I’ve been in a bloggy mood lately, so here we go with another round of updates in my mundane life. Maybe I’ll post something other than “here’s what happened!” soon, but who knows. Occasionally I like to have posts like my PHP Soap Timeout post, so maybe I’ll come up with something awesome like that soon. But for now, all you get is life updates.

Arizona

I didn’t mention this before here on my blog, although I did mention it on Twitter and Facebook, but I decided to head down to Arizona for my grandparents’ Christmas Eve party. My grandfather had some health issues this year and I didn’t want to miss a guaranteed time when I’d be able to see him around Christmas. I don’t know how much time he has left with us, be it a few months or fifteen more years (I hope it’s even longer than this!).

In any case, Laura was unable to accompany me on the trip. I took off a half-day on Christmas Eve to make the drive down after I got off of work on the 23rd. My work only had a half-day scheduled for the 24th, so I only had to take off 4 hours. My Dad met me here at work when I got off at 4 and we set off for the Phoenix/Mesa area, replete with gifts and items we’d need to survive the harsh Arizona desert… Rather, clothes and toiletries.

We decided to pit-stop in Boulder City to say hello to Laura. She wasn’t expecting us to drop by before we got out of town, but BC is literally on the route to Phoenix from Vegas, and the diversion from the US-93 to her office isn’t very far. She was happy to see us and we chatted for a bit before finally heading out.

The drive was mostly uneventful. We got held up at the dam for awhile because there were quite a few people driving out south on US-93 and there are security checks at the dam. It took us about 20-25 minutes to get through the checkpoint, then we were off to the races. We didn’t end up behind very many slow people.

There was a point in Wickenburg where US-93 ends and that section was totally rebuilt and included two traffic circles. My Dad was leading the way and hadn’t encountered the rebuild before, so there was a little stopped-in-the-circle action before he figured out what direction was what. Apparently, he also needed to fill up in Wickenburg and he’s got a Chevron card, so he was originally going to stop and get gas there. Unfortunately, his regular Chevron had become a Shell station, so he ended up skipping it. Once we were on the AZ-74, he called me up to use my GPS or iPhone to find the nearest Chevron. We ended up hitting up a Chevron at our connection point from the AZ-74 to the I-17.

The rest of the drive was all highways inside the metro area basically until we got to my grandparents’ place. Once we got there, we unloaded a few things, talked with my grandma for a bit, then headed to bed.

Note: I just noticed I’m already over 500 words. I have three topics to cover and I’m only about 1/4 through the first topic… Are you ready for a much longer read?? I sure am!

The next day was obviously eventful as it was Christmas Eve! The day of the party, the day I’d finally get to see a lot of my Dad’s side of the family that I never get to see. The morning started off slow, with my Dad, my grandma, my cousin Cody and myself all talking about stuff and whatnot. Cody’s still pretty young so I guess he didn’t talk much, rather than act like a kid, but hey. I ended up playing a game of Stratego with him, and he’s pretty good. I haven’t really ever played before and he had some good tactics.

My cousin Dani showed up a bit after noon. She’s turning 18 on New Year’s Eve this year, and holy crap she got tall. Not quite as tall as me, but taller than Laura. We didn’t have a whole lot going on at the time because my Dad was puttering around on his laptop and my grandma was cooking up food for the party that evening. She suggested for Dani and I to go catch a movie, so we did. Ended up seeing The Blind Side. Good flick, I particularly enjoyed it.

Even though I had my iPhone and the GPS in the Prius, I decided to just follow Dani to her place so I could see her parents earlier than they would have made it to the party. Mark & Ricki, I hadn’t seen them in quite some time either, so it was really nice to see them. Mark’s lost quite a bit of weight, I’ve never seen him as light as he is now. I’m not sure how much, but I’m fairly certain it’s around 50 pounds.

