avablog

What’s worse than catching a cold in the summer?  Blech.  Fortunately, I just got an e-mail that’ll keep me going:

“Tour De Brew”
Seventh Annual
Brewery Bike Ride

Saturday, July 14, 2007

INFORMATION:
·        Route is Old Capitol Brew Works in Iowa City to Millstream Brewing in Amana.  The exact route will be handed out at registration.
·        Register at Old Capitol Brewery from 10am – noon the day of the ride.
·        $8 registration of Brewery Bike Ride (2 beers along the route too, and a brat at the end!)
·        Pre-registration is great if you want to let us know you’re going to ride so we can get some kind of head count, but if you don’t get pre-registered – just show up anyway!
·        Two beer stops along the route – provided by John’s Grocery and THIRSTY Home Brew Club.
·        Continue onto Millstream Brewery in Amana.  More beer and brats.
·        All-in-all, it is about a 30mile ride.
·        It’s a poker run too so there will be plenty of door prizes waiting at the end of the ride!
·        After arriving at Millstream Brewery, we’ll have a variety of Millstream Beers to choose from (of course we will be featuring the John’s Generations White Ale!)

I try to keep up with as much tech news as I can, but I admit to losing touch a bit over the last couple years. Things just happen too fast, and Ava deserves my attention more than, say, the iPhone (just writing that is a huge step for me).

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Tonight was the first night I cooked in our new house. I mean, I’ve made oatmeal and scrambled eggs, but I actually made dinner for the family this evening. For the record, it was a stir fry with asparagus, onion, sirloin, snap peas, and mushroom, served over brown rice.

Ava didn’t eat much of it, but Leah said it was good. The new stove works great.

I spent the day running errands and pulling lots and lots of weeds. The previous owner here really took care of her yard, and there are quite a few nice plantings around, including some gorgeous lilies. Like these:

These just started opening up earlier in the week. They came on just as the orange ones were fading out.

We also went and picked up some wicker porch furniture Leah hunted out at Stuff Etc. We’ve got furniture out the wazoo now, so I suppose it’s time to start having people over. Keep an eye out for your invite. Please specify chicken, beef, or vegetarian.

Somewhere along the way, Ava’s become concerned with people on motorcycles and bikes who don’t wear helmets.  She absolutely delights in pointing out every time someone goes by with no headgear on.

She and I were standing in the front yard during the move two weekends ago, and a woman rode past us without a helmet.  She was maybe 12 feet from us.  Ava pointed at her and, in a disapproving tone I think she picked up from her mother, said, “No HELmet!”  The woman looked over at Ava in mock embarrassment and covered her mouth with her hand; Ava appeared satisfied with the response.

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I know, it’s getting to the point of boredom. This’ll be over soon.

The kitchen, complete with toddler eating breakfast.

The TV room. This picture looked much brighter on my MacBook. I swear I’ll get some better pictures when I can get some decent (natural) light in the house.

I was putting Ava to bed this evening, telling her a story about Terry the worm, and she asked me out of the blue if I have nipples.  I said I did.  Then she asked, “Are you going to feed me?”  I told her she’s a big girl now, and she eats big girl food, not breast milk.

Whew.  Close one.

What a weekend!  There are still some boxes sitting around here and there, and there’s certainly some stuff that needs to be put away, but we’re in now.

I had a nice Father’s Day.  Ava gave me two beautiful ceramic tiles that have her hand prints on them.  Leah gave me a gorgeous framed print of a picture I took three years ago (or so).

The highlight of the day, though, was ice cream with Ava after dinner.  She got her sugar cone with rainbow sherbet, and we moved outside to sit on the curb in the parking lot.  Ava was licking away, fighting the constant drips running over her hands.  At one point, she sidled up to me and put her little hand on my thigh.  She just left it there and looked out at the traffic going by.  It was sublime.  It’s pretty amazing to be a dad.

And I was not prepared for it. Not prepared at all. I expected this conversation when she was six–NOT when she was three months away from her third birthday!

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Forget anything I’ve said about previous versions of there being only two types of people in the world.  The definitive measure is whether people say they like to paint.

I hate painting.  I hate the prep.  I hate the mess.  I hate the cleanup.  I frequently run into someone who says, “I love to paint!”  And I look at him like he’s still standing in the exhaust cloud of the spaceship that dropped him off on this planet.

I was up in the “attic” at the house again this evening, bent over and crumpled up, covered in insulation and dust, sweat dripping down my brow, and all I could think was, “Thank God I’m not painting.”  I don’t dislike people who claim to enjoy painting, I simply question their self awareness.

Now I know why it’s called that.  My cursed desk job is harder on my arse than it is my hands, but a weekend chock full of manual labor is a great reminder of how easy it is to thrash your digits.

