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The heat is on!

Posted In: Everyday life — November 27, 2005 @ 12:16 am — Peter

Since moving into our home, we’ve suspected that something isn’t quite right with the heating system. I’ve managed to convince myself that the lousy ‘50s windows, lack of insulation, illogically oriented heat registers, and other issues stemming from an overall dated structure were to blame for the chilliness in the wintertime. Stephanie insisted on having the system checked out, and I’m glad she did. After spending a few minutes in our attic where the furnace lives, the repair man informed me that our recently updated furnace was improperly configured and only operating in a single-stage mode instead of two-stage. He seemed confused as to why it was configured this way and I was, too.

During the home buying process, the prior owner showcased all the updates she had done over the years of owning the home, one of which was the new furnace. Of course, I assumed that this shiny new furnace was installed properly and would keep us warm. The prior owner mentioned that the furnace installers were bent out of shape over the idea of hoisting and installing the new furnace in the attic. Perhaps their frustration with the situation caused them to wire the unit incorrectly?

So, what is the two-stage furnace feature that will be keeping us warm and toasty? Lennox has a great overview of what it is all about.

Tonight has been a good test of the new configuration with temperatures dipping into the 20s. Perhaps I’m imagining it, but our house feels significantly warmer using the same program on the thermostat. I’m optimistic, and believe this tweak will solve the bulk of our heating issues. I’m still going to install the plastic window sheeting in the nursery and consider buying new heat registers since our current ones are coated in paint that is likely effecting air flow. It was also suggested that a flow enhancement device be installed over the heat register in the nursery.

Anyway, for the first time since the start of cold nights, I’m sporting a t-shirt around the house

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Here Comes the Sun

Posted In: Everyday life — November 26, 2005 @ 12:43 pm — Peter

It is a beautiful fall day out, sun shining, cool breeze, and a lovely 60 degrees F. According to the weather folks, were supposed to get some snow tomorrow. I’ll believe it when I see it. As promised, I took some pictures from the office building I work in downtown, however, they didn’t come out very well. Despite leaving the flash off, I caught glare off the window. I also dug up a few other pictures of downtown and posted those also.

http://motyka.org/gallery/album.php?id=35

You might notice that I’ve added a new feature to the photo gallery. Since our collection is growing, I felt we should have annotations describing our photos. We’ve not gone over all our previous photos and added comments yet.

I’ll be working on a self evaluation questionnaire for work this weekend that contributes to my overall performance review. I believe I’ve done an above average job so far and hope to be promoted to senior level as a result. I’ve even heard some gossip about me being scouted for the architecture team. I’d love to migrate over to technology architecture since it would tap into skills I’ve gained from the Regis MSCIT program. Speaking of Regis, I’ll also be including my academic plan in my self evaluation as a roadmap to my education initiatives. I can’t wait to resume classes!

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Nothing in particular

Posted In: Everyday life — November 25, 2005 @ 8:09 am — Peter

Yesterday was a food extravaganza at our home as we prepared a delicious assortment of fall favorites for Thanksgiving. The menu was comprised of a Tofurkey feast, mashed potatoes, candied yams, herb stuffing, cranberries, biscuits, and the usual holiday fare, sans animal products. Of course we didn’t eat all this food in one sitting, we have a fridge packed with leftovers! I’ll be heading home over lunch today to have a reheated plate of this yummy blend of comfort foods.

After dinner yesterday evening, we went to see the new Harry Potter movie. Unfortunately we arrived at the theater too late, about 10 minutes before show time, and found only seats in front that required us to crane our necks the whole time. Despite being uncomfortable for nearly two hours, we really enjoyed the movie. I never got around to reading the Harry Potter books, so the outcome of the movies are always a surprise to me. I’m definitely looking forward to the next film.

Besides cooking and movie watching, I managed to get quite a few items on my task list done over the past few days. The co-sleeper has been installed, I hung a candle holder on our bedroom wall, and listed our old Toyota Corolla for sale. Despite being a holiday, I received 8 inquiries regarding the car. A couple of these people will be coming by on Saturday to look at the car and hopefully one of them will buy it. I really want to get rid of the car before baby arrives as I can’t imagine I’ll have time to coordinate a sale when things get really busy…

Today is a very quiet day in the office. Being a casual dress day, I didn’t have to iron clothes this morning so I arrived at the office very early. Knowing this would be the case, I brought a camera with me to snap some pictures of the downtown view from the 17th floor. Later I may go up to the 26th floor to get some pictures from the board rooms with the amazing postcard views. I can’t help feeling dorky taking pictures out of a window. I don’t know why this is, but I always feel lame taking pictures…

So, you may notice this post does not allow for comments. I’m considering removing comment ability from our blog all together. The spammers have beaten me into submission with an average of 200 spam comments a day. While these comments don’t get displayed on our site because of the captcha, they do get caught in the moderation pool and I’m required to review the moderation pool to approve legitimate comments. Since we don’t receive many legitimate comments, it is quite daunting to fish through hundreds of spam comments looking for one or two legitimate comments. So, the spammers win and I may gut the comment function from Wordpress.

