Before and after

We tore down this unsightly and stupidly heavy door that's under our deck.

And we bought the materials and built the new one that opens in the middle and is made from lighter wood.

Taaa daa!

Going yard

The outdoor spring projects continue unabated here at Monkey Central.  We have to get them done before it gets too hot and humid to be outside for very long.

This project was pretty minor after redoing the fence and the rail by the steps we redid last summer.  The lilac bush and the bird bath, our little friends Ozzy and Luli down the street call it a 'bird pool,' were already in place, so all we did was buy some landscaping stones and encircle them both in together.  Then I dug up what bit of lawn was left inside the new egg shaped enclosure and Sparky covered it over with straw, then cardboard, then we dumped three bags of topsoil over that.  In a few weeks she's going to plant herbs in there to replace the ones that died in the big cold snap we went through this past February.

The next project, digging up a row of monkey grass and extending the old rose garden out to the walkway in the back yard was a bit harder.

I dug out all the monkey grass, it came out in huge clumps, then I dug the top layer of regular grass up, and turned it over.  The grass used to cover an area about the size of our Scion XA.

 Once I got that dug up, turned over, and the bigger chunks busted up in to manageable clods, Sparky covered the area with cardboard and we tramped it down.  Then we whisked ourselves off to buy topsoil and compost/manure mix which she laid down while I recuperated from all my back breaking labors.

Then the rains came.  And the next day after the rains cleared out for a bit, Sparky realized we should have built the raised bed before she spread all the dirt out.  So we took some lumber had left from redoing the fence and the railing and we built a new raised bed.

Today the weather gods smiled upon us, thank you Thor!, and it was warm and sunny.  So I went and got some large pine bark nuggets and spread them around out newly built raised bed.  In a few weeks when the tomato and pepper plants are ready, Sparky is going to plant them in our new bed.

I like projects like this because they take up part of the lawn and less lawn means less I have to mow and more food we can grow.

Nearly there

Our outdoor spring project of replacing the old fence on the side of our yard is nearly done.

We tore out the old fence that had been shaded by trees for years. 

It had been beaten down by falling tree limbs and it was rotten in places so it needed to go.  So we knocked it down and took out all the rotted fence posts.  Then we started putting in the new fence.

I used the old fence posts for a guide and if possible I put new posts in the exact places of the old ones.  Some were easier to get in than others were.

After a bit of fussing and arguing and with a bit of help from our neighbor, we got the first post in, then the second one, and then the first eight foot section.  

I was able to use an existing post, so the second section went in pretty smoothly, with the help of my friend Keith.

The third section went in after a few days delay due to rain and a cold snap.  We have to have a gate at the bottom of the fence so I can get the mower in and out easily, so I had to put in a shortened section, another post, and then the gate, which I'm still working on.  

Even with the remaining adjustments needed to the gate, I was able to go ahead and paint the fence yesterday.  

It looks pretty darn good and it's miles better than what used to be there.  This fence should last years and years longer than the old one due to not having trees near it.  We had the pecan tree cut that used to shade the old one and our deck and the neighbor had the old diseased maple on his property cut.  

One project down, many more to go.  Oh, the joys of home ownership.

It's magic

We turned a pallet of flat stone:

Into a rock enclosure this past Sunday afternoon.

Amazing, isn't it.

Slow and steady wins the race

 After having a half a tree fall on our property and getting two more trees removed in the past year, we finally decided to get estimates on fixing the walkway and steps that lead down to our backyard.  The estimates came in way over our budget so we decided to tackle as much of the work as we could safely do.

This past weekend we pulled up the rotting railroad timbers that made up part of the old walkway.

We piled them all up on the curb and now we wait for the city to haul them off.

Then, instead of replacing the steps that lead down to the garden in the backyard, we began repairing them and we built a new top step.

Sparky laid the bricks in after I framed it with treated 4 x 4's, laid down pea gravel and paving sand.  Not bad for a pair of amateurs.

