Sunday, December 16, 2007

Well I guess winter has finally decided to put in an appearance. The snow has hit Ann Arbor and its piling up. There should be about 8 inches or more of the stuff so far and its supposed to keep coming down for quite a while yet. Took the car out for an early morning spin and had some fun. Why do people with little sports type cars go out onto the roads before the plows go through? By 9AM the roads were starting to look like parking lots as little cars stuck on hills and traffic started backing up behind them.

Saw a great bumper sticker, it's a play on the Lord of the Rings and it says "Frodo Failed - Bush Has The Ring". I still laugh when I think of it. You can see it at Stamp and Shout if you want to see it. The pictures below were found on the Political Humour page at About.com.





Anyway, funny stuff to decorate your car with.

Founders Brewery has moved from Monroe on the North edge of downtown Grand Rapids, MI to a place on Grandville Avenue on the South edge of downtown. They are real good, but I have some pictures from the last night at the Monroe pub and the first night at the Grandville pub.

Saturday, November 3, 2007

The craziness continues as I work on reworking the site. I'm adding a few more pages as I turn this site into one giant portal that will provide information and links to all sorts of different things. Basically organizes all the various browser bookmarks into one, relatively organized area, where I or anyone coming through this site can access information. Some of its just for fun, some of its helpful for working on things like websites, and some is good for hunting up vacation ideas. The month of November should be intersting, busy but interesting.

Saturday, June 9, 2007

So much has changed since Christmas time. I finally sold the house, with the sale closing on April 25, 2007. A great relief, I must say, especially since it lifted the financial burden of paying for and maintaining two households on opposite sides of the state. All of the pictures for The Project are posted and I'll leave them up for a while since that accounted for pretty much every free moment for over a year. I never could find a place for the piano so in the end it stayed with the house. With the house gone, it's now time to try and pay off some bills.

I spent a week out in Seattle around Memorial Day weekend, hanging with my friend and his fiancee/wife (at the start of the trip she was fiancee, by the time I came home she was officially wife). Of course part of the reason for going was to attend the wedding, a small affair with immediate family and close friends. We all trekked to a small town called Port Townsend in Washington over the holiday weekend. The wedding was there on Sunday in a park along the water, it was very nice. There were a couple of official events related to the wedding, but the rest of the weekend everyone just got together in smaller groups and hung out (mostly at the Waterstreet Brewery) and enjoyed a very relaxing weekend, with a wedding thrown in for good measure.

Once I got back from Seattle I decided it was time for some changes. I've had space issues in my apartment from the day I moved in. I moved from a four bedroom house, which I had full, to a one bedroom apartment. While the apartment is of decent size, it certainly wasn't big enough to hold all the stuff I had in the house. I got rid of a lot of stuff (those who know me, also know that I'm a bit of a pack rat) when I moved, but I still have a lot of stuff crammed into every conceivable opening in this apartment. On top of that all the furniture I have is from the house, so its sized for a house. So the first thing I'm working on changing (probably take several months as I have to go slowly as money allows) is the furniture. So far I've managed to pick up two larger shelving units and a TV stand/table. That has allowed me to replace the stereo cabinet, entertainment center, and a handful of smaller bookcases. What I'm working on now are some CD and DVD storage units as well as a futon (the futon will replace this big ass sectional couch that is taking up a large amount of space in the living room area of the apartment). Hopefully by summers end I'll have the futon.

Well with all that said I guess the last thing to say is that I'm going through the site and getting things up to date. Removing old stuff, adding new stuff, like the new hockey schedule for Michigan which has already been released. Soon I hope to have a list of the vinyl records I have for sale posted. That's one thing that continues to take up huge amounts of space in the apartment and I hope to sell them off. Finding ways to get them advertised is the biggest problem I have right now. Enjoy the summer and check back for updates. Later!

Monday, December 25, 2006

Yes, it's Christmas day and its the first time in a while that I've had time to make any real changes to the web site as a whole. Shouldn't find anything earth shattering, maybe next time, but I am changing a lot of navigation links to buttons. I think it makes the navigation aspects of the pages more straight forward (buttons are more familiar to people for navigation than simple links) and it looks better too (bonus).

Besides navigational changes other areas that will be seeing changes are the For Sale section which will get an area for LP's. I've been selling my record collection, but its been going slowly. Hopefully by putting up my own page and doing a little advertising and using some meta tags I might be able to speed up the process. They take up so much space and I never listen to them anymore so its time that they move along to other people who are still actively listening to vinyl.

The other area that will be seeing some final additions is the area called The Project. All that work is finally done and I have a few sets of final pictures to publish that will finally see things brought to completion. All that may not get done today, but I have most of the next week off from work so by New Year's all of this should be done.

Those are the big things I guess, there may be some smaller changes here and there, but those will be the things that get noticed. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all.