Oh, did I forget to mention my grandma also lost over 50 pounds? She’s looking much better too. What is it with all of the weight loss in my family? Apparently my Dad is the only one gaining weight, haha. Love ya Dad.

So I helped them load up gifts and whatnot and we drove on back to my grandparents’ place. My grandfather was finally home from work when we got back, so I caught up with him for awhile. It was really good to, since he was the primary reason I decided to take this trip in the first place and miss Christmas Eve with Laura and potentially screw up time with her on Christmas.

My uncle Brad was also finally there, so we got to trade shots and banter around a bit. It was fun, he always is. He’s one of the four of us look-alikes: My grandfather, my Dad, Brad and me. I dare say I’m the best looking of the group!

The look-alikes! From left: Me, my grandfather, my Dad, Brad. Lower-right, my cousin Cody managed to get part of himself in the photo.

From there the party really started. My cousin Matthew and his wife Danielle showed up, and even he’s lost weight! 60 pounds! He officially weighs less than me, the first time in our lives that had ever happened. Unbelievable. He really looks different, being that light. He’s thinking of entering the police force in Phoenix or, if that doesn’t work out, he’ll see if the military will give him a job. I’d rather him be in the police force myself.

I apologize to the rest of the party attendants, but my short-term memory can be bad and in this case, I can’t remember who all else was there! I suck, I know. Oh, my great-grandma Sigourney was there as well. She’s still going strong, I can’t believe it. She’s in her 80s.

The white elephant gift exchange went well, I ended up walking away with three items. I originally nabbed this storage net you can mount to a wall. At one point during the exchange I mentioned that Laura would like this nice carafe that was out there. My aunt Ricki is the one who originally bought it, and she nabbed it at the end with the expressed purpose of getting it for me. She’s awesome. My grandma also had an ice cream bowl & toppings set she opened that never got stolen, and she let me have it because she knew Laura and I would like it and she wouldn’t use it. Interesting stuff. A few other small gifts were passed out and the party ended.

One thing I did discover during the party — my cousin Dani is a nut. She fits in with this family well. Dani and I have been messaging back and forth in Facebook for awhile now and I never realized just how much like the rest of us crazy people in my family she’s like.

Actually, she was my first recruit into getting my family to call me Robert, and she never slipped up once while I was down there. When I was younger, I went by Bob (and even further back, Bobby) and I’ve long been trying to get my family to make the switch and call me by what I want to be called, Robert (even Rob works, although I never introduce myself as Rob… still get called Rob more than Robert…). My aunt Ricki made an effort, so that was cool. My Dad was also making an effort.

Interestingly, my grandma had always wanted my older sister Katie and me to call her Gran. I had no idea until she mentioned it to me during the trip. Thus, I am now calling her Gran.

I got up at 3:30am Vegas time on Christmas and left at about 4:20am Vegas time. Arizona doesn’t participate in daylight savings time, so they share the Pacific time zone during the summer, and during the winger they share the Mountain time zone. So they were ahead at this point. I filled up my car to the brim with more gas before getting out of town, and I was off!

The drive up was again, relatively uneventful, but as I got closer and closer to Vegas I felt the pressure of making sure I got into town in time to shave, change and get to mass in a presentable manner. I was unkempt and didn’t have a change of good clothes with me, so I was trying to avoid driving straight to mass. So I sped, as we did speed going down to Arizona.

At one point, the US-93 was switching between a single road with a dividing line between north and south lanes and having a median between the two. During one stretch of the median, suddenly there was a car coming head-on at me! Thankfully, I was still barely inside a two-lane stretch so there was room around him, but if I had been about ten seconds further ahead, we would have met in a very narrow one-lane spot… Doofus. Needs to learn how to drive.

Getting through the dam at this point was a breeze. I ended up getting home at 9am with basically 30 minutes to shave & change and get out the door. I went a little longer than I wanted, leaving the house at 9:40, but I still got to mass with about 10 minutes to spare. Thus, Christmas had truly begun for me!

