Mark a few more tasks off the list of things to do

So, what did I do this weekend?  Well, I started the coffins, and they're coming along slowly.  I'm gluing them now, and plan to carefully nail them after the glue dries.  I'll post a picture when they're done.  Candice will be painting a rock (or maybe two - I don't know) to mark the graves with.

I bought and installed new outdoor lighting for the house and installed it to include solar lighting along the driveway.  It looks tremendously better than the old lighting and the light for the deck is WAY better because it doesn't have a motion sensor (which couldn't be set to have the light always on).  The hearse project now has the "lamps" for the hearse to go along with the wagon wheels.

I also finished cleaning the garage.  Except for the mess I made by cutting wood.

Gabe had a birthday party and is enjoying all his presents.  Hard to believe he's 7 years old.

We also went and got Candice's hoses for her glass studio.  All we have left are two connectors, flashback arrestors and a regulator, and she's totally in business.  That and of course learning the techniques over again with the new, better torch.  I imagine she'll post something about them knowing her by her first name at the glass store in Golden despite only having been there one previous time in her blog (http://mistressmasochist.blogspot.com/) soon.

That's all for this time, thanks for reading!

Premature Coffination (second post of the day)

So, turns out the guy who I was getting the coffin from got the transaction vetoed by his wife.  Though they've never used it before and it is taking up a lot of space that they need, she wants to keep it.

But on the bright side, in my efforts to get a debt consolidation loan that haven't been working for a couple of years now, I managed to refinance the car for 5 years at half the interest rate and get the full current value of the car in the loan.  This gave me almost the amount I wanted in the debt consolidation loan at a better rate than I would have gotten if I had gotten the debt consolidation loan which I can apply towards the credit card debt.  In all, I'll be saving at least $3300 per year in interest payments alone.  That should have me paying off all non-house debts (including the car that was refinanced) in just 4 years time or less.  w00t w00t!

That also means that we have breathing room on our budget, which is the more important thing as my financial stress levels have plummeted to reasonable levels.  It also means other house projects will start sooner (Art shed/basement/furniture, etc).

It's a great day!  Thanks for reading.

Birthdays, Coffins, and Dinner Plans

So, scratch what I said about Gabe's shoe size in my last blog post, it's now size 5!!!

Gabe's birthday party is this weekend.  We actually had all of his presents bought about a month out.  This is weird for us as we usually wait until the event is almost upon us (we're not last day shoppers, but are last week shoppers quite frequently).  I'll be grilling out and Candice is designing an Angry Birds cake.  we're also mostly done shopping for the girl's birthdays in May.

I also have pland (probably Sunday) to build the kitty coffins.  Yes, tiny toe-pincher coffins for the two kittens that didn't make it.  Now that the weather is starting to turn warmer, we plan to bury them in the yard.

And speaking of coffins, I found out that a guy I work with has a spare full-size toe-pincher coffin he built but doesn't use.  He sold it to me for a dollar, we just have to drive over to his place and get it.  We'll probably go fairly soon, either after the kids go to bed one night or on a weekend.  So our Halloween House decor is starting to come together...

Lately we've been actually planning out what to cook for supper for 2-3 weeks out. (What's with all this preparation stuff?)  Occasionally we'll swap out one night for another, but we've got a basic framework of a plan...

That's about all for this post, thanks for reading!

Conversation Pieces

So it has been a while since I posted here.  First off, with a total practice time of 1 hour 15 minutes over a two day period, Gabe learned to ride his bike.  He was doing so well that we talked Grandma into giving him his birthday present about two weeks early.  So he now has a 20" bike to replace his 14" or 16" bike which was WAY too small for him.  Yeah, he's only 6 (almost 7) years old, but he is over 4 1/2 feet tall and wears 4 1/2 size ADULT shoes.  Now, he's kinda having to learn all over again because the dynamics are a little different for him.  Most notably, the bike weighs WAY more, so he has to get more used to balancing it better when not actually riding it.  It also has two hand brakes instead of the one.  He sort of had a "handle" on the concept, but now that he's on a much heavier bike that's higher up, he can't really just stop it with his feet as easily.  So he's been practicing stopping and he's getting pretty good at it.

Donna is much better at riding her tricycle, but quickly loses interest and just wants todo whatever I'm doing when we're all out front.  She got a new princess bike helmet and MUST wear it at all ties when we'e ou front where bke riding could possibly occur.

Megi is getting much better at the assisted walking (using a couch, etc to help her walk), but still isn't nearly as mobile in an upright position as she in on all fours, but it won't be long.

Candice's torch finally came after a fiasco where they shipped the wrong one (and they didn't even have the decency to send us a better one in the mistake) and we had to send it back.  Good thing we didn't have any true time constraint on when we needed it.  We still have to get hoses, flash-back arrestors, gauges, and I have to figure out how to do the ventillation system so that the numbers work for both the garage and the planned shed workshop hat we will hopefully get built in a year or two.  Ideally, it'd be an overhead one, but the numbers can't really work for both as you need to take the size of the whole room intoconsideration when building that type.  An enclosure will be too claustrophobic and restrictive, so I'm toying around with some ideas, espcially since she showed me some pictures of some that others have.

The spacebar and the letters o and e don't work reliably on this keybord, so if any of those are missing, know that I have an excuse.  Any other errors in this post and I probably made the mistake.  Hopefully I caught and replaced all of both types of errors.

