It’s ok, they’ll still be there this fall and they’ll still kick ass.

(I identify a little less with ‘home’ every time we go back)

New TV – (June 2007)
Cable Box Woes – (July 2007)
TV Service Woes – (September 2008)
TV Service Woes Remedied – (September 2008)
Neither Side Gave In – (October 2008)
Temporarily Disconnected – (January 2009)
I Want My U-Verse, Fuck You Time Warner – (March 2010)
Fuck You U-Verse…no, I still love you – (March 2010)

It all makes for a fun little story if you read them all.

So what does this have to do with anything?

Today I wake up and pop open my e-mail like any other day and there it is…an e-mail from AT&T letting me know that U-Verse is now available at my address. All those months of putting my address into the availability checker and asking them to notify me when available finally paid off. I think I came a little.

Hopefully, I’m not counting my chickens before they’re hatched because God knows with my luck in this area that something is bound to go wrong. But tonight, I’m putting together a package and scheduling an install date.

Giggity!

It just felt like the house phone never got used. In the past month there’s been exactly six calls to the house landline and in every case it’s a sales call (for some reason Time Warner started calling recently) or a reminder on an appointment. No one made a single outgoing call. It was like paying for nothing. So I ported the landline number to Verizon and added a line to our plan. This simplifies changing the house number for things like the school, doctors, bank accounts and such. I activated one of our old phones on that line, tossed the phone on the desk and presto! We have what amount to a home line. It’s just that it’s a cell phone with the old house number and it’s just $9.99 a month on Verizon.

So yeah, the future is now. We’re flying free and I feel liberated, man. Liberated.

It was honestly the biggest spider I’ve ever seen that wasn’t in a zoo setting or someone’s pet. I think at one point it barked at me – or roared or growled or something.

This first photo is taken from the far side of the garage looking back at the house. That’s the little nasty workshop nook on the right and the door into the house on the left.

A little closer look at the workshop nook. It was pretty bad, but the nook area was a nice touch. Not too many houses in the neighborhood have that.

I’m not a garage guy. I don’t do much work. I don’t fix things. I don’t touch the cars. The thing is, I can do shit (good enough, at least… or fake my way through it) and my wife is often impressed. I mean, I had some tools and stuff. The act of buying the house made these skills more necessary and our collection of ‘garage stuff’ grow. We just kind of kept stacking things in the garage with no rhyme or reason. I hated the nook. It was dirty and broken and icky. We worked around it rather than with it for over a year.

Then last month on a particularly slow day in early April (right after Easter, I think) I decided that with things warming up and many projects needing done, that I was going to just start ripping shit apart in the garage and see where I ended up. I cleared out the crappy old cabinets and patched all the holes and stuff in the wall. As of April 7th, this is what I had:

I wanted to keep it as simple and cheap as possible, but still do something useable and nice enough. I started with a coat of paint. The same color that’s in the office. Yes, it’s orange-y. It looks really orange until you put something orange next to it and then you realize it’s not nearly as orange as it seemed. Technically, Behr calls it copper. On the 10th I had this:

Oddly enough, that same week my wife scored a bunch of stuff from the hotel. They were finishing up a huge renovation and there were a lot of old items that were no longer needed. She snagged me two cabinets and a little basket/drawer/storage unit thingy. I started to lay out my area:

The next few days I got pulled away as we totally stripped and restained and sealed the deck. It took a bit longer than expected and it was only over those few days that I learned we have almost 450 sqaure feet of deck space. What a pain in the ass. But it looked 1000 times better:

When I got back into the garage I went to work on the door leading outside. I painted both the door and the trim and put new hardware on the door. I used paint we had from other areas of the house and scored the bronze hardware on the bargain rack at Home Depot for under $30. The end result was vastly superior to the white door, white trim, brass hardware combo that was there before:

I also started paining the cabinets (this time with a paint sample we got a few weeks before when considering colors for the laundry room):

I finished the job with the colors from the door and swapped out the plugs and switches with sleek black rocker swtiches and flat, flush plugs and diamond plate covers (look closely). This cost less than $20 – mostly for the diamond plate covers:

Next up was the single biggest purchase of the entire redeux. I needed a topper to create a workbench with the cabinets and figured rather than some specialty thing, I’d just swing by Lowes and pick upa stock piece of laminate countertop, cut it to size and install it. It cost under $100 for an 8 foot piece and an endcap. Oh yeah, that “W” floormat was a christmas gift that we hadn’t had a place for previously:

I wanted a pegboard or something, but I wanted to stay reasonable in terms of cost and I absolutely hate that fiberboard crap that all the stores stock. I wanted something different. After some research I score this clear pegboard for $42 and did a fun Bowser graphic behind it with a piece that no longer had a place in my son’s room since we moved, but I had held on to for some reason:

I new I needed a little more space for stuff than I had and the garage is pretty tall. Seemed like an obvious choice to score a couple of 1×12′s and bracket them up high as shelves. Wood and brackets ran around $30.

