Propane torch for carmelizing sugar.....one day.

Here's the industrial strength torch for carmelizing sugar for Creme Brulee. We actually have a handheld torch that would take forever. I think using this (which I believe professional chefs use), we could carmelize in seconds instead of minutes. But the actual reason for buying this was to solder some pipes for our new water heater.


You can see my beginner soldering work on the pipes. Solder all over the place and not the best looking job. But the pipes don't leak so I'm not complaining. You can even see where I scorched the EnergyGuide label.


Here's the old water heater.


Here you can see that the tank was beginning to rust through. Probably the right time to change it.


Here's the new one. Only took me like 6 hours with 3 trips to Home Depot because I forgot to buy something or a change of plumbing strategy. The model we got is from Sears and is their top of the line electric water heater. The water heater has an efficiency rating of 0.95 and has an R-value of 24. Although in the summer, our garage is like 130 degrees anyways.

Finally after 2 months.....

The Nikon Nikkor 18-200mm vibration reduction zoom len arrived. This lens is probably the most sought after lens for any of the Nikon DSLRs. An easy way to tell is to call up your local camera shop and ask if they have the lens. The usual response is them laughing at you because the wait is usually a few months. Trust me, I just had that happen to me in OR twice. The demand is so great you can sell the lens for easily $100 - $200 more than the retail price. The lens actually costs more than our camera. :) You can read reviews of the lens from Ken Rockwell or from David Pogue's blog.

So you might be asking, how do the pictures turn out? Well, our D40 had a problem with the flash not firing so it's back at Nikon being fixed. Hopefully it'll be back soon. We've waited 2 months, what's another week or two.


Here's the lens fully extended.

Mechanical failure

The wall anchors I used to hold the shelves on failed. You can see the bottom shelf leaning against the sewing machine. If the sewing machine wasn't there, you'd see a much bigger mess and holes in the wall. I've since then replaced the top anchors with toggle bolts that open up behind the wall. Those supposedly can support a lot more weight than the anchors I used before which look like large screws. I still think one of the cats jumped onto the shelf causing it to fail. Maybe Riley since he's the heavy one.

Garage cabinets in less than 2 weeks.

Before....



...and after.


The amazing thing is that 1 guy installed all of these in ~5 hours. He had a staple gun and probably used a few thousand staples to put all of the pieces together including mounting it to the wall. Oh and check out the outlet in the peg board!

In preparation for the arrival.....

...of our new garage cabinets! We finally got around to ordering some garage cabinets so that we can clean up the junk in our garage, well at least hide it. Plus we'll be able to clean out the closets in our guest rooms. I'm having a 4' workbench put in so of course you need to have outlets by the work bench. This was the project for the weekend. Not too big of a deal although my first job in wiring a new outlet from an existing light switch. I also wired another outlet to go in the upper cabinet. This way I can easily wire undercabinet lighting in the future.


Midway through the job. Here you can see a hole in the middle. This was where I was originally going to put the outlet but after making a hole, I noticed I had a pipe running behind the spot. Luckily I didn't drill into it, otherwise, you would have seen a different photo with a much larger hole.


Here's the standard before photo. Not very exciting.

8 wheeler and power tools

Well our stroller travel system arrived from albeebaby.com. The price was right at $140 for both the stroller and the car seat but it turns out that the car seat doesn't have the latest and greatest EPS foam that the newer 2007 models have. This foam which is used in bike helmets is supposed to absorb energy during an accident. The next morning after getting the stroller, Riley left us a nice little present again in the family room. I'm not sure if it's because he was scared of the stoller or because the pheromones ran out. Regardless, I put in a new pheromone bottle.


And not to get too soft with a baby coming, I had to buy a new drill and circ saw from home depot. They had these on sale for only $40. It was good timing since my old black and decker died. I have a few projects to do this weekend.

Super Club Card?

Not sure if you are like me but my wallet is full of stupid club cards so that companies can track what I'm buying. Oh and it allows you to save on items that are only on sale if you have the card. You can usually link a phone number to the account instead of carrying the card. If you don't want to give your phone number or carry the cards, you can create your own card with up to 8 bar codes at www.justoneclubcard.com. Another trick is to register another number that lots of people know. For example, our company directory number has been registered with a lot of the local stores around here. It works great because you don't have to carry anything or register to get the benefits.

How many people sit in this chair at Ikea?

POÄNG chair from Ikea with Chester testing it out. Every time we visit Ikea, we usually test out this chair and without fail, we comment, "Wow this is pretty comfortable." The sitting usually follows with bouncing in the chair too. So we finally broke down and bought one during out last visit. After taking it home and assembling it, our test of the chair illicited a much different response. "Wow this is pretty stiff." I guess having hundreds of people a day sit in the chair loosens it up. Even though it's not as bouncy as the ones in the store, it's still pretty comfortable.

Food Poisoning

Frost Damage in AZ

Our Ficus tree after a weekend of below freezing weather. Typically they are green year round.

Water show at home?

We opened our bathroom door and noticed that there was water all over the place. There was probably half and inch of water on the floor. My first thought was "Did our pipes freeze and burst?" since there have been a lot of people with pipes bursting due to the cold weather we've had in AZ lately. But I soon discovered that there was a leak coming from the hot water valve under the sink. You can see the old valve in the picture with the plastic knob. The plastic had broken and water was leaking from there. Quick trip to Home depot and I came back with a much better quality ball valve that only needs a quarter turn to turn off the water. I'll be changing out all of our valves so that they don't break again. Good thing this didn't happen while we were on vacation etc. It could have caused some real damage and mold problems.

World's Largest Video Screen?

