Stu's Rusty Bucket

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Fixes to the house

Things I want to do to the house

Basement
- Pull of the half-high wood finish around the basement + repaint that half of the room
- Rehang basement bathroom doors (the bathroom door and the door to the furnace)

Master Bedroom
- Hang joys full length mirror on bathroom door (mirror mastic should be ok)

Master Bathroom
- Rip out plastic shower and tile bathroom + proper shower door
- Put new exhaust/fan/light in bathroom

Hallway Bathroom
- Rip out plastic tub/shower thing + replace with real tub + tile
- Attach overflow pipe (thats currently not!)

Garage
- Replace 80 gallon electric hot water tank with smaller tank or gas tank

Garden
- 4 rows of raised beds with proper soil (about 3ft tall)

Decking
- Sand and refinish front + back deck
- Replace broken plank in back deck

Monday, September 17, 2007

Personal Finance

Ive added a slew of personal finance + frugality blogs to my Google Reader and I’m conviced to do a few things tonight.

* I need to get into the attic above the kitchen and see what the insulation is like and really check out the insluation in the other floor of the house.

* Get that plastic gallon milk jug into the three cisterns we have (bricks are bad they can crumble and break down over time...).

* Replace the huge 80gallon electric hot water system with a on-demand hot water system…

OK, So I’m kinda dreaming on the last one but I think it would be totally worth it.

First I need to work out how much the current system costs us and how long it would take to pay off replacing it. Not an easy task.

Then its on-demand electric vs on-demand gas. If we went gas we would have to get a bigger gas tank, but with electric we could just replace the existing tank and screw the new on-demand onto the wall.

I also know there is little to no insulation between the basement and upstairs floors, partly because its a floating ceiling, and partly because of the 10 degree difference in summer and the arctic conditions in the winter

Thursday, March 15, 2007

This years garden takes shape

One of our friends came with his roto-tiller the other night and tilled us up a nice patch in the backyard for a new garden. I think we are going to have problems keeping it moist, as we are on the top of a hill and all the water drains off.

Seed Savers Exchange also sent my potatoes out, I have 5lbs of Russet Nugget on their way. I don’t have a clue how much/many 5lbs of potatoes are, it could be 3 potatoes or 1 whole bag. I also don’t know if they have been cut into slips or are whole potatoes.  If they are not cut, I’ll have to cut them into eye segments and let them harden off and then directly sow them

I’ve got some seed trays to go and I need to seed them up tonight with bell peppers, tomatoes. This weekend if its not bad weather, I’ll direct sow some October beans, green beans, peas. (October beans are a dry bush been, rather than a pole bean. I have not grown dry bush beans before so I don’t quite know how much space to give them...)

Besides sowing, this weekend I need to get some wooden stakes and some chicken wire to fence the garden off.  I don’t want to take any chances with nefarious ground hogs, rabbits and deer eating my produce.

Lets just hope the ground hogs don’t try and dig under it :(

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Babies, roguelikes and dogs

Christmas come and gone. New Years come and gone. Worked my xmas holiday, we are now on the back end of our project that went live Jan 1st… So hopefully I will get my weekends back now.

Christmas was nice and not so nice. Sister in law had an ectopic pregnancy and they took her fallopian tube which was sad but good thing they caught the ectopic pregnancy before it became fatal.

We got some disposable nappies for xmas, since its never too early to start. I still like cloth nappies but we dont really have a washing line to string them out on. (electric dryers dont run cheap!). So I guess its disposable we are going :/

We also got a pack-n-play. All we need now is the baby to put in it. Not quite sure how the dog will react to the wee one when she/he arrives.

Speaking of he/she. We have a docs appointment this friday. Not sure if its a belly ultrasound or not but I think it is. 15 weeks? I dont think they can tell the babies sex yet but we are holding out till its born if we can to find out.....