Ah, but wait! A note on miles-per-gallon for the trip for the Prius before I start section 2 for Christmas. Going down to Arizona I got about 48 MPG. Pretty good for highway driving in a Prius, it made me happy! But that should have been an omen. It turns out most of the driving down to Arizona is literally down. Downhill, that is. Driving back to Vegas is pretty much all uphill. I effectively got 36 MPG going back to Vegas, which is abysmal for a Prius. I actually had to fill the tank in Kingman to make it all the way back. It sucked.

Christmas

Note: over 1,800 words so far! Wow… Long.

Mass was good. It was a nice Christmas Mass. I got to sit next to Ron & Priscilla, Laura’s stepdad and mom. Laura sang cantor at Mass as she always does and had an excellent solo near the end. It actually elicited applause from the congregation, which isn’t really supposed to happen. Haha.

Laura and I headed back home after Mass to collect the gifts we needed to track back on over to the Waltons’ place and to change into non-Mass clothes. So we did all that and headed back out.

Opening gifts was fun. Laura got to open her new Amazon Kindle from me, which I wrapped in triplicate — I wrapped the Kindle and its cover, put it in a box, heavily taped that box and wrapped it, then put that box in another, heavily taped and wrapped again. It was pretty funny, if I do say so myself.

I had a pretty good haul myself. Got this new component shelf I was wanting for the bedroom so we could put an “entertainment center” in there with the TV I scored from work for $50. Laura got me this awesome new Harmony remote to replace the one downstairs and move the existing one to the bedroom. I need to customize the new one with a background image and a new font theme. Hells to the yeah! Other goodies came my way, such as a Bionicle Lego set, Left 4 Dead 2, The Hangover and more. I also got this nice cube of photos from Katie and my other Parkers up in upstate New York, which was totally awesome. I love hand-made gifts.

We transitioned to dinner, which was excellent as always. Unfortunately, the Waltons don’t get the NFL Network, so I kept up with the Titans-Chargers game online via the NFL’s website. Unfortunately for the Titans and their playoff hopes, it wasn’t a very merry Christmas and they got handled, so no playoffs this year. Maybe next year, we’ll see.

Speaking of Christmas sports, the UNLV Runnin’ Rebels had a basketball game against USC. Unfortunately for them as well, they lost, bringing their non-conference record to 12-2. That’s a pretty good record and I think they’ll make some noise in the Mountain West Conference this season. I think, unless they totally implode, they’ll make the NCAA tournament this year, making it three times in four years. Getting back to where the program needs to be!

After dinner we just sat and talked and watched TV. Ron and Laura read books from their Kindles and Julia worked on her Christmas gift to her boyfriend Alex. Laura and I got sleepy, so we headed home to get some sleep.

Cleaning

We didn’t end up going to bed right away. Our house was an absolute disaster at this point. Neither of us had any time to keep things clean and neat while we were both getting Christmas gifts ready for people and I was prepping to head out to Arizona, so the place was very messy. I ended up doing a little tidying up and organizing and breaking down boxes while Laura read a bit more on her Kindle. Then we headed to bed.

The 26th wasn’t a day for straight cleaning. I still did a bit here and there throughout the day, but we had a lot going on that didn’t involve cleaning. Laura had breakfast with her friend David, we both had lunch with some of my old friends from high school and we had dinner with her parents at White Chocolate Grill. Tasty goodness, I had this great penne alfredo. Afterwards, we came home and I hooked up our new bedroom “entertainment center.” It contains the TV I bought from work, as well as a Blu-Ray player and DirecTV HD receiver I got from Best Buy (using gift cards from both the Tuckers and Waltons) while Laura was having breakfast with David. To mount the component shelf on the wall, I used this new DeWalt 14.4V drill I got with a Lowe’s gift card my Dad got for me. The drill was very nice, but some of the studs in my house are so difficult to screw into that I actually have to use slightly shorter screws…

