01/22/04 @ 2:08 AM MST.

The fun thing about working on a 100 year old house is that you never know what you're going to find. I knew that there was a false ceiling in the kitchen, and while uncovering the rest of the brick, decided today to take out the ceiling so that I could uncover the chimney all the way up. Hoo-boy, did I not know what I was asking for. First, I discovered some really nice wall paper (look to the left) that is God-only-knows how old. Unfortunatly I also discovered some water damage and basic dry-rot going on in the real ceiling. In places closer to the outside wall the plaster was falling down, and was already resting on the false ceiling, leaving the lathe bare and rotted, with the insulation from the attic coming through in places. Fun stuff. After some serious depression and stress, Randall convinced me that the thing to do was to pull all the plaster and lathe down (which will bring the insulation with it) and replace it with some brand new plywood, sheetrock and insulation, and that we could probably do it in a day. The fact is that although I really hadn't planned on doing that much work, it probably should have been done a long time ago anyways, and it does give the kitchen a really nice open feeling (picture above left you can see how much more height removing the false ceiling gives the room.) And with the nicely painted walls and nice kitchen below the extra foot and a half and the messy ceiling, it gives the impression of being a sit-com stage kitchen........

01/17/04

Randall learned about the chimney that goes up the middle of my house, and had a great idea of revealing it in the kitchen, give it that rustic bare-brick look. So, I decided to check it out, picked a spot that was covered by a picture incase I didn't like it and decided to cover it up. Well, as you can see, I liked it and got the top part uncovered. It was a lot of fun, had almost an inch of plaster and wallboard to take off to get to the brick. But I like the way the brick looks and it will be terrific when I get it all cleaned up and sealed. The next step is going to be to take out the fake ceiling, and then replace the wall with bare beams, opening up the kitchen to the dining room. Ahhh, the work never stops....

01/15/05

An interesting day today. First it started with an inservice on Mathematics across the curriculum. The presenter was showing us a game of "truth or dare" where one student asks another student a question and if the student gets it wrong they have to do a dare. Well, she picked Dean, who was sitting next to me and told him to choose another person to truth-or-dare. Well, since all the questions were math, and he just wanted to get it over with, he chose me and the question "What is the top number of a fraction called". So, being in one of those moods, I answer "I don't know". Dean gets to give me a dare and I end up on my hands and knees barking like a dog. In front of the entire faculty, the presenter and the principal. Teach me to be a smartass. (probably not).

Then, after the inservice, we have a faculty breakfast. I thought it was going to be a lunch so I signed up to bring lasagne. Talking out loud I decided to try to make a breakfast lasagne, and with the help of the home-ec teacher, I came up with a recipe and decided to use the faculty as my guinea pigs. To tout my own horn, I'll tell you it was a hit. It's nice when you try something new and works out good.

01/14/05

And you thought it was cold this week here in SLC.....

You are all missing out on some great times here in Wisconsin. We are in the January drop, where the Canadian air comes in and brings us into a mild, short freeze. This one is different from the February freeze where we watch to see how many days we stay below zero, usually its 5-7 days. The weather segment on the news is fun to watch on mornings like this. One of the news people was outside doing a segment on how cold it is. She poured out some water on the sidewalk and we watched it freeze. It was a short segment. The weather report sounds like this “Cold weather today. Wear layers and don’t stay outside too long. We will warm up today to a high of 1 degree.”

Lisa - it's 40 degrees here at noon, and I was shivering on my way to school.

Got some funny plays on swear words in an e-mail. Kind of adult content, although it's just comics and nothing is obscene about the drawings. Click HERE to check them out.

01/12/04

Got some really funny pictures of animals in an e-mail. Click HERE (and then on the "Jan 12, '05" link) to check them out.

Also got this picture of the tsunami in an e-mail. Click on it to see it full size.

From the "Creative Thinking in a Jr. High" file : A kid was brought into the office today. He had a perfectly innocent looking binder, one of those ones that is big enough to hold a textbook and zips up. Well, he had rigged it up to hold a portable DVD player and a handful of DVD's. Seems one of the teachers (for your amusement Shafer, it was Moore) found him and 3 or 4 other guys sitting on the floor in the boys bathroom watching "R" rated movies eating 5-Buck pizza. I think they would have gotten away with it if they hadn't put out the velvet ropes, or if the usher hadn't offered Mr. Moore a "really good seat on the front row" for a fiver.......

