It’s certainly been a bad year for seasonal allergies in Wisconsin.

At least the bees are enjoying it. As for me, I’m anxiously awaiting the first frost.

One of the things I was a little concerned about when I bought my house last March, was the fact that I’d have to do yard work.

Since I moved away from my parent’s house many years ago, I’ve been living in apartments and condominiums where all that was done for me. But the idea of sharing walls with other people (especially bad neighbors) was something I was growing pretty tired of. That was actually one of the major reasons I moved last spring.

I’ve been living in my house for almost seven months now. This afternoon I spent several hours working in the yard, most of which was devoted to taming a group of overgrown lilac bushes. While I was doing that, I thought about the time I spent working in the yard since last spring. I’ve come to the conclusion that the yard work really isn’t all that bad and definitely not worth paying condo association fees (or extra rent) to have someone else do it for you.

Like many things at this fixer-upper of a house I bought, much of the yard has been neglected over the past few years, and it’s taken some work to get it back in shape. In April I did some trimming of shrubs and trees, but it’s been apparent to me lately I didn’t do nearly enough, especially to those huge lilacs. Some of them were so overgrown they had six to eight inch wide trunks. As you can see in the photos I cut them way back. They were several feet higher than my neighbor’s fence, wide enough that they were rubbing against the house (right side in the top photo), and so thick you couldn’t walk through to the backyard on that side.

By the way, that thick trunk in the bottom photo is a nice maple tree. The top photo shows most of that tree (on the right side of the house). Maples usually show deep colors in the fall, and I’m sure that’ll look great when the leaves turn color soon. In fact, that small section of the yard is a nice microcosm of the whole property I bought. It needed some work, but there are a lot of nice aspects to the place that really shine once you get it fixed up.

Now comes the waiting. Wait for the counter top people to measure (hopefully tomorrow). Wait for the appliances to be delivered (hopefully this week). Wait for the counters to be manufactured and installed (hopefully in a few weeks). Wait for the plumber to install the faucet, disposal, and dishwasher (hopefully soon after the counter).

If anyone needs me, I’ll be waiting… hopefully.

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

That was 19 days I went without having internet access at home. I don’t think I’ve gone more than a week without some kind of online access since my days of connecting to computer bulletin board systems on my Atari 800XL computer. And talk about broadband, that was with a state-of-the-art, 300 baud modem. Yes, I am old.

Being without home internet access for so long made me realize how much it’s a part of my everyday activities: reading the online news in the morning with a cup of coffee, using it to find phone numbers, getting a quick map, listening to new music streams, and just keeping up with friends and family. I almost felt like I had lost one of my senses.

In the past four days I’ve made seven trips to a home improvement / hardware store, with still more things on my shopping list to pick up. I’m expecting the clerks to start greeting me by name soon. I already have people working on my kitchen remodel, which is something I want to get done fairly soon. The house is definitely a fixer-upper, but it’s going to be real nice once the fixing up is done.

Probably the most frustrating part of this move is the fact that I still don’t have internet access at the house yet. Since the phone company is having some problems (and I’ll be getting DSL through the the phone line), I’ve been suffering from serious internet withdrawal. Hopefully I’ll be plugged back into the matrix soon.

In a little over two weeks, I’ll be moving to my new house. My condo is starting to resemble a warehouse with all the boxes around.

Moving is always a major pain. You’ve got to find good boxes, pack, change addresses, coordinate movers, have painful conversations with utilities, etc. One of the good things about it though is it forces you to go through your stuff and do some “shoveling out” as my father likes to call it. In the process of looking at things I’ve accumulated over the years, I’ve discovered there is a lot of unnecessary junk at my place. Some of it was still in boxes from the last time I moved. I seem to be especially fond of things that probably belong in an electronics museum. In one box (unopened since my last move), I found:

• Sony walkman (yes, that’s for cassette tapes)
• A plethora of 3.5 inch floppy disks
• A zip drive and a dozen 100mb zip disks
• Several computer mice
• Two computer joysticks
• Computer trackball
• Backups for Windows 98 and Windows 95
• Enough coaxial cable, telephone cable and speaker wire to span the City of Madison.

