In the Land of Milk and Blueberries

This weekend I got a lot of little things accomplished at home, which keeps me from playing in traffic but doesn't allow me to check anything major items off my TO-DO List.  I took the first step toward wiring the house for Internet by dropping a CAT-5 cable from the modem to the office.  Which means I had to drill a small hole in the Jack-and-Jill closet ceiling (surprise Nightingale!)  This means I can now shift/relocate some of the devices I use to carry the wireless signal throughout the house.  The only reason I'm holding off on doing any more drilling is because I'm not sure were the cable modem is going to live.

My ideal solution is to build a LAN closet in the basement laundry room.  However this requires a little bit of money and more certainly of what direction Life is taking us.  If a mini-Icarus arrives, the office becomes the kid's room and the modem likely either stays in the attic or gets moved to the basement or even first floor.  This will probably depend on what we do with cable.  At the moment we have cable for the Internet and the most basic package that comes with it.  I'm not sure it is even possible to unbundle the two and I think we are forced to keep the receiver because Comcast decided to scramble even their basic channels. 

I'm also just about ready to finish up the pantry project.  We have this empty ledge on the wall that leads down to the basement and it would be the perfect place to install some shelves for extra storage.  Unfortunately, the right side of said ledge is hard to get to because of the stairs and I'm not willing to invest in a special type of ladder for a one time use.

I had this idea to install some type of shelving using galvanized pipes which is all the rage on various DIY and home improvement blogs I follow.  The problem again is not being able to work easily in that space.  And the pipes themselves are bit hard to manage.  At first I tried going with various sizes and I thought I could build it and redesign the shelf height on the fly.  Finally I decided to just get two pipes cut to a reasonable size and I will use brackets to hold the shelves in place with the pipes being more for looks than support.  [Note: they will provide some support as I will describe in an actual post about the installation.]

August was a bit of a busy month for travel and family.  A few weeks ago, we were in New Buffalo, Michigan for the weekend to visit the Little Monkeys nephews.  Being in a small Americana town like New Buffalo reminds me of Kirksville, Missouri, the college town where I went to NMSU (now Truman University) a lifetime ago.  You see the same main street in the downtown with the clock tower and the city hall.  There's usually a nearby train station and a few other familiar landmarks.  And cornfields.

Some people pay a fortune for a view like this

A good portion of the trip was watching the Little Monkeys with their iPad app.  Apparently they have one that "talks" and naturally they learned rather quickly to make it say "poop head."  Who can deny that children are the hope for the world.

We did spend what added up to almost 10 minutes trying to figure out the holidays and what to do about nightingale parents’ upcoming 40th anniversary.  The Adamas* have some ideas, none of which really appeal to me.  It's also fairly apparent that an agenda is already being pushed.  They want to do something big like a trip but it has to be somewhere kid friendly and safe, which rules out a lot of the cool destination locations around the globe.  And I'm certainly not advocating we go somewhere where they rape and kill tourists.  I just think some places are being thrown out more over exaggerated reputation than actual facts.

The only trip my family ever planned was coming over here from Europe after World War II.  I understand it too didn't go quite as planned and as such they never went on a family trip again.  So I suppose it's just that way with all extended family events.

The weekend after that the Adamas spent the weekend at our place.  Then for Labor Day we went to Gross Point because Nightingale's parents (Cartwrights*) were going to visit various family members while staying with the Adamas. 

I lobbied for Thanksgiving knowing full well that has only a 10% chance of happening and even if it does, the Adamas won't come down from Michigan.  We will likely go up there for Christmas and that leaves Easter/Spring Break for Nashville as Little_Monkey#1 is off school for spring break.

*  the new pseudonym for this set of in-laws will be Adamas. The new alias for my in-laws will be Cartwrights.