Off to Minneapolis!

On Saturday I'm leaving for Minneapolis. I have some work things to do there on Monday, and possibly Tuesday. In the meantime, I'm going to spend time with a coworker buddy of mine and see an ol' high school friend. I'm pretty excited about all of this. Tonight I'll dig out the digital camera and make sure to take a lot of photos since the flickr account is looking a bit lean these days.

Work is going slowly on the house. I'm happy to pull back because now I realize how much time I have and how little work is actually left. Also, next weekend I'm going to Louisville to see the brother which is tied into a business trip on Monday at a plant in Ohio. I gave myself a four-plus hour drive on Monday morning to the plant from Louisville, but fortunately the meeting starts just after noon. Any excuse I can get to see my brother and his family works for me.

Boy scouts

Last night as I was messing around in the garage (with the new nail guns) some kid came up on the driveway and asked if I wanted to buy Boy Scout popcorn. I declined. I don't have any issue with the Boy Scouts or whatever, but that stuff is expensive. And at work ... I can get all sorts of popcorn products for a lot less.

The only issue was karma. That is, I then pictured a few years down the road when I'd be driving Asim around the neighborhood doing the same thing.

Guess it wouldn't have hurt to get a box.

Nail Gun on its way

According to the gremlins at FedEx, my nail gun set should be here at the office tomorrow. I can only imagine what fun I could have with my coworkers and a nail gun, but I will try to control myself. The other reason I'm excited is because now I'll have compressed air on hand to blow around all the damn sawdust I've been creating (a pain to sweep) and take care of the tires on the cars. And yes, I am driving both of them fairly regularly. The BMW to work, and the wagon to haul wood/tools around in. The wagon is also full of sawdust. It also creaks and groans more and more each day. Huh.

Managed to get a little bit of tv hooked up over the weekend. I have the big three which provided some college football late Saturday night and two games on Sunday which was very nice. I hate that Monday Night games are on ESPN, but the Sunday night on NBC is fairly good tradeoff.

I watched about ten minutes of some "Chuck" show last night on NBC. I'd seen a few minutes of this before several months ago. And it was the exact same scenario. Bad guy has something that good guys want. "Chuck" awkardly tries to take care of it, messes up. Hot chick comes to save the day. Kind of stupid. I'm waiting anxiously for 30 Rock to come back. Maria and I watched the whole first season on Netflix and were hooked.

Economic slowdown

So just checked the ol' bank account. I think it's time to stop the trips to Lowe's and Home Depot. Thankfully October is one of the two three-pay months, but still, man, time to ease off on the home improvement for a while.

I made good progress over the weekend putting more stuff away, getting the futon set up and acquiring three channels on tv -- ABC, CBS and NBC -- which facilitated some football viewing and chip/salsa eating. Asim's room is done with paint. Now the trim remains for the two. I should have Asim's bed painted this week as well. His room is blue, and his bed will be yellow ... hmmm ... I guess it was subconcious on my part. Given this plan, though, it'll probably backfire, and he'll go to Michigan or something.

Went to a pumpkin patch on Saturday with Nick and Family. It was good and wholesome, but rather lame compared to the Apple Festival Thing we did a few weeks back. They had a little petting zoo at the Pumpkin Patch, some activities for the kids, a corn maze, and a hay ride. With no hay. That took you to a "pumpkin patch." Which was just pumpkins spread out in a little field and not the actual patch. But the day was nice, and the people friendly, so that was cool.