I got 5 out of the seven ugly bushes dug up over on the "garden" side of the house.  The other two have thousands of thorns on them and I think I'll leave them for now.  Maybe later if they don't bloom and look pretty this year.  Previously, the "garden" side was an ugly tiered bush and rock garden.  We plan to make it an actual edible-type garden this year and eventually have a flower garden and koi pond there.  Candice's work shed will probably reside on that side, too.  I also took down the rest of the fence that blew down in the high winds from the past few months.  All except the posts.  Those suckers are going to be tough.  There's no sign of cement holding them in, so either they're cenented deep, or just dug in really deep.  I guess I'll find out soon enough when I put my "muscles" to work getting them up in the next few weeks.

I also got the wagon wheels in, so the horse-drawn hearse building project is officially under way, but the next time the budgt allows for getting stuff for it is over a month away. 

I'm not sure what this weekend's project(s) will be, but I'm guessing that garage cleaning part II will be on the agenda.

He did it!

Last night Gabe gave it another try on his bike and quite a few times pedaled at least six rotations before losing balance.  And this without any "holding" from anyone else!  He's really getting it!  Not much more today yet. 

If the weather stays nice this weekend like predicted, I will do some outdoor work that will start the process of getting us a garden planted.  We have some ugly bushes that we're going to dig up where the sprinkler system runs and when it gets warmer more consistently, we are going to plant some edible stuff in its place.

That's all for now.  If I think of anything else or something more comes up, I'll add another post.  Thanks for reading!

Gabe's Biker Progress

Last night, Gabe made progress learning to ride his bike.  He actually made an effort and didn't give up.  Now if we can get him to not look up at the sky or down at the ground, it might actually click for him.  We didn't hold the bike for him too much once he got the hang of "starting off."  Instead we stood in front of him to get him to focus on us rather than his feet.  When he'd look at us, he'd make much more progress, but inevitably he'd look down at his feet which would shift his balance and make the bike tip over.

But he doesn't learn the same way most kids do.  He doesn't like to be "taught" anything and prefers to learn it on his own, so you have to appear to not be trying to teach him most of the time (though this has gotten better in recent years).  We got him a Leapster video game system (lots of education oriented video games) and he WOULD NOT let us touch it or show him what to do.  The first 6 months or so, he just pushed buttons on it, but eventually he figured it out and is really good at it (in fact taking away his video games is one of our most effective punishments now). 

Potty training him took one day.  Yes you read that right - one day.  But we tricked him.  We sat him down on the potty and loaded him up with juice.  Once he went and realized that's what he was suppossed to do, he had it down.  Only a handful of accidents total. 

So, once it "clicks" he's gonna be good at it.  We just need the weather to cooperate and stay nice for him to practice at it.

The deathtrap that was our garage is now safe for hobbies again

Yep, I cleaned out the garage.  It's been clean enough to park both cars in it, but the "third" car section where I try my hand at woodworking and various other handyman stuff, and more importantly where my wife makes glass beads has literally been a deathtrap since there was no easy egress in or out should an emergency arise.

But no longer!  It is not only clutter free (except for my workbench top - that'll be the next big garage project), but swept, etc.  The bikes are hung back up out of the way - they were a big part of the danger issue.  Hopefully when the weather gets and stays warmer we'll be mindful of rehanging them after each ride and not just lazy "because we're going to ride them again the next day."

We started Gabe's bike riding lessons again today.  Last time (a year and a half ago) he broke his arm on his first day trying.  Today was more successful in that he didn't get hurt at all, but less in that as he's been doing for a lot of things lately that he doesn't want to do, he started crying because he doesn't want to exert the effort it takes to learn.

So he's sulking in his room until he can stop crying about it today.

That's all for this post.  Thanks for reading!

Operation Cleanup is Underway

It's not quite spring yet, but we're starting a mini "spring cleaning" project this weekend.  This serves two purposes:  it gets some much needed cleaning done and it occupies the kids for long periods of time as they have to pick up most of the rooms we're cleaning before we clean them.

They screwed up changing batteries in smoke detectors when they changed Daylight Savings Time

The only good thing Daylight Savings Time was EVER good for was markings on the calendar for changing the batteries in your smoke detectors.  But when Congress expanded it by a month on each end to save on energy costs (they did so without any studies showing it would in fact save energy and in fact Studies have shown it does the exact opposite), that made the time in and out of DST became uneven and therefore not a good measure of when to change your batteries, unless you like to tempt fate over the warmer months.  So, I usually use the Spring and Autumnal Equinoxes for my timeframe.  But this year's spring changing is having to go off a little earlier than planned because one of the smoke detectors started beeping yesterday and had to be replaced a few weeks early (it falls on 20 March this year).  So this weekend, just to keep them all in relative sync, we're doing the rounds for the rest of the house's smoke detectors.

I also ordered the wagon wheels today to begin the 2011 Halloween construction project.  HOPEFULLY, by Halloween, I'll have built a funtional horse-drawn hearse.  I should probably plan it out more thoroughly but I'm going to go with a basic design to begin with and flush out details as it unfolds based on how it holds up.  Along those same lines, I think I'll be replacing the front house lights and using the old ones ON the cab of the hearse.  Both ought to make my wife happy.

I've also found out from a friend that also lives in Erie that there is a YMCA on Arapahoe and 95th that has ice skating and hockey for kids.  So we might be looking into that for Gabe and maybe Donna.  Apparently they are $90 per class and kids can start at 3 years old.  The hockey season is I guess about $350 to play, so we'll see how it goes.

That's it for this entry.  Thanks for reading!