Jan 16 2007
Been awhile since last I wrote…
Well, not as long as some of my friends neglect their blogs, but long enough to make me miss it. And very long for me. :)
It’s not that I’ve not wanted to write…it’s that I’ve been quite busy of late. What’s going on, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you…
To begin with, Kim and I have been doing various projects around the house. We begun the project frenzy when Kim got off work for Christmas vacation. We decided we were going to put up shelves to proudly display my beer bottle collection. Our plan was to put the shelves up quite high so that they are out of the way, but still displayed prominently in the room. As I posted earlier, we had quite a few problems with this little project. To begin with, our walls are plaster and lath. However, in some cases I ended up drilling into a stud. In these cases, we just used the screws that came with the shelves rather than the molly bolts we got. However, in at least three cases, it was not so cut and dry.
In one case, I drilled through the plaster and encountered…nothing. No lath, no stud, just the air inside the wall. In these cases, Kim and I were a little hesitant to hang the shelf on the wall, lest we pull down some of the plaster. We used the molly bolts here and hoped for the best. It is holding quite well.
In another instance, we would be drilling through the lath…or at least, we were trying to. However, I had to lean on the drill to get anywhere at all. I’m sure those of you who are more knowledgeable of these types of projects know exactly what happened. The drill busted through the plaster and the part of the drill that grabs on to the bit busted through the plaster, creating a hole that was FAR too large to hope that a molly bolt would stick to the outside of the wall. When this happened, we used a different sized shelf and tried again…the holes we drilled would be in a different place, we’d patch up the holes we made, and off we go.
However, the new shelf was going right into a stud, and when trying to get into the stud with the drill, I busted one of my grandfather’s drill bits trying to get in there. At this point, I was ready to throw in the towel and stay with the 2 shelves we’d already put up instead of the 4 we had planned. Kim, at this point, had a brilliant idea. Why not put up the shelves on the opposite wall? GREAT IDEA, HON! (No sarcasm there, really!) The shelves look even better than how we originally planned, and they’re solidly up. WOO!
The second home improvement project was to get a safe for our pistols as well as our important documents like passports, etc. We planned on bolting it to a very immovable piece of our house, and this worked well for us. However, I was unable to get the drill into the area we needed to drill. I took out some drawers, and was able to get the drill in from the bottom of the area, but I couldn’t mark the bottom of the area for drilling. I finally had to create a template that I could drill on either side, and tape that to the bottom of the area. It’s bolted down, and contains what we need. WOO FOR SECURITY!
After that, it’s been work that has been sucking away my time. I’ve been trying to get a free VPN solution up that will link my remote offices to the main one as though they were just in a different room instead of a different town! This has required a lot of work from home, so I’ve been too busy to write in my blog.
In addition to this, I have been placed on the Request for Proposal Review team to train me in putting together our proposals to possible clients when we’re bidding for projects. This is a way cool chance for me to show my company that I’m management material. It also helps me to learn more about the business that I work in, which helps me propose IT solutions that actually help my company get the job done. It’s a win-win solution for me, but it definitely requires more work. No problem, really, as this place is still the best place I’ve ever worked, but it means I have less time at home to write in my blog.
I’ll still write…fer sure. But it might be a little less while I’m learning the ropes around here. :) And I’m still looking at everyone’s blogs, so keep writing. :) Megan, I’ve really enjoyed that you’ve been posting in your blog lately, even though I’ve not had time to comment. I read your essay this morning, and read about your trip recently as well as looked at the pics you posted. :) I’ll comment this week, I promise. :)
I’ve also started a new diet. I’m not weighing in or anything, so I won’t be posting updates, but I’ll talk about the diet a little this week as I get used to it. :)
See you all l8er.