01/10/04

So, bowling sucked last night, I bowled like crap. Barely broke 100 on two of the games, high score was just my average. But you know how one little thing, especially at the end of the day, can make up for all the crap that came before it? Well, it's the 10th frame of the last game. We're losing the game by just a few pins and I'm up. Boom, the ball hits the headpin and leaves me with a 6-7 split (note diagram on the left). Not an easy strike, even for someone who is good. I look at my teammates with this look of "I'm up the creek without a paddle." Nate says "You're gonna do it" and I ask in whose reality can I pull this off. Nate says why his of course. I throw the ball, it goes exactly where I wanted it to go, smacks the 6 pin on the right side and sends it off to the left right into the 7 pin. Picture perfect. Yeah, I know, pure dumb luck. But I did it and it felt good.

01/09/04

Satellite photo of Utah, click HERE.

<<<---- Utah, a funny place to live. Click on it. You know you want to.

01/08/04

More from Lisa on life in Wisconsin....

I just wanted to let you know about the weather here since we got back.

It was raining when we arrived and wavered between 25 and 35 for a few days. On Saturday it was near 40, then as the sun went down it started to rain and the temp dropped. The rain was freezing on contact. It rained all night as the temp rose then fell. We woke up Sunday morning to ½ inch of sheer ice covering everything. Whatever ice did not get cleared up stayed. The ice was so slick the kids went out to play that afternoon. They started on a plastic sled at the top of our driveway. They slid down the driveway and all the way across our cul de sac to the neighbor’s yard before slowing down.

This morning we woke up to 2” of snow and it was still snowing. The schools were not closed or delayed. They expected 4-5” total by 10:00 a.m. The commute to school and work was on snow covered roads. The snow trucks were not out on the streets except on the highways. Everybody just plowed through. Everybody went to school and work as normal, leaving a little extra time for travel. 4” of snow during the morning commute did not slow down this town at all. This afternoon is calm and beautiful but tomorrow will be bitter cold and windy, but no worry, life goes on as usual.

Contrast that to Salt Lake, where we had just around 1 1/2 inch of snow on the morning commute and people freak out. You have two schools of "thought" in this town concerning snow on the road; The slower the safer & Why should snow slow ME down? camps. When you combine people driving 25 mph on the freeway (literally, that's not an exaggeration & in the passing lane) and the 4wd SUV's that forget they have no better stopping power than a 2wd, you end up with the hundred or so fender-benders (& worse) that we had on Monday.

01/07/05

Got some pictures of of the Tsunami in an e-mail today. Click HERE to check them out.

And a video of an item every creature-comfort minded hunter needs. Click HERE to download it - it's almost 2MB so it may take a little time.

So I come home from school Thursday and my computer is going "Hmmmmmm, kizizzzz, click, hmmmmmm, kizizzzz, click,,," over and over again. It did this before and I just pulled it apart, vacuumed it out real good and messed around with some switches and it seemed to be fixed. Nope. Well, I know just enough about computers to fix most things, but also enough that if I don't fix it I screw it up real good. Kinda like what my Abnormal Psych. professor told us at the end of her class : "Now you know just enough to be dangerous." Shoulda applied what she said to computers. It got to the point where I decided the only thing to do is get a new computer. So I did. Got a good deal, well at least it will be when I get the $300+ of rebates back. Anyways, got it up and running, but couldn't get the internet connection to work. It was already 10:30 at night, so there wasn't anything I could do except go to bed and get some sleep, take care of it tomorrow. Now, I know what images the idea of "internet addict" brings up, but I still have to admit to being one. A little bit different though. I felt so disconnected knowing that my website was inaccessible, that I was cut off from the world wide web, that I couldn't access my e-mail. Who was trying to get on my site? Who was sending me e-mails that I wasn't getting. Not that this site gets a ton of hits a day or that I get much other than junk e-mails, but that didn't matter. I still was cut off. Anyhoo, enough about my neurosis; I got home today and called Comcast to see what I needed to do to make things work, and voila!, it's up and running. All I needed to do is turn off the computer, re-boot the cable modem and power up. So I'm once again connected to the world, and hopefully things will run smoothly for at least a couple more years........

