John & Colette’s Adventures

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.

We had about 36 hours of no power on Friday & Saturday. The Northeast got hit with a nice ice storm that of course knocked out power to most people along the coast. I guess there were about 260,000 in Maine without power – even more in NH. We’re feeling lucky we got it back on when we did.

While it was out we painted the rest of the kitchen. Today I hung the Tech Lighting pendant lights. They look super! Colette is busy bringing up Christmas decorations and scattering them about.

We tracked down the not-so-clever frozen Christmas Tree today. It’s been sitting in the Garage for the last 6 hours defrosting. I’m thinking we might not be able to put it in the house until tomorrow. It might have to wait until Tuesday since we have Colette’s christmas party tomorrow night.

Here’s the stove in action!