John & Colette’s Adventures

I built a couple shelves so I can stand up and work. It's supposed to be better for you than sitting on your butt all day. 

I just used random scrap wood so looks aren't that great.

Some early observations:

• I need to angle the keyboard so the back is lower than the front. The flat angle is hard on the wrists. I actually have a set of sliding keyboard rails from my dad that I was thinking of inserting on the monitor stand. That way I just have 1 shelf and a slide out keyboard tray.
• The monitors might be too high.
• I wonder if I'll need to wear shoes more often now. Standing around in flat feet all day could get sore.
• A bar rail to step up on would be nice.
• The cats like laying under the shelf

I send a bi-weekly invoice to our office manager and I've gotten bored with the standard email so a few months ago I started writing silly messages. Here's this week's:

We find our brave engineer on the outskirts of a small town in northern New England. He's holed up in a small, but comfortable, cape in a quiet, heavily wooded residential neighborhood. The sound of a snoring cat and the clacking of keys is all that disturbs the morning. The birds are even strangely quiet today.

Suddenly, there's a large crash out the window! A giant Tyrannosaurus Rex has just lumbered into the front yard!  Snarling and snapping at anything within reach – spittle flying in a spray of foam. His roar is deafening after the morning quiet.

Our brave engineer stops typing and stares out the window in disbelief. Dammit, he thinks. The homeowners association clearly states that all pets must be on leashes if outdoors!

Sighing, he goes downstairs to the freezer and pulls out the moose shank he keeps for just this situation. Carefully, he goes out into the dooryard and starts to wave the tasty morsel around.

"Hey, you!" he shouts. "Hey Mr. Squiggles! You dumb oaf!".

The T-Rex looks at him, menace in his eyes. It takes him a minute or so to focus and then he realizes this is not an enemy. His tail starts to wag – giant bone quaking thumps into the ground.

"That's it! Want the bone? Want some brekky? Here, fetch!"

The brave engineer hurls the shank into the neighbors yard and the T-Rex lumbers off after it.

Our brave engineer looks after it for a second and then turns back into the house. He makes a call to his neighbor and with a great effort tries to get back into the work zone.

Soon, there's nothing but the sound of a snoring cat and the clacking of computer keys.

The car has been acting up lately. We would get into the car and couldn’t turn it on when using the keyless ignition. We’d just get the blinking red key symbol. Replacing the batteries in the fobs had no effect. It was quite annoying!

Yesterday I took it into the Nissan dealer and after about 40 minutes got a call from them.

“There’s something weird going on with your car.”
“Yes, I know”
“We can start it without having the keys in the car.”
“What?”
“Did you ever lose a key?”
“Yep – maybe a year or two ago.”
“Well, we think it’s still in the car somewhere.”

Turns out it was trapped in the rails under the driver seat! I think its battery was starting to die and that was causing the flaky recognition of the key fob. Hopefully, now that we have recovered it everything will work fine.

I’m still of the opinion that keyless ignition systems are a solution to a problem that people didn’t have. Although Colette likes it. But she carries a big ol’ purse everywhere.

I’ve uploaded some photos from our last trip with Globus & Cosmos (where Colette worked while we were in Denver) to the Canadian Rockies. It was an excellent trip from Calgary through Banff and on to Vancouver.

Click here to go see the mountains.

Forgot to include that we had Jacque & Terry & Alex visit us for about a week. We met up with them in Boston and spent a couple days down there playing tourists. We then took Amtrak back up to Portland and introduced them to Maine – “the way life should be” (must be true – it’s on all the state signs).

I even went with them to LL Bean’s to go trap shooting! What a blast! (ha!) You can’t come to America and not shoot something. Alex was thrilled. We also went to one of the coldest baseball games we’ve been to in Maine. It was a dreary day. In fact, the whole week was rather a bust weather wise.

We took our old kitchen cabinets and hung them down in the basement (drilling into concrete with a plain drill – not fun). The island we raised up 6″ and turned into a bar. I hung up some dry wall, ran some power & hung lights and this week we finally put up a dart board. I think we’re all set.

Of course, I could use a little fridge to put my kegs in…

The Australia photos have been uploaded. You can find the pics here.

Now that I’m on Facebook, I find I update this site less & less. As evidence, I give you the fact that we went down to Australia for over 2 weeks and nary a word of the event could be found on our site!

I’ll be posting pics soon, but in summary the trip was excellent. One week was for work (which ended with some not-so-great financial news – bummer) and one week was just for fun. Of course, Colette HAD to go!

It was great being back down under. We felt like we had returned home in some ways. Everything felt right – I only turned on the windshield wipers once instead of the blinkers as intended. But I did the same thing in the Versa on the way back from Boston so it all balanced out.

More later.

A few before & after pics:

Before

After

New Track Lights

After losing power for 36 hours during the last storm I finally went out and bought a generator. Unfortunately I couldn’t find one with electric start. Oy! I wish I hadn’t waited until the last minute. That electric start would have been nice.