I’ve been kinda surprised to start finding new pumpkin stuffs in the aisles of my local Walmart and Target already … probably means it’ll be about time to dust off the old pumpkin blog for another year any day now! 
More Cleaning Mayhem
I’m so tired of cleaning.
I can’t believe that even after spending damn near every single night at the old house for the last week, plus working all day today, we’ve still got such a ridiculous amount of work left to do before we give the keys back to our landlord next Thursday. I mean, we’ve made a lot of headway … I guess you just don’t realize how much work it takes to completely scour a place from top to bottom when it comes time to actually move your things and get out.
I honestly don’t think that we’ve ever put this much effort into cleaning someplace we’ve rented before, which is kind of ironic because it’s been the shortest time I’ve ever lived in one place since I moved to Florida! Seriously, the last house that we lived in for 3.5 years didn’t get as thorough of a cleaning … though maybe some of it is just perception because if memory serves, we pretty much cleaned out our last house in one crazy, 12-hour stretch, as opposed to doing a few hours each night over the course of a couple of weeks.
Still, I’m pretty sure that if you did the math, hours spent at this place would be vastly higher than any other place I’ve had to vacate during my time as a wandering tenant.
I suppose if anything, there’s solace in knowing that as a homeowner now, unless I buy a new house I shouldn’t ever have to go through all of this again!
…and if I do, it’s going to be a waterfront mansion, so in that case I ought to be rich enough to afford someone to come in and clean up after me, too… 😀
frogs & lizards
It’s been raining a lot, so likewise they’ve been out in troves. I decided to take a break from cleaning today to snap a couple of pictures…
Cool Mars Links
I honestly didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to the Mars rover landing a couple of weeks ago simply due to being completely and utterly overwhelmed with this whole moving thing, but here are a small handful of neat links that I’ve come across in the last few days when I did have a few free moments here and there…
First up – this incredibly touching video put together by one of the engineers who helped to design the rover:
Next, an Ask Me Anything Reddit thread with a group of scientists and engineers from the mission:
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ybmmh/we_are_engineers_and_scientists_on_the_mars/
And finally, I found this both interesting and funny as I waited for Windows to update itself this morning:
NASA Pulls Off 160-Million Mile Software Patch
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/08/nasa-patch/
Welcome to Mars, Curiosity – hope your fate is a little better than that of the last rover… 😉
inadequate water pressure vs. fancy shower heads
I always feel like buying a new shower head is kind of a crap shoot. You go to the store and gawk at all of the fancy, new options like rotating heads and a bajillion different settings, and then you bring one home to find that half of that crap doesn’t actually work because your water pressure isn’t strong enough…
I don’t know whose house they actually test these things at, but this one didn’t even seem that fancy – just a stationary head and a handheld one that you can either run separately or at the same time … that is, as long as you don’t mind the handheld do-job being super droopy because there’s never enough water pressure leftover to push anything more than a slight trickle out of it!
Maybe it’s the water company’s fault, maybe it’s the fault of the people who built the house, or even those who design these shower heads … all I know is that I shouldn’t have to get a team together to analyze which shower head would be optimal for my particular water pressure configuration… 😥
The Lego Story
I had no idea that…
- …2012 was Lego’s 80th birthday.
- …the company’s history was dotted with so many potentially show-stopping failures.
- …the grandson of the man who invented Legos is one of the people who currently runs the company today.
Very cute, very informative little 17-minute animated short – Happy Birthday, Lego!!!
(via The Awesomer)
Dream Journal : The Big Flood
A couple of different perspectives on this one…
First and foremost was looking in on a big city from a short distance away – skyscrapers rose hundreds of feet into the air, and yet they were surrounded by rapidly rising water as waves came crashing in from the nearby ocean. The first few floors appeared to be underwater, but in general the opinion among us onlookers was that everyone in the buildings higher up were still safe … and then a gigantic wave approached that dwarfed an entire building. Everything went dark as we watched the wave hit.
Subsequently, I found myself inside one of the buildings with my friends. We had to use the restroom, but were told because the lower levels were flooded that we’d need to go higher and use the bathroom on the 33rd floor. Soon after we found ourselves looking out over the waterlogged city from some sort of outdoor balcony, and panic began to set in as the waves started crashing closer and closer to our location. A big one crashed over the side of the building and I remember saying to a friend, “So this is how we die…” but we all managed to hold on and survived as the water pulled back after the wave.
Just when we thought that we were in the clear because the waves had seemed to stop, the currents in the water surrounding the building began to churn debris up from the streets and throw it in our direction. We were narrowly missed by mailboxes and a couple of smaller cars, and then when a much larger dump truck was seen tumbling through the surf rapidly in our direction, I remember saying, “We need to get out of here…” just before the scene going dark.
Oddly enough, last week I caught myself watching this series on YouTube about a handful of personal accounts of the tsunami in the Indian Ocean the day after Christmas back in 2004, so I wonder if that’s where some of the imagery came from…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9DMiy_DVok
Backyard Roller Coaster = Best Dad Ever
And here I thought that I was pretty cool because I had a club house in my backyard!
I guess you could say that she’s Bad to the Bone!
I love the facial expression that I was able to capture here! Sometimes she gets very possessive if you try to come anywhere near her while she’s gnawing away, but surprisingly this time she was just as happy as can be and even let me pet her while she was going to town on her new house bone…
The “Grrrrr!”-look was icing on the cake!
Thin Post : Exploring the New Neighborhood…
So tonight was the first night that I took Cleo out for our nightly walk in our new neighborhood, and according to Fitocracy, the first time I’ve been walking in about two weeks. 😯
We ended up going about 2.5 miles in 45 minutes … it’s going to take some time exploring Google Maps to find an optimal route because there aren’t nearly as many interspersed neighborhoods here as there were at our last house. We’re technically still in the same community as before, but the place was built in four phases and the real estate bubble burst shortly after starting the latter two, so while there were tons of houses and streets to wander around our old house 10 miles away, not so much with this new place!
Then again, solitude can also have its perks, so the verdict is still out on that one… 😉
…
Trying to slowly get back into healthy mode, though … the wife and I both pretty much realized that it was going to take putting healthy food and regular exercise to the wayside if we ever stood a chance of getting moved into this new house, so we’ve both been eating a lot of crap that now needs to go back to random splurging instead of nightly stress relief!
I don’t think I’m necessarily ready for nightly exercise just yet, despite what Cleo will no doubt demand after wetting her whistle tonight! We still have a week and a half to get the old place thoroughly cleaned before giving it back to the landlord and I’m sure we’ll be spending a lot of time in the evenings there over the next week, but if I can manage maybe every other night getting out for 45 minutes or so of walking, I figure that oughta be a pretty good start.
As for my ridiculous goal of losing 28 pounds in 67 days 46 days before leaving for our cruise next month??? I’m gonna have to get back to you on that one… 🙄