My Wet Baby Day

Posted on August 17th, 2007

Or, Baby Shower Weekend.

We’re holding our baby shower this weekend and in order to keep costs down we decided to throw the party in our apartment. Of course, we’re really looking at this shindig as more of a housewarming party because it will mark the first time we’ve had a party in our place since the renovations were completed, but the bonus is that we also get gifts for the baby. Unfortunately, this means that we need to unpack and clean our apartment, two things that we haven’t been able to do for the last eight months. And let me just say right now that if you’ve never lived through construction in your own home then you don’t have any idea how fricking awesome it feels to wake up in the morning NOT covered in white construction dust.

I actually cried when I woke that first morning.

Another downside of throwing the party in our home is that, since some of the guests will be bringing their small children with them, we’ll need to “baby-proof” our apartment which is something that we just don’t comprehend how to do. For one thing, we have stairs without a baby gate, and no plans to install one even after our child is born. Although the lovely HoBiscuit is iffy on my reasoning, I don’t believe that one is necessary if we just take care as parents to teach our child that the stairs are dangerous and she should be careful or she’ll get hurt. I grew up without stair gates, so I figure our kids can, too.

But, I ask you, why stop there?

You see, I also plan on burning her fingers with a hot pan to teach her not to play with hot things. Letting her stick her wet finger in a wall socket so she learns about the pitfalls of electricity. I’ll slam her fingers in a car door so she’ll always remember to keep her hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times, and I’ll even let her eat rat poison so she can thank me later on in life for teaching her not to eat things unless she knows what they are. This way she’ll learn all of life’s little safety lessons as a child living at home where I can protect her and then I’ll write a book about how everyone should do these things to raise perfect and happy kids and the world will praise me because of my superior parenting skills.

What? Why are you looking at me like I’m a monster?

Anywaste, babyproofing the apartment is tough for us because we don’t even understand what might be dangerous for a kid. Having never been in contact with children under the age of 7, I’m completely clueless about what they might find “fun” to play with, but I’m pretty sure I’ll need to hide the neon orange box cutters we have laying on the kitchen table. And I’ll probably need to put away all the day-glo colored bottles of household cleaners that I have in a box in the living room with, “Yummy Kandy” written on it. Two things I do know for sure is that someone will need to guard the stairs and we’ll need to put little socket-blocks in all the wall sockets to stop curious fingers. Hey, come on now, you didn’t really think I’d let kids hurt themselves, did you?

Really? Wow. That hurts… wow. Just… wow.

Filed under Family, Geek Life, Home Ownership | 1 Comment »

Geekgasm 360

Posted on August 15th, 2007

I still got it.

Right now, I’m listening to music that resides on my networked attached storage device which is being piped through my home network to my home theater system. Some of you might not think this is such a big deal, and to you people I say, “You just don’t know.” This is SUCH a big deal, and not only because I’ve got the music playing over the network. No, that wouldn’t be very exciting since most people nowadays listen to their music through their computers, so of course my doing it is not big news.

Unless, of course, you take into account that I’m not using a computer.

Yeah, that’s right. No computer necessary for my music listening pleasure. I finally figured out how to directly stream music from my “server” (the aforementioned NAS) to my home theater sans computer. Why is playing music (soon to include picture slideshows and even movies) without needing a computer so important to me? One reason is that my NAS is always on but my computer isn’t. In fact, my computer has to travel with me when I go on the road for work which means if I’m not home then poor HoBiscuit wouldn’t be able to play ripped music or watch recorded movies until I returned.

And that would be bad.

Also, streaming directly from the NAS means that my computer is free to do other things, like photo editing, without having the added overhead of processing and streaming the music. And let me tell you, the less strain on my computer while I’m working on 500GB image files, the better. Now, if only I could figure out how to get the movies to stream without needing a computer to do the heavy lifting of on-the-fly transcoding, I’ll be in Geek heaven. The mere thought of watching all my… ahem, ‘free’ anime on the home theater’s 106″ screen has my mouth watering in anticipation.

And ohmygod, larger than life Pr0n!!!11

Filed under Education, Geek Life, Home Ownership | No Comments »

Floodwatch

Posted on August 8th, 2007

So… heavy rain sucks.

This morning there was a massive rainstorm here in NY and the basement of our building flooded. Luckily for us, our apartment was spared any real damage, just a little seepage under our basement door, but three other apartments with direct access to the basement were not so fortunate. Our neighbors have about 3″ of water covering the floor of their apartment now, completely destroying many of their carpets, books, low furniture and any other stuff that was on the floor. It’s doubly bad for them since they’re in the process of doing work on their upstairs area and so are living in their basement. That means a lot of their stuff was in cardboard boxes on the floor waiting to be unpacked once the work upstairs was done.

Talk about a crappy day.

Plus, all of the building storage rooms, where many apartments keep extra stuff in boxes, were also filled with water. Again, luckily for us we only had plastic tubs in the storage areas, but many of our neighbors had stuff in cardboard boxes which means their stuff is most likely destroyed. The really strange thing about this whole mess was that we had a condo meeting last night to discuss some ongoing problems the building has been having with water leaks. Even weirder was that some owners expressed the opinion that as long as the leaks didn’t affect them they didn’t feel they needed to pay money to have it fixed.

Talk about Karma.

