ErkkilaDotOrg

Finally got around to trying the 14 day free Eve online trial. It’s like the bird flights in WoW made into a game… => Meh!

Last couple days have been interesting.

• Walk out in the woods with the timber guy
• Walk out in the woods with new neighbors friends
• Got drowned on that last walk
• Pulled a tick off mah belly button (dr tommorow ;p, damn meeses)
• Painted 1/2 the chicken coop, i believe the color is something like “mass murderer red”. At least that’s how I look when i’m done.
• Fixed the wiring on the new grape vine supports
• Dug some holes for blackberry bushes, need to chisel out some roots and finish planting.
• Mowed (alot++++++)
• Made fajitas for 10th anniversary (Go us)

I’m both happy and sad every time I remember that the letters “FTL” on my undies mean “Fruit of The Loom” and not “Faster Than Light” .

I guess i’m also happy it isn’t a monogram.

Yoshi’s life celebration party was today. As usual after dog gatherings, Icky’s exhausted. Afterwards I donated $25 to: in Yoshi’s name. (Yoshi is a pug belonging to Michelle, who runs the Rochester IG group.

Things we found in the shed while cleaning it out:

• Boxes of metal parts, mostly rusty
• A very large light fixture
• An old lantern stuffed full of fiberglass insulation and mouse poop
• Large metal fan
• Two large boxes full of glass panes (it seems that the diassembled greenhouse we found in the barn had more pieces) and a few panes of plexiglass
• Very many metal parts possibly related to that disassembled greenhouse
• carpet squares
• large stove parts (?)
• tar paper
• roofing squares
• plywood
• large metal wheel with gears
• old metal scale
• very heavy metal safe. We thought we had the combination but it appears to be rusted shut
• Assorted wood pieces
• Smallish but very heavy old metal desk, with drawers stuffed full of fiberglass insulation, mouse poop, and at least one mummified mouse. Drawers in said desk were rusted through due to mouse urine.
• Live mouse family
• Live 1.5′ garter snake
• TONS of fiberglass insulation interspersed with mouse poop and chewed nuts/seeds/junk
• About 6 wasp nests
• About 4 mud wasp nests
• Many plastic pipe fittings, some stuffed full of fiberglass insulation/mouse poop
• Metal pipes and faucets
• Metal chains, various sizes
• Large sack of some kind of white, powdery stuff containing vermiculite and perlite, which promptly burst open and made the rest of the cleanup miserable
• Lots of dirt
• Unidentifiable things–feces? Mummified animals? Owl balls? I don’t want to know
• bits and pieces

We’re talking about an 8′x8′ shed, here. Unbelievable.
How about a nice shower and decontamination?

Why do it after 8 years? We want to get some chickens.

Finally, one of the lilacs flowered nicely. Must have been the long spring or maybe the extra water from the new drip irrigation system last summer.

We met a future neighbor today (pee did a few days ago). They won’t be moving in for quite awhile but are flying back and forth to do some work to the place (it already has a beautiful new porch) . Should be quite a change from San Diego (probably cost less per square foot, too :).
There’s finally a halfway decent Mexican restaurant, El Pacifico, in Newark. It’s not quite this but an improvement over the last one in Palmyra. Looks like we’ll be doing that at least once a week, until, of course, pee gets a messed-up order and we can never go again (the dreaded restaurant curse).
There was another Rochester Small Dog event last weekend. Too bad I forgot an extra camera battery.

The lengths I’ll go to to save $30-$50 (depending on seller) for Texas Ranch House on DVD:

• Recorded in HD on TWC DVR because I wanted to watch it in HD at least once (yeah, I know my final product is SD DVD but at least it’s a nice clean source).
• ‘Save to VCR’ from there to standalone ReplayTV box, wait 2 hours per night’s recording (no, no easy means of extracting data directly, and it’s not mine so I’m not likely to break into it)
• DVArchive to download it to my laptop
• gopdit to determine edit points (remove few commercials, chapter points to skip ‘next time’, credits, etc
• rtvedit to apply edit file from previous step
• rtvconvert to get it from Replay format into something more palatable to DVD (splitting into m2v and mp2 as future steps like that better)
• mplex the audio and video back together (don’t ask why. At least it’s all in sync.)
• take screen shots, edit out music clips, etc; gimp it into menu screens and a bunch more steps to stick it all together
• dvdauthor it
• mkisofs it
• copy the iso back to our media machine
• burn to DVD

See ReplayToDvd wiki for some details.

Just think, this is still fair use. Maybe not for long. If only I didn’t have to go through that additional digital to analog conversion….

I’ve spent the past few days completely obsessed with Texas Ranch House (in HD, on PBS). In particular, following threads on TWoP (lots of snark and actual posts by RH Jared) and Yahoo Groups (where you’ll find posts from Mrs. C, Vienna, Johnny, Ian, and Rob). What’s really funny is reading both forums over the course of the airings. Initially everyone’s fairly sympathetic to everyone, but by night 4, watch out Cooke family! Which, by the way, was jaw-dropping. To think Mr. Cooke whined for weeks about how everyone should respect his business acumen, then it turns out he didn’t do the one job he was most responsible for (keeping perfect books), and has the bad business sense not to realize the RH’s were probably the most important piece of the whole puzzle. Call their bluff, indeed. You have to wonder if the producers didn’t tell them their performance would be graded based on whether the ranch could actually have continued.

Loved Howie. We’re convinced he’s part Italian Greyhound or Whippet…check out those legs and tail! Our joke was that the dog must’ve been fed a lot of beans over the course of the production, and that his name should’ve been Beans. So every time we saw him, we yelled Beans! and pretended he was constantly scheming for more of them so he could stink up the ranch house/bunk house.