01/01/05

Welcome to 2005!

12/30/04

Got this from Lisa today - loved it.....

YOU MIGHT LIVE IN WISCONSIN IF. . . . . .

If you consider it a sport to gather your food by drilling through 18 inches of ice and sitting there all day hoping that the food will swim by. (One of my 3 favorites!)
If your local Dairy Queen and A&W are closed from November through March.
If someone in a store offers you assistance, and they don't work there.
If you may not have actually eaten it, but you have heard of Lutefisk.
If you have worn shorts and a parka at the same time.
If you have either a pet or a child named "Brett".
If your town has an equal number of bars and churches. (Another of my 3 favorites!)
If you have had a lengthy telephone conversation with someone who dialed a wrong number.
If you know how to say Oconomowoc, Waukesha, Menomonie and Manitowoc.
Your idea of a traffic jam is ten cars waiting to pass a tractor on the highway.
"Vacation" means going up north past Hwy 8 (Tomahawk) for the weekend.
You measure distance in hours.
You know several people who have hit deer more than once.
You often switch from "heat" to "A/C" in the same day and back again.
Your whole family wears Packer Green to church on Sunday.
You can drive 65 mph through 2 feet of snow during a raging blizzard, without flinching.
You see people wearing camouflage at social events. . including weddings.
You install security lights on your house and garage and leave both unlocked.
You think of the major food groups as beer, fish, and venison.
You carry jumper cables in your car and your girlfriend knows how to use them.
There are 7 empty cars with their engines running in the parking lot at Mill's Fleet Farm at any given time.
You design your kid's Halloween costume to fit over a snowsuit.
Driving is better in the winter because the potholes are filled with snow.
You refer to the Packers as "we."
You know all 4 seasons: almost winter, winter, still winter and road construction.
You can identify a southern or eastern accent.
You have no problem pronouncing Lac Du Flambeau. :)
You consider Minneapolis exotic.
You know how to polka.
Your idea of creative landscaping is a statue of a deer next to your blue spruce.
You were unaware that there is a legal drinking age.
Down South to you means Illinois.
A brat is something you eat.
Your neighbor throws a party to celebrate his new pole barn.
You go out to fish fry every Friday
Your 4th of July picnic was moved indoors due to frost.
You have more miles on your snow blower than your car.
You find 0 degrees "a little chilly." (And finally, the 3rd of my 3 favorites!)
You actually understand these jokes, and you forward them to all your Wisconsin friends.

12/28/04

With all the sadness and trauma going on in the world at the moment, it is worth reflecting on the death of a very important person which almost went unnoticed last week. Larry La Prise, the man who wrote "The Hokey Pokey", died peacefully at age 93. The most traumatic part for his family was getting him into the coffin. They put his left leg in. And then the trouble started.
SHUT UP. You know it is funny.

New funny pictures from the Christmas (oops, sorry, I work for Granite School District, gotta say "The Holiday") season that I would have had up in a more timely fashion if I hadn't had a small case of pneumonia last week. Click HERE to check them out.

12/27/04

Rolly & Wells (Salt Lake Tribune) last wednesday had a couple of good articles, at least ones that made me chuckle. The first one is because someone actually had the lack of control to do something I've always wanted to do :

Christmas Stress : Shoppers in Orem on Friday witnessed a man jumping up and down on the hood of a Volkswagen in the University Mall parking lot. The suspect got away, but Orem police detected that the VW was taking up two parking stalls, which may have been the motivation for the vandalism.

I have always wanted to key the car of one of those self-centered, more important than the rest of us butt heads that insist on taking up more than one parking spot. And, um, no, I was not in Orem last Friday......

The second one hits a little closer to home (or work as the case happens to be) :

Community Spirit : Patrons enjoying the annual Magna Christmas parade earlier this month were treated to a holiday bird -- but it wasn't a turkey. A Brockbank Junior High School student marching in the parade launched a middle-fingered salute to someone in the crowd who was trying to take her picture. Apparently, it's a new twist on the traditional beauty queen wave.

