Sure Sore

I am completely sore from yesterday’s working on the house. However, I slept really well since I was so exhausted. I learned that I have almost completely lost any skillz I once had with a hammer. I have forearms that need some serious exercise if I plan on using them for this sort of work again (and I do). Today we’ll go back up to the house and continue working.

I’m also enjoying the time with my father-in-law Clair. It’s good to be here and working myself silly. Not to mention the Washington weather is so radically different from Texas or Colorado weather. Yesterday we arrived and it was raining. Then it cleared up after a little fog. Blue sky opened up with sunshine and a beautiful clear view of the Columbian river. Then it got cloudy and rainy again. Then the sun came out and was lighting our work area so that we got a bit more sun to make up for day light savings time.

Sweet. Potatoes.

Tonight at dinner I was taking a bite of potato when I coughed. In a really bizaare moment a piece of that potato came shooting out of my nose. This was a little awkward and made everyone at the table laugh. However, this was not enough. Nope. I had a large piece of potato lodged in my nasal passage. I had to blow and blow to get those pieces out. Jessica was not impressed and threatened to uneat her dinner if I brought it up again.

So, dinner was good, I enjoyed it, but I was stuck with roots in my nose and a semi-nausious wife all due to coughing. Has this happened to anyone else?

‘This New House’ or ‘Extreme First Over’

So this weekend I shall be working my hands off (I’ve never fully understood what the phrase ‘working my butt off’ meant) at the Forland property helping Clair get the house closer to completion and further from being started. This means that all of the weekend will involve sweating like a pig, toiling, hammering, nailing, being board, and screwing around. With that in mind I’ll try to take more pictures of things around there so that you can see what we’re up to.

When this house is finished it will be quite a treat to live in. Or at least it better be since so much time, energy and money has gone into it. Of course it they don’t like it they can give it to me 😉

Washington State

Like Texas Washington is a state. Also like Texas people live here. But apart from that and having two senators in the United States Senate, the states are absolutely different. Colorado feels like an interesting blend of the West coast and Texas. Maybe it is because it nearly touches Texas and because Californians and other West coast nut jobs move to Colorado. Maybe it is because Trint is from Texas, moved to Colorado but lives in Texas again.

It is a little weird to see people leaving Washington wearing signs ‘The end is near! Mt. Saint Hellen is a warning!’ It would also be weird to be wearing a sign like that and have a matching pink leotard and tutu. The guy at one of the 350 Starbuck’s shops in this neighborhood was a little put off by my red sweatshirt that said (and I quote), “Indiana. Hoosiers.” My father-in-law John sent it to me for my birthday and it’s come in quite handy as well as looking stylish. In case you didn’t know Starbuck’s was started back in 1611 – the same year the King James Version was first published – in Seattle while the Russians were starting to beat the British in building the Grand Funk Railroad and out whaling Bob Marley and the Chinese fishermen.

Washington is beautiful, and God was generous and let the sun shine on us. Apparently around here that is as common as Beattle’s Reunion Tours. However, unlike Cher’s 3 year long ‘fairwell tour’ the sun went away and the clouds returned.

So anyway, I’m here now 🙂

How Not to Use Large Fonts

I have not checked this site out in Internet Explorer, but in FireFox the text is so large that I think the font size might actually be 500 pixels. Or to put it in lay terms: freaking huge.

Update: the font looks like it’s a heading in Internet Explorer. This is a classic case of bad web design furthered by bad web testing. Funny.

I Want My Hour and $30.00 Back

So since we’ve moved away from Texas the search for outstanding Mexican food has taken us to various restaurants around the Denver metropolitan area. Tonight we went to one of the worst, if not the worst Mexican restaurants yet, 3 Margaritas. We arrived at approximately 5:30 ready to eat. We were seated promptly and then I went to the bathroom where I was presented with advertisements at the urinal for various male adult related services (including a ‘Hot women’ salon where apparently attractive women will cut your hair). When I got back to the table I looked at the menus and most everything looked ‘normal’ for a Mexican restaurant. When I ordered I ordered the Carne Azada, which is a pretty typical meal for me to order. Jessica got some sort of spinach quesadilla. Abby was ordered the toquitos.

