osheas::blog

After a loooong week in San Jose working the CLA 2008 conference, we’re back home catching up. Even better, we have NO travel plans for at least two weeks! We actually had a lot of fun. Here’s a photo of us in action:

We didn’t have to wear those outfits the whole time, thank goodness.

Here’s my exciting link of the day: there is now an OFFICIAL Monty Python YouTube channel! No more crappy clips cadged from old VCR tapes - the gang has posted really high quality versions of classics like the Penis Song and the Ministry of Silly Walks.

What a year: Obama wins AND we get a Monty Python YouTube channel! Life is good…

My birthday was this past Monday, and in keeping with our new austerity plan, no huge elaborate celebration was planned. Instead, Chuck surprised me with a Segway tour of Newport Beach! This might not seem all that exciting to some people, but I was over the moon! Segways are SO MUCH fun! And SO easy to learn to ride. If only they were more affordable (oh, and we weren’t on that austerity plan I mentioned earlier), I’d want to buy one! I’m not the most coordinated person you’ll ever meet, and I had the whole navigation/steering thing down in less than five minutes and in the entire hour and a half we rode around crashed into nothing!

After our Segway fun, we headed over to Disneyland for a mellow afternoon of odds and ends. Things got off to a bumpy footing when we went to California Adventure to ride Soaring over California. In an example of really crappy customer service, all of the signage said the wait would be about 30 minutes - but it was well over an hour later before we finally got on the ride. At no point along the way did an employee come out to explain anything to those of us in line. Grrr!! Walt would NOT have been happy! We never did find out what the problem was, but the Fast Pass customers did get preferential treatment - when things began to move, they got on first. Again, people, a little explanation would have gone a long way to keep us all happy.

Shaking that bad experience off, we headed over to Main Street and watched Disneyland: The First 50 Magical Years (we actually wanted to see the Mr. Lincoln presentation but that appears to be long gone) for which we had no wait (yay!), then we rode the Matterhorn (I haven’t been on that ride in years, and had forgotten how cool it is), then Pirates of the Caribbean (again, no wait at all), and one that I have never been on before: the Mark Twain Riverboat. I remember back in the old days (I’m dating myself here) that was an E ticket, and given the limited number of E tickets in a book I NEVER wanted to use one on such a lame non-thrilling ride. Well, who knew there was a backside to Tom Sawyer Island with pioneers and Indians! All in all, it was a great day to be in Disneyland: nice weather, manageable crowds (but I have a thought - what about once a month they have an adults only day where you have to be over 35 to get into the park?). We’re premium pass holders, so it cost us nothing (unless you figure in the cost of two deluxe passes). This is our last year for deluxe passes - we’ve managed to go a whopping twice this year, which makes the cost of the passes actually MORE than the cost of just buying tickets when we go to Disneyland.

Pics of all our adventures are here.

Wow, time sure does fly when you’re busy working! I’ve been nose to the grindstone for a bit now and haven’t had a chance to update the blog on the status of the littlest O’Sheas. Yes kids, the red wigglers arrived and have taken up residence in their new chalet. They spent the first week out in the garage, but late last week we moved them to their permanent home in the backyard. We’ve been feeding them a yummy diet of coffee grounds and filters, banana peels and assorted other tasty trash. We don’t see much of them, though I always say hello whenever I drop stuff in on them. Here are some pics of the construction of the chalet.

Here’s a video tour of the fully decorated house, as filmed by me (lame filmmaker) using my Canon 800IS (nice camera!).

Here at Chez O’Shea, it’s the time of year when our electrical bill goes through the roof, and our neighbors sigh and shake their heads, and wonder when the hayseed trailer trash moved in. Yes, it’s time for holiday lights, courtesy of I-Have-No-Shame Chuck. He spent two weekends before Thanksgiving doing the preliminary stringing of lights, then after Thanksgiving has been putting the finishing touches up. This year we have two new reindeer to join the current herd. Three live in the side yard, and two now frolic in the front yard. Lights are strung over all the fences and some of the trees. Still to come: lights in the backyard. And once the tenants in front go away for the holidays, Chuck will put more lights up there (they have rather, uh, less extravagant taste in holiday lighting). [Pictures are here](http://flickr.com/photos/osheas/sets/72157603462581289/). I’ll add more as we take them.

