Wednesday, October 25, 2006

I made the evening news!!!!

Ok I dont know how long this link will be active and I was not even going to put it up but lisa was like "you need to put that on your blog" SO here we are with my 5 seconds of fame.

http://www.whiotv.com/video/10155231/index.html

cheers

Thursday, October 19, 2006

PROGRESS!!!!! - like oh my gosh!

Yeah so I'm like totally fighting acting like a little kid on x-mas morning but its like sooo super cool. Work on the house started this week and wow are they moving fast. SO whats like happened. Well they came on tuesday and did a bit of prep and remounted the vanity in the downstairs bath so its now a fully functional bath again! And their is running water downstairs!!!! Wed. Saw the arrival of our cabinets (actually they came in on tuesday and they picked them up late tuesday afternoon) at our house!!!! Most of them were put into place but not really mounted. SO what did I walk into today????

Can you say some floor!!!!


This shot is from the back door towards the front. They laid almost all the living room floor today! Im so buzzing!



This shot is from the front door back. Basically the same as the last shot just from the other side of the room.


Heres my kitchen. Still a bit of work to be done but they are jamming on the floor right now and then are going to finish the small details of the cabinets and make sure they work all nice and spiff.


Heres a shot from the garage door out to the living room. Its like wow it almost looks done. Notice none of the kick plates are in and the countertop is not actually anchored save for one or two screws.


Heres the other side of the kitchen. Still lots to be done but hey im so excited right now that stuff is getting done.


Ok yeah well I thought I would throw this last one in since some might wonder??? Hey Chris wheres all the stuff that is usually downstairs. Well here it is. My garage has been overrun for the past two months and I long for the day I get it back.

SO whats left to be done??? Well the floor has to be finished and they think they might be mostly done if not done with that by tommrow. I think they are a wee bit optimistic but they say they are coming at 7:30 and the only thing they are doing is the floor so who know!

Cabinets need to be finished and their are quite a few little details that need to be done with that. I think that will be a lot of little adjust this move that type of work.

clean up

Move back in!

Its conceivable that all the work will be done within the next week or by next weekend which makes me ohhhh soooo happy. Also I have made the appointment for the guy to come and measure for our new countertop so I will meet with him on tuesday and see how that goes. After that its supposedly 3 weeks till the countertop is in and then the house will again be done and put back together again.

SO w00t!!!

Cheers!

Thursday, October 12, 2006

ankle update

Thanks for all the concern. To answer questions:

"what did the doctor say?" -- Nothing!! I did not go to a doctor. I have rolled my ankle before and this was not as bad as other times. Probably a light sprane. All a doctor would do would be to wrap it and tell me to ice it and stay off of it. I am an expert at wrapping ankles and I know how to ice and staying off of it is "yeah duh" SO I have just been taking it easy. Thankfully my job allows me to sit most of the day and I have been wearing clogs instead of my normal boots to allow my ankle some room to heal and not be agitated.

"hows the ankle" -- The ankle is doing well. I am wearing normal boots again and although their is still some residual swelling it feels basically fine now. Im still keeping off of it and dont think I will work it until maybe saturday and that will probably be a bike ride not a run.

"massive gaming time!!" - I wish!

"Road obstacles FTW!" - Oh jason how right you are. The road obstacle was the hands down winner that day!

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

My Big Fat Swollen Ankle

Yup thats right I suffered an Injury yesterday during a normal Lunch Time run. I was crossing a street and foolishly was looking out for cars and not so much for little acorns or whatever the heck it was that I hit. All i know is it was rather big and very round and when I landed on it my left ankle rolled quite severly and It hurt like the dickens. I almost fell but managed to keep myself up right and just took a second to catch my bearings. I looked down and it was already starting to swell so I knew that was not good. SO I got to walk the last mile of my 5 mile run back to the office where I promptly iced my ankle for about an hour. What I had not realized at the time was that I seem to have also pulled something in my knee as that is hurting quite a bit as well.

Hooray for physical fitness!

So im kinda bumming today as I had taken a pretty big amount of time off since the marathon and was going to hit it hard starting this week. Now those plans are a bit gone and im just trying to keep my weight off my ankle and knee and let it get all healed up! Oh well. Thats life.

Cheers!

Thursday, October 05, 2006

Why my life at times sucks and also why I hate lowes!

