And now the garage is gone...

No turning back...

Until today, we would say to each other "you know, we can just cut our losses, forget about the remodel and move back in...". Well not anymore. As of last night we no longer have a roof over the garage and living room. There is only one direction from here...

It's happening

Stuff is starting to happen at the house. The fence is up, the downstairs interior is prep'ed and... the demolition has started. So far they have only started to take the chimney down, but it is great to see progress. We'll keep this page updated with photos.

6th birthday

Liam had his 6th birthday party in the park on Saturday. He had about 8 friends over from his schools and had a great time running around - while the parents froze in the fridgid breeze.

More photos are here.

Permitted

We finally got our permit from the city today, meaning that they gave final approval to our plans. We think that the fence is going up around the house today, then, hopefully, tomorrow they start demolition. Finally.

I have decided to be a tourist

Instead of staying at my parents' house and watch Chinese soap opera, I have finally decided that I'll make myself a tourist in Los Angeles. It's not all that healthy to stay at home watching TV and eating all day. We had dim sum with 4th uncle and his family, then went off to Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. We had a lovely time there. Mom was surprisingly interested and was reading almost everything. She was seemingly more interested than dad. We also watched a small movie of Sister Wendy describing the arts in the Museum. We had a small snack then walked around the garden. After the Museum visit, we went to see "Batman Begin" in historic downtown Pasadena. The movie was very good, just the right humor and darkness for my taste.

We're outta there

We moved out of the house and into a two bedroom apartment on Alma last weekend. The move went pretty smoothly, one truck load of stuff of the apartment, one final carload to Goodwill, and everything else divided between our bedroom and the front study.

The apartment is nice, 2bed/1bath, hardwood floors in the living room, washer and dryer in the unit, double-paned windows (important since we are on a busy street and right next to the railway) and within 5 minutes walk of the house.

We're still waiting for the final approval of the permit (should be this week), but it was a bit disappointing that absolutely nothing happened to the house during the week.

We'll keep this album at smugmug updated with pictures to show progress.

38

There's is nothing like 108 miles to put the proper perspective on a nice, fast 38 miles with friends. I joked to Cynthia just after I had finished yesterday's ride that I was cured (of the cycling bug) and that I never wanted to see my bike again.

I guess I relapsed; actually feeling surprisingly good today. I think my suffering was more mental than physical yesterday.

Liam's first sleepover. NOT!!

We're visiting my parents down in West Covina. Liam was very keen on spending time with his cousins so we went to see my sister Christine after breakfast. Derek and Liam were very happy to see each other. It was interesting to see because they only see each other 3 or 4 times a year. The only way I can explain the closeness between Liam and his cousins is probably because there is a biological bond for blood relatives. We had a very Chinese lunch, Chinese sausages and fried eggs. Then I got really tired and felt asleep on the couch. The last week was a tough week, wrapping up work at Securify and organizing the Teacher Appreciation Event. The boys played nonstop until dinner. We met 4th uncle and aunt at Maxim for a simple Father's Day dinner. Derek asked if Liam could sleep over and Liam got really excited about it. There is a small chance that they'll have to call me at the middle of the night to pick Liam up but I figure he is ready to give it a go.

Well, I was wrong!

I called Christine to make arrangement to meet tomorrow and found out Liam had a change of heart soon after they started the car. He said he now wanted to go home. When Rick told him that it would be fun to go to their house and they'll watch a movie and eat popcorn, Liam said "I have a plan. I'll go to your house, watch the movie and eat the popcorn. Then I'll go back to Gung Gung's house. It's a good plan." I figured it was probably better to pick him up at 9:30pm than to pick him up at 3am if he wakes up in the middle of the night wanting me there.

108

Cynthia and Liam flew down to L.A. for the weekend, so I was left with a Saturday to myself. Never having ridden 100 miles, I decided to do the Mount Hamilton to Livermore loop. 108 miles, 8500 feet of climbing. There was a 60 mile stretch where there was not a single traffic light or stop sign, and barely any people or traffic.

The Lick Observatory at the top of Mount Hamilton was open (a sign asked cyclist's to take off their cleated shoes!) so I went in and had a look around. They have a cool 36" telescope in a huge dome that still looks like something from the 40's.

I was taking it easy on the ride (a bit over 6 hours) but still got pretty tired by the end.

First post

The very first post to the thamlock blogspot blog, now that PacBell screwed up thamlock.com.

It turns out that PacBell just moved the phone line, not the DSL line. What this now means is that we need to cancel the old DSL account, order a new DSL line, and then wait 2.5 weeks to get it installed. Doing this we loose our static ip address that we have had for the last 6 years - it is impossible to get a single static ip now with PacBell. Totally incompetent.

On the bright side, I think that I will stop running our own servers. We have email and URL forwarding so that we can keep thamlock.com alive. But I am using gmail.com as my mail server (why should I maintain sendmail, spam filters etc when someone else will?), blogspot as the blog server, geocities for HTML pages and smugmug as our photo server. The latter being the only one that we actually have to pay for.