The dog has not been feeling the best lately. She is all mopey and sad and off her food a bit. We are at the end of her shedding so thats good. She was quite interested when we got our bbq gas grill delivered by my in-laws and paid for by my parental units. She probably knows juicy steaks, hamburgers and chicken get grilled on it. Took her for a nice walk yesterday and she perked up a little, I think the rich xmas food scraps from the table didnt agree with her… she is nothing but a food thief…

The grill is nice, its a 3 burner, cast iron grill, side burner. 44000 btu. We are going to test it tonight with some london broil I have been marinading for 24hours. We seasoned it up to 700F for a while on the weekend, so should have burnt off all its factory oils.

One of my xmas presents this year was an awesome gardening book, its all about creating your own varieties of herbs + vegs, cross pollination etc, dehybridisation. Growing for particular colour, taste, shape etc and how to cull just for a specific trait. (eg: Hot Chilli Peppers and Bell Peppers/Capsicums are of the same plant.) (Imaging crossing a hot pepper with tomato and getting a spicy type tomato… that would be cool).

For the first time in a long time I spent some quality coding on my roguelike, sdlrl/cracks and crevices… It progressed very nicely.

I migrated I think all game saving structures into my own memory management system. This way I can save the entire state of the game by just dumping the memory manager. It abstracts out memory pointers so need to worry about any of that crap when saving/loading.

Fixed some issues with attributes (one of the corner stones of my game) and now it plays sweet. Since attributes are only add/sub and not ‘set’, you can turn on 5 lanterns to increase your FOV by a huge margin. I dont see ‘stacking’ like this as a bug, just like turning your car headlights to high-beam..  Stacking is one of the other cornerstones besides time/speed. There are no levels for advancement, the idea is to stack items that increase your life etc or find rare items that can do it for you. Same goes for magic points. To concentrate on magic you need to stack items that increase your magic point accrual rate for the big spells.

Got three skill levels working now, easy (you get 3 seconds per move), medium (you get 1.5 seconds per move), hard (.5 seconds per move)....

Thursday, June 08, 2006

Mayhem

Lots of stuff been happening lately. Got myself a mandolin and started learning music and playing. It pisses me off, because its tedious, but that is the only way to muscle memorise the gaps between the strings and the frets… I havnt even started on the frets yet..

Im enjoying it but it drives me to abstraction!

Compiled mt-daapd for my kurobox last night, went very smoothly, dang its nice. Now any computer in the house with itunes can see the music server which is cool. The NAS is working very well.

Joys birthday is coming up, our anniversary is the following week.

House closing next week, and we really need to start packing stuff up… but who knows.

Family reunion in Minnesota the week after that.

Boy, the next to weeks are gonna be super busy.

Thursday, March 09, 2006

Gardening

Since this house we want to buy (are trying to buy) has a yard..  I’ve been planning my veggie patch and garden… I’ve already gone a bit extravagant with my design.. ohwell. Its been sooo long since I’ve had my own patch…

Last weekend Joy and I went out to the hardware store and got several packets of seeds and things to start some seedlings in for this coming year. Beans, Tomatoes, Celery, Peas, Watermelon, Bell Peppers, lots of herbs. I’ll have read potatoes and sweet potatoes too probably since they are easy peasy…

Ideally I’d like to have raised box gardens so I dont have to mess about with digging and crap..

Oh and I can start a compost bin… Sweeeeeet.

I’ve even been looking up horticulture classes but these things all want like X many credits of English, X many of math etc. Which is not what I want at all.

Mortgages

Boy arnt mortgages fun! We had to sign a bazillion papers the other night and it still keeps coming. The worst thing is I have to product two years of work history which I dont have here in America, then there was my two year work absense from hiking and waiting for a work permit.

Thats always fun to explain…

So heres to hoping we get a mortgage… :/

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

House

Well, our offer on the house was accepted, tho they pushed up the signing date from july to june 15th or something.

So now we get to do the mortgage thing and I need to prove work for the last few years… That will be fun explaing the nice two year gap… :/