I got all that setup and reconfigured our old Harmony remote from downstairs for the new system upstairs, and voila! I’m particularly happy about the Blu-Ray player, as it can connect to Netflix, Pandora and YouTube. So we can now also watch Netflix streaming in the bedroom off of the Blu-Ray player, while downstairs we do that using the Xbox 360. We can’t use Pandora downstairs, so that’s a plus. Although I’m sure I could find a way to stream Pandora downstairs if I wanted to, maybe via a laptop or something. Maybe I will…

Thus, the 27th! Cleaning day! Collected all of our trash, including the now-empty boxes from our new components and gifts. Broke down the rest of our Amazon boxes and stored those and the packing materials away. Cleaned off the living room and dining room tables, put all of our new gifts away, stored our wrapping materials (well, what’s left of them). Cleaned some straggler dishes, put the previously-clean ones sitting int he dishwasher away. Tidied up the bedroom slightly, but there are still some straggler clothes in there. Did cable management on the new “entertainment center” in the bedroom. Took the closet door off (we’re replacing it with a curtain, it got in the way of some racks of clothes and was more of a bother than anything useful). Cleaned up and organized both the library and loft. The library had my bin of cables and technology parts strewn about because I needed to find cables for the components in the bedroom, so that was a chore. Vacuumed downstairs and upstairs, dealt with piles of mail, dealt with piles of stuff to shred.

We still haven’t gotten the empty boxes and non-food trash bags out of the house. Our trash days are Tuesday and Friday and our trash bins were already 100% full, so there’s nowhere outside to put the new trash. We’re taking it to the curb tonight, thankfully.

Hmm… Anything else? Might be, but trust me, that list I just gave you took quite a long time to do. We ended up having people over in the evening, so we were happy we got all of that squared away. We still need to do hard floor cleaning and some dusting and have a new, smaller stack of things to shred, but other than that I think our house actually looks good again.

Anything else you want to know about my four-day weekend? Oh, I’m pending some more CD/DVD/BD jewel cases because we’re really low and I’ve got paintable cable covers for the bedroom coming soon so that’ll look better. Phew. And I need to cut down our coaxial satellite cable, because it’s too long and it’ll look bad because I can’t figure out how to make it look goo otherwise.

Hmm… I do still have a Home Depot card to use…

Over 3,000 words! WTF!

So this is a dual blog post apparently… I thought about splitting it into two, but neither subject is really long enough to devote its own blog post to, unless they’re short posts.

Basically, today had a 45-minute window of blog posty goodness. I called up my Mom to talk to her while I finished up some things here at home and while I drove to church afterwards. A short time after I left my house, I asked her what she was doing at that moment, and she said she was playing World of Warcraft… Yes, seriously. My Mom was playing World of Warcraft. She’s been playing MMOs for a few years now. She started with a couple Disney MMOs, Toontown and Pirates, I believe. Her guild leader in Pirates apparently suggested repeatedly for her to give WoW a try, so she acquiesced and got an account.

Now she’s hooked on WoW. And it floors me. My Mom, playing World of Warcraft? How the hell did this happen? The most popular MMO and she’s playing it. Not only that, I’m not playing it! The reason I try not to play MMOs is because I know I’d get addicted. I have in the past. I played Earth and Beyond for quite some time after its release and I played it just about every moment I didn’t have something very important to do. There’s just too much time required to play MMOs. But here my Mom is, playing a game not even I play.

It’s just a little strange to me… I’m supposed to be the gamer, you know?

In any case, a few minutes before I hung up to head into church, I got a call from a 1-800 number and ignored it. I didn’t recognize the number and I was talking to my Mom for the remaining moment I had before walking in to church (which is nearly midway through service at this moment). Laura called me right as I hung up the phone with my Mom and told me that ADT called her about our alarm going off. Well, I knew who the 1-800 number was now.

