I’m no meteorologist, but something seems off this year. Over the past number of years, having snow on the ground at Christmas has become increasingly rare. No so anymore! In the past week alone, we have received three snow storms, each delivering over 6 inches of snow. Don’t get me wrong, I like snow… it’s removing it from the driveway that I hate. What makes it worse is the lack of intelligence required to be able to plow a road in my town. This means I end up with a huge pile of snow, in the middle of the road, at the end of my driveway. I didn’t realize I was responsible for shoveling the road… maybe I should send the town a bill?

My wife’s key fob to her Jetta stopped working some months ago. Appears to be the battery, since the LED is very faint and, well, the doors don’t unlock. Upon quick inspection of the fob, it appeared to be a sealed unit, which to me meant $$$$ at a dealer.

Not so!

A quick search found this page over at riskin.org. I suppose I should be thanking Kimmy and Jacob Riskin, so… thanks guys!! You’ve turned an expensive trip to the dealer into a cheap trip to Radio Shack.

There are step-by-step instructions and many more images available on their site. Go check them out and save some bucks.

It appears as if I have been neglecting my poor ol’ blog for the past few months.  Ok, so maybe I have.  But I assure you it has not been without good reason.  There have been 3 weddings in the past 6 weeks (one of which was my own!), a trip to San Diego, a vacation in Australia, countless incompetant businesses I’ve had to write complaints to, a house to clean (still have wedding gifts all over the place), numerous doctor visits, a washing machine to fix, and a whole shitload of work to catch up on… not to mention the normal stuff like mowing the lawn, taking the cats to the vet, going shopping, writing emails, eating, sleeping, etc.  Fun fun.

So, the other day I decided to transfer all of my domains to Crabersen Internet Solutions, clean up some of my DNS information, and do a general healthcheck on my various web sites.  Then, today I decided to post something to my blog, and while I was at it found the need to upgrade my installations of WordPress and Gallery.  Aparently they were grossly out of date.

What’s in store tomorrow?  Well, I need to actually post some decent pictures on my Gallery page and eventually re-do my home page.  It sucks.  I know it sucks and I just don’t have the time to update it since I spend all of my energy battling idiots at work who think they are web experts.  Um, sorry… the fact you know how to surf the web does not make you a web expert by any means.  Furthermore, the fact you use IE means you should be shot.

I’ve had this old wooden wall shelf lying around the house since we moved in, thinking one day I’d hang it up and put some stuff on it. Well, the day finally came. Yesterday I got off my butt and mounted the shelf to the wall and quickly filled it with some of my Whalers memorabilia.

I still need to make room for my posters, promotional hard hats (from when the Hartford Civic Center roof collapsed), and other items that don’t currently fit.

Ok. Nothing is ever as easy as it first seems. Aparently when a bracket says “includes everything needed to mount an Epson projector”, it doesn’t really mean everything. So, it’s back to the drawing board to figure out what I should do about attaching the projector to the ceiling mount bracket I now have. Grrrr. Once I figure that out, I’ll get some pics up here… really.

Yay! The ceiling mount bracket for my digital projector came in today! Woohoo!! Looks like tonight’s project will be mounting the projector and testing out our new home theater setup in the basement. I’ll post some pics of the setup this weekend.

My new riding lawn tractor found its way home yesterday. Woohoo! I was actually excited to go out and mow the lawn, but instead we ended up going shopping. So, I had to wait and mowed a small section of our back yard today after work. It was hot outside so I carefully placed a tasty beverage in the mower’s convenient cup holder and I was on my way.

I’ve never been on a riding lawn mower before and I must say, it was a lot of fun. A go-kart with blades. I wasn’t too impressed with the LT2000’s ability to eat up long grass and weeds, but it the rider sure saves a lot of time. I kept finding numerous blades of grass that were getting missed right down the middle of where I was cutting. That’s probably because my grass was about a foot high, but still. When I’d turn, the cutting deck seems to lean to one side, creating a very uneven cut. I found myself going over my old tracks time and time again just to make sure I got every last blade of grass.

Hopefully next time, I won’t let the lawn get a foot high and the LT2000 will behave a little better. I’m just glad I don’t have to walk around my yard for 3 hours following the ol’ self-propelled walk-behind Toro.

Now if it would only start snowing! I need an excuse to head back to Sears and get the snow blade for this thing!