Sunday, April 23, 2006

As usual I've been neglecting my site update duties. Other than the hockey page I haven't done much here since September. Today its time to add some new stuff. I will have some updated pictures from The Project, some of which are from before Christmas if I remember correctly. I'm also adding a For Sale that will list a number of things I have for sale I'm in the process of moving into a smaller place so I have things to get rid of that I simply have no more space for. I'll be starting with those moving sale type items, but I'm also selling off my record collection so I'll be adding some pages for records and that sort of thing soon as well.

Wednesday, November 2, 2005

And the work continues, I've just added a travel link. Nothing special just more links to pages that I've used at various times when planning trips or investigating trips. There are some links to planning places like Orbitz, Hotwire, etc... and of course some conversion sites for currency, units of measure, etc... .

Monday, October 31, 2005

Check that out, two entries in the same month - I don't think that's happened before! Anyway, just a quick note to mention that you'll now see a link to a Music page. It has links to a number of things and will most likely contain more as time goes by. Right now I'm moving my bookmarks onto pages so I can get at things no matter where I'm at (since I don't always have my computer with me ;-). If anyone ever runs into anything they'd like to see added let me know (there is an e-mail link down below, yea I just added that too).

Barely an hour later and I've added some blogs, journals, and personal pages. Don't ask me why I have those pages, some I remember and some I don't. Some are sports related and some showed up in some search or antoher and there was something on them I wanted to refer back to so I just bookmarked 'em. After I get things more under control I'll go through and do some clean up. Most likely see more pages added here as time goes by; especially now that I have a place for them!

Monday, October 3, 2005

Well Chad and Kirsten are married now so I've removed the "Chad's Wedding" link. There wedding was outside on Saturday (10/01/2005) on the shore of lake Michigan and the weather couldn't have been better. It was a great day for everyone, especially the birde and groom. Congratulations to Chad and Kirsten!

I'll be working more on the entire site adding more pages, with mostly links. I want to get the links I have in various web browser favorites areas onto this site so it becomes more of a portal, but there should be some interesting stuff in different areas for people to look through. I also want to add some navigation buttons so you can jump from one area of the site to another (yes I know, long overdue). Well for now that's it, just a note to say that changes are coming so keep an eye out.

Sunday, June 19, 2005

It's been several months since the last update to the project, but we've finally reached a point where I feel enough progress has been made to post some updated pictures. We've essentially completed the re-framing step for the upstairs remodel. All the main walls are back in place. The only left to do is put a few nailer supports into various walls for dry wall, clothes rod support, etc... . Follow the link for the project to see what things are looking like today.

The new car is rocking, the Forrester is definitely a great little car. With the price of gas the way it is it's a good thing to have a car that doesn't guzzle to much of processed oil, but does provide room to haul stuff. The last test for it of course will be how it does at pre-football game tail gates :)).

Monday, January 24, 2005

Well now it's been an interesting day. I think I just bought a new car, we'll see how the credit application and financing go. If everything works out by the end of the day Wednesday I'll be driving a new Subaru Forrester. They are a mini SUV. I'm not a fan of SUV's, I think they use to much gas, but this particular car (mini-SUV) is rated at 28 mpg so that's pretty good. I'm hoping that as it gets broken in the mpg will get a few miles per gallon better. The Mazda finally gave up after 334,000 miles and a few extra hundred :) so I've had to go car shopping.

I've updated the pictures from "the Project". These were actually taken a week and half or two weeks ago. I've been having tremendous problems connecting to the site and consequently not only have pages been serving erratically, I haven't been able to update anything. Finally, today I tried and was able to upload a lot of things. The Project got updated, I've got all but four of the Michigan hockey game wraps now posted up, and of course this front page is now updated. Hopefully some new project pictures in a couple of weeks. We seem to be making some strong headway all of a sudden and the framing is starting to get done!

Thursday, October 21, 2004

Holy Cow!! I actually added something new. I've added a link to "The Project" which I will use to show progress, no matter how slow, in a home remodelling project that I've been working on for at least a year and a half. Lot's of destruction has been done and it's finally time to start rebuilding things - yea!!

Been a while since I've added anything to this front page, but I guess I should add something. The Michigan hockey page is still the main page where I make the most changes, although I have hopes of finding the time to add on some of the other content that I have rolling around in my mind this summer. You can follow the existing links to get to the Michigan hockey page.

I've been trying to keep the pages real "light" using simple basic structures so that they load quickly no matter what the speed of your connection. No bunches of flash stuff or anything like that (at least at this time). For those who like to tighten down what their browsers allow there is only a little bit of java script on the hockey page to handle a couple of pop-up windows that I use (no adds, just really small pages that I don't really want to fill the whole browser with so I just make small pop-up windows).

Well I guess that about updates things for now, hopefully there will be much more content in areas other than Michigan hockey - but I have to get at it before the hockey season starts because that takes up a ton of time to keep up with that. Later....