Today, we took possession of the new house — hooray!

Becky arrived first, planning to unload some boxes, only to find…. the old owners! They were supposed to be out at 5PM, but (his words) “that’s just what the contract says, and who pays attention to that?” He also suggested that we could just let him keep a key so he could continue getting stuff out of the house sometime in the future. In fact, his wife was changing clothes in the bathroom for dinner that night… long after they were supposed to be out of the place.

Needless to say, that didn’t go over well with us. But, they’re gone, we have the keys, and that ugly mini-drama is behind us — good rubbish, good riddance.

So, we took a few boxes over, met Wendy, drank a little wine, had John and Mary over, had Mary (from Becky’s office) over, and finally came to the old house to rest.

It still feels like I’m in someone else’s house. I dunno how long it will take for me to get past that. Soon, I hope. Until then, I’m sure I’ll still tiptoe, and wait for someone other than us to walk around the corner.

A week from today, the movers will be here to move us out of our first house.

We are packing furiously, and trying to get everything ready for them. We want to make this simple, quick, and painless — easier for them is easier for us.

We nab the keys on Monday, and that will mark our first “legal” intrusion into the new house. We’re already planning to take a few items with us so we can start marking our territory.

So much to do…. new locks, new dryer, new bed, visitors….. This is going to be a busy Christmas week, even though I only have three days of work at the office. Kevio will be up on Christmas Day, and I know he will help tremendously.

The Wright Brothers launched us into the wild blue yonder one hundred years ago today. (No relation, BTW, that I am aware of.)

The festivities on the Outer Banks didn’t go well, with the recreation of the flight falling flat due to rain and mud.

So, had the Wright Brothers failed (like the recreationists today), become discouraged and stopped, what then? I feel certain someone else would’ve picked up the slack and carried forward. There were enough folks trying to create flying machines that someone else was bound to have figured it out, but it does make you wonder…. what if?

It’s official — we have one house too many!

All the paperwork was completed this afternoon for the new house… no fuss, no muss. Closing was a breeze, and that’s the way I like it. Forty-five minutes of signing this and initialing that, and the house was ours.

We take possession on Monday, and I can’t wait. The thrill of packing, moving and unpacking await, and I welcome the challenge! We’ve already begun putting some of the rooms away, and will continue for the next 10 days or so until moving day, on the 27th.

The first new thing for the house? A new king size bed, bought tonight — the largest bed I will have regularly slept in during my life. It’s about time I had one that size, too. The dogs want to be on the bed (and sometimes, under it) and there’s just not quite enough room for the four of us (plus the occassional visit from LC).

Tonight, we and Wendy did our final walkthrough of the new house. It was really cool to walk through this beast of house, knowing that in short order, it would be ours.

It stills seems like a dream, and seems like waaaaaay more house than I will ever fill. Beck still believes that it will fill up faster than I think, and she’s probably right, but, boy-o-boy will it fun to do!

We only had one slight concern, and that was some of the work that was needed on the firebox. It looks like it might not have been done, although it was hard to tell. Our inspector found some slight cracks in the firebox that concerned him, and we just want to make sure that it gets done. Everything else we asked for has been done. That’s surprising, as I expected we would need to fight for some of it, or do it ourselves, funded from escrow.

The clock is ticking!

A bowling era, that is…..

Tonight is the last scheduled night for me to bowl for this season, and the first time in at least a decade that I’ve not had “bowling night” in my schedule during my winter weeks. I’m tired, I’m not necessarily enjoying it, and it’s just time that I need to reclaim to push toward my goal of photographing things, and selling my work. Truthfully, I doubt any of us will be bowling next year — no one seems to be enjoying it.

However, the thing I will miss about my Thursday night bowling team is the camaraderie, and most of the all, the deep discussions. Usually, someone just tries to egg someone else on, accusing someone of being narrow-minded, or a liberal, or a conservative… whatever. Tonight, though, was deep, deep. God, dinosaurs, homosexuality in our children, heaven, hell, learned behaviors, genetic predisposition….. It feels like there wasn’t much that wasn’t covered. Somehow, tonight was different. Maybe we all knew it really was the end of an era.

I watched the first part of the SciFi Channel miniseries, Battlestar Galactica. I was impressed.

Of course, the special effects have really advanced since the original series premiered in 1979, and with it being on cable in the 21st century, the ability to take on “the real world” — sex, alcoholism, equality among the genders and races — is much more pronounced.

I really like the “newsreel” look to the show. I always called that “monkey cam” — the appearance of hand held cameras, with chimps at the helm — but for BSG, it works. I liked this view equally well in battle sequences in the last Star Wars film.

Overall, it seems like they got it right, although the gender bending of both Startbuck and Boomer is a little weird. I was happy to see, though, that they kept the swagger of the original Starbuck. You could almost see Dirk Benedict pulling the sames lines and playing out the same events. And, every once in a while, there was homage to the original series: a technical drawing and museum piece Cylon centurion, the original series theme during the Galactica retirement ceremony…. even the classic zoom up to the Galactica across the side that carried its name that many of the episodes featured.

This BSG is well worth the watch!

I’m still amazed at the sacrifice that the WWII generation endured on the future’s behalf. I don’t believe that any generation in American history sacrificed as much.

For all the WWII vets, my hats off to you. Same goes for vets and active duty members all over.

It was quiet on my watch, and I hope it gets back to being that way.

Man, have I been web-spinning tonight. Unfortuntely, I’ve been getting the keyboard wet with drool from looking at some of the designs out there for folks’ websites.

I’m absolutely getting awed with CSS, and some of the things that can be done with it. I’m also starting to understand how limited IE can be. I’m also finding HTML tags I didn’t even know existed.

All in all, a very liberating, shocking, mind-expanding, mind-blowing experience.

Here’s the goal for Phydeaux’ Deaumayne — CSS, no tables, and a very, very cool layout. I’ve been convinced of the need to follow standards, rather than just hack stuff together, and I need to redesign to fit that.

I also need to load a couple of other browsers on here to do a little side-by-side comparison of the site in different environments — mozilla, opera and netscape come to mind, but there are probably others.

I still remain committed, however, to not using FrontPage, and to hand-editing my code. I just don’t like how much extra junk FP puts in the code. It may be that it makes the code more standards-based, but it simply looks like it is adding too much extraneous stuff.

So, redesign soon, very soon…. Bear with the wet web paint over the next few months — it’ll dry soon enough!

(BTW, the title reference is from ST:TNG — google it.)

Yes, we do St. Nicholas Day.

I had a discussion with someone at work on mine and Darla’s celebration of it, and he thought that was very unique. He also asked if we celebrated Christmas since we did the St. Nick’s Day thing. Of course we do!

Here’s the drill. We each drop a Christmas wish list in one of our slippers, and usually a little something for St. Nicholas and his steed. Come the morning, the list is gone, and a small present is left behind.

This year, I got the second DVD volume of Coupling (great show!) and Darla got Pirates of the Caribbean DVD. That’s one whale of a film!

Is it silly? Probably. But that’s just me and Darla!

We shopped and shopped today too. Zany Brany (BTW, they’re going out of business — that’s a shame), Kerry Cottage and finally M-R Music for a little more sheet music for me. Gotta keep practicing my piano!!!

I also installed Darla’s 802.11g card and got it running on the network. It’s not quite configured the way I want, but it’s functional, and ready to be in the new house (in which there will be no networks cables!). I’m still quite impressed with the wireless network technology. I’m sure once the transmitters move to higher frequencies, the bandwidth will increase significantly, and you’ll have gigabit wireless adapters all over the place.