The branches are now all cleared up.

Posted on September 27th, 2008 in RealLife by Andy

Well almost….. The tree guys eventually turned up on Thursday this week – they were meant to have been here Monday, and the downed tree has now been removed. The stump and the other half of the tree remains – we’ll have to get rid of that soon as it’s not stable. However most tree companies are charging silly rates at the moment so we’ll wait a while for the work to die off.

This morning I finished chopping up the rest of the fallen limbs and carting them out to the front of the garden to be picked up by Dublin. The guys did a great job earlier in the week picking up the wood from the front garden and so I had space to fill it all back up with the back garden. I had another big branch suspended from the tree out the back, but this one was not nearly as painful (in all manners of speaking) to remove – it came out pretty quickly and with no injuries unlike the first branch which left me feeling like I should be blogging in superscript for a few days

I now have all the small twigs and leaves to rake up which will be a job for the rest of this week in the evening – hopefully it won’t take too much time – still on the bright side with the amount of branches that fell, thats a lot fewer leaves to rake up this year.

Hurricane damage photos

Posted on September 21st, 2008 in RealLife, shopping, vacation by Andy

Another view along the trunkI’ve posted a few of the pictures of the trees that fell when Hurricane Ike blew through Ohio. The crazy thing is that North Carolina (that was meant to get the hurricanes earlier in the week) was hardly affected. Hopefully some tree surgeons will be here tomorrow and my insurance people will be talking to his insurance people. Hopefully they do bother to show up rather than go somewhere else as we need to talk to them about taking the other trees down.

I actually went and got an electric chain saw from Lowes yesterday to try and tidy up some of the damage. Amazingly they still had some saws left, but only a choice of 2 electric or 2 gas powered ones. As the electric was $60 and the gas ones $250 I got the electric (as we have power).  I was surprised at how well it works and was very pleased that I got it rather than a hand saw. It was a slight risk as the next time we have a storm we may not have power, but I figured that if we don’t have power it’s unlikely that I’m going to want to start chopping branches up anyway.

Homeward bound.

Posted on September 19th, 2008 in photos, vacation by Andy

We’re heading back to Ohio today. The weather makes it nicer to leave at 5.30am when it is chucking it down with rain and being really windy - makes you feel you are not missing much beach weather. On the down side, it means you have to drive through wind and rain - ugh.

Sometimes you just wish you could click your heels together three times - it would certainly make the journey quicker.

Follow the Yellow Brick Road! (by absoblogginlutely)

The power is back - hurrah!

Posted on September 16th, 2008 in RealLife, vacation by Andy

In ironic news, Ohio was affected worse by the hurricanes than the Outer Banks - we ended up without power for a day in Ohio but didn’t have any hurricane outages in the Outer Banks (although we did have a power outage when the weather was gorgeous).  The good news is we now have power back at the house - I was able to find this out by checking to see if I could connect to our internet router back home - when I was able to do this I knew the power was back.  The bad news is that we have two trees down in the garden.  One is across the driveway and the other narrowly missed the next door neighbours house.  Not looking forward to dealing with those two.

It’s raining again!

Posted on September 10th, 2008 in vacation by Andy

Woke up this morning (at 4am) to the sound of thunder and then a short while later to bright flashes of lightning.  The thunder continued to about 6.30 and so I’ve been up for ages.  It’s still raining and it is too depressing to look out of the window and attempt to see the sea.  On the bright side I’m tanking through some of the books in the house - I’ve already read three books and am about about a third of the way through the fourth.  So far we’ve managed to get down to the beach for about 50% of the days we’ve been here - the funny thing is when the hurricane hit they didn’t bother to put the red flags up on the beach to forbid swimming - but the day after, when there looked like there were some nice waves, the flags were flying.  The following day the flags were down though so I borrowed the boogie board and went into the surf.  The waves were pretty rough and totally wiped you out after about 10 minutes in the water - I went in about 3 times, lost my baseball hat in the waves  and spent the rest of the time in the shade of the umbrella catching up on the reading. Still managed to get (a little) sunburnt though - the worst of it being on the top of my feet and the back of my hands.  Hopefully this doesn’t continue and I don’t come back to the office looking like a lobster!  I’ve posted the sunset pictures taken after Hurricane Hanna - so far we’ve not had other nice sunsets - the sun has just set rapidly without any nice cloud patterns or colours.

We’ve seen a fair amount of wildlife, several lizards, one deer in the backyard, dolphins at sea and