Next up we're fixing the rest of the walkway where the timbers used to be.  After that comes repairing the rest of the steps.  We're taking it slowly, one bit at a time, and when I cuss the hard work and the sweat is flying, I remind myself that by doing it ourselves, we're saving over four grand.

Two Stooges Home Improvement strikes again!

They had to tear up part of our front sidewalk when they put in new sewer and water lines out in front of our house back in February and we finally got around to fixing it a few weeks ago.
We leveled the ground up and then we put down some gravel and leveled it up as well.
That Sparky, she wields a mean rake.

Then I mixed up bag after bag of Quikrete, we used 8 forty pound bags when all was said and done, and we filled that sucker in:Our repair job has held up well so it looks like we did it correctly. Now we need to get another bag of some other type concrete to cover it over so it looks more like the old walk. But the main thing is we no longer have a huge law suit waiting to happen in our front yard.

Back and better than ever

Finally, after months of waiting for our repair guy to fit us in his schedule and after weeks of hard work repainting and redecorating, we finished our basement!
Sparky busted her butt repainting and redecorating. All I did was help repaint the floor. But mostly I stayed out of her way.
Looks great.
Doesn't it. Yes it does.

Adventures in home ownership

We think we may have our air conditioning unit fixed. As some of you may remember we got a warranty on our house when we bought it back in October. We tried using the warranty on the same unit last fall when it would not shut off, but since we did not use a warranty company approved HVAC service company we had to pay for that repair ourselves.

Then when we had a pipe burst this past winter they said it was not covered.

So when I found standing water under out unit a little over a week ago I was hesitant but I called it in anyway. The warranty company contracted the job out and the guy came out last week. He figured out what was wrong with it and shock of shocks they approved the repair. Well the AC guy had to order the part and it finally came in today and he came out and worked on it for a couple of hours this afternoon, then he said it was all good to go. I started writing him a check for the amount of the deductible and he tried to tell me I had to pay him $40 more on top of that. I politely but firmly told him that our deductible was only $100 and that's all we'd be paying him. He objected saying that the warranty company was supposed to call us to tell us that the was a $40 fee on top of the deductible for some reason he tried to tell me. I told him once again that we'd be paying the deductible and nothing more. I also said that if they wanted $40 more from us they could make their request in writing and that we'd take it under advisement. He stammered a bit, then he made a call on his cell phone. I handed him the check for $100 and thanked him for his labors and I asked for a receipt. He told me he'd have to go outside so he could talk in private to whoever he was calling and he went to his van without giving me the receipt I requested.

Next thing I know he's starting his van and he drives off from our house. No receipt, no explanation, no nothing, he just left. I think he was trying to make a little pocket money off us. If he really wants $40 extra bucks he can mark up something when he submits his bill to the warranty company, he wasn't about to chisel one more red cent out of us.

Fixer upper of the week

It's a perfect starter home for someone.

You can't stop me because I have become a DIY monster

Flush with the success of fixing our sliding screen door on Friday, I tackled another project yesterday. I turned a closet in one of our basement rooms into a garden tool storage space by removing the closet doors and putting up a peg board. I made a frame with some 1 by2's in the closet after I removed the shutter style closet doors. I was able to screw the frame right into the paneling in the closet.
Then I took my pre-cut peg board and I screwed it into the frame.
Then it was just a matter of putting in the pegs to hang stuff on and boo ya, Bob's yer uncle, there you go. We've got a sweet storage space for our garden tools, shoes, shop vac, and other stuff.