I started driving back home and gave ADT a call. Our motion sensor had tripped and they’d already alerted the local police about 10 minutes before I got a real person on the phone there. I let them know I was on my way home and they took down my vehicle information so that the cops would know I was the homeowner.

So I got home before the police arrived and tentatively entered my home… Nothing out of place. No sign of entry, nothing moved, the dog happy as a clam to see me, the cat upstairs. Nada. The motion sensor is downstairs overlooking the dining and living rooms… How on earth it could have gotten tripped without any other zones going off is beyond me. The cat only weighs 10 pounds at the most, and the motion detector requires 50 pounds to set it off. So I have no clue what the hell happened.

I called ADT back and let them know it was a false alarm… And decided to write this blog post in the meantime. I think that the police still have to show up because the call was made, but I’m not sure. We’ll see later today if they show up.

So a couple weeks back, Laura’s parents decided they were going to give us their landscape bricks in their front yard. I guess they’ve decided to completely re-landscape their front yard, so they had all of these bricks they no longer needed.

Well, it didn’t take long for Laura to think of a use for them. She’s mentioned a couple times in the past that she’d like to plant a garden somewhere in the side yard, so these bricks now gave her an opportunity to get a raised bed garden. So we spent some time on Friday evening loading up all of the bricks from her parents and drove on home.

We ended up so busy on Saturday that we didn’t end up having the time to set up the bricks for the garden, so we had to play around with driving since we only had one vehicle to drive. We were approaching a problem in the fact that we really needed two vehicles to be able to attend church on Sunday, because Laura always goes ahead of me since she sings and has to get there early to practice.

So I decided I’d work on getting the bricks done in the hopes of freeing up the truck for me to drive. Well… It didn’t work out too well. By the time I got all of the bricks laid, it was already a half-hour into the church service, let alone giving me enough time to shower and drive on over. So I filled the bed in with 5 of our 6 bags of gardening soil and proceeded to work on the sand pit.

It’s not really a pit… Laura and I decided we needed to train Pepper to do her business in one area of the backyard because it’s difficult to clean up after her when she goes in the rocks. Thus, a sand pit.

Well, Laura ended up getting home before I made progress on that. We headed out, grabbed lunch and ran by Star Nursery to get the vegetables and flowers that we were going to plant in the new garden. When we got home, Laura went to work on that while I helped and also went over to rake out the area for the sand pit.

About 45 minutes later, we had the garden planted and the sand pit started. I knew I wasn’t going to have enough sand since I, at first, only used the excess sand from the brick levelling I did. I estimated I needed about 5 more bags to fill out the pit, so when Laura left for her choir concert (I was going to head out later to watch it once they started), I headed to Home Depot and grabbed the sand bags. I also got a short fence for it so that it would be relatively separated, save for a two-foot wide “entrance” for the dog. I got home and promptly filled it in, but couldn’t get the fence in all the way thanks to the monstrously hard ground that Vegas has.

What a day. What a day. I still need to wrap up the small fence, but that’s it. Slowly but surely we’re adding more landscape to our back and side yards.

I do apologize if you’re sick about reading about how busy I am. But such is my life as of late, and as we all know, I like to talk about stuff that actually relates to me in my blog.

So today is my marathon day. If I survive the day without going crazy and not breaking any bones, then I’ve accomplished an extraordinary feat. Here is my schedule:

• 7am-4pm: Work
• 11:30am: Lunchtime mortgage meeting
• 5:30pm to, at the latest, 8:15pm – Corporate Challenge Flag Football
• 9:00pm: Work (evening release)
• 10:00pm: Indoor Soccer

I’ll probably get home at 11:30, where I’ll probably go immediately to bed and wake up the next morning to get to work at 7am again. Oh. My. God.

So let me explain some of these items. Obviously, I have work. But during my lunch break I’ll be heading to rework our mortgage, probably to a decently lower interest rate, which would rock. If that happens, we’ll likely keep our payments where they’re at now, and if we run into issues in the future, cut how much we’re paying to it. It’ll be a nice buffer should we ever need to use it. Otherwise, we’ll pay off the house much faster.

