The screen never fit right in our dining room window, so I figured we should replace it. Read more for the photos.
house
01
Sep 08
Busy weekend
It’s been a weekend that could have easily supported a blog post a day. But I’m lazy and I really was hoping to get a new photo or two printed before posting…but other things happened and I still haven’t made any new prints. So here’s the updates instead!
This one will be long with a lot of photos…no teaser photo for the front though.
29
Aug 08
Being right ain’t no fun sometimes.
Yeah, I admit I like being right. Most of the time. But sometimes I really wish I wasn’t right about something. Like the prediction I made when we bought this house that “Those carport tarps won’t last a year” despite the sellers assurance that “They have a 7 year warranty and are only a year or so old.” Which of course means – it happened again.
It happened again.
Read on for more details, more photos, and something completely different.
28
Aug 08
More time in the dark
Still no safelight so I get frustrated quickly when printing, but that should be rectified soon. Even so I scraped an hour or so out of my schedule to try and crank out another print or two last night. Results were not quite what I had hoped for:
Better exposure, but neg was damaged.
17
Aug 08
My latest darkroom
Well the blog started with my first darkroom, this isn’t a sign that the blog is ending…but I now have a darkroom again! Well, kind of. A new camera store opened up in town and we stopped in on Saturday to check it out. Turns out they have darkroom supplies, so I couldn’t resist. We picked up some paper and chemicals and decided it would give us incentive to get a darkroom up and going! Read on for details about how we’ve pulled it off…kind of…. Continue reading →
28
Jul 08
Lootin’ the corpse
So, less than a month between updates – maybe I’m getting better at this after my downward slide. Before I get to the reason for the title though a few “Off-topic” updates. I’ve been miserable sick the past week. Summer colds are bad enough in temperate weather…but when it’s over 100 out and you’ve got sinus pressure, runny nose and an annoying cough – life is extra miserable. Thankfully after a weekend of cold meds and curling up on the couch with tissues I’m feeling much much better today.
The solar lights mentioned in my last post have gone from bad to worse…only the two I repaired are now working. The others are in my office letting their batteries drain. Though about half of those seem like it may be bad batteries and not just overcharging. I’ll give them a few more weeks of darkness before putting them back out.
The backyard grass continues to grow and I continue to watch it. Still not quite grown in well enough for me to post photos…but a HUGE improvement over the bare earth and gravel that was there when we moved in. I think one more bag of fertalizer and one more bag of seed for the remaining bare spots and it will be looking good enough for photos. And hopefully by October or so when the weather finally breaks it will be ready for backyard party season! I’m already getting the itch to start making more pizzas remembering how great the last two experimental “grilled pizzas” came out.
And while I’m bound and determined not to let this disintegrate into a “Coffee blog” that is the reason for the title and what has again inspired me to put my lazy fingers to the keys and bang out an update. The corpse in question is our local Linens N Things which is one of the stores they’re closing to try and save their hides in the tumbling economy. Since I am as always about 180 degrees out of sync with the rest of the world bad economy for everyone else means time for me to score some great deals, kind of like we did with our house!
09
Jul 08
You would think….
Living in one of the best areas for solar power in the entire country you would think I’d have better luck with said technology. But no, that’s not the case. Shortly after Amy and I moved into our new house we bought a set of solar path lights using one of the many gift cards we got from our wedding. They were fairly cheap, made of plastic, and having just a single amber LED in each they don’t give off much light. It only took a week or two for me to replace them with a set of traditional 12v lights. But the LED lights still worked so I didn’t want to just discard them.
23
Apr 08
Freebies and slack
Yep, I’m slacking again. And once again it’s not that I don’t have anything to blog about, just that I haven’t had time to sit down and do it. Believe it or not it’s not even that I don’t enjoy this – I do, typing is quite cathartic for me. Which is kind of the problem. I enjoy it too much and tend to zone out while writing. As a result I end up spending more time than I planed on it and instead of feeling unburdened when I’m done I end up feeling guilty that I spent so much time at it when I have so much more I should be doing. It also doesn’t help that WordPress 2.5 broke the smugmug and lightbox plugins I was using so posting photos is a bit more arduous than I really care to deal with. The new built in gallery in WP 2.5 is excellent, but I really have little interest in using it as I prefer to keep my photos on my smugmug site, uploading them twice annoys me.
But Amy’s most recent duet of posts on her blog seem worth of mention. So read on for my thoughts about the fickleness of freebies and whatever else I manage to bang out before accepting I’ve spent enough time and need to get back to using the keyboard for something more productive!
01
Apr 08
More zeros, more ones – fewer knobs. Going digital … again.
Over lunch we stopped in and picked up a digital converter box with one of the coupons I got us. I’m a gadget freak and the idea of possibly $80 towards a box that should only cost $20 (so realistically it ends up costing about $60 at the store was hard to pass up. Even when it became obvious that as I suspected the boxes would be in the $60-$80 price range. Politically it upsets me to see our government wasting money like this, yeah they’re making a killing auctioning off the spectrum and they could probably get a 47″ HDTV for every household in the country and still be well above what they expected to make in the auction, but I still don’t like to see the government spending money. But if they’re gonna hand it out anyway then I’m not going to refuse it. Politics aside what do I think of the converstion, read on. Continue reading →
30
Mar 08
Applicance fun
Well I got some bad news and some good news about some of our appliances today. Bad news, our main fridge may be having problems. Good news, I fixed the dishwasher – for real this time. I’ve also learned quite a bit about coffee the past few days and as normal I’m getting a little obsessive about my new interest. Continue reading →