Look what we can do

We've become Mr. and Ms. Fix It since we moved in to our new house. Today we replaced a screen in a sliding screen door! Our house has stayed pretty cool through out this early heat wave, except for our TV room. It gets hot in there because there is a huge sliding glass door and window that faces the west and the sun streams in and it heats up the room like crazy. I fished out the sliding screen from under the deck a few days ago and this is what it looked like before we fixed it: Notice the massive hole in the bottom of the screen. It was big enough for a pig with human flu to get through. So we trotted off to our local big box hardware store to see what replacement doors or screen repair kits cost. After much debate we decided to get a roll of screen, some spline (that's the stuff the holds the screen in place in the groove in the screen door), and a spline intaller tool to fix the door with.

So this afternoon I ripped out the old screen and the old spline and I cleaned the door. Then when Sparky got home from work we installed the new screen and this is what it looks like now: It's fantastic now. We can open the door and let the room cool off naturally and leave it open all the while we watch TV at night. Before we had to close it after an hour or so because moths and other insects were coming in. Now we can leave it open and enjoy the night air! It was actually insanely easy to install the new screen, the only hard part was getting the door into the track after we fixed it. All in all it cost us about $28 to fix the door and it would have cost us Jeebus knows how much to get a custom made door if we had to go that route. So we saved a bunch a money by doing it ourselves and we got the cool night air without bugs every night if we want it. Boo ya!

You haven't posted all day long Monkey, what the heck have you been up to?

Well, Nosy Parker, if you must know, I've been chasing lizards and nailing the ones I caught to the outside wall next to our keen blue bird bath. And I cut off part of the drain pipe and put on a new elbow so the rain water will drain into our new rain barrel.

And I mowed the lawn as well.

Now, lazy bones, what the hell have you been doing all day? Reading blogs?

Misadventures in home ownership

This past Saturday was a regular Saturday around our place. We slept in a little, had a relaxing morning once we did get up, and then we showered and went about our usual Saturday afternoon errands. We went to Target, the liquor store for some wine, picked up some Powerball tickets, and then we decided to head home because it was cold as Christian charity outside. We got home about 3:45PM and I noticed that our water pressure is low, we usually have crazy high water pressure so I knew something was up.

I called the city water department to find out if there had been any breaks in the main line near our house and the nice lady said there had not been but she'd be glad to send someone out to check the line in our neighborhood. Meanwhile about an hour later Sparky says she can hear water running when she stood in the downstairs half bath. So I tore myself away from playing cards on Yahoo to go outside under our deck to see if the sound of running water was coming from there. I went out in the cold and I opened the big door under out deck and I found out that the water was not running under the house, it was FUCKING POURING.

Water was not only shooting from a copper pipe that lead into the line inside the house it was also streaming from another pipe as well. It was a fucking mess. Water was falling faster than public confidence in our idiot President. Lately I've been a pretty handy guy, I recently replaced and rewired our two front porch lights, I filled in some holes in a cinder block wall with some concrete, I unclogged our upstairs bathtub so now we don't shower while the water rises above our ankles, but there was no way in hell I could have tackled the plumbing problem that we had under our place this past Saturday night.

I marched inside and gave Sparky the bad news. She scrambled to find the home warranty company's phone number, we got a home warranty with our house and when we tried to use it after we had our HVAC unit worked on they told us that they did not pay on after the fact repairs and that they had to be the ones to call the repair people and they told us that they had people dispatching folks 24/7 so there'd be no need to worry if something happened on a weekend. She found the number and I called them.

Can you guess what happened next? No one fucking answered.

So I called a plumber. No answer.

Then I called another. No answer.

Then another, this guy finally answered and he said he could be at our place in a few hours and that I should turn the water off at the main line where it comes in to our house. He told me where to find the turn off switch and he asked if I wanted to wait on him. I said I'd call him back if I did.

I called another plumber. This guy said he and his assistant were just finishing up a job and that his assistant would be at our place in about 10 minutes. Bingo.

The guy gets here and he surveys the situation. He tells me, after what seemed like an hour of chit chat, that he can fix it, no problem. He tells me he has to go to Lowe's to get parts and that he'll be right back. I asked him if he could shut the water off first. He says, "Well Duh! I nearly forgot to do that." He shuts it off, I tried before he got there but I could not get it turned off, after thawing the valve. It was frozen shut because it's been super crazy cold here for the past three days.

