Weekend before #5

This weekend was pretty eventful. I never left the house on Saturday but I spent essentially the entire day putting together a new computer. It's for upstairs in our bedroom so we can watch various things. Not sure how much we'll be doing it in the summer, but in the winter it's sure nice to be snuggly under the covers when vegging out. It has a TV tuner and I'm using some software called MythTV which is essentially an open source "TiVo". As is usually the case with open source software, it took all day long to get it remotely working. It was mostly working by the end of the day though so that was somewhat satisfying. I also reformatted my netbook with Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.04, a version of Linux. It just came out, and it worked flawlessly out of the box. Everything on the netbook behaves as it should without me spending all day trying to get it to be that way. That's how Linux should be, so hats off to the Ubuntu developers. Now the netbook has more functionality than it did before.

On Sunday the following happened:

Emily went out to ride in the morning. While she was gone I went downstairs to move a light fixture in the ceiling beams. It is in the way of the Smith press which I also put together today (more on that later). While down there I was examining the insane wiring that is going on and decided I was going to sort it out. I want to rewire some of the circuits in the house (eventually) because a lot of them don't make sense. (For instance, the outlet in the kitchen that our toaster oven is plugged into is the same circuit as my room which has all of the computer stuff in the house. Plus it's not GFCIed and code requires that for counter kitchen receptacles.) It's a crazy mixture of old and new wiring and tons of "old" junction boxes where 10 wires come in and out and who knows where they go. So I started at the beginning: the breaker box. I figured out which wires coming out of it were which circuit breaker number and labelled them. Just this shed a lot of light on things and set me well on the way to getting it all sorted out. Here's a picture of the aftermath (and a hint of the craziness of the wiring):


Shortly after I finished that project Emily came home. Next I finally mounted a picture Holly sent me as a present. It looks excellent in black/white room:


A hint for people mounting things in drywall: The "Cobra" brand plastic screw anchors from Lowe's, the #6-8x1" ones. They come in white, which is great for our walls. But I have determined and am now writing down permanently the fact that a 3/16" drill bit makes the perfect size pilot hole. I'm only using anchors now that I know that. That's the most frustrating part of using plastic anchors in general. I always drill a hole too small, try and hammer it in, screw up the anchor, drill the hole bigger, etc.

After that Trevor came over and we went to the Red Canoe for lunch. I had an excellent panini (it's one of the only places I've found up here where you can get a nice hot panini) and so did Trevor. Emily had a grilled cheese on panini bread, though she actually ordered a tuna melt but was too nice to tell them. They also forgot to bring Trevor's tomato bisque soup out. I will forgive them because it's a small place and the food is great anyway and they didn't charge us for it (they just forgot to write it down when we ordered it, I guess). It's a really neat place and the food is made to order (so it takes a while to get it, but it's worth it). They also serve excellent coffee and I had a (hot, even though it was hot outside) mocha. After we finished eating we also bought six muffins (well, Trevor bought two). They have been voted "Best Muffins" in Baltimore for several years running, and they deserve it. I'm looking forward to a num num num breakfast.

Following our lunch outing we went home and Trevor was kind enough to help me put the Smith press together (since we really needed three people for the job). It was indeed tricky to get it up. It is so totally precariously close to the ceiling it's amazing. You can see the light that I "moved" (I'm going to actually move it and put a junction box and outlet in where it was, and then put up a long fluorescent light in it's place) as well as our water main line (which we had to carefully flex up a bit to get the thing put together, yikes!).

Super close! You can see the part that is actually above the beam there.

Trevor then headed home. Emily went outside and pulled out a ton of dandelions. Shortly thereafter we decided a trip to Lowe's was in order. I made a wishlist consisting of a bunch of things and she had a mental wishlist of flowers to buy. It was actually a pretty good trip. I bought some extra electrical supplies and the fluorescent light I mentioned earlier, along with a little workbench/vicey thing. One of these days I'm going to put a proper workbench in the basement... one of these days. Emily got some very pretty flowers and herbs as well. I also bought a case of 12 fluorescent 48" T8 light bulbs, which I'm pretty sure are the same ones we use in the kitchen (and for my new fixture). They were half the price of buying them two at a time and I couldn't help it. I'll have enough lights for the next 10 years now.

After all that I did a tiny little workout on the bench and discovered how amazingly weak my pectoral muscles have become. That will change, hopefully! Then I went outside (it's dusk by this time) and did a 3/4-hearted effort mowing the lawn, which really needed it. It'll make it another week or two now at least. We still don't have real grass coming up everywhere, just weird patches here and there.

Oh, also, we're deciding on a deck person tonight. I'm likely to go with the last person we saw, from the Fence and Deck Connection. He was a bit more salesman-ey than all the other people we saw, but this is also the only company that I had a personal recommendation from (a coworker of mine knows the owner well and has had two decks built by them). His price was very reasonable, and in fact one of the lowest and it included a black aluminum picket fence rather than just 2x2 wood pickets. That'll be easier to maintain and look nicer. I feel a bit torn because I really liked the second to last guy (the owner of Frontier Deck Builders). He was a very affable fellow, but I guess affability doesn't really matter when it comes to having someone build you a deck. Tomorrow or Tuesday we'll sign and fax some paperwork around. Hopefully have a deck by June! Sweet. We also upped the size to 22'x12'.

This is a long post! *phew* Now doesn't everyone feel like they just spent the whole weekend with me?

Oh and also, Mom: no, there was no reason we were looking at the PET/CT other than I wanted that image. Also there are a few interesting things to point out in it. Obviously you can see my port clear as day and the stent. But you can also see my colon. It's a sort of splotchy thing starting a little above where my bellybutton is. The splotchiness is in fact poop in my colon, exciting! But you can also see that I don't have a "normal" colon. Most people, it goes left-right, goes straight down, then goes left again before connecting to your anus. You can see mine goes left-right, then does a diagonal to my anus. That's because they removed about 20" of it right near the rectal verge and had to reconnect it. Up in my chest, where my heart and lungs are (the lungs are the big black voids) you can see these sort of spidery vein looking things coming out from the center of my chest. That's actually scar tissue from the radiation I had for Hodgkin's disease. I've been told that normal people don't have this (I've never seen anyone else's before). It's not really a "big" deal or something to worry about, but I just have to be careful to be sure I stay current with my health in the future as it can lead to some respiratory problems late in life. I think I am more proactive about my health care than 99.99% of the population though, so no worries. Plus late-term respiratory problems are basically one of the least worrying things for me at the moment, hah!