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!

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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.

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21
Jun 08

The dust! The cobwebs!

Ahhhh!   Man this thing gets dirty quick if I don’t keep up with it!  Sorry for going so long without any updates.  Things have been crazy busy in life the past month or two.  And while that did make for lots of blog worthy stories – it also left me with no time to type them up.  And the issues with photo posting after the last update continues to bug me and make me not want to post.

I’m getting rid of the twitter box.  It just slows things down too much and I don’t update it enough.  So maybe the site loading quicker will help inspire me to post more.  Plus I just made some big progress on my Manx that I’m anxious to talk about so that may also spur some more posts.

Of course I’m also still enjoying watching grass grow in my yard – so “more frequent” posts may be a relative kind of thing 😀  Keep your fingers crossed!


07
May 08

Back in the saddle

I know what you’re thinking.  Hopefully that means I’m back in the saddle with regular updates.  And while I certainly hope that’s true I’m not quite going to be promising it yet.  The last 7 days we had Amy’s mom visiting so things were a little busy and finding time for blogging was not at the top of my list.  Even so the blog saddle is not the one I’m declaring myself back into just yet.  Nope, rather I’m talking about the one musical instrument I’ve ever been able to do more than annoy people with.  My parents shipped my old coronet out to me and I just picked it up from the post office.  It’s in pretty rough shape – this was my learner horn and not the good horn I later upgraded to (and then sold when I quit playing) but it still plays so that’s enough for me to try and relearn.

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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!

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14
Apr 08

An idea so perfect…

How I never thought of this I’ll never figure out.

Yeah, the amp I made sure came out clean:

Amp on breadboard

But I win zero points for style when compared to this:

http://www.dinosaursandrobots.com/2008/02/in-praise-of-coconut-shell.html


11
Apr 08

WTI time again

The marines in town are having their “annual” (they started doing it more than once a year awhile back) training exercises here in town right now. At my old house it was a real blast, they’d land at a school two blocks away – but the approach they took came directly over my roof. I used to go up and sit on the roof to take photos since they were so incredibly close. I figured that was something I wouldn’t get to enjoy anymore here at the news house. Turns out I was only partially right. Continue reading →


08
Apr 08

More Coffee

Well, the green coffee beans I ordered finally arrived. Sweet Maria’s was real quick on shipping them out, but UPS messed up and misrouted the package. So it ended up making a side-trip to Mesquite TX before it found it’s way home. The original shipment was supposed to take 2 days, it ended up taking 4 additional days to correct the mistake. The package finally showed up at 6:59 PM yesterday, and by 7:30 my first batch of home roasted coffee was packed away. Read on for the full story and this mornings impression of the results. Continue reading →


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 →


31
Mar 08

More thoughts from yesterday

Think of this as a continuation of yesterdays update. First off the dishwasher did well with the little red doodad finally liberated.

Decorative pastic that was stuck in our dishwasher

The fridge is now at a safe temp – but it’s cranked all the way up to do it so we are going to have to have it looked at…but it can hold for a few weeks since this just isn’t a good time for us to be worrying about fixing the fridge. I may also go into a bit more detail about what happens when I get a new obsession with some more talk about coffee. And just for fun a couple of fisheye photos from Christmas that I found on my memory card when I took the photos for this post. So read on for the rest of the fun.

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