I’m sitting here bored on a Monday night. The kids are sleeping and the wife is out of town for an overnight conference. It’s business as usual after a week of vacation in November. My wife took last week off because:
1. She has vacation time to use and we have no specific plans for anything anytime soon.
2. Her hotel is getting a full blown renovation (like $2 million+) that starts at the end of the month and runs through spring, so she kind of need to be there.
So the idea was to take one of her remaining weeks before the renovation and one after in the spring. Her anniversary is in June so she gets more weeks then – and we’re using immediately using one of those to go check out the Intimidator coasters. It all worked out. We had some stuff that needed done around here and everything fell into place.
We spent Saturday, Sunday and Monday getting the leaves out of the yard. You may have seen the leaf density photo, but it does no justice to the sheer amount of leaves that our yard held. It was a solid three days of effort to clear 95% of the leaves. 95% is good enough for us, but we have a couple of hardcore neighbors still going out in the evening catching the last few leaves that trickle from trees or blow around in an effort to maintain a perfect score. I often feel like smacking them.
On top of that, on Monday I had a dentist appointment and for some reason she (my dentist) loaded me up with an obscene amount of novacaine – like to the point that I was so numb on the side of my face that I was slurring like a drunk. To make it even better she really crammed that needle deep into the gums at the back of my mouth. I was still a little sore the next day.
On Tuesday we went out and did a little shopping. In the evening we turned in my son’s football equipment.
Wednesday, we finally got to considering the basement on a serious level after the great flood of 2009. The flood sucked, don’t get me wrong, but the truth is, we wanted to eventually redo the basement anyway. This just forced our hand a little.
There’s a bunch of things we want to change down there, but the main thing was the bar and stuff that took up entirely too much space, was ugly and made no sense for a family who doesn’t throw swank drinking soirees in their basement. Well, ripping that shit out was WAY easier than I had anticipated and by Wednesday evening the bar, built-ins and back wall were reduced to a pile of rubble that was now sitting in the garage. I only broke two hammers in the process. Never bother with the cheap wooden-handled kind – I’ve had a couple for years and years now. After this past Wednesday, I don’t. It feels very manly to break a hammer. (insert stupid Tim Allen grunting here)
So yeah, a big chunk of the basement work we want to do is taken care of. We have some ideas and a “What the hell, why not?” attitude going forward and we’d like to do what we can by spring and then get carpet laid again. Basically the 80% of the total work that accounts for 30% of the total costs. That’s make it ‘ours’ and much more functional and liveable. We do the big expensive ‘vanity’ stuff (like complete and rearrange the half bath down there – down the road when we have more liquidity in our cashflow.
It was a good start that was easier than expected and has us excited about the possibilities down there.
On Thursday we finally got a guy out here to fix our garage door. The torsoin spring snapped about a month or so back and we’ve been unable to open the big door since then. It was an easy (and relatively cheap) fix and we felt kind of stupid for not pursuing it sooner. That evening we all decided to go see A Christmas Carol. I hadn’t seen a movie at the theater in 3D since I was a kid and wanted to check it out, plus the movie looked kinda cool – even if just for the rendering – and in typical “my wife is a CVB member, pillar of the hospitality community and general area service industry insider” we can do movies for free most of the time. This was one of those times. (seems like a sweet perk, but we’re really not movies-at-the-theater people – a couple a year at most)
Now people complain about amusement park prices on the various forums and I think it’s crazy. Shit costs money, simple as that. Apparently these people don’t see many movies because had we paid for tickets for the 7pm showing in 3D the total would have been $50 for two adults and two children. On top of that 4 drinks and a bucket of popcorn clocks in at right around $30. (I wanna say it was $32, but if I try to remember the prices and do the math I get $27 and change – so it’s somewhere in that range)
$80 to see a 90 minute movie with basic refreshments. That’s almost a dollar a minute for a family of four…and people are ponying that up. The amusement park price whiners need to shut the fuck up. Amusement parks are a great value.
So yeah, the movie was the 1000th rehash of the same old story. It was cute. I like that the 3D these days (and I’m assuming it’s tru e based on the previews we saw in 3D for several other movies) isn’t the gimmicky “coming at you” stuff that I always thought 3D was. This 3D went the other way and added depth to the scenes. Rather than the background at the screen with everything jutting out from there, it seemed like the foreground was at the screen and everything went back from there. Rather than being visually assaulted by the images, I found myself wanting to reach into the scene deeper to see even more. It’s come a long way and we all agreed that it really worked well and added to the movie. If this is 3D in the 21st century, I’m all for it.
On Friday the kids had off and my daughter was sitting on a buttload of birthday money so she and my wife hit the Greene in the morning and then swung by for me and my son and we did the mall and some other stores in the afternoon.
On Saturday, my son had a birthday party to go to, so we dropped him off there and did some stuff around the house including cleaning out the garage a little since the door was functioning again. Once we get the bar remnants out of there, we can start pulling in for the winter. We haven’t really used the garage as a place for the cars yet because last winter we had just moved it and it was all full of crap. Over the summer we filled it with tools and bricks and dirt and junk from all the outside work we were doing and then as fall approached the door broke. We’re finally almost ready to use the garage as a garage. How sick is that?
On Sunday we vegged and watched the Steelers fucking lose. We kind of kept it lazy and watched football and the stupid shit that’s on TV on the weekends and finished our vacation with the latest episode of Californication that night.
That was the past week+ in a nutshell. I’m sure I forgot something, but I wanted to dump this onto the blog before it got too far removed and I didn’t feel like it. I have photos of much of what we did, but don’t feel like getting them on here right now.