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I don’t have a picture yet, but the new stove is now at the house.  It’s cool, all black and bad-looking.  I unboxed it last night when I stopped by the house to walk through and make sure everything was OK.  It was.

I have lots to do this weekend.  Ava and Leah are gone to Decorah and Minneapolis for the weekend, so I’ll have plenty of free time to make headway on my list of things to do.  Hopefully, Quentin will be by the house today sometime to finish off the kitchen counter.  And speaking of the kitchen, Leah scored two new Pier 1 bar stools for $40 at Stuff Etc. a couple days ago.  They have an orange stain that actually fits pretty well with the walls in the kitchen.  It’s like fate.  I’ll get pics of them and the stove at noon today, with any luck.

One of the coolest things about having a child, IMHO, is contemplating the things they’ll live to see.  Space elevators.  Cure for cancer.  Robot revolution that rises up to destroy all humans.  Stuff like that.

But one of the –  if not the — coolest prospects is finding life on other planets.  There’s a story out today about UK scientists advocating the position that there is presently life on other planets.  I really hope Ava’s around if and when there’s contact with intelligent life from somewhere other than Earth.  And I really hope that intelligent life doesn’t decide to use humans as a food source.

In a somewhat related story, I found this piece entertaining.  I love dinosaurs.  Did (do) other planets have dinosaurs?  That would be cool.  How can Crichton not be writing a sequel to Jurassic Park that features some astronomer finding a distant planet full of dinosaurs?  Better yet, make it a prequel.  Twisty!

A couple recent pictures of the new house:

There are many more pictures of the house, including some from before the renovation, in this flickr set.

The “floor guys” started yesterday and made a lot of headway getting the stair treads and second floor sanded. It looks very cool, and it’ll look even cooler once the poly is applied. After work last evening, my brother and I ran an errand out to Lowe’s and then headed back to the new place to get the LCD mount on the wall. We added some extra support in the crawl space (also, “Command Center”) behind the wall, and now the television is hanging there very, very securely.

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I mowed the lawn at our new house for the first time today.  It was interesting.  Mowing one’s lawn is a pretty intimate experience, or at least can be.  More than just a means for getting the yard presentable, it’s a process of discovery.

I’ve been in the new house now dozens of times since the closing.  I’ve been all through the basement and even spent time doubled up in the attic crawl space with my cordless drill, but walking around in the grass behind the mower today really made the place feel like ours.  Maybe it’s all about getting in touch with the soil, learning where all the bumps and roots are, discovering the spots where the grass grows longer or thicker than elsewhere.

I also timed myself.  About thirty minutes, which isn’t bad.

That’s what I finally ended up with for an LCD TV. Office Depot was (still is, until 6/2) selling these units for $699, which is a nice deal. So I ran over and picked one up. It looks good so far, even with a standard def feed. Of course Leah walks in, looks at it for the first time, and says, “Why does it look so grainy?” Ah well….

GIS for “olevia 237t:”

Anyone who’s talked to Leah since we made the decision to move to a new house (and even before then) knows that this has been a very emotional time for her.  She’s very attached to our old house, particularly because she was close to the woman who lived there for 70 years.

Well, this morning, in what must surely be a sign from whatever deity you think is wandering the skies (or the Earth’s core), we quite unexpectedly learned a bit about the family that built the house we’re moving to.

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From the WSJ:

American men in their 30s today are worse off than their fathers’ generation, a reversal from just a decade ago, when sons generally were better off than their fathers, a new study finds.

Well, I’m in my 30s, but I don’t know that I’m worse off than my father was when we was my age.  I suspect I’m probably better off, or at least as well off.  Of course the comparison isn’t entirely (or even partially) fair, since my dad was mostly stay-at-home.  I guess the upshot is that I don’t feel any kind of disparity between the lives my parents lived and the life I’m living now, and so, is there really any disparity at all?  If a demographic falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

If all goes according to plan, we should be the owners of a new home tomorrow in about 11 hours.  Leah’s walking around with a $170,000 check in her purse; it even survived a trip to Domby, which is a miracle.  We haven’t used a realtor for this transaction, so we’ve learned a lot about all kinds of very detailed documents.  I’ll be glad to have all that behind me.

Tonight was the first night of the farm share from ZJ Farm.  Not much to speak of yet, some spinach, lettuce, and rhubarb.  It was nice to have some fresh, meaty spinach for dinner.  One of the first orders of business after we close the house transaction is to demolish the existing kitchen counter and replace it with a new one.  We’re also getting a new stove.  I’m excited about cooking in this new space.

Leah and I are trying to keep an eye on Ava for signs of stress or discomfort during our relocation. She seems to be doing pretty well, but we do get the sense that she’s off just a bit. So we’re trying to do fun things and get plenty of ice cream and read lots of books. But this evening, nature intervened and threw a wrench into our works.

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