So we also have Corporate Challenge Flag Football this evening. I’ll get into the reason why, but our earliest game starts at 6:30 and our latest goes until whenever. If we keep winning, we keep playing. But I know for a fact that I can’t play past 8:15 and some other people can’t because we all have evening releases at work. Which, of course, is next on my list.

Our evening release should actually be pretty easy. Normally, when we have Thursday evening releases, if I have an Indoor Soccer game later than 7:30, I won’t play. But this evening’s release shouldn’t take longer than a half-hour. So I’m going to head up to my Dad’s place and do the release from there, which is 5 minutes from the Indoor Soccer facility. As long as the release doesn’t take too much longer than we’re anticipating, I will make my Indoor Soccer game at 10.

Wow. Indoor Soccer at 10. Looking forward to that one too. But that means I’ll have at least played in two games (one football, one soccer) and potentially up to four, depending on how the flag football games shake out. I’ll be dead, dead tired. And let’s not forget all of the other busy-ness I’ll be tackling throughout the day.

Oh, I figured I should give you a quick wrap-up to my odd breathing issue. Yesterday it started getting better as the day went on, and when I woke up this morning, it was gone! I’ve had a suggestion that it could have been allergies from a shitload of dust that was kicked up over the last couple days by high winds, as well as hyperventilation, in addition to those thoughts that I listed on the post yesterday. If it happens again, I’ll have to see if I can identify any similar and dissimilar conditions between the two occurrences to see if I can come to a better conclusion.

So as for the reason we’re playing Flag Football tonight — we won last night! But that will be a blog post later today, likely, as I want to expand upon that subject.

Also, Wyatt Gallagher had a pretty interesting post on the state of the USA right now…

Regardless of if I actually have less things to do recently than the last three weeks, I feel productive again. I feel a little energized to get stuff done. Apparently all I need is the feeling that I’m not overwhelmed. Even if I really am, haha.

I’ve only been able to explicitly work out using Wii Fit four times this month. Today will be the fifth and last, since April starts tomorrow. Other than working out today after work, I will also be tidying up the yard by bringing in a shop vac from the neighbors and vacuuming up all of the dead leaves and debris in the yard. I’ll also clean dishes and put the ones in the dishwasher away. Oh, and lets not forget about folding the laundry that I did over the weekend.

But I still feel good about all that. I’ll probably still have time to mess around should I choose to. I may end up troubleshooting the extra desktop system I’ve got to try to get the hardware working, then I’ll install Gentoo on it and turn it into a monitoring station for my web server, which this blog is on.

Oh, I’ll also probably shred some more old documents that need to be shredded. And I might start sorting out the last three months’ worth of sales tax receipts.

Also, money kinda sucks. It’s nice when Laura and I get little spurts of extra cash to get some things done, like coach lights, a Blu-Ray player (wait, I never posted about that?!) and trips to Disneyland. But some of that extra cash ran out and we’re wanting to keep more of a buffer in our checking account than we were, so it’s back to curtailing spending. Especially since we’re finally getting my life insurance setup. Beh. Money sucks.

With the exception of last weekend, I’ve been pretty damn busy the last three weeks. It’s had its highs and lows, but at least I wasn’t totally bored. Well, I think the pretty damn busy stretch is mostly ending.

Laura and I have gotten the house cleaned up a lot. Most of the outside work I needed to get done is done, save for clearing out debris and potentially planting two new plants. We want to get bar lights installed but that’ll take a little more time to get together. And we’ve got a couple get-togethers planned soon, but nothing big.

So I think we may be out of the woods. I may get to work out a lot more now. Let’s hope.

Speaking of working out, our neighbors want us to get a membership at Snap Fitness, this little gym within walking distance of our home. Apparently it’s $55 per couple per month for membership and there’s no contract, so that’s appealing. We may actually do it, because Wii Fit can only go so far for a cardiovascular workout.

