Beebe4

If you are like millions and enjoy reading up on this blog every once and a while, but don’t like to remember to come check it out… you can enter your email address to the right (in the field titled “Enter your email address below to subscribe to Beebe’s Thoughts!”) and have a free service called Bloglet email you a summary of the day’s posts. The service is smart enough to only email you on days that I post something (no email will be sent on days that nothing is posted).

Another tool I want to point out, for those of you that read multiple blogs, is a free service called Kinja, where you can set up a list of blogs that you would like to aggregate and it will provide you with a summary of recent posts for all of the blogs in one place, so you only have to check one website to see if anyone has posted versus visiting all of them. Click here to see my digest of blogs that I check daily.

I am pretty busy as of late. With this construction work going on at my house all of my free time is taken up with the “homework” I have to do between the days that I am paying the “professional”, Kent, to help me. I figure it is the wise move to have someone around that does this for a living to help with the renovation work falling into the skilled category. His rate is a pretty fair price, since he is a friend of Pearl’s from the church, but I do have to make sure he doesn’t talk his way into a lot of free money… because the dude can talk!

Upstairs Bedroom

Last weekend Shawn and I ripped out the sheet rock, and some of the cardboard sheets that were holding the old insulation in place (wish we had known better, and left them in place)… once we saw how ancient the insulation was, and considering we were not sure if it was asbestos or not, we decided to wear respirators for the rest of the weekend (see Sherry during cleanup). After I was finally able to find a piece of insulation that was intact enough to read, Sherry did some research and found that Kimsul Insulation is not asbestos based, but was in fact popularized by the 1948 movie “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House” in which Cary Grant says, “Wrap your home in blanket of Kimsul.”

On Monday night I ripped out the den’s walls and built-in book shelves, and on Tuesday finished the prep work for the upstairs and went with Kent and Sherry to Lowes to purchase the sheet rock, replacement windows, and other materials.

Sherry had also volunteered to bring a cheesecake to a work party on Friday, but after her first attempt at cheesecake on my Birthday (story not posted to protect good intentioned, but you can use your imagination) she had to swallow her pride and ask me to make it. So in between loading all of our deconstruction mess (from the street to the container), I whipped up a cheesecake. We decided after hauling all the old drywall to the road that it would be worth the $300 to get a trash container, which was delivered yesterday (only two days late). The good news about them being two days late was that after some angry phone calls asking “where the hell is my container” they gave me the free upgrade from the 12-yard to the 20-yard, which I think we will need anyway.

After the cheesecake was baked… and cracked (pretty upset about that one)… I decided that I had better run out to Home Depot (have to spread the love… can’t just spend ALL our money at one home improvement store) to pick up some wiring. I like older homes, but wiring from the 1940’s just gives me the willies. So since we have the walls out I figured I would take this opportunity to update the wiring and decrease the fire hazard of older wiring.

So when I got home at 9:30, eat some homemade wings (THANKS REGINA!!) and then made Sherry get out of bed and help me. I know I am sounding mean, but one person could not (quickly):

• make sure the circuit breaker was off
• see if the conduit I was wiggling was the correct one
• and push from one end while pulling from the other end of some tighly run wires which was still running through the insulation and behind the cardboard

So I would like to say thank you to my lovely wife for getting up after you had already gone to bed and helping me last night, even if you were still in your pajamas.

Joe and Anne

Here is the happy graduate… and his girlfriend, Anne. Check out the pictures from his party on the flickr link. I had a lot of fun and finally got to bond with some of the other male family members. Funny how guys get along so much easier when a game (like horse shoes) is involved.

While out in Vegas I meet up with an old friend from Sengent. We talked a little about work and he mentioned something that gave me an idea for an opportunity. So when I got back I called Gioel and it turned out to be an interesting idea all the way around… so I have agreed to moonlight for the Model Exchange project and do some community maintainance and site development. I am pretty excited about it.

We started a new project in the house. We have torn out the left upstairs bedroom’s walls and ceiling in preparation for putting up some new sheet rock and a fresh coat of paint. Pearl has hook us up with a guy from the Church she works at who is charging us $10 an hour for his labor… pretty darn good deal if you ask me, of course that is his rate if I help him. Shawn helped me this weekend and it turn into a bigger project then we had hoped for (surprise, surprise?!) so it took us much longer then expected… and we were not able to get to the Den to start the deconstruction in there.

Leigh & Ashe

My sister Leigh has setup a picture site on flickr.

The URL for her photo page is http://www.flickr.com/photos/44124305809@N01/

I have set one up also, my URL is http://www.flickr.com/photos/beebe4/, I will add a link to the right shortly.

Today, I celebrate my 2 year anniversary of being married to my wonderful wife. We have agreed to not spend any money on each other since we just dropped a couple thousand on a very nice vacation to Las Vegas, NV and Scottsdale, AZ… but I decided to get her some flowers anyway. And still trying to convince her that we can afford a decent dinner… maybe at our favorite place, Fellini’s (not that same chain as in Atlanta). They have the most amazing salads there, big enough for two man-children to share and still have left overs!

I will post pictures of the vacation soon… you can go to my yahoo pictures to see them now, I just haven’t commented on them or organized them very well.

Details as to what we did will be coming soon too. Feel free to leave us a happy anniversary comment below!!!

I will be gone for the next 7 days. Write all about it when i get back… have fun without me.

So when I was in college I worked at a company that was trying to integrate your email, faxes and voicemails all in one place and provided interfaces via any of those 3 technologies (i.e. you could have your emails forwarded to a fax machine by calling up your toll free number and enter the fax number to forward the email to, and voicemails were saved off as audio files and sent to your email, etc…).

Although it was a pretty interesting job, I think my sister Mandy‘s summer job is pretty much the coolest thing I have heard of. She has a nack for finding this obscure, really cool jobs. She is spending the next few months out in Death Valley (can you say HOT!) working in the library at Scotty’s Castle (which is not a Castle, and not Scotty’s… but who’s counting). While looking into the Castle, I found an archive of some old photos, which I thought were pretty cool. Here are the results of the search from the Online Archive of California for “Scotty’s Castle”.

I say that she has a nack because she also had lined up some sort of cataloging gig with a company that keeps track of vintage Ringling Brother and Barnum & Bailey posters, but that fell through.

See how fast you can move that mouse by trying to Slap that Ho.