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Connect the dots

Posted In: Everyday life — November 20, 2005 @ 11:00 pm — Peter

I did some CD ripping this weekend and we now have a several more albums available via our mpd jukebox. We’ve listened to most of the B-sides connection by The Cure while cooking and putzing around the house. “Connect the Dots” is a wonderful box set and I highly recommend picking it up if you dig The Cure.

I was successful at knocking 4 items off the to-do list! Raking took a nice chunk out of my morning and resulted in seven thirty gallon bags of leaves. I then took a stab at installing the car seat and discovered the convertible Britax we picked up on sale was too big to fit in our Honda Civic in a read facing orientation. We then trekked out to the Babies r’ Us in Westminster to find a more typical infant car seat. I wrestled with the Peg Perego seat that would complement our stroller, however, it would not fit in our car. Out of exasperation, we settled for a horrendously pink Graco seat that fit perfectly on the first try. Since we were already out in the burbs, we visited an Arvada fire station to have the car seat inspected. Much to my surprise, I installed it correctly!

A few minutes ago I wrapped up mounting the shelves. I sought advice from someone at Home Depot about ideal mounting hardware for plaster. The clerk recommended a certain type of wall anchor that worked perfectly. I simply read the instructions on the box that said to use a 3/16 drill bit and got to work. I’m so happy to have conquered this rather novice task, we finally have stuff on our walls! Now I can sort through the stash of wall stuff we have and mount other items as time permits.

As a reward for getting so much done this weekend, Stephanie made a batch of Chocolate chip banana muffins. We enjoyed some tea and snacked on muffins while adding more items to the list of stuff to get done. The list is longer than I’d like at this point, 15 items or so… Yikes! With all this stuff to get done and a busy work week ahead of me I’ll likely be very difficult to get a hold of. Keep this in mind if you need to reach me.

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Chase the blues

Posted In: Everyday life — November 19, 2005 @ 11:46 pm — Peter

It has been a busy weekend knocking items off the “honey do” list. I have a few items to wrap up like hanging shelves, weather proofing windows, raking leaves, installing car seat, and selling our old Toyota Corolla. Hanging shelves has proven harder than one might expect. Our home is a ’50s era ranch complete with plaster and lathe walls that tend to crumble when mounting things. I’ve learned how to work with them somewhat, but my last attempt at hanging a shelf resulted in a nasty whole that required patching and touch up paint. With that behind me, I’ll give the shelves another try tomorrow.

I cleaned up our iPod tonight and started prepping it with music Stephanie would like to listening to while laboring. We’ll be bringing iPod chock full along with a neat clock radio to fill the LDR with inspiring tunes. Our music collection has recently reached 50gb and I’m considering purging some tracks that we don’t listen to very often. This is hard to do when excess storage space allows for hoarding. We have 120gb of storage for music and I don’t see us nearing capacity anytime soon. Until then, we’ll hang on to everything both good and not so good.

The Colorado Avalanche played back-to-back games this weekend. Friday night was a very physical game in Anaheim and the Avalanche came out on top. Unfortunately, tonight didn’t go as well. While the Avs played well and kept the Kings from getting too far ahead, David Aebischer let too many goals through. I’m convinced that Aebischer is the problem at this point. Peter Budaj has been outperforming Aebischer consistently in the games he has started and should start the game against the Flames on Monday. Something odd I noticed during a commercial for Monday’s game… The pitch for the game went something like “Can Iginla and the Flames… against Marek and the boys”. Odd hearing the Avalanche being referred to as “Marek and the boys”. Granted rookie Marek Svatos is having a great year so far, I’d expect a more senior player to be inserted into the phrase. Speaking of senior players, when was the last time Joe Sakic has done anything of note? Sure he had an assist tonight, but surely we’re to expect more from him than that.

I got a haircut in the afternoon and left feeling very relaxed after a back massage from my barber Kurt. Floyd’s Barbershop practices some pretty old school techniques such as, straight razor neck shaves and the vintage back massage tool. If you’re looking for a salon, I highly recommend Floyd’s @ Colfax and Lafayette.

I almost forgot to post these Friday night we stopped at CompUSA while running some errands and got to playing with an iMac with a camera. We were silly and took a few goofy photos, click the thumbnails for larger pics.

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