And they say that even bad press is better than no press at all. Even better is that it was before noon that I had heard that a parent had called the school insisting that the administration admonish the entire student body.

12/19/04

Ok, so I've been relegated to level of "Old Coot". Today at the Chevron I'm working with Dave, who moved here 3 years ago from Florida, and a guy came in who had just moved back from So. California, after moving there as a kid. We get onto the subject of the weather, and the lack of snow. Dave says he expected to see a lot more snow when he moved here, and California guy says, yeah, he remembers a lot more snow when he lived here as a kid. Before I can stop myself I hear myself saying "Well, you know it comes and goes in about 10 year cycles. When I moved out here back in '74 Utah was in the middle of a drought. I remember my parents selling the condo in Park City 'cause nobody was skiing and they were losing money. But then in '82 we had so much snow the streets downtown were rivers 'cause the culverts couldn't handle the overflow. (Damn! I left out "an' the Great Salt Lake rose so high they had to move I-80 two times, the Guv'ner spent 60 mil to pump it out to the west desert") Then it dried up agin' and wasn't back 'till '91 when I wuz livin' out in Glendale with mah brother an' hiz wife thet we had it piled up above the doors of the duplex." Well, ok, it didn't go exactly like that, but you get the idea. I swear, as the Cali guy left I had visions of me as Floyd the barber sitting in my shop telling Goober and Barney Fife about Mayberry back in 19-ought-3.

12/15/04

And................Someone found a copy of John Kerry's first draft of his concession speech, click HERE to read it......

12/13/04

Dave, Andrea and I get out to West Valley about 20 minutes early for the Chevron Christmas party, so Dave offers to buy us a beer at the local pub so we can be 'fashionably late' instead of 'annoyingly early'. The clerk at the 7-11 steers us to this little bar/grill right around the corner called the "Copper Kettle" or something like that. We're sitting there BSing with the bartender, watching the cook making some of the best looking burgers we've seen in a while. As he's carrying them out to the customers, the bartender tells us they're called the "Chubby". Aptly named, the Chubby does not have a bun, instead it is a burger, grilled onions and mushrooms stuffed between 2 grilled cheese sandwiches. Holy cow, talk about a heart-attack on a plate. Think I'm going to have to go out and try one sometime.........

12/12/04

Today was Car-Wash Hell day at the Chevron. We must have had to reset it at least a dozen times. One time Dave, the guy I was working with, was kind of pre-occupied in the bathroom when this young couple comes in to let me know that there was a lady stuck in her car in the car wash. I couldn't leave the store empty so I asked them to tell here that I would be there as soon as possible, and went to knock on the bathroom door. Well, apparently the sound carries very well down the hall to the bathroom, because as soon as I knocked on the door Dave said "I'll be right out". Dumpus Interruptus. Well, I get out there and the the car wash has this poor lady completely surrounded. Scrubbers behind the car, scrubbers on the side and the one that comes down and cleans the roof was sitting pretty much on her windshield. And the driver side window didn't work, so I had to talk to her through the passenger window. Didn't take much, I just had to push the bar on the windshield up until it clicked into place, climb around the side, behind the machine, put in the key which moves the machine back to the beginning. Fortunately the whole thing didn't upset her too much, she even dared to stay in the car wash while I punched in a new code and gave her a new wash. Even the Mercedes behind her dared to attempt it after watching the whole thing. I stood there watching the two cars get washed just to make sure it didn't jam again. Fun stuff......

12/11/04 Supplemental

Well folks, sorry about the problem with the site, but it looks like everything is up and running. As you know, it took me a couple of days to figure it out, but figure it out I did. I won't bore you with the technical details (mainly because it was a simple problem and kind of embarrassing that I even let it happen), suffice it to say that I now know what the problem was and it won't happen again (at least not until next December when it's time to renew the domain name again).

12/11/04

Ok, I know the site has been down for a little while, just having some technical difficulties. I think I've figured out the problem, but to be sure, I need someone to e-mail me to let me know that things are working the way they should be. If you got here through normal routes (not using the numerical IP address) please click HERE and let me know. Thanks.

12/07/04

Good Morning.

February
Danny : 16th
Todd : 20th
Patrick : 23rd

January
Lisa : 17th