Horsey Rides for a Quarter

It's all fun and games until someone gets hurt.  OK, well no one got hurt, but this video was kind of cute that I took of Emmett bouncing on Ash's leg.

I need to play around with some settings on the way I create and/or upload the video, so I need some more practice, and this seemed like a good one to start with.

Shelves. Yeah...boring, I know.

Ash is turning me into an Elfa® fanboy.  These shelves are sold at The Container Store, which we used to shop at a lot when we were living in GA.  They are custom-cut for your measurements and completely modular/customizable, meaning you can hang up some shelves, then move them up or down as you need to.

The first project in our new home that we did using Elfa® shelves was the laundry room, which just had one long shelf over the washer/dryer.  We converted this to three shelves, which added a ton of storage space in our tiny laundry room.  This was my first Elfa® install, and I understood then what Ash saw in these shelves.  They were wicked easy to put up. 

So then we decided to do our master closet, which is not really a walk-in, but yeah you can walk around in there a little.  Basically what we did was split the long wall into two shirt-length hangers and a single hanger for pants, with shelves on top.  Before it was just your typical one shelf with a hanger below it across the whole wall, which is just so much wasted space.

 

To be fair, I should mention I think you can buy this kind of customizable and easy-to-hang shelving at Lowe's/Home Depot, but when we went there to get something for our laundry space, they weren't able to cut the shelves to fit our dimensions.

Materialism (a.k..a. Gadget Pr0n, a.k.a. Bring on the HD!)

I admit. I'm very materialistic. Being a boy, I specifically like gadgets (as opposed to material goods such as...oh...clothes or furniture or furnishings and such).

With our tax return in hand, I guess you could say we've gone on a bit of a tear here in the last month or so. It started with the entertainment center. Well, the entertainment center didn't arrive until 7pm one night. Ash was gone, so I had to deal with these nimrods for the next two hours by myself. Needless to say I saw enough plumber's crack to last a lifetime, and their solution to when something doesn't fit right: kick it or push it until it fits ("that's what she said" - Michael Scott). They didn't install the back panel of the left tower right (the cords go up instead of down), and the whole right tower needs to be replaced. Awesome.

But anyway, it's not like you take it down to Target and go up to customer service. It took 2 months just to get it delivered, so I expect it'll be another two before they actually fix what was messed up from the first time. And you better believe Ash'll be there when they come back!

So anyway, once the crack-heads left, I measured the TV opening and went to Circuit City and bought the largest HDTV I could fit into that space. To give you some perspective, we replaced an old standard definition 26" Sony Trinitron that was about 12 or 13 years old. So we went from that old P.O.S. to a 46" Samsung LCD.

The next day, we brought out a DirecTV installer to get a dual-tuner HD DVR. Holy sh'pocky! HD channels rule (girls drool). And being able to record in HD is obviously a must. We have a Tivo and have always been huge Tivo fans, but a) it wasn't dual-tuner because you need a 2nd satellite line coming into the house which DirecTV had to install, and b) we would have had to buy a whole new HD Tivo anyway.

Since we are doing away with the whole receiver/cd player/speaker setup from before (we just never used all that stuff), I did buy Ash a Bose iPod docking station that is the bomb. Not a real bomb, that would suck. Just the bomb. You can see the unit in the top of the left tower in the picture above.

Hearing music stream forth from the iPod out of some real speakers prompted me to purchase a new stereo for my car yesterday, one with an iPod/iPhone connecter built in. So I can control the music from the actual stereo. Anyone with an iPod Touch or an iPhone knows how impossibly and horrifyingly dangerous it is to do anything with the device while you drive. So this will make it more safer and better sound quality. The FM transmitter I was using before was definitely not the bomb. Having to change stations every 5 miles was so idiotarded I can't begin to fathom how people actually use those on a daily basis.

So, you see how this works right. Ash wants an entertainment center...I get a TV. We get a new TV...gotta get an HD DVR. Want to get rid of the receiver and the CD player and the speakers? Well we need a docking station then. You don't want me getting into a wreck do you? Well then I need a new car stereo. It's all justified. Paperwork's all there, look it over...

p.s. Count the parentheses in this post and you can understand why the blog is called Parenthetical. Hell I even get past the title without dropping a pair in there.

