Remodel: Stucco'ed

We've got walls (drywalls) on the inside and stucco on the outside, it's looking pretty promising.

Click here to see more pictures.

Cynthia

Berry'ied

The battery on my old Treo 300 was giving me about 2 mins talk time last week so it was time for a new phone of some kind. Some folks use Blackberries at work so I asked if I could have one, the answer being yes if I used it for work email.

The Blackberry 7230 is the closest I have seen to the General Magic vision of all those years ago. It has some quirky usability issues to get used to, but pretty cool. And gmail integrates quite nicely.

Yes, this did come from my phone.

More Soccer

I went to my first soccer game of the year. They play a lot better than they did last year, much more aggressive in getting the ball. It is interesting that I think I can see already the kids that will still be playing 5 years from now

Remodel: Decisions Decisions

I took Christopher and Liam to visit the house and to gather my thoughts about the new decisions we have to make.

The decisions are getting tough, things I didn't think I would need to deal with just surfaced up. The fireplace was demolished due to structure reason and now we'll have to decide on the new fireplace design because the new fireplace is a lot smaller. Our designer is also urging us to change the wall color downstairs (I was going to keep it the same originally).

For the inside colors, I'm going toward a neutral tone, probably a taupe color. Our neighbor Marina got a designer to help them with their selection and came up with a quite an interesting mix. Here is their living with light yellow wall and a light salmon celing. What's on the celing becomes the wall color of the next room. Very interesting transition.

For the outside colors, we're likely to go with our neighors Richard's colors. His colors are also used by Mr Pei for his house.

Let it rain

We now have a real roof over our heads, not just pieces of plywood. Just in time too, because there were a few thunder storms last Tuesday. There seems to be lots of progress this week... the gas fireplaces are in, the skylights are in, the insulation is in the walls and ceilings. The drywall is going to start going up tomorrow I think.

We had one little shock this week when the contractor told us that the new move in date would be January 17th. We had a few discussions and now the new schedule says early December.

Pluck off

Cynthia bought me Bill Maher's "New Rules" a little while back. One of our favorites is...

"Ladies, leave your eyebrows alone. Here's how much men care about your eyebrows: Do you have two of them? Okay, we're done."

Hat Trick

Soccer season is back with us again. Liam is now playing in the AYSO U7 league. This was their second weekly game and the Tornadoes continued their unbeaten streak. But best of all is that Liam scored 3 goals in his teams 7-3 victory... I think that these are the first goals that he has scored in a real game.

While he was running around Palo Alto, I was racing up Mt Tam. I was 6th in my division, but quite a bit slower than last year, but I can't be too unhappy given the "incident" 7 weeks ago. (What is really strange about the result is that I wasn't the only "Kieran" in a field of 50!). Here's my race report that I posted to the club mailing list.

Remodel: Being useful

Kieran, Liam and I pulled cat5 cable from the server room to the library and bedroom upstairs. Kieran said he felt a sense of accomplishment. I just thought "What a nice Saturday for us to spend the afternoon indoor". Nevertheless, it was good to get that done and we all felt pretty useful at the end of the day.

Click here to see Kieran and Liam at work.

And then there were two

My "old", "good" bike has now left the building. A couple of weeks ago I actually sold it to our general contractor, but he hadn't been able to pick it up until this evening... he is a relatively new cyclist so I also went shopping with him to buy a helmet, pump, shoes, etc.

Kind of sad to see it go. I now have the fewest number of bikes (2) that I have had in a couple of years. Time to start looking out for a time-trial bike (gotta get the concubine count back up :-)

Kieran's Concubine

My coworker asked me whether I would allow my husband to have a concubine, my reply was "He does, that's his bike". I thought it would be an interesting question to post to Kieran. Sure enough, he said "Nope, I rather have a new bike.". Do I know my husband or what?

Seeing that the last bike survived both crashes without a scratch (the bike mechanic confirmed this) and Kieran broke his collarbone both times, this concubine was very much loved. Of course, the concubine also came into the tent when we went camping.