I started getting all my crap situated and things started coming together:

At that point, my wife was so motivated by how much better the little nook looked that she said, lets just finish the entire garage. We got rid of the white and went with the khaki/beige color I put on the cabinet doors. I did the attic door and house entry door in the same dark brown/light brown combo as the door leading outside. We had a bunch of shelving from the hotel renovation that didnt quite go together in any useable way, so we picked up some pieces on our own that matched and put together a unit that spanned along the back wall of the garage. We got tools hung up along the far wall, I painted and frosted the windows and still had room for the kids’ bikes and the lawn mower. The almost finished project:

(click for a larger version of that photo)

The total cost to us ended up being right around $300 thanks to using so much “found” stuff to get it done. I still need to get a hook to hang the ladder, pour cement steps and lose the wood ones and put bronze hardware on the door leading into the house. Overall we’re very happy with the results of something put together basically on a whim, a month’s time and a couple hundred bucks.

Before and After:

Caught this on TV earlier by accident. It may be one of the funniest things ever in the history of everything. My daughter and I cracked each other up all night long with it and I’m laughing again just posting it here.

“I’m not gonna lie. I was playing my tuba and this cobra man started dancing around.” – holy fucking hilarious.

I just wish I could find a decent quality version of it. Who the hell records their TV with a camcorder anyway?

I currently have an assload of projects going on around here – none of which matter enough to get into right now, but all of which need done and are in various stages of completion with various levels of activity during the week.

The biggest project this week (and the only to be finished entirely) was the deck. It needed stripped and restained/protected – whatever you call it. We went from a mildew-stained reddish finish that was here when we bought the place to a sweet dark mahogany color. It was way harder and took way longer (almost 18 hours over three days) than we had anticipated and kinda threw our plans for a productive week off, but the deck looks seriously good. We got the grill and furniture out over the weekend and made sweet lamb and rosemary burgers that we picked up on the way home from Kings Island.

The check engine light was on in the HHR (seriously, it’s a perfectly adequate vehicle, but I’m already over it) so we got that taken care of on Monday. Turns out the culprit was a loose wire on the something or other that I don’t care about. Nice to finally not have it lit everytime I get in the car, just looking at me like, “Well, fuckhead?”

On Tuesday, the allergy thing was so fucking bad that I finally called the doctor. I got a steroid shot in my ass. I do believe it’s the first shot I’ve ever gotten in my butt. But it did the trick. That an a couple of prescriptions for Prednisone, Fenofexadine and Singulair have me under control. With the allergies getting worse each spring, the suggestion was to take a preventative maintenance approach next year. Will do.

We wasted a morning at Kings Island on Saturday for opening day. I seriously cannot express enough how little that place does for me. Yet at the same time, I can’t quite place my finger on it. There’s just something about it that’s boring and uninteresting. Really one of my least favorite parks of its kind. I don’t anticipate more than one or two return trips this year – I’ll bet we use our passes more at other Cedar Fair parks than at Kings Island this year.

There was a lot of discussion about the removal of the Nick characters and their replacement with Peanuts in the award-winning kids area at Kings Island. No one seems to care in a really directly noticable way, but I still feel there’s a difference and I’d word it like this:

You have a favorite room or area in your house because it works for you. It’s functional, the style, the size, whatever. It works. Now change the color of that room to one you like less or barely like. The room is still as usable and functional and sized the same, but it’s not quite as ‘nice’ of a room to be in. You want your pale green room, not a bright blue one…even if a bright blue room is a perfectly fine one.

That’s how Planet Snoopy feels. It’s bright and shiny and has all the same things that are all just as fun, but it’s just not as ‘nice’ to spend time there. I’d rather see Spongebob than Snoopy.

Plus, there were lots of lost opportunities to have Snoopy standing victorious over Spongebob’s corpse. Big miss there.

Both kids had a friend spend the night last night too.

I also got 3 hours or less of sleep twice this past week, for no good reason other than because I did.

Didn’t do anything special for my Birthday last week – actually working in the garage and got a drill from the kids as a gift – total ‘dad’ stuff. Thanks to everyone who posted on my Facebook page. I appreciate the thoughts.

Things to get on, continue, start, finish or never get to this week:

1. Start the landscaping and lights in front of the house
2. Painting the entryway ceiling…17 feet up
3. Continue on the ‘workshop nook’ in the garage
4. Mow the grass (the guy on the corner has mowed 4 times this year to my 0)
5. Hang the valances we built for the living room windows
6. Get new concrete steps poured in the garage and lose the horrible wood ones
7. Get the Kings Island pictures up on Coasterimage
8. Other stuff I’m forgetting

We’ll see. Time to get back in the normal groove this week.

A couple of close runner-ups were:

It’s like one of those lame online psychology tests. Pick the one that most represents Easter to you.

(and yes, I took all three of those photos today)

Who knows what lies ahead? I have at least another 4 or 5 hours in me. Most likely some Letterman, some Red Eye, some internet and hard boiled eggs.

Not much to say. It’s cool. It might get a little use around here. Mostly because we don’t have any other devices floating around to stream from Netflix (or anywhere else for that matter). Quality is equivalent to standard definition TV.

