I got served homemade quiche one night and ribs with corn on the cob another.

I'm running electrical and putting up the new ceiling this weekend. The next post will be about that. Unless I forget to turn off the power and both my hands are wrapped in gauze. Then the post will look something like this:
'fsf;lv,,erpo[pwq0pt39nmvdfop4twtjlksvdd;lka00iiifcxmaspl['qw[epoo'

Someone's in the Kitchen ...

removing ceiling tiles...








...and painting the cabinets...










...a bright new happier color...









I should have taken a picture with the cabinet doors attached, which is what we did Sunday. If you've never tried it, re-attaching cabinet doors isn't as easy as one would think. I took us 4 attempts and a trip to home depot before we got it right. So now that we know the ropes of taking apart, sanding, priming, painting and re-hanging cabinets, we hope for the same success with the other side. I'll post pictures of the finished project.
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Halo, Sister-in-Law!
We were graced with an overnight stay by my sister-in-law, Lauren, last night. She was very excited that the XBOX was repaired. While I am very familiar with the single-player campaign I had no experience with the head-to-head mutli-player feature, of which she was familiar. It took me a while to get acquainted with the maps and the rules of the board. Once that occurred, there were frags a-flying. Frags to the face, frags to the back of the head, frags off of the ladders. With all the fragging going on, you might think there'd be no room for anything else. Oh, but there was amble room for trash talking. And later root beer floats.

Into the Flood

Oh how the best laid plans get wrecked! In this case, by 5 inches of water. I had plans to update this blog weekly then our basement got wet. Five inches of water came up through the a drain in the utility room. Most of everything in the basement got wet. While lots of stuff got ruined, we didn't lose much of importance. Unfortunately, a box of pictures and items that belonged to Dawn's father was ruined. Sadly, our insurance doesn't cover memories. It does cover everything else. We've been told we will get money for almost everything that got ruined. Which is comforting.

Here are the highlights:
our pottery barn computer desk

Basement Walls

The drain

Furniture

the records and Christmas tree

Update

The link should be working now. Sorry for the delay.

New Window Zodiac

We've been very busy working on the house these last weeks. With a majority of the inside set, we've focused our attention on the outside of the house. Our flagship item is new windows. We had the old windows taken out and replaced with shiny new ones. The new windows are great - they keep things like dirt and the wind out of our house, which make us very happy.

Check it out for yourself.

Gnomes in the Yard

It snowed for a majority of the day yesterday. This morning there was a healthy dusting on the cars. It reminded me of our only substantial snowfall this year which was back in February. During that snowfall I took this picture:








Aside from greeting guests on our stoop, our door gnome is also a handy snow measureing device. February snow fall = the height of a gnome's knee.

Weekend Roundup

I am failing in my goal to update this every Wednesday. This is the second time that I've posted on a Friday. I must get better at this - or just switch the day to Friday.
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So it's the weekend. It's Friday. I've spent the last hour blasting Sleater-Kinney on the stereo and chasing my cat around the house. I'm sweaty and dusty and in a great mood. I'm feeling exceptionally good - the best I've felt all week. Now, I'm going to ruin this great mood by writing yet another letter explaining my continued dissatisfaction with the moving company ABS Moving & Storage. Once that issue is closed out I'm posting all correspondence between ABS Moving & Storage, the Better Business Bureau and myself.

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The weatherman says significant snowfall is in order for the Washington DC metropolitan area. Even though I've sworn off winter because of all the warm weather, I'm excited for the snow on Saturday. Winter, I take thee back.

It's All Backwards

Apologies for posting this two days late. I'm aiming for posting every Wednesday. Today I got to leave work early and enjoy the very lovely weather we had. 70 degrees at the start of February. Who would have guessed! It was a great day for not being at work and instead, sitting on the deck doing some personal junks like this. It did seem strange editing and post picture of Christmas time while sitting on the porch in short-sleeves, but I'll take what mother nature is willing to give. At this point, I almost don't want it to snow ever this year.

Shocking Results

Just before new year's I took up the task of replacing the light switches in the house. It's not that difficult once you turn the power off. The whole event was going well until I turned the power back on to test everything out. With the power back on I discovered that 6 lights no longer worked. After a few adjustments, now one switch controlled all 6 lights. A few more adjustments and the switch finally controlled the correct light and the other 5 lights also worked properly.

Even though it took me 6 hours to complete the job and the poor wife had to sit in the dark most of the night I'm still calling it a success because in the end all that matters is whether you got electrocuted or not. And I did not!

Duna-na-na-na-na

Sam, you were right. Best.card.ever. I put it in the window so the whole neighborhood can see. Thanks for the birthday wishes.