Jerm's Insanity

Got a cat. She’s cute.

Been making pesto from my monster basil… ohhhh the yummyiness

Last weekend I made my 3000th Jump a few days after my 10th Anniversary of my first skydive. Chrissi made her 300th on the same jump along with 11 of our friends.

I’ve been building an arcade machine. Really. More on this later.

I Finally made it out to California in August. It was swell.

I bought a Mac. I love my Mac.

After watching “Thank God You’re Here”

Jerm: I wasn’t that impressed with George

Heidi: Which one was he?

Jerm: George Takei?

Heidi: OH! Han Sulu, right!

Jerm: …
Update:  Though i joke, i DO count myself blessed that she knows enough about the subject to even  know the names to mix up.

Hot air, I tell you. And that’s how we like it.

I spent a very chilly saturday afternoon following the sage advice of my carpenter friend. On more than one occasion he pointed out what a big heat-suck my pull-down attic door is. Not only am i dealing with an old mechanism that is slightly misaligned (read: not a tight seal), but also a thing piece of plywood with folding stairs attched to it, and above that….. open attic space. Yes boys & girls, after all of that time reinsulating the place, there was basically an uninsulated hole in my cieling.

“Oh my!” I exclaimed, “what can i do?”

“Build a box, grasshopper,” spoke the master.

So build i did. And after much mucking about with trying to cut clean lines in inch thick styrofoam (SO glad i didn’t go with thicker stuff) and going through enough duct tape to make MacGyver wince, here are the fruits of my labor:

I installed shown box above the attic stairs and the result was actually quite remarkable. I installed it at about 10pm yesterday (it was about 12degrees F outside/in my attic) and once i set the box in place (myself at the top of the attic ladder, door fully open) i was actually warm. Closing it all back up there is now a marked difference in temperature (warmer) near the attic door. woohoo!

After months and months (checks history….) and months of bloggy abandonment, i’ve decided to break the silence by assisting the terminally unobservant by pointing out a bit of change in my blogginess.

After a few respsected friends of mine expounded upon the virtues of a blog software rather different from the one i was using, i decided to make the switch. Previously, i was using Google’s Blogger software. While this was quite a convenient solution, it lacked some nice functionality that wordpress does not. Additionally, even though i pubished to my own server, there were still parts of the layout dependant upon Blogger. Now, were Blogger as reliable as Google’s search page, that would not be an issue, but in addition to the issues often encountered when trying to publish changes, sometimes even just accessing the Blogger dependencies would fail and hang the loading of my site.

This was completely unacceptable, as my 3 readers deserve far better than that. So, here it is in its infancy. I’m not quite sure i’m happy with it, but i was through publishing on the old software and needed to get this working so that i may recommence leeching valuable minutes of your lives with my banter.

Welcome to my private revolution.

One of the swell things about moving from a rental situation into an ownership situation is the security deposit. I just i just laid out thousands of dollard for down payment, closing costs, rennovations, utility activations, etc… but a few weeks after moving in, i got this great little security-deposit refund check that’s kinda like reaching into an old pair of pants and finding $550.

Stay with me.

Having been in normal rental situations for most of the past 6 years, there’s been this was of cash that i put up as security for the first apartment and, not beging the sort to really wreck a place, has gotten moved around ever since. Having not seen this money in so long, the return of it feel like found money, a windfall (ok, a light breeze-fall), soemthing that should under no circumstances be used for such pedestrian things as paying off debt. No, this moeny should go toward something indulgent.. something geeky.. something like a pair of 20.1″ LCD monitors… yummy

yes, i know full well that money would have been “better” spent on, oh i dunno, paying off debt, or socking away for a rainy day, or a really nice hooker… but damnit…. w/o buying these heidi would have had to go back to her 14″ CRT.. the HORROR!! think of heidi!!!

So we moved in.

Wait.. backing up…

We got done in time. Our drop-dead date for getting moved into the house was Oct, 1. Anything after that and there would have been a most-unhappy second month of paying both mortgage AND rent.

The final 2 weeks were utter craziness. I was going to the house at 730am, working on it until 9, going to work, going back to the house after work, and more often than not, working until after midnight. Ceiling drywall is a bitch even with the lift and took us far longer than expected. Then the taping went slowly. The trimming was a lot more work than we had ever imagined. The painting took for ever. The day that we had 4 extra people to paint, we coulnd’t paint. My camera broke. The cable guy put his foot through the hallway ceiling (3 days before move-in) and I nearly had to dispose of a body. On Friday the 29th, the night before the move, Herr Carpenter and I went to Home depot at 9PM to get tack strips, carpet padding and a kicker. We learned as we went… managing to get done with 1 bedroom and the living room before 1am. In the morning i managed to get the office done just before the first load of stuff came from heidi’s apartment. It was madness i tell you.

Things have calmed a bit since then. The mad rush has subsided. Heidi had been diligently emptying boxes and getting the kitchen functional. I’ve been finishing up the wiring and the other bedroom and getting the livingroom (read: TV, DVR, etc..) functional.

The place really started to feel like home when i was sitting on the couch, with the tv across the room, talking to a friend of mine. Suddenly it was my space an i had a guest, as opposed to having helpers assist with the project. This was a huge divergence from the feeling i had while carrying boxes in, “why are we bringing boxes in here? this isn’t a place to live.. it’s a thing that we work on.” Suffice to say, the ammended thought came with great releif.

Anyway, the one big thing that was still missing from all of this was the office. It has until very recently been a respository for everything that hasn’t had a place. A large junk heap awaiting dispersal. I’ve had the laptop&wireless to check email with, but every proper geek needs their workstation. I was missing my computing spot. A desk with a chair and a proper keyboard and non-laptop monitors. After deciding that the office is just far too small for even a hacked-up version of the O’Sullivan desk that i picked up at Staples, CousinDave and I constructed my a mighty-fine desk out of wood scraps. It’s not the prettiest thing in the world, but it’s big, functional, and by god it’s mine.