Chatty Chuck, that's the name I gave him, unbeknownst to him of course, came back pretty quickly from Lowe's with all his parts and he quickly fixed the leaks. He replaced a section of pipe and he connected everything that needed connected. He then told me I should insulate all the pipes we could, we still have some older copper pipes outside under our deck, and that I should wrap all the pipes possible in blankets until such time as I could do all the insulating. He then hit me with a bill for $230. I figured I'd have to shell out about $150, $175 tops, so it felt like he reamed me without even giving me a peck on the lips beforehand, you know, kind of like how Bush/Cheney and corporate America have been doing us for the past 8 years. I gritted my teeth and paid his bill.

After I wrapped some old blankets around my pipes we waited out the night's cold temps. I'm no stranger to having frozen pipes, we used to get them all the time when we lived in Lee County when I was in high school, so I left a small stream of water running to keep ice from forming in the line. I decided that I was going to stay up all night to make sure things went okay. But around 4:15AM I decided I had enough and that since the water was coming in fine I'd go to bed for a bit because I knew Sparky would be up in a few hours. As I went to bed I noticed that the snow flurries that had started falling earlier had now morphed into freezing rain.

I woke up around 11:30 AM and after a quick breakfast of oatmeal with brown sugar and banana I went off on our first trip of the day to Lowe's for supplies. I bought pipe insulation and Gorilla brand duct tape, which I highly endorse now. I didn't buy enough insulation the first trip so I had to go back for more. I also bought a thick towel to cut up in strips and wrap parts of the pipe lines in. As I insulated pipes and taped said insulation in with my Gorilla brand tape, Sparky wrapped up some of our other pipes in an old blanket that she cut up. After what seemed like hours of working in a stooped position under the deck, I was ready to shoot some foaming insulation in some of the crevices where the pipes went inside. But my can of foaming insulation was hopelessly clogged so I sent Sparky off to buy another.

While she was gone I finished insulating, taping, and wrapping towels and blankets around our pipes. She got back and I shot the hell out of the crevices with foaming insulation and after 4 hours of cold damp dirty work we were done. After having to do most of the work while stooped over my lower back is killing me but Mr. Ibuprofen and his good friend Mr. Moosehead beer have lessened the pain. Sparky worked like a champ and most important of all she didn't try to tell me how to do things as we worked so things went pretty smooth, in spite of the cold, the damp, and the stooping.

So now our outside under the deck pipes are all wrapped up nice and warm and they await the cold temps that are supposed to be with us for a few more days. Hopefully, with a little bit of luck though, the worst may be over because the really cold temps don't last long here in our fair city and generally winter itself is done by mid February.

The only problems we're still facing are the fact that the home warranty company never called us back and the water pressure in our upstairs bathroom sink is super low, the water barely trickles out but the bathtub water pressure is fine and so is the toilet water situation. I'm thinking that something got lodged in the line leading to the sink when the water was off and then got turned back on. It could happen, this is an old house and goodness knows what's in some of these old water lines. We decided that when the assholes with the home warranty company finally do call us back were making them send someone out to fix the pressure to our upstairs bathroom.

All in all though, we handled out first home repair mega emergency pretty calmly and with grace under pressure. But I'm telling you right now, I hope it's years before we have to find out how we react to the next home repair mega emergency.

Hey look what we did last night

We got off our asses and we hung some pictures!

Here's close up of the framed album covers:
We decided to go with a 'faces' theme when it came to hanging the album covers in the living/dining room. We had a bunch of them already but I did pick up the middle left one and the bottom center one yesterday at a local thrift store/flea market.

The room looks a lot better now that we have some furniture in it and some stuff on the walls.

Adventures in home repair

(Not the toilet in question.)

