jeffpollard.net

One More Day..I hope..

Well, the house wasn't quite ready enough last night for us to run my cable. Here's the status: House "A" has electrical and drywall. House "B" has electrical and drywall. House "C" got their electrical done yesterday and will most likely get drywall today. In our house (D), we have MOST of our electrical done. That is, all of the wires are run, but they aren't stuffed into the wall boxes and the break box hasn't been wired yet. Also, we don't have any coax cable or telephone cable. That should all happen today and should be inspected before the end of day. Which leaves me in a perfect place to come in and run my ethernet cable. YAY! Let's just hope the drywall guys don't work too fast and start putting up some drywall in our house! Oh, I almost forgot to mention house "E". They don't have any electrical at all. But..they do have a really weird white stuff that has been sprayed all over their framing. None of the other houses in our neighborhood have had this special white "paint", except this one. Anybody care to speculate on what it may be? It's not thick like insulation, it's more thin like a paint. Strange.

Let it rain, let it rain, let it rain!

Well, Richmond residents got something today that we've been needing for months now: rain. When I woke up this morning, it was raining. It rained pretty much all day. In fact, it's still raining out there right now. This is bad because we didn't get a chance to look in our house this evening, but it's good for the area crops and the water drought situation. As of last week, all local counties and the city of Richmond have all placed restrictions on water usage. These include restrictions on when folks can water their lawns, wash their cars, etc.

So anyway, yeh, we didn't make it inside our house because it was pouring down rain when we drove over there. I can only hope that the electricians didn't get their work done today. If they did, it could be bad news for me getting my ethernet wiring done. We'll see how it looks tomorrow night. I'm guessing that we'll be running cable tomorrow night. Should be fun.

If you weren't too impressed with my short and very abreviated version of what we did this weekend, you can read the FULL story over on Olivia's site. She did an excellent job of re-telling the events that I was too lazy to type. If you haven't figured it out, I tend to have a small problem with laziness sometimes.

I've also updated our house photo gallery with some new photos that I took Monday and Tuesday.

Still Alive After a Non-Vacation

I'm still alive! I know it's been a pretty long time since I wrote anything new here. I'm sure you all pretty much wrote me off as a loss. I really do have lots of excuses for why I haven't written anything on here, but I won't bore you with them all.

We left for Myrtle Beach last Thursday morning, later than I had hoped. I discovered halfway down there that my truck was wearing the insides of the front tires a little. So, when we arrived at the beach, my top priority was finding a place to align my truck and rotate my tires. After I finally convinced the local Firestone place that my truck would make it onto their alignment rack, they decided to help me out. They found my alignment was off quite a bit and rotated my tires straight front to back. After that, we gave the truck a warm bubble bath. It felt good to know that the truck was clean and not eating its tires.

We woke up early Saturday morning to meet some folks from CustomTacos near the mall (where the show was). It turns out that only 2 other trucks showed up, but it was fun to ride around as a group. We got breakfast and then headed to the mall for the show.

The show was great..but hot as crap. I can't remember a time when I've been so hot. It doesn't help that we were on an asphalt surface, therefore intensifying the sun's rays. Luckly, I decided to bring my CustomTacos bucket hat to keep the sun off of my face. It was a great show and there were some great vehicles there.

The rest of the weekend included going to the beach for a short time, cruising the strip (bringing back lots of memories from Beach Week, 1996), getting rained on, and getting further baked by the sun.

We stopped by Olivia's grandparents house on our way home. They live about an hour and a half from Myrtle Beach, so we made a little detour to visit them. We didn't leave there until about 8:30PM. Just to put it in perspective, the drive from Myrtle Beach to Richmond, VA is about 6 hours. We finally arrived at home at 3:30AM Monday morning. Looking back on it, I'm really not quite sure how we made it back in one peice. I was tired and yawning BEFORE we even left South Carolina.

So, we get home to find that our cable (and cable modem) is out. Actually, it had been out when I arrived home Wednesday..the night before we left for the beach. I called AT&T where I found out that our area was "experiencing difficulties". When asked when the "difficulties" would be resolved, they responded, "It should be fixed tonight". Flash forward to last night: I called AT&T again, telling them that our cable was STILL out and that I wanted a credit on my account for 6 days of outage. The lady told me that the outage was not widspread and must be something wrong at our location. She tried to weasel her way out of not giving me 6 days of credit on our account, but I finally convinced her that I had been misled to believe that our service would be back on Thursday. The cable guy showed up this morning as we were leaving. He said that our cable was simply disconnected, probably by another technician installing someone's cable last week. So, our cable was out because some dumbass didn't think to plug our cable back in while installing it for someone else? You better bet I'm getting my 6 days credit on my cable bill.

So, I think I've pretty much caught up on my sleep and now that our cable modem is back and working, life should get back to normal. I can't wait. I think.

Relaxing Weekend..calm before the storm?

It's been a relaxing and satisfying weekend. I got to get to bed early, sleep in late, change the oil in the Taco, and even watch the race today. Olivia and I even worked up the energy to repaint our duck bathroom back to white. The paint we got ended up being the wrong white, so we still have to put one last coast of the correct white on it. It's sad to see it all white again. I enjoyed the blue that we had painted it. Perhaps we'll do the same in our new house.

Speaking of the house, things are moving..but slowly, it seems. We now have front windows and stairs leading the upstairs. They've also cut our skylights in our master bedroom. It looks great in there. check out the house photo gallery for all of the latest photos on the progress. It's pretty exciting. House "B" has some plumbing, so it looks like the contractors are starting to come in and do their work.

All plans are now made for us to head to Myrtle Beach either late Wednesday night or very early Thursday morning. The last show in the Show-N-Shine show season is Saturday there at the beach and we'd like to get there a few days early so we can relax and enjoy the beach. It should be a good time, but 6 hours is a long way to drive for only being there for about 4 days.

