Priceless Art

The Phoenix Art Museum had its grand re-opening this weekend where they had free admission all weekend long. They opened up a new modern art wing that had an interesting firefly exhibit. Basically, it's a completely dark room lined with mirrors and strings of little lights hanging from the ceiling. It's pretty cool except for the fact that you are paranoid of hitting the wall as you walk around. They also had an Asian art section, evening dresses from the century, Ansel Adams Gallery, Cowboy Art section (we skipped that one), and some other cool modern art.

UFO sighting?

Out with the old....


in with the UFO?

Apple pie assembly

Nothing like apple pie from scratch. Even the pie crusts were home made. Although they were a little too crumbly. Probably didn't add enough water.

Apples from Chelan, WA by way of Costco.


A mound of chopped apples, sugar, butter, cinnamon, and salt provided by Christy.



The final product!

Cheap construction

Whenever it's really windy out, you can always here the ventilation flap inside making noise. The reason is that the vent opening to the outside doesn't have a door. Probably not the best thing when it's over 100 degrees out too.


Well after some tinkering around with some sheet metal, I was able to create a flap that will hopefully prevent the wind and hot air from entering the house. The white in the picture below is clear caulk that hasn't cured yet.

Bathroom remodel

This one fortunately cost under 20 bucks and will hopefully prevent the kitties from kicking cat litter out of the box and more importantly not let them pee outside of the box. Our previous one didn't have the cool bubble lid and door. The problem with introducing any new bathroom is that your cats might prefer their old bathroom more and boycott the new one. After finishing the bathroom upgrade, I was a little nervous since the cats had not used it or even gone to check it out. Let's just say I've never been more excited to wake up and see some logs in the litter box.

4" nail but no 5" nails

We had a roof tile fall off during a storm. Luckily no one was under it. I thought putting it back up would be easy enough but turns out that my 4" nail was just a little too short to hit the roof. Turns out that Ace hardware doesn't sell anything larger than a 4" nail. So a little improvising led to a piece of wood screwed to the roof and then I nailed the tile into that. Hopefully the wood lasts. All of this looks easy enough minus the fact that you are 20 ft up in the air.

Cologne for Cats?

This is our last hope. The cats demand to be fed at 4:30am and won't take no for an answer. They scratch and body slam themselves into the door. Hopefully this cat pheromone plug-in diffuser will do the trick. Will let you know in 4 weeks if it worked or not.

Nothing like a glove to catch those fly balls

Caught a Giant's game while vacationing in SF. Even rode the slide in the huge coke bottle in the stadium.

Spoke a little too soon

The finally two speakers came today although one had a damaged corner. Personally I think this happened prior to shipping since the speakers were double boxed with thick foam between the boxes. Regardless, they are sending out a replacement speaker.

You can see the damaged corner here.



After



Before

Last of the upgrades

Finally bought 5 new speakers to go with the TV and DVD player from aperionaudio.com, who sells direct over the internet. One thing that I've read is that the build quality is top notch. This was evident in that fact that the speakers came wrapped in velvet bags as seen in the photo. They also provide you with a sound meter so you can properly setup your system. None of the speakers came damaged even though they shipped UPS ground and are probably more fragile than the two lamp shades that were damaged during UPS shipping. I still think you should never write fragile when shipping things.

Also, if you call up Aperion Audio, you can ask to see if they have A-stock speakers which are opened items but not damaged for a 15% discount.

Gotta love Costco

Found these lights below at Costco over the weekend. They looked very similar to these other lights we tried out but couldn't use because of the mounting plate. We were able to get 3 of these lights for the price of 1 of the other ones. These lights even have a built in motion sensor and photo diode.



Original inspiration that didn't fit.


Here are the old lights. Slowly but surely we are getting rid of the 80's.

Caroline enjoying chocolate

Universal sign to kick me....

Three different boxes with "kick me" on them. You can see how well the light shade stood up to the punishment. Next time we'll be buying a light locally.

Out with the 80's

Before...


...after

Upconverting DVD player to go with the HDTV

After our cheap $30 DVD player died, it was time to invest in a new upconverting DVD player. Ended up getting the Oppo 970 player. Oppo has 2 players, a highly rated 971 and a just introduced 970. The 970 supports discrete on and off so that gave it the nod over the 971. Below is a picture of the 970 as packaged in the box. Not quite your normal plastic bag.

Why that's a large base you have

We noticed we had a crack in our dining room table base so Ethan Allen came and replaced the base. However the base they replaced it with had a slight design difference in the form of a wider end. I guess customers were complaining that the table seemed to wobble and so they flared out the pedestal base to better support the top. You can see the design change below. I didn't realize furniture had continuous improvement.

X-Ray Vision

Just had my 6 month checkup for my eyes. The doctor says that my left eye is 20/15 and my right is 20/20. The right eye is better than it was 3 months ago but I still don't think it's really 20/20. Something just doesn't feel quite right as it doesn't feel as sharp as the other eye. Maybe it's because that eye is 20/15. Hopefully my right eye keeps getting better so that I can stop testing it on road signs while driving. :)

Does a tree make a sound.....

Unfortunately there was a casualty from the storm that hit our area last night. Nothing like a chainsaw to lift the spirits. :)

Traffic info on your phone

Google just updated their google local for cell phones that allowed you to get directions and search for places. Now they updated that with traffic info in their new app called google maps. I just loaded this onto my phone and it works great. Downside is that you'll need a phone with a data plan.


Here you can see the traffic in Phoenix.

A remote for the remote

Okay so it's not exactly a remote to control another remote but rather one to teach your normal remote. I've finally got working discrete on and off commands instead of the typical one button to power on and off your TV. Basically what it means is that you can easily have one button to turn everything off and another that turns everything on without the problem of having say the TV only turn on. All of this required buying a special remote (on the right) that has a JP1 connector and then programming the commands into the new remote so that I could teach my real remote the new commands.