I decided to put the new toilet seat we bought yesterday on the toilet in the half bath this morning. It's an older toilet, and by "older" I mean it's so old it came over on the Mayflower. The vanity next to the toilet is a boxy older style of vanity and when I say it's next to the toilet, I mean it's right next to the toilet, and it makes it hard to get in under and around the toilet to do the necessary repairs.

So half awake I lay down on the floor next to the toilet so I can see the nut I need to loosen up to get the toilet seat off. I spy what I believe is the nut and I began unscrewing it with my hand. Next thing I know water is pouring out of the toilet tank and on to me and the floor. Being the genius I am I unscrewed one of the nuts that attached the water tank to the toilet base. After a not so refreshing shower with toilet tank water I corrected my mistake and I managed to wrangle the old seat off that toilet.

I managed to turn a 5 minute job into 45 minutes of work and a whole lot of cussin'. Taking a dump in that little half bath from now on is going to be sooooooooooo satisfying.

What are you doing to help your country in this time of financial crisis?

I'll tell you what you're doing, unlike Sparky and I, you aren't doing a damn thing. We, on the other hand, are keeping all your sorry asses afloat by selling our condo and buying a house. And let me tell you people I'll be damn glad when it's all over with.

We've spent our entire summer either getting our place ready to sell, looking for a new place, and stressing out over doing both those things. We got tossed out of our place when prospective buyers came by to see our condo and we had many people tossed out of their homes when we went to look at their houses. Finally when we agreed to sell our place to our buyers we then had to worry about finding another house to buy after one that we made an offer on had major problems with it. Thankfully we found a great place and we move in on Tuesday.

While I will never put the address of our new homes on this blog and I also will never put a photo of the outside of the house on here, I will tell you that it's a great house. If someone would have told me that we'd end up buying this house when we started out all this months ago I would have told them they were crazy but here we are with a great house in a super neighborhood. We are both excited as anything to be moving out of the condo we currently have and into the new place, in fact we got so excited that we couldn't stand it yesterday afternoon so we drove by the new house and as we drove past it we noticed that one of our new next door neighbors had an Obama '08 yard sign in their yard. Sparky and I both squealed with delight when we saw it. I'm never going to tell on this blog how much we got our new house for because I know some smart ass will leave a comment that says something like, "You couldn't buy a show box for that price where I live." But I will say this, we got a good deal on what to us is a lot of house.

In just a few days we'll be out from under the condo association, take possession of our new place, and move in. And when we become masters of our own home destiny then all this stress, all the worry, all the bull shit, all the hard work we did getting ready to sell our condo, all the hard work we did packing up our stuff will have been worth it because we will be in the last house we'll ever buy, barring either of us winning the Powerball and or Mega Millions jackpots that is.

So that's what we're doing to help the economy, we're buying a house, paying movers, and buying some stuff to go in our new place. We're doing all we possibly can, now it's time for you slackers to do your share too.

Pssst, wanna buy a condo?

All the major remodeling jobs are done and we're almost ready to start showing our place next week.
Most everything went pretty smoothly. The painting/repair guy did a heck of a good job on all the stuff we hired him to do. He fixed all the little things that needed fixing and he did a great job on putting in the tile on the floor in downstairs half bath. His paint job on the ceilings and the walls is pretty darn good as well. The only complaint I have with his work was that he got a little messy with some drywall mud one day and he got it all over some furniture and a lampshade and some other stuff, but he did the right thing and he knocked off some on his final bill to make up for it.

If only the counter top and carpet installation had went as smoothly as the other stuff did.

We purchased the counter tops and the carpet from a big box home improvement store who's name rhymes with "blows" and at this home improvement store they make you pay for everything up front, the materials and the installation both. And they run, they don't walk, they run to the bank to deposit your check. Then they order your materials and they tell you that an installer will call you when your stuff comes in. So basically after you pay for everything in advance you've got to wait for your stuff to come in and you're at the mercy of whichever installer happens to be line when your stuff comes in.

