Construction next door to my house

Side Note – March 9, 2012: This was supposed to be posted about 9 months ago, so I haven’t bothered to change the tense in the wording below. Also as of this date, there still aren’t any planters.

So here is a totally random occurrence. My neighbor was down in his basement, and he heard a hissing noise coming from the water meter area. It turns out that the galvanized pipe that brings water into his house was corroded at the shutoff valve and slowly leaking. A plumber was called in, to diagnose the situation and as soon as the plumber touched the pipe, it starting gushing water (so typical).

With water rushing into his basement, my neighbor called up the water company, to hurry up and shut off his water, so that his basement doesn’t flood. The water works ended up coming out and shutting off the water. With the final solution being, that he needed a new water line run to his house.

I’ve had to replace a water line before at one of my other houses, and it is no fun…… except for the plumber who collects the fee.

So as you can see from the pictures, they really had to dig up his yard to run the new copper water main. But with a new copper line in place, that will more than likely be the last water line run to that house for at least 100 years.

Below, you can see the different phases of the dig-out, in a little bit of a before and after montage.

And on kind of an interesting side note. When I was taking with my neighbor, he has no plans to replace any of the grass that was torn out. So what is he going to do instead? He said that he was going to put in raised planter beds for a vegetable garden on the side of the house. Personally I think that it’s a good idea, we’ll just see if he actually does it.

MIIA has been MIA

It’s been close to four months since my last post. Unfortunately my life has been very hectic since about mid-July, with side projects and general work stuff. I’ve got some new posts lined for after the new year. So I’ll see you in 2012.

Back from a little break

So, you might be asking yourself………where the hell have I been? Well, the short answer is busy. But now that some of the major time commitments that I’ve had over the last 3 months have concluded. I can get back to posting on this blog, like back in the good old days.

Thanks for your patience, and I’ll be posting updates this week from the last two months.

Costco Rebate Time – 2011

I ended up getting my Costco rebate check in the mail a few months ago. And since that time I’ve been struggling to figure out what to buy from Costco to use up the rebate check. I really hate to use my rebate on consumables such as foodstuff, cleaning supplies, booze, etc. Since if I’ve spent all this money at Costco through out the year on consumable stuff, I should at least be able to get some enjoyment out of my rebate if I use it on “durable good” of some kind.

Last year I ended up using my rebate to get an 11-cup Cuisinart Food Processor. So this year, I’m thinking about getting a new digital camera, since my current Nikon camera is kind of messed up. So this past weekend, I finally bit the bullet, and picked up the Panasonic Lumix FP3 digital camera in black (which was the only color available.) I ended up going with the Panasonic for two reasons:
1) Manual lens cover. This was the only item I wasn’t willing to compromise on, since I seem to do quite a bit of activities in sub-zero weather. And this was how I screwed up the automatic lens cover on my Nikon (sub-zero temperatures in Chicago.) So the next camera had to have a manual lens cover. And this Panasonic model has a manual cover.
2) Price. For $99.95, you can’t shake a stick at the price. Especially for a camera with 14.1 megapixels, which is totally nuts in my opinion for the price.

So theoretically going forward, the pictures on this site should look a bit better then before, but I offer no guarantees, since I’m not a professional photographer.

Back from month long break

To say that I was a little bit burnt out with posting to this blog, is a very large understatement. So I basically took some time off during February and March, to take care of a large pile personal projects unrelated to this website.

But with that out of the way, I should be back to the usual posting schedule for this blog. And with gardening season right around the corner, you’ll start to see more gardening posts in the months ahead. Since I’ll need to get me tomato and pepper seedlings started in the next couple of weeks, so that they’ll be ready for transplanting around Mother’s Day weekend.

Christmas presents 2010

I really received some great Christmas gifts from my sister and her husband this year. But hands down the two best items were a Frieling 8-cup stainless steel French Press, and a copy of Momofuku.

You’ve probably already read about some of my trials and tribulations, with regard to all the glass French Presses that I’ve owned and broken. So getting a stainless steel French Press is a HUGE upgrade in the “coffee making department.”

And you also know that I think that the Momofuku cookbook is total awesome for co-opting ideas. So it’s nice to finally own a copy of this book, instead of having to borrow it from the library all the time.

Blog upgrade news – Jan 6, 2010

Well I’m about half way through this blogs software upgrades. I’ve got all the hosting stuff taken care of, but now I’m running into issues with upgrading the WordPress software that powers this blog.

It turns out that WordPress 3.0.4 (which is the latest version) is too cutting edge of a release for all the plug-ins/widgets and theme that I use on this blog.  I’ve already had to reinstall WordPress at least nine times, since it keeps on crashing on me because of the plugins I use. So hopefully this weekend, I’ll be able to get WordPress running at 100% uptime.

Website Updates for the New Year

And with the New Year, comes some long overdue technical updates that need to be made to this blog. As you’ve probably noticed over the last month or so, I haven’t been posting as often as in the past. It basically boils down to that I’ve run out of hard drive space in my hosting package. And with the previous post on the sunflower seeds, it used up the last of the free space available in my package. So to even keep this blog going I’ve already had to delete out archive files from other websites I run (which I really didn’t want to do) just to keep this site up and running.

I’ve already put in my order for a package upgrade. So hopefully I should be all done with the site upgrades over the next week. And then I can get back to business as usual with this blog.