Good times, good times…

All my troubles seemed so far away…

Oh, sorry. Broke into song there for a moment. Laura would be happy with that one, seeing as it’s the Beatles.

So yesterday was a busy day for me indeed. Actually, the whole weekend was. I’m sure you’ve already read my previous post about the weekend appearing to be really damn busy, right? So here’s a recap of what went on.

Saturday we got up relatively early, sometime around 7. Showered, dressed, all that goodness. Then we drove up to Utah for Julia’s softball games. Sadly, right before we got there we learned her next game wasn’t for quite some time, so we didn’t have to get up so early and rush to get out. Oh well.

So we caught one of her games, which her team should have won were it not for an awful coaching decision that really took their defense out of the game. Her next game was too far off for us to stay so we then headed on back home.

When we got home we showered again because we were kinda grungy. Got a couple things out of the way that we needed to and then headed off to Tina’s birthday party boozing at BJ’s in Henderson, NV.

Ok, so they had a reservation for 8pm. Not bad. For some reason or other, they wanted Tina to get there a half-hour early. I’m not really sure why, that’s an odd request given that a reservation is for 8 and not earlier, not later… Weird. So Tina was there from 7:30-8:00 for her 8:00 reservation. Everybody showed up at about 8.

And we all waited… Until… NINE. 9:00pm! What the fuck is that about? Yes, I dropped the f-bomb. Had to. Not only did they have Tina get there a half-hour early for a reservation, but they didn’t seat us until an hour after the reservation! What the fuck is a reservation for, anyway? Stupid, stupid idiotic dumbasses. I like BJ’s but who knows the next time I’ll want to go there. Their Pizookie is awesome, but maybe not awesome enough for a 1-hour wait on a reservation.

That happened to Laura and me at the White Cholocate Grill on Valentine’s Day. We had to wait a half-hour for our reservation. Apparently I didn’t rant in a blog about that. Oh well.

Since getting seated took so long, we didn’t end up going putt-putting with them afterwards.

So Sunday starts and we went to church. Cleaned up a little bit around the house beforehand. Then after lunch… Holy crap. I spent about an hour raking rocks around our front and back yards with a couple of my neighbors that decided to come out and help (thank God!). We have excess rock in some spots in the yard because another neighbor gave us their rock that matched when they re-did their front yard.

After that, the neighbors wanted to play a little football. So we did, for about 15 minutes.

I then proceeded to install our new coach lights on the front of the house. That took awhile as the stucco got in the way quite often. Had to make some small repairs and I still need to make a little bit more sometime soon. Gotta get stucco patch. Then when I was done with that, I installed a set of hooks for our rake and a ladder we’re currently borrowing from Laura’s parents.

Oh, then we went on a date soon afterwards. And watched some of The Office when we got home.

And is that the end of being really damn busy? Nope. Tonight is a meeting with our financial advisor at home, so we need to clean and tidy up a bit. Then tomorrow I’m having my car’s tires rotated and if I get home during daylight hours, I’m going to continue working on levelling out the rocks.

Joy. So wait, Wednesday appears to be the first day I’ll have a little free time… Let’s hope.

So last Monday I was vacuuming when I got home from work. Actually, I was cleaning most of our downstairs because we had our financial advisor coming over. It needed to look good and our downstairs was pretty messy.

Over the course of the vacuuming, Pepper’s hair just stopped getting sucked up. Usually, if we haven’t vacuumed in awhile, I’ve got to do a double- or triple-pass over the section I’m vacuuming because there’s so much hair that the vacuum can’t get it all at once.

Well… I was to the point where octuple-passes over the carpet wasn’t working. It was really frustrating and I stopped trying and just picked up the pushed-around hair that I could by hand.