We put hardwood floors in the front house. Oh. My. God. What a difference! There was icky doo-doo carpet before. The floors now look fantastic!

More pics here. I need to get some before shots, and also the process shots. It took four days to complete the job. Chuck did NOT do this job. Once was enough for him. O C Hardwood in Huntington Beach did the work this time, and they are FABulous. No website, but google the name for their contact info. Chris is the man!

Here’s a tour of the newly remodeled office, with most everything back where it belongs.

We are entering week three of our latest home improvement project: the office remodel. Week one was all about the ripping up and destruction of things, and we were pretty caught up in the activity. Week two involved much sanding, painting, and flooring. Week three has been the week of living with the reality of the mess. Our self-imposed diaspora is officially getting old. I am down in the dining room where I have a card table and the dining room table cluttered with a disorganized mess of papers and computers. Chuck is squirreled away in one of the spare bedrooms, surrounded by a bed stood on its side and fold-up tables covered in computers and papers. We communicate by phone a lot, calling each other from our now remote locations to ask questions and consult. Finding anything is a challenge as a good portion of our stuff is in boxes packed away for the duration. Thank goodness Closet World is coming back this week.

Photos are here of the work so far.

It’s been a good week or two since we did any work on the house. Well past time to start a new project, wouldn’t you say?

The new project involves the office, and there’s a toilet/plumbing sidebar that is unrelated except for the fact that it involves spending money. The office project started with us being unhappy with the layout of our desks. They faced each other, which sounds cute but in practice was annoying and rather confining as we only had five-foot long desks to spread out all of our computer stuff and papers. We called Closet World (as they did the original work), and they drew up new plans that will have us at opposite ends of the office ensconced in our separate corners with lots of room on either side. While they were at it, we also decided to consolidate all of our file cabinets into one long row. Our file cabinets mark the last of the things we hadn’t joined - we each kept our own files and filing systems. We’ve been married long enough that we have determined it is time to merge our files. That’s how married we are now.

Then there was the electrical - Chuck likes a lot of light all the time and I prefer to work in semi-gloom. So we had an electrician come out and switch the controls so that we can control the lighting on each of our ends. And we decided to move the light switch from behind the door (a dumb place for it) to the other side of the door. Oh, and also move the plugs up a couple of feet and add a couple of new plugs. And in casse you were wondering, yes, this was all pretty expensive. How expensive? Well, let’s just say it ended up costing a lot more than the $1500 we were thinking it was going to cost. this is the money pit, after all. Silly of us to forget that.

So Closet World came out the other day and ripped off the countertops and moved all of the other bits around and will come back on April 24 to rebuild it all in the new configuration. The electricians are upstairs now doing their thing, and once they’re done we will need to repaint a good portion of the walls, and also patch some of the hardwood floor. Since we obviously can’t work in the office while all of this is going on, we have each removed to our separate corners for the duration. Chuck is in the smaller of our spare bedrooms and I am in the dining room. We spent a bit of time shouting up the stairs at each other until we remembered that the phone can do an intercom thing. Now we call each other.

The plumbing sidebar started with the front house, when one of the toilets up there wouldn’t flush. So out came the plumber with a massive snake that used mondo water pressure to clean the lines (we try to do this once a year or so as a preventative measure). This did nothing for the toilet up front, so today they came back and replaced the toilet. A good thing as that toilet was probably twenty years old. All is now well, and we are out $900 but now have clean pipes and happily flushing toilets.

I so love all of this that I am decamping to La Costa for a spa weekend, leaving Chuck to fend for himself amidst all of the dust and clutter.

Chuck took some photos of the office as it was torn up, that I will upload as soon as I figure out which camera he used.