So now, as I sit in my dry basement I am thanking my contractor for insisting on using water-resistant and waterproof materials when he remodeled my basement. Even though those things cost me a little more money at the time, they are definitely worth the it now! Even more so since next weekend we’re supposed to be hosting a baby shower here at the apartment, and if we had flooded I’m not sure what we would have done with the 60 people coming over. Hmmm… maybe we would have been forced to hold the shower at Medieval Times, like I wanted to in the first place. Ah, just thinking about the serving wenches, leg-o-meat and jousting knights is making me smile.

Damn, maybe I shouldn’t have been so quick to thank my contractor after all, huh?

Filed under Home Ownership | 1 Comment »

Stage 27,925: Complete

Posted on July 26th, 2007

I can almost taste victory.

We bought our current apartment over a year ago and moved into it back in January and we have yet to unpack. You might wonder why we’ve been living out of boxes for the last 7 months, but really, it’s no big mystery.

You see, we’ve been doing renovations.

Of course, this is where most of our friends and family throw up their hands in frustration and disbelief. Not because we’re doing renovations, but because we’re doing renovations on what was a completely brand new apartment in a new construction building. Yes, you read that right. We are the very first people to live in this apartment, and the building in which we live was constructed less than three years ago. Nothing was used, everything was brand new. So why did we do “renovations” when it sounds like nothing needed to be renovated?

Well, because as it was the apartment sucked.

The layout was all wrong, with doors everywhere they shouldn’t be, hallways that used up space that should have been better utilized, no usable closet space and a kitchen that was worse than useless. The developer had simply built a building fast and cheap without thinking about how people would actually live in the spaces he was creating. Luckily, HoBiscuit and I are very good at seeing past that kind of stuff, so we ignored the horrible layout and saw that the actual space was wonderful. A duplex apartment with three full bathrooms in New York is almost unheard of! So, looking past its cosmetic flaws we thought we could make it into something beautiful for us to live in. Transforming the apartment from the ugly caterpillar it currently was into the beautiful butterfly we imagined it could be. All it needed was a little work, and some money.

And holycrapyoucannotbeserious amounts of time.

Oh my lord, did we underestimate how long this project would take. We originally thought three months would be sufficient to complete the entire project, but we quickly came to realize that we were so very, very naive. From construction permits, to ordering materials, to unexpected surprises, nothing happened on time or on schedule. It was as if we were cursed by the construction gods and had to atone for our sins by being forever covered in white construction dust. Some of our daily rituals included making the bed every morning by covering it with a plastic tarp, eating every meal (every fricking meal!) at local restaurants because we didn’t have a kitchen for four months, and always wearing some kind of foot covering just in case a stray nail or screw was lying around looking for a foot to penetrate for giggles.

Damn you, 8 penny nail. Damn you to hell.

We had done renovations before, but never like this. And we hope to never do it again. But now, finally, we are nearing the end. This week is the last of the finishing touches on the work already done. And in one month, around the time that the Mighty Baby will be joining us, we should have a brand new stair railing as well. And that will finally end this whole saga and maybe, just maybe, I can stop using this craptastic laptop as my business machine, set up my home office properly and start blogging on a regular basis again.

Won’t that be nice?

Filed under Geek Life, Home Ownership | 2 Comments »

A Quick Update During My Moment Of Silence

Posted on November 22nd, 2005

My Most Awesome of Electronic Computing Devices Ever is dead.

On Sunday evening, as I was working on my computer, the screen suddenly went dark and I heard a soft popping sound. “Hmmm, that’s odd.” I thought, and looked over at the big box that sits to my immediate right thinking that my Vunder-Machine had powered down or something. That’s when I noticed the wisp of grey smoke coming from the back of the computer and the acrid stench of melting plastic.

“Huh. I wonder what that could be…?”

It took a second, but I got there eventually. At that moment the synapses in my brain began firing the way they’re supposed to and I dove for the power cord and fire extinguisher. But I was too late. Long story short, although there was no actual fire, my motherboard, graphics card and power supply are all crispy in that “fresh from the nuclear reactor” kind of way. Luckily, I keep most of my files on an external hard drive which is fine and dandy, but there are a few things I still need to get off of the internal hard drive of the computer. You know; things like my QuickBooks files and client lists.

And my pr0n.

So, although I was hoping to be posting here again by next week, that hope has been thoroughly dashed to pieces as it now seems that I will have yet another thing added to my list of Things To Do. I’ve already decided to buy two computers, one for business use and one for home/entertainment use, which hopefully will make my life a little easier in the “networking computers is easy, like teaching theoretical astrophysics to a retarded chipmunk.” kind of way.

Because I’m a glutton for punishment, that’s why.

Well, I might as well do a full update while I’m here. Wouldn’t want to disappoint my adoring fans fan. During the time that I’ve been away, HoBiscuit and I have bought another new apartment and are in the process of killing ourselves by bleeding to death from paper cuts due to all the forms we need to fill out to get a stupid mortgage for the new place. And, just in case that alone doesn’t kill us, we’re also trying to create the world’s largest ulcer, in my very own body, by attempting to sell our current place at the same time. Also, HoBiscuit and I’ve been working non-stop for months and we’re very, very tired.

Woooo, what fun.

Well, that’s all for now. I’ll be back when I can. Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate it and remember; when life gives you lemons, kick life in the nuts and demand better service.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled silence…

Filed under Breaking News, Geek Life, Home Ownership, Rants | 4 Comments »