After waiting slightly longer than I expected the plates arrived. Not just any plates but plates that looked like they had been under the heat lamp longer than expected as well. In fact the cheese had that ‘Hi, remember me from yesterday’ look to them, the beans were oozing into the ‘lettuce’ that was flumped onto the top of the plate and the rice, which had been carefully prepared sometime after Y2K sat there blandly holding the beans to their top, left side of the plate. The guacamole was strategically thwacked in the middle with the carne azada taking the right. It to had been contaminated by the rice, beans and ‘lettuce.’ You will not that I added single-quotes around ‘lettuce’ mostly because I’m assuming it was lettuce. It kind of looked like lettuce that had been under a heat lamp, and therefore wilted, or maybe some dried out cole-slaw – it tasted like warm lettuce when I tasted it.

The beans were bland, the rice was bland, the ‘lettuce’ was worse, the guacamole was great, but only in comparison to the poorness of everything else. The carne azada had been marinated for quite some time and so it’s flavor was intense. Unfortunately it tasted like it was being marinated for a beef jerky recipe. Given the condition of my plate I consider it hightly plausible that if the meat stays under the heat lamp long enough it actually dries out and turns into jerky. I can only assume that then it is shredded and placed into some other ‘shredded beef product.’ Alternately it may be sold as jerky in some stores.

In the end we just wanted to go home and cry in our beds but we couldn’t. You see one of the problems at this time was that we were at the mercy of the waiter who was busy doing something. OK, I don’t know that for sure, because it is possible he was doing nothing. No matter what he was doing he was not bringing us our bill. Finally, after bringing me my bill, which I was prepared to pay instantly he disappeared just in case I wanted to get out my calculator and double check the computer’s math. So my card sat in the plastic tray with the receipt (which proved the food was over priced) waiting for our server to collect it and then run the transaction…

Winter passed. Spring passed. I had another birthday. We had our second child, Eric Matthew. Abby got married and had my first grandchild. And then finally, after the waiter had surely committed identity theft and ordered mud flaps with the silver silhouette of a naked woman on them from Ebay, I got my card back with more paper proving I had paid to much for dinner. I signed the receipt and contemplated writing a lengthy disertation on food preparation or calling the attention of the manager. I decided not to since I had better things to do with my time than sit in that stinky restaurant for one more minute.

However, in the end we learned one important lesson: Chipotle may be all over the place but they know how to make a wicked burrito bowl! Even though it is made right in front of you, you get fresh food, not heat lamp warmed ‘schtuff.’

Going to Visit a Client in Washington

I’m going to visit a client in Washington state for a little over a week. If you need me you can reach me at on my cell phone or email [see Contact Us]. I’m hoping to also get some cool photos as well. We’ll be staying with my in-laws so that should be good, hopefully they’ll get a good Abby fix.

I will most likely help them on their new house as well, which is great, I love manual labor. They’ve got a roof, walls and trees up there, hopefully the rest of the house will just auto-magically show up so that they can move in sooner than later.

Any-who, I’ll be away from Denver, but not unreachable by any stretch.

The Switch Has Happened

OK, the switching of hosts happened, and thanks to the excellent staff at Net River the switch was painless. The only bit of data that I’ve not transfered is the database data for this blog’s StatTraq installation. I decided that the size of the table made it not worth transferring. Therefore, I’m starting over with the table’s data and will probably keep it trimmed as best as possible for speed reasons.

I’m Switching Teams

OK, I’m changing my hosting provider to the excellent Net River. Once things are all switched over the service will most likely not be interrupted. However, I make no promises about the next 24-48 hours in which anything could happen.