Once we get around to paying down much of the debt we ran up in the past year or so, I’d like to really set the house up with some new entertainment equipment. I’d love to get the whole house networked and streaming our entertainment options. We’re still using the receiver/speakers on the big TV that we bought in 1996.

Whatever. The Netflix streaming on Wii is neat. I’m sure there are much better options, but if you don’t have anything else around it’s nice to play with.

We really dug AT&T’s U-Verse and were a little miffed that it wasn’t available when we bought the house. We’ve been reluctantly paying Time Warner for a little over a year now and we went with (for the first time in forever) a lower package. We’re normally all-in when it comes to TV packages, but Time Warner just sucks so bad and is so out of touch with what customers want, need and expect that it’s not even funny. To be honest, I miss some of the channels we haven’t had for the past 15 months, but refuse to give TW any more than I have to. We don’t even have cable boxes on the TV’s upstairs because I don’t want to give them the monthly fee. It costs almost $18 just to have a DVR on the big TV. (Yes, $18 a month – broken down as 9.95 for DVR service, $7.64 for a Digital Converter and $0.32 for the remote… Fuckers!)

Anyway, over the past 15 months, I’d occasionally check the AT&T site and try the availability tool. It always told me service wasn’t available at our address. One time at the mall we stopped in and talked to them a little about how we had service and loved it then moved less than a mile away and now can’t get it. We were told that crews were always in the area expanding coverage. We also knew this was true because those crews usually spent months at a time at my wife’s hotel and she even hit them up trying to get them over our way or find out more info.

Then two or three weeks ago, I swung by the availability check tool and punched in our address knowing what the result would be. And I was right. But something clicked this time and I thought, “Why don’t I start punching in addresses in my general vicinity and see exactly where the lines are.

(In all fairness, I had done this before, but not to great extent. Just some random address on each street until I found availability. Nothing detailed or methodical. And I knew we were close, but not covered.)

So this time I start with the guy across the street and get a “no” on service. So I got around the circle of the cul-de-sac and get three more “no” answers for the two house on the end and the house to our right. So then I go to the house across the street at the end (the 6th house of 6 on our little cul-de-sac) and get a “yes” on service. WTF!?

So obviously being on a cul-de-sac, our street hits the perpendicular street and forms a “T” shape. Our street runs east/west and hits the “T” on the east side (the west is the ‘circle’ end of the cul-de-sac) and the perpendicular road runs north/south. Of the six houses on the cul-de-sac (three on the north side and three on the south side) only the easternmost house on the north side shows availability.

I’m trying to paint a picture here.

So I decide to go south down the perpendicular street and find no one able to get sevice on either side of the street. But if I make a right and head west, so that I’m now checking houses who share the woods behind our house (people who we share property lines with in some cases) I’m seeing that they all show it available and two of them actually currently have AT&T service!

So I come back to the “T” and go north on the perpendicular road and find that everyone that direction has service available and a few even use it already. I complete the circle by checking the houses behind the people to our left on the end of the cul-de-se (the next perpendicular street to the west) and find complete availability with some customers sprinkled in.

Ahhh, let me just draw a picture:

The yellow glowing house is us. People in red can’t get service and people in green can. That’s how broken and fucked up it is. My guess was seem to be right in between two VRADs. I don’t know a whole lot about how it works, but I know it’s distance based and that it’s not unusual for odd patterns like this to appear based on the way established wires/cables are running.

I figured I’d either need to go back into the AT&T store or give the 800 number a call and explain the situation and see if they could send someone out to see things firsthand and let me know if there was a way to make this happen or not. All I know is it was frustrating looking out the front window and seeing a house that got service and then looking out the back and seeing another bunch of houses with service available.

Then, no shit, two days later, my wife gets a call from a friend of ours who just moved (into a really nice fucking house/neighborhood). She wanted to let us know they were getting U-verse and wanted to pass along some info knowing we had been wanting it for a while. Basically they were in almost the same situation. Houses all around able to get service, but their address showing not available. The difference is that AT&T just got over to their neighborhood and had salesmen going door-to-door to drum up awareness, interest and sales. So they talked to the dude and explained and he confirmed the weirdness and said that this happens a lot and most times, AT&T just has to come in and “get it working”. I assume this means running a few new cables to shorten the distances, but I have no idea, really.

At any rate, she gives my wife this guy’s name and number.

So on Monday she calls and he shows up at the hotel to talk to her. He gets the info (our address and the addresses around us) and tells her the same thing. Basically, let me get hold of some people and see if we can get this working for you, it shouldn’t be a problem. He’d be in touch.

We heard from him today and he made an appointment to stop by on Saturday. Not sure what for, but it’s a positive sign.

So here’s to me getting my hopes up and maybe, finally, after 15 long months, getting rid of Time Warner and their bullshit once and for all.

If this doesn’t pan out, I might have to consider DIRECTV. I’m not totally against it, but I’d rather not. And I’d still need to use TW for my net connection. So that’s less than optimal too.

Keep your fingers crossed for me.