House: Week Eight

There's been lots of progress on the house over the past two weeks, but almost none of it is particularly photo-friendly.

The closest we've come is the shingles on the roof. But in addition, they completed all of the HVAC vents, plumbing, electrical, low-voltage wiring, and poured the front porch and basement floor. We've been through the pre-drywall walkthrough, and they start insulating the walls tomorrow. In addition the exterior coverings have been delivered, so I expect next week we'll have the start of siding and/or stone coverings.

We found out today that it is unlikely they will paint the exterior of the house this winter. While I would like to have it completed, I am glad that they aren't going to try to paint in temperatures that are far too cold for that to be effective.

There's a little over two months to go, but it is encouraging to see all the progress and feel like we're creeping up on the point where we can start locking down financing and other arrangements.


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Movies

I watched a few films on the flights back and forth to London, thanks to the on-demand movie system.

On the way over, I watched Terminator Salvation and was unimpressed. It was enough to keep me aware, and perhaps would have been more exciting on a larger screen with better sound, but it wasn't particularly good.

On the way back I watched two movies:

Fighting, which I had put on the Netflix queue a few weeks ago, and ended up liking. Terrance Howard annoyed me a bit, but the storyline was interesting despite being terribly predictable. And the fight scenes were pretty exciting. The plot was completely what you would expect, and gave me the impression that someone wrote Rocky + Fight Club on a napkin at the bar and out popped Fighting's script.

State of Play, which was entertaining but not terrific. I liked the twists the storyline took, as well as the way the investigation unfolded. It wasn't terrific, but it kept my interest.

There were quite a few other very reasonable choices, but after two movies on the way back, I had had enough and had to move on to other ways to pass the time.


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Other Side

One of the things that I was nervous about for our trip to England last week was driving on the other side of the road. I originally was going to drive from London to Reading and then Reading to St. Albans. I ended up changing plans and taking the train to Reading, but I still had to drive to St. Albans and then around that area to get to and from the office.

When I drove to St. Albans it was night, which made things somewhat more difficult, at least in terms of navigation. Without a GPS, and with fairly questionable directions from Google Maps, it was a bit of an adventure getting to the hotel. The following morning finding the office with written directions was again fairly sketchy. There were a few wrong turns and one near accident. Amusingly the guys in the office also made me drive everyone to lunch that day. Hazing the new guy, I guess.

After a day though, I pretty much got the hang of things and it wasn't a problem anymore. By the end of the week, it was starting to feel much more natural. I was quite surprised at how well it went overall.

I will admit though, the first night driving on a two-lane road with the headlights coming on the other side of the road freaked me out. My brain was firmly convinced that we were going to die.


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London Trip

Last week I had to go to England for work. Linzy was able to come along and so I went a little early so that we could spend a weekend in London. After a few days of commuting out to Reading, we went up to St. Albans to visit another office. We stayed there for the rest of the week and then flew back on Saturday. It was a pretty busy trip, between the traveling within England, work, and trying to fit in some sight-seeing. But it was fun nonetheless.



London was interesting because I haven't been there since Brian, Chris and I went back in 2000. Since Linzy had never been there, we did a lot of the normal touristy things like visiting the Tower of London, going across the Tower Bridge walkway, and seeing the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace.



St. Albans was interesting because it was a much smaller town in the English countryside, so it had a completely different vibe then being in the center of London. Linzy did far more sight-seeing then I did in St. Albans, but I was able to go visit the Cathedral with her, which was very cool.

The Tower Bridge at night


The changing of the guard was exactly like I remembered it being: packed with people.


The St. Albans cathedral had some underground tombs that were visible through grates on the floor.


Sheep grazing in the countryside.


Charlie the peacock putting the moves on the Puegeot.


Lots more pictures in the Flickr set.


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Time Change

I woke up this morning at 5:30am thanks to my normal returning-from-Europe jet lag. Apparently 7.5 hours of sleep is plenty as far as my body was concerned. Unfortunately with the end of daylight savings, that was actually 4:30am.

The good part of being wide awake that early was that I got a ridiculous amount of things done this morning. By 10 o'clock I had already done two loads of laundry, read the paper, did work e-mail for a few hours, exercised, and paid the bills.

If I needed so little sleep that I could get up at 4:30 every morning, I could probably rule the world.


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House: Week Six

This week progress on the house was painfully slow for the bulk of the week. The framers spent most of the time plugging away at finishing the roof sheathing, which took far, far longer then I would have imagined. This appeared to be because of the slow nature of making all the angle cuts where various sections of roof met and also because they seemed to run out of wood not once but twice.

Then, on Monday there was a flurry of activity as the last pieces of wood finally showed up so they could finish the roof, the windows were delivered, the eaves were finished, and the house was wrapped.


On Tuesday they installed all of the windows in the house except the one over the garage, and had the shingles delivered.


Then on Wendesday, they didn't work again. Two steps forward, one step back. But at least we are really, really close to being sealed from the weather.


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LED Lights

I watched the first season of Big Bang Theory on my iPod going to and from India earlier this summer. Prior to that I had seen a few episodes here and there, but hadn't watched it regularly. Lately, Linzy and I have been watching it pretty regularly.

I get a kick out of the humor, particularly Leonard in season 1, but now Sheldon in the current season. Linzy also seems to enjoy it. Although I regularly get the feeling that to some extent she is laughing at me.

One of the things that I am regularly amused by is the Dell XPS laptops that they frequently use on the show with LED lights and colorful add-ons. We bought a dual-SLI XPS laptop at work for a new particularly graphically intense application's on-site sales demonstrations and the sales team mocked it mercilessly. In the end we settled on sweet Sony Vaio laptops that are probably somewhat slower then the SLI monster, but work much better for the sales people.

But watching Big Bang Theory, every time they show one of the XPS laptops I envision a buttoned down English sales guy pulling out a 17-inch noisy laptop with a power brick the size of a college textbook and having the rear LEDs start flashing during the demonstration. Totally unrelated to actual humor on the show, but it still makes me laugh.

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