Flickr

So I'm trying out Flickr for uploading my photos to instead of Picasa-slash-Google; linking to photos in Google and placing photos in the blog is a PITA, so I wanted to see if Flickr would be easier.  Seems odd that blogger and Google photos would be integrated so poorly, seeing as they are both Google tools.  Here is the link to my new Flickr account.

For starters, I uploaded two albums.  The first is when a couple of ex-co-workers visited.  Ooh, neat, I just put the picture right there (click the pic to go to the full album).  OK putting pics in the blog is much easier than Picasa.  That's insane.  It's your own tools, Google!  Can't they play nice?

The second album is of Teh Emm3tt, of course (click the pic for the full album).  There's some good shots of him and Xander laying next to each other on the bed, some shots of him sleeping, me sleeping, me and him sleeping, him playing Super Baby, and ... mom playing Wii.  To calm him down one night, we did a sing-a-long to Fountains of Wayne which we streamed through the Tivo.  Technology's swell.  When it works.

But now its time to say
What I forgot to say
Baby baby baby
Come on, what's wrong
Its a radiation vibe I'm groovin' on

Captain Fussypants

So what kind of 2-month old doesn't calm down in the car? Our kind. He's gone on two car rides today. The first one it took him about 20 minutes to calm down. The second one he was happy and smiling as I put him in the car seat, after 10 minutes (on my way back from Blockbuster returning Dan in Real Life and Into the Wild), he cried his poor little eyes out.

Our usual trick is to bounce him while holding him in a sling, which is convenient because it frees my hands up to type this.

Here are some updated pics. We had a pediatric appointment on Friday, and Em is 101/2 pounds! So he's put on almost 4 pounds which, and I really have no frame of reference but, I think is a good thing. And he's outgrowing some of his newborn clothes already. Doc says we can expect about another month of The Fuss though. Yay.

...

I started this blog 6 hours ago. It is now 9:20 and he finally went down for the night. I so look forward to the day when I don't put him in his crib, slink away, and then have a desire to celebrate when I don't immediately hear him start to fuss.

Resurrection

OK, OK. I give. If the fans want more blog, well then, I guess I can prolong the death of this one at least a little longer.

Next, they'll want cake. Anarchy!

Here are some updated pics of Emmett. For the prior albums, you can always click on the "Brian's Public Gallery" link at the top. Feel free to explore, Dora.

So, here's some of the highlights of what's been happening in the PalmerRaineyan house:

• I watched Em by myself quite a bit this weekend. I survived. The long-lasting impact on Emmett's life remains to be seen. He is being monitored for laziness, fast-food cravings, and twitch reflexes that will tell if he has been over-exposed.
  
• We finally closed on the house in Columbus. Rawk.
  
• We watched the movie Once, and liked it. I bought Ash the soundtrack.
• We got crap reception with Verizon, so we switched to AT&T. I got an iPhone, and I'm loving it so far. When we decide we are keeping AT&T for real, we'll send out new digits.
  
• Ash is addicted to nonograms, after I bought her Picross for the DS for Christmas. You can try a few yourself here.
• I am still addicted to oGame.

We need ideas for good movies to rent. The writer's strike couldn't have come at a worse time. With Emmett here are watching more TV than ever, and even with Tivo suggestions that are recorded, we are running out of stuff to watch at 3 in the morning while one of us is up with the little man, bouncing on an exercise ball, trying to get him to go to sleeeeeeeep.

Almost Home

A lot's happened since Oct. 11th (last post). I started my new job on the 15th (love it). It's mostly been spent shaking my head back and forth going "eeb-adee-eeb-adee-eeb-adee" like that one robot (Lost in Space?). Bit that's normal.

I've been traveling back and forth to Charlotte about once a week. Charlotte's a decent town, unless you're craving some takeout hibachi, in which case you have to settle for mediocre kung pao chicken. I did get to have the best burger-and-fries I've ever had though, at a chain joint called Five Guys. Holy sh'pocky. Good burgers and they literally give you a bag of fries. Remember the large size brown paper bags used for lunches - not the small ones, the larger ones - now fill that about 2/3rds the way to the top with awesome tasting fries. O' Snap.

We found a house in Gastonia, here are some pictures. We close on the house Wednesday and move Friday. Going to be a craaaazy week next week. But we are very much looking forward to getting moved and settled and to have this all behind us.

That's about it for this week. The hypnotic din of the heating unit here at the Marriott Courtyard is putting me to sleep.