Since the counter tops we picked out are made here in Johnson City we did not have to wait the full four weeks they said it would take to custom make it, we only had to wait two. The installer called me when it came in and we set up a time for him to be at our place. On the day he was supposed to be here he called fifteen minutes after he was already supposed to be here to tell me that he was going to be another 45 minutes late. He kept saying, "I'm gonna be late, is that okay?" I refused to tell him that it was okay because it most certainly wasn't, so I said nothing and finally he hung up and arrived about an hour later. He looked like he was hungover and had been sleeping under a rock all weekend when he rolled up to our condo.

The counter tops that we were replacing were not very big, our place isn't huge by any stretch of the imagination, and yet it took him almost seven hours to take out the old counter top and to install the new ones. Since the bastard did not start until almost noon he did not finish until almost 7 that night. If he had started at 8 or 9 in the morning then he would have been done in plenty of time for us to put some stuff back in the kitchen and make dinner at decent hour.

But as it turns out the counter top installer was nothing in comparison to douchebags who did our carpet install. Again, we had to pay for everything up front and then be at the mercy of the ass wipes who they sent out to install the new carpet.

In one respect the carpet guy was smarter than the counter top guy because he never committed to a time that he would be here to do the install. So that meant that we'd get our carpet, that we'd already paid for mind you, when ever the hell he decided to show up. On the day when they were supposed to be here, last Monday, I got up early because I expected the carpet guy to be here at a decent hour, however it turns out that I was living in a dream world where workmen who do installation for big box retailers actually give a shit about customers. Eight o'clock rolled by and no call. Eight thirty, nothing. Nine? Nope. Nine thirty? Oh hell to the no. Then at about 9:45 I get a call from the carpet guys and they tell me they'll be at our place around 11 or 11:30.

They finally roll up at about 11:15 and they started to work about 25 minutes later. I tell the guy who looks like he's in charge that I want them to start upstairs and do the hall way first, then the stairway, then the landing, then the living room, then the dining room. I tell them I want it done like that so that they do not track up the new freshly laid carpet. The guy then looks at me and he says, "So, that's the way you want it done huh?" I had to bite my tongue to stop from saying, "Yes, you inbred fucking idiot, that's the way I want it done! Now you and your heroin addicted partner get to fucking work before the sun goes down please!"

To make a long story longer, they took all day, all afternoon, and into part of the evening to do the install. They made a huge mess, left carpet strips and bits of scrap carpet crap all over our new carpet, at one point they had our carpet stretched upside down out in the parking lot, they left big bits of carpet outside, and they did not finish the install until almost 7 in the evening. I was ready to strangle them by the time they got done. They didn't give a shit when they got to our place, they didn't give a shit about working neat, about vacuuming up their debris, or about finishing at a decent time. After they deigned to load up the old carpet and padding and as we were cleaning up after them the one in charge comes in and says, "Oh by the way, don't pull any threads that are sticking out, cut them, because if you don't then you may unravel that part of your new carpet." First off, they should have cut any threads they saw. Secondly, they should have been doing the clean up that we were doing when he came back in to pass that bit of wisdom on to us. It took us until about 8/8:30 PM to get our place to where it was livable and we finally got to eat some supper around 9 PM. Bottom line, we'll never use Lowes for big jobs like this again.

But we're happy the worst is over and we can finally start showing the place next week. Now, who wants to buy a nice 2 bedroom one and a half bath condo with new kitchen counter tops, new carpet, and that has been freshly painted and fixed up?

How can you miss me if I never go away?