With Tommy gone from work this week, I have a feeling that work is going to be a bear this week. Ironically enough, he's going to be in Myrtle Beach. Perhaps we'll be able to get together one night while we're there late in the week.

My CustomTacos forum system has been experiencing intermittent error problems for the past week or so..ever since the OLM data center move, strangely. It's really frusterating my users and causing me worse-than-usual headaches. The worst part is that I don't know what's causing it and I'm getting ready to go on vacation for a half a week where I don't want to have to worry about it. Perhaps upgrading the forum software to the newest version and moving to a new server will solve my problems.

Gotta get to bed. Jennifer's coming over at 6:30AM so that I can take her to the airport. She's flying to New England for a concert. She's pretty excited from what I can tell.

Digging Myself Out

Well, folks, I've finally dug myself out from the heap of crap that I've been under for the past few days. I'll summarize to make things simpler.

The show this past weekend was great as usual. I feel like I'm beginning to see all of the same people at the shows that I go to. It's not that it's boring..but I know that there's a whole lot more to see out there and I want to see it.

So, we get home from the show and I have 185 photos to post. Luckily, Marc Pawliger, Joe Ault, and the rest of the Photoshop team have a great scripting system to help me pump out cool photo galleries with ease.

The flood of emails from the weekend was more than I expected. In them, I received no less than 3 CustomTacos tech articles, 4 requests for owner galleries, 1 sticker order and a site donation. Not bad.

Today, the forum on CustomTacos started screwing up again. It's getting really old having a forum that acts up every few months. Last time it magically fixed itself after a few heated phone calls to OLM tech support. They weren't too helpful when I called today. Amazingly, it seems to be working better tonight, though.

Work is getting busier. Leases are coming up and lots of people are hitting the road and needing help with dial-up. Requests for Final Cut Pro installs are up; it seems like EVERYONE wants to be a big movie editor. Too bad it's a $1000 program. It looks like we're going to give Adobe InDesign a shot at becoming our page layout program of choice. We've been installing it on many machines around the company. I guess I'd better learn how it works.

Progress on the house seems a little slower than last week. Units A and B in our building have stairs. Units A and E have front windows. It looks like our second floor has interior walls...but we can't get up there to see them..no stairs!

Going up!!

When we arrived out at the house tonight, we were totally suprised..again. They had far surpassed our expectations today. Take a look >> I think Olivia might write more on this sometime today. It's late and I gotta get some sleep before our big plans for the weekend unfold.

Wow. Lots o' progress!

I'll skip the boring stuff (Work was pretty slow again today) and get right to the good stuff that you all want to hear about anyway: We drove out to the house this evening as we normally do now and found some pretty exciting stuff. Remember how I said that I figured that they'd start on our first floor framing before the end of the week? Well, they've started alright. Here's the status:

They've moved all of the roofs off of the foundations and out into the road.

Secondly, they've removed the second floor subflooring and stacked them out in front of the building. This second floor flooring is what we THOUGHT was our first floor subflooring. After some comparing and investigating, we now know that the "subflooring" that they were building on our foundation was actually the second floor. So, the second floors are stacked out in front.

And, most exciting of all, they've begun (are are moving along quite quickly!) framing in the first floor. We have a front and back piece, while some of the other houses in our building have some of the inner walls. I suspect that we'll have most (if not all) of our inner walls framed by tomorrow evening. Very exciting! Check out the house photo gallery for all the new shots..there's a bunch!

Got Roof?

This weekend was nice and relaxing. We spent most of it either out at the pool baking in the sun or sleeping.

I've posted many more photos on my House Photo Gallery site, including photos of our roof. Yes, ROOF! They've finished the subflooring and are now lining the roof trusses up and putting the roof boards on. Forgive me for not using technical construction terms. Our windows have also arrived and are currently sitting in our back yard. My hope is that one day they find their way onto the front and back of our house. Just a thought.. Anyway, go enjoy the new photos.

OK, everyone OFF the bandwagon...

Today was just like yesterday. Pretty fruitful day at work then a trip to the pool, a trip out to the house, TV and computers, then bedtime.

While we were at the pool, this kid (he couldn't have been 16 or 17 years old) goes over and sits down by the lifeguard (if you really want to call him that). And then he says, "Man, what a bunch of sh*t; This kid just told me that he has a Honda Civic with a 400-shot of NOS." The lifeguard looks at him strangely and then the kid continues, "Oh wait..you're not really into cars, are you.." "No, not really" replies the lifeguard.

And this is when it kindof hit me how much influence The Fast and the Furious has had on the general public. It's funny how quickly customizing vehicles has become a bandwagon of sorts. Years ago when I was in high school, there were three of us who had custom trucks and we were sortof outcasts. I mean, we had friends (each other) and stuff, but it wasn't "popular". And now? I imagine that a good number of local teenage kids either have a customized car (probably a Honda) or are planning on getting one when they turn 16 (Read: Mommy and Daddy will give them one). Amazing. I can't say that this is all bad, because it increases the overall popularity and visability of the scene. But maybe in a bad way.

But here's what I'm really getting at: What really bothers me is how many of these young kids are out there making the entire scene look bad. They're out there revving their engines at each other at stop lights. They're out there flexing all four cylinders; provoking anyone they can everytime they take off from a stoplight. I fear that the general public already has a deteriorated level of respect for customized vehicles if they've seen The Fast and the Furious (stolen cars, racing, violence, etc.). These kids are just out there reaffirming the belief that people who drive customized vehicles are a bunch of punk kids.

I'm ready for the wagon to stop and and all the rice kids to get off the bandwagon.