Ok so in the midst of all the wonderfull crap with my house my thermostat just died. Yup stopped working. This was about two weeks ago and I tried a number of things like stripping the wires back a few inches and re-wiring the thermostat (i had it disconected for painting) That didnt work. SO i eventually realized that my thermostat runs directly off of my Furnace. Who knew! And that my furnace in turn also had no power. SO I went for the obvious and checked the breaker. Nope that was good so why no power. Well I kept looking at it but was getting no where so I brought home a volt meter and started testing different areas. I could tell that power was getting to the furnace from the house wiring but it was getting stopped somewhere. SO I started unplugging things and testing for electricity. Well buried under many wires and other things I finally found what I was looking for. A blown fuse. Eureka! Thats an easy fix! or so I thought. I looked at the fuse and its a normal blade type fuse like you usually see in a car. SO I went out to my car to look and see if I had a spare in my fuse kit that would work. Nope. All the new blade fuses are much smaller and higher amps. Psst you can tell the amps by the number on the fuse. Mine was a 3 and most of the ones in the care were in the 15-30 range. SO I thought ok this must be lower and for home HVAC use. SO last night a trip to lowes was in order. Well I got there and im looking at the fuses and I cant find anything even close to what I have in my hand. SO I of course make the mistake of asking for help. The conversation went something like this.....

me: excuse me
lowes: yeah
me: im looking for a fuse
lowes: a what? (spoken as if the word fuse was new to him)
me: A FUSE (yes perhaps louder will convey the meaning of the word fuse!)

I then proceed to hold up the fuse

lowes: we dont sell car fuses
me: this isnt a car fuse
lowes: it sure looks like one to me
me: well it came from my furnace
lowes: ive never seen a fuse like that in a furnace

at this point im just in shock that im arguing with the guy from lowes as to weather or not the fuse came from a furnace and not a car? Im like wt? Its not like car fuses are used to make meth and house fuses are ok so if I pull the ol 1 - 2 switch-a-roo on the lowes guy I can make some smack.

He continues to insist that its a car fuse and tells me to go to autozone. Im like whatever so lisa and I leave and head for home depot. While the gentleman their was more helpfull and not arguing with me he again felt that it was also an auto fuse and was surprised that it came from a furnace. I explained my furnace was only 5 years old so I did not feel this was a particularly large order for home depot. The gentleman agreed and appologized for not having the fuse and again also suggested autozone.

Brief side note -- people at lowes are ignorant and mean. people at home depot are nice and friendly

SO seeing as best buy was right next door to home depot and auto zone was a few miles down the road I thought. Hey maybe they will have it. guess what. They didnt. guess what he said. yup autozone. SO after 3 stores I went to auto zone and bought a nice 4 pack of the fuse I needed.

SO something that should have been simple and easy ended up a long, annoying, and frustrating journey. Now if this were a rare occasion that would be one thing. But this ladies and gentlemen this is what its like to be Chris Knodel. HOO AHHH!

Cheers!

Monday, October 02, 2006

Insert Title Here

Ok I couldnt think of anything to call this update and I was tired of using "quick update" for a title so there ya go. SO whats up??? Well last week I was in Columbus all week in Training taking RH033 which is the first level "power user" Red Hat Linux training class. It was a good class but im so glad that I dont have to do that everyday. 8 hours of classwork in the same content area with roughly 3 labs a day is just too much. Especially for 4 days. SO thats over.

I guess I will just break things out like I normally do.

House:
No real progress. Worked on the guest room most of saturday fixing / re-painting the walls. Was not expecting to have to do this but thats life right. But now that room is back to working order and Lisa and I were able to re-claim Kaiya's room and move all the junk out of her room into the guest room closet. Which makes Lisa much happier than she was before. And that my friends is a very very good thing ^_^ Still have not heard when to expect the cabinets to be in or any other work to start!!!!! Which is just freakin awesome!

Training:
SO what now that the marathon is over??? Some of you might be wondering that? Well I have one more race for the year and thats the ghosts and goblins 5k near the end of the month. ITs a 5k so its the first race im doing this year where im not worried about finishing and actuallly thinking. Hmmmm how fast can I do this in. Ideally I would love to go under 20 min. But that would mean sub 7's for the whole thing. Dont know if I can squeek that. I would at least like to go under 24. I think last year I was 26 something and I feel a lot stronger than I did last year so we shall see. Im going to focus on a lot of speed work over the next couple of weeks SO we shall see. And hey its only 3.1 miles. Thats nothing so i think if I dont cross the line feeling like I have to spew It means I didnt run hard enough!

Gaming:
Finished Xenosaga 3 last night and alls I gots to say is WOW. SO good. I have often complained about video games having dissapointing endings. Its like you put all this time into a game and you are treated to all of about 5 min of post boss fight wrap up. And its almost always (read always is) a total let down. Not this game! OMG Can you say close to 1.5 hours of post boss fight cut scenes and FMV. Its like wow I finished the game and now I get close to a full length movie to wrap the loose ends of the game up. Very Very satisfying. Total play time right now is 71.5 hours and we still have a couple of small things we want to wrap up.