Muy Caliente!

I tell you, my life is so exciting.  Want to know how exciting?  I don’t care; I’m going to tell you anyhow.  Sara and I spent last night ripping out the old contact paper in our kitchen and replacing it with shiny new contact paper.  We didn’t finish so the fun continues tonight.  Let me tell you, SPICY!!

I must say I had an incredible weekend.  Sara and I were invited to spend the weekend at her Aunt Diane & Uncle Emile’s Beach house on Fire Island, NY.  I was a little concerned that it would take 4 hours each way by train and over $100 to get there and back, but boy was it worth it!  The only bummer of the weekend was that it rained almost the entire time, but that was offset by being able to spend more time with these amazing people.  We mostly socialized and took walks through the quiet (Seaview) neighborhood.  A few of their friends stopped in from various times including Teese Gohl and Steve McLaughlin with his daughter Grace and dog Rosie.  Their house and property was absolutely amazing and the whole island is beautiful.  We could have easily spent our two weeks honeymooning there instead!  We also got to listen to Emile play his trumpet for us, which sounded great and has really inspired me that I should be practicing more!  Hopefully, when they get back to the city, we can visit them again some time in the fall because I had a blast!

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Well, all last week Sara and I were painting our new bedroom before our bedroom set was to be delivered on Saturday.  We finished up the last coat of trim about an hour before the furniture arrived.  I must admit that the paint job and the furniture look fantastic.  The room look so big while we were painting and now looks so small filled up with furniture. 

Yesterday (Monday) was Sara’s dad’s 63rd birthday so we spent Sunday over at the Charlap’s celebrating.  Dinner at Jade Island was good as always and the ice cream cake from Coldstone was amazing.  Happy Birthday Mr. Charlap!!

This weekend Sara’s Aunt and Uncle have invited us out to their house on Fire Island, NY.  Sara and I are excited to go because they are very nice and we don’t see them that often.  It will also nice to spend a weekend on the beach!  I have never been to Fire Island but I hear it is very nice!  Of course it’s going to cost Sara & I over $100 (roundtrip) and 4 hours (each way) to get there via public transportation (NJ Transit to Penn, LIRR to Ferry, Ferry to FI).

In other news, because everyone asks, we will be moving into our new house as soon as we buy a refrigerator, which will be either sometime this week or next, YAY!!

Yay, another post!

Sorry they are so few and far between!  I have just been really busy at work (where I normally post) and all other times.  In fact the only reason I am writing this is to procrastinate while I should be mowing the lawn.  Anyway – what you may ask have I been doing?

1. Well we got new hardwood (Bamboo) flooring and carpeting installed thanks to Lowes.  Wait, did I say thanks to Lowes?  I mean in spite of Lowes.  Now Lowes is a great store to pop in and buy a box of nails, but never, and I mean NEVER have them install anything!  They will charge you more that anyone else since they are just the middleman and hire a third party contractor to do the work.  That means your paying market price for the work by the third party and then Lowes bumps up the price for their own profit.  Seems obvious enough now, but we didn’t realize it at the time.  Next you have to go in and order everything.  Granted a guy came out to measure our house and gave Lowes a list of materials to purchase, but when the installers came out, just about everything except the bamboo itself was wrong (adhesive, transitions, not enough 1/4 round, not enough bamboo, no vapor barrier, etc.).  Oh, and all that stuff you need?  You have to pick it up yourself!  That’s right 40 boxes of wood (50lbs each box), 15 gal buckets of glue, etc.!!  Good thing I have a truck or who knows what we would have done.  Next, the one day installation took four days.  Now the installers were pretty cool, would have been nice if they spoke English so we could communicate our issues with them, other than just repeating what I said and saying “no?” at the end.  Anyway – we were going to return the whole thing and I actually sent the installers packing once because of all the “additional” charges – smoothing and leveling the floor, more wood, different glue, more quarter round, etc.  The general manager made a deal so that they didn’t lose a customer, but I got to tell you, we are never getting anything installed by them again.  Now that it is all installed, I have to say it looks very good!

2. Other than that, we have started painting our master bedroom.  It has been a long process.  All of the ceilings in our new house have the “popcorn” texture which we can’t stand.  We decided in a small “sitting” area in our bedroom (8’ x 10’ dormer) we would try to remove the “popcorn” texture.  Seemed easy enough: just spray it with water and scrape!  Well, it did come off OK with water and a scraper but it was definitely not smooth!  So the process went scrape, sand, spackle, sand, paint.  What a KILLER!  I hate working above my head, especially jobs like sanding (!) and spackling.  It has also been slow progress because Sara was sick last week with a fever and came down with pink eye yesterday.

3. My parents where at LBI the last two weeks so Sara & I have been house sitting.  Unfortunately during our watch, one of my 20 year old goldfish died.  Kind of a sad moment as there is only one left now. And no, you still can’t see it!

4.  A couple weeks ago the Park family had a big party which we were invited.  What a BLAST!  The Park family is probably one of the coolest families I know.  Good people, LOTS of food, an 80 degree swimming pool, and horseshoes.  They also had some pretty intense volleyball action!  It was good to catch up with a lot of Sara’s friends from college.  Keep in touch y’all.  Hopefully the lunch thing with Jen, Sara, and me works out soon!

5. We also went up to Morristown a couple weekends ago to visit Sara’s friends from where she used to live.  We all met at The Famished Frog, which is a pretty cool bar (not as cool as Ernie’s!) and hung out for the night.  We all got pretty loaded and stayed over at the Prails house who put us up for the night.  It was good to see everyone and catch up!

6. This weekend Stouffer is in NJ on vacation so tonight (after mowing and painting), I’ll probably give Tom & Sarah a call and see if we can’t go play shuffle bowling at their house or go hit up Ernie’s!

7. Hey all locals, the last weekend in August is Zoom Zoom Live!  I went last year and it was really fun!  Basically it is for all the Grand Turismo/autocrossing people.  They have a bunch of courses set up and you can drive any Mazda you want and race around them! FREE! Last year I raced a RX-8 and a Mazda3.  We were in line to race the new MX-5 when some jerks in front of us were intentionally trying to spin their cars out plus the sun was getting low, so they closed the course after waiting in line for an hour.  That’s the only problem is waiting in line since it is FREE!  I heard if you go when it opens, there are no lines – that’s what I am planning on for this year.  Anyone want to come with me?  Just give me a ring – details are here.

Well, that’s all for now.  I probably won’t be posting again for a while since after we finish painting the bedroom, we will finally be MOVING!  Yeah so nights and weekends are going to be pretty tied up for the next couple months – packing/unpacking/setting stuff up.  A big BOOO is that our Verizon DSL is not available in our new house and we can’t afford cable internet so it looks like we are going back to dial-up, yay

I really can’t wait for next summer once we are all moved in and everything is square.  Then we can finally enjoy the community pool and go for some decent bike rides.  Hope all is well with you, my reader, and feel free to comment (except you damn spammers!!!).