On the bright side, I found a small pocket am/fm radio which I thought I’d lost years ago. Maybe I should unpack the boxes a little sooner when I get to the new place?

Now that I’ve got a good offer on my condo, I’ve been shopping for a house. I’ve come to realize that shopping for a house is a lot like shopping for clothes. First you browse the listings, then find houses to look at. Once you visit a potential house, you spend some time walking around and checking its comfort, not unlike a new pair of shoes. Like clothes, you wonder how long aspects of the house will last before they might need some mending. Will those sleeve buttons fall off soon? Will I need to replace those windows? If the house doesn’t “fit right” you move on to another house. Or you might think the fit is okay, but wonder if there is a better fitting house out there. You try the next house. You might also hear of a new sale (house or shirt), and try that one on for size. Does it fit?

Right now I’m just looking for a good fit.

Life-changing books are not just your favorite books… but books that altered your behavior, changed your mind, redirected the course of your life. Books as levers.

An interesting question worthy of pondering. Here are mine.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
by Douglas Adams
Douglas Adams’ wonderful novel (and subsequent sequels) became popular during my college years, when reading for me turned into a chore. It was hard to read just for fun — it was something I HAD to do to get good grades. The Hitchhiker’s Guide changed all that. It was the first book that made me laugh out loud. In addition to the humor, Adams includes many poignant life philosophies as well.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West
by Dee Brown
Reading the tragic history of the American Indian, told from their viewpoint, first sparked my interest in Native American culture.

John Hedgecoe’s Complete Photography Course
by John Hedgecoe
I bought my first single-lens reflex camera (a Fujica) when I was in high school. Soon after I got it, friends of my parents (Eric and Doreen) visited my family and gave me this book. It opened up the world of photography for me, teaching me concepts such as depth-of-field, composition, aperture, shutter speeds, ISO, etc. This particular book is long out of print, but Hedgecoe has many others, including some specifically on digital photography. Highly recommended.

Tales of Known Space
by Larry Niven
This collection of short stories was one of the first science fiction books I read. After reading Niven’s thought provoking writing, science fiction titles were the only ones on my book shelves for quite a while.

Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web
by Hakon Wium Lie and Bert Bos
This book was required reading for a class I was taking in the Web Developers Certificate Program at Marquette University. It showed me the simple yet complex beauty of CSS and designing for the web, and solidified my interest in web development work.

The Black Stallion
by Walter Farley
Farley’s Black Stallion series were outstanding adventure stories for a boy in junior high school to read. I remember spending hours with my friends pretending we were in the stories. They were probably the first books I read that made me really enjoy reading.

It was the third time in my life I’ve felt an earthquake (the other two times I was also in Wisconsin). While the tremors I felt this morning were fairly mild, it certainly is unsettling to feel the earth moving under you.

The Chicago Tribune has a nice interactive map of the earthquake (the epicenter was near West Salem, Illinois). You can also email the Tribune your location to be added to the map. Did you feel it?

When I got it home, I took the neti pot out of the box, read the instructions, prepared the solution, and hesitated. Did I REALLY want to pour liquid into my sinus cavities?

After thinking about my stuffed up nose for a moment, I yielded to the wisdom of this ancient home remedy and began the procedure. Once done with each side, I blew my nose. Not to get too disgustingly descriptive, but I blew stuff out of there that looked like it was hanging out in my sinus cavities for months. Before I went to work the next day, I used the neti pot again, and I couldn’t believe how much better my sinuses felt. I should have been using this thing long ago.

The lesson of this story? When several people are all telling you to try the same thing, this is a major sign from above. Don’t be a fool. TRY IT. Using a neti pot may look strange (see the demo below). But it works.

Neti pot demonstration