Picture of the water show at Bellagio over the holidays. Microsoft just used the water show to give further hints to their vanishingpointgame.com You can watch the show here. It's actually pretty cool. They use the water spray to serve as the screen for a projector. Definitely not HighDef but possibly the world's largest. You can also watch the youtube videos of Loki and the vanishing point game here.

Mahalo Roy

We got a coupon in the mail to eat at Roy's and receive a complimentary Santoku knives and a cutting board. Since I'm a sucker for a coupon, we made reservations at Roy's at Opentable.com. As a side note, we've found that only 1 restaurant has ever read the comments that you can leave for the Maitre d' and that was Ming Tsai's Blue Ginger in Wellseley, MA. Christy is deathly allergic to nuts and everytime we make a reservation, I put that in there. Only Blue Ginger has ever relayed that info to our server where she made sure we know which dishes had nuts in it. Sorry for the digression. So after spending a minimum of $75 in order to get the knives, our server tells us that we got the last one. Not sure that is true but as long as I get them, I don't really care.

The knives are okay. The quality isn't that good and steel is not that sharp. In the picture, I have our Wusthof Santoku knive (black) in there as well for comparison. I highly recommend that knife which costs more than the dinner. Funny thing is, we actually don't even need these knives. We could probably use the cutting board. Maybe I could sell these on ebay but a quick search shows you can buy them at HSN.com for $15. Maybe next year I'll use one knife as a white elephant Xmas gift.

New Toy

Our Xmas gift to ourselves was a new DSLR Camera -- The Nikon D40. We haven't really had much time to play with it. I'm sure we'll have lots of time to practice come June. Ken Rockwell has a pretty nice review on his site and a recommended user guide.

One thing this camera has as compared to the Canon's is Auto ISO. Auto ISO is where the camera will automatically increase the ISO value so that the camera can keep the programmed shutter or aperture. This way you don't have to keep setting and resetting your ISO values.

Dim Sum Vegas Style

Out of all the times I've had dim sum, I don't think I've ever paid more than $11 a person. And I was stuffed. Vegas casinos are now cashing in on dim sum with their all-you-can-eat buffet. Bellagio charges $49.88 for their buffet. Notice, it doesn't include a beverage. This is similar to spending $30K for a luxury car to only find out that the floor mats are extra. I'm sure the tea costs $5 a cup. Even their normal buffet is only $34.


Not to be out done, Wynn charges $48.88 for theirs. Might be worth it just for that extra lucky 8.

Private Helicopter for Xmas

Nothing like getting an RC Helicopter for Xmas. The Picco Z is the smallest and lightest with Auto-stable technology. Overall, it seems to work pretty well. The helicopter has 2 channels so you can only control up/down and left/right. Controlling it isn't as easy as it looks but overall still pretty easy. Our cats aren't even really spooked by it. I was expecting them to attack it as it flew by but nothing. They acted like they've seen miniature helicopters before. The helicopter is pretty resilient and holds up well to crashes. There's even a user group with modifications for this thing.

Good thing I don't work for Dell

Christmas came a little early this year. I finally finished building a new Core 2 Duo 2.66 Ghz PC with 600 Gigs of Raid 5 storage, 7600 GS Nvidia graphics, and 2 Gigs of DDR2-800 RAM.


Here you can see the gigantic Scythe Ninja heat sink.



So while Dell can build a PC in about 2 minutes, it took me about 5 hours.

I hate waiting in lines and I love a great deal

I'm sure most of you have shopped at Target but the next time you go, check out their credit card reader. This has got to be one of the best ones in any retail store. You don't have to read any directions, or push credit versus debit. Just insert your card, sign your name, and then take your card back. There's no press yes to confirm the amount. The machine is smart enough to know it's a credit card versus a debit card. I especially hate the ones in the supermarkets where they ask you a million questions, or at gas stations where they try and sell you a car wash. I once saw this older man, swipe his card 4 or 5 times because he didn't answer the questions fast enough or it didn't register his swipe. You might as well write a check if you are going to slow down the line that much. Okay I'm exaggerating there.

Also, Office Max will give you $3 for each printer cartridge you bring in and you can use up to 5 in a visit for a total of $15 off a $15 purchase. Staples has had something similar but they usually don't take Canon ink which is what we have.

Early Xmas presents?

Riley left us a nice present on the rug. Unfortunately it's not the type of present you can't wait to wake up and open. Originally we had bought those cat pheromones so they wouldn't scratch on the door or leave presents. The cats still scratch on the door although now at 6am instead of 4 or 5am and they haven't left us any gifts in a long time. So it seems that the pheromones don't quite work. The pheromones did run out during this last episode but I think the gift was Riley getting even for not being fed until 7am.

Thanksgiving mistakes

We cooked turkey for thanksgiving and had a few friends over this year. We've cooked turkey twice before without any problems but this year we screwed up twice. Well rather I screwed up twice. The first was that the bottom of the turkey wasn't fully cooked. I attribute this to our new convection oven. Convection cooking cooks things more uniformly regardless of the rack position and faster because of the better heat transfer. However, this didn't quite work because we were roasting in a v-rack where the bottom of the turkey was being blocked by the roasting pan. Next time, we'll either flip the turkey half way through or roast on a flat pan.

The other problem we had was that I didn't remove the giblets. Well the exact problem was that I didn't find them in the hole that I thought they'd be in. Instead I found a gravy packet which threw me off. I thought they had replaced the giblets with this gravy packet. Well turns out the giblets were actually in the other orifice. You can be sure that we'll never make this mistake again. The picture above is actually from thanksgiving in 2003 when we were in Boston.