Our painter/fix it guy finished painting the room where I slave away on the internets for your enjoyment and edification earlier today so I'm back much sooner than I thought I would be. The dude kicked ass and did a great job, I'm telling anyone who is in the Tri Cities area if you need any work done let me know and I'll give you the guy's number, he's that good. Everything he's done so far has made Monkey Central look 1000% better.
That's my empty desk against some freshly painted walls. Gone are the black marks on the wall that I made by scraping my old chair against it. Gone are the smoke stains from countless Marlboro Lights smoked in the years before my heart attack. Gone are the many holes we drilled into the walls to hang pictures and or blinds and curtain rods. It seems a shame to put anything back in a clean pristine room, but do it I must for Sparky doesn't want our books and CD's stacked on top of the dressers in our bedroom.

Funny thing this, when I was putting the electronics back in here I put the modem power cord on my computer speakers and then I tried to connect the speakers power cord to the modem and it didn't fit. I was convinced I had vacuumed up some sort of adapter so I went to Circuit City to see their modems fresh in the box. I learned then that I was trying to connect the wrong power cord thingy to my modem and I also learned that Motorola modems, the very same ones that my cable company has been charging me $6 a month to rent from them, had fallen in price, they used to be $69 and change but today they were $39 and change. So I bought a new modem and hooked it up when I got back. I'll be taking the cable company's modem to the local office tomorrow and giving it back to them, then I'll point out that they can no longer charge me rent because I now own my modem. Boo ya. My fuck up ended up saving me money. Crazy huh.

The other big development of the day was I found a great new green and white striped polo shirt at K Mart for $10 bucks and so I bought it. Oh wait, that's not the other big development.

The other big development was that Barack Obama chose to come to near where I live to make his first public appearance since clinching the nomination. He was in Bristol, VA, which is 20 miles from our place, this afternoon. I could not attend in person due to the house stuff but I did manage to catch him on TV and I took a photo of him. How often has a newly minted Democratic Presidential nominee chosen one of the Tri Cities as the first city he appears in after clinching the nomination? Hmm, let me think, let me think...Oh now I got it. Just one. Barack Obama. That's it. How cool is that? Very fucking cool.

Actually I have a theory as to why he did it. He wants to subtly let everyone know that he is dope with the "Whiskeymarie/Dr. Monkey Axis of Kick Ass Bitchin' Bloggers." He delivered his historic nomination clinching speech in St. Paul just a few blocks from where Ms. Von Partypants works and lives, then he comes to my backyard to give his first speech after clinching. It's almost touching how he wants to stay close to those bloggers who he clearly loves and whose support he obviously covets.

To be fair I think Bush McCain once flushed the toilet on his wife's private jet as it flew over our neighborhood one day.

Shut out

It's going to be light posting for me for the next day or so boys and girls. The guy we hired to do the painting and the repairs at Monkey Central is repairing and painting the office where I slave away on the internets. He'll be done in there hopefully by tomorrow afternoon and then I'll be back with my usual cornucopia of posts.

Also, here's some big news on the blog front, as if I don't blog enough, I've just been named the official blog master (or would it be 'blog bastard'?) of the Southern Appalachian International Film Festival. That's a cool film festival we have here in Johnson City. My friend Keith got me involved in it and he got me the blog gig with the film fest folks. I'm doing it for free because I love cinema, blogging, and having yet another forum for my views and opinions. It'll be a great blog full of info about the film fest and things connected to it. I'll have the link for you soon.

That's all for now kids, I'll be e-stalking you all later.

It must be going around

I guarantee you I won't look this good while it's going on, but one thing is for sure, it is going on. Finally. The "it" I speak of is the home improvement projects we decided to get done in advance of putting our place on the market. The guy who is going to do the minor repairs is busy bringing all his various tools and sundries in and then he'll be off to buy the ceiling and wall paints. So while he's here and working I'll probably be forced to move stuff to get it out of his way. And one of the things I'll be moving at some point is my computer and that means blogging and the reading or your blogs might be a little light this week and part of the next.

And after the repairs and painting come the carpet installation and the new countertop in the kitchen.

So don't think I've left you, I'll just be around a little less for the next few weeks.