That night when Laura got home, I mentioned the issue to her and suggested we get a new vacuum cleaner. Here’s the part that sucks. Our first apartment together had one vacuum, and it died when we moved (just at a year). Then we had our current one (well, not current anymore) up until this last Saturday, so it lasted less than a year. So we would be on vacuum #3 after about 1.6 years of 2 other vacuums… Let’s see, $100 per vacuum per year… Yeah. Enough.

We bought a Dyson. The pet-hair one. The top-of-the-line one. And with a 20% discount at Bed Bath & Beyond too! Totally awesome. And the verdict on its performance?

Firkin rocked up the joint. We had to empty the canister five times over the entire house. And we should still probably go over all of it again because I’ve heard you should vacuum twice when you get a Dyson just so you can see how awful the place was with the old vacuum. Crazy, crazy stuff.

Not only that, but this last weekend was supposed to be all dedicated to a different major addition to the house: new couches!

We’d been using hand-me-down  couches since our apartment. We had two downstairs and one upstairs (that is still there, it’s not bad and the cover is good). We decided that replacing the couches was the next major purchase after the new TV and entertainment center. We were perusing some random ads for the President’s Day sales and RC Willey had a nice set for… Really damn cheap. Oddly enough, cheaper than the Dyson! Haha.

Laura jumped on it after work that day and they were delivered on Saturday, right after we got the Dyson to vacuum downstairs so the couches wouldn’t be sitting on pet hair.

They’re great! Comfy couches with plenty of padding, and you can lay down on them comfortably… I’m so happy with them. I’ve been desiring a couch that you could lay down on in one position for a long time and not hurt and whatnot, and they deliver. They look good and feel good and they’re just all kinds of awesomeness. Totally worth it.

So what do we have in store in regards to home improvement, be it structural or furnishings? Well, I think our immediate plans have new coach lights outside and bar lights inside. We’ll see.

So now four items in our living room have come from RC Willey: 2 couches, TV and TV stand. And I really never shopped there before…

So sue me, I couldn’t think up a cool catchy blog post title.

Oddly enough, even given this economy, Laura and I are finding some small ways here and there to get some home improvements done. For example, the curtain rod in our master bathroom was, well, kinda janky. Laura never saw the issue, but it fell once, and nearly on top of my head. It looks like KB Home tried to jam it into one of the walls because there are circular marks that look like the end of the curtain rod.

After it fell, the best I could do was prop it on top off the shower enclosure that sticks out from the wall. From that point, I was just careful not to tug outwards on the curtain because it could roll off, in theory. Otherwise, it seemed like a perfectly normal curtain rod.

I’d been wanting to get a replacement for some time, and those curved rods they have in hotels are nice. My Dad has one and it’s nice. I broke down yesterday and got one in Home Depot while I was getting plumber’s putty. I put it up last night at about 10:30. Used it this morning, and…

Wow. It’s nice. There is so much more room inside there now! It’s firkin awesome man. I also bought a scale since we didn’t have one, so now I get to know just how fat I really am.

Aside from that, we’re finally getting new couches! We’ve been running on hand-me-down couches for awhile. They’re not bad, just not nice. Haha. They’ve seen some mileage and wear and tear. But now we’ve ordered some new ones via an RC Willey President’s Day sale and they’ll arrive on the 28th.

We’re slowly making over our living room. The TV and TV stand both came from RC Willey via Black Friday, so they’re greatly contributing to our gradual home makeover via one-day sales.

Our existing couches are already spoken for. Poor Steven doesn’t have any and we’re handing them over to him, to use as a temporary stopgap until he can buy some good ones.

Let’s not forget that we got HD satellite hooked up recently as well as a nice new Harmony Remote. And I plan on getting our coach lights outside installed sometime by the end of March, and we need to install bar lights sometime soon too.

How are we affording all of this in this economy? Well, we’re planning well for these things and not rushing into anything. And we’re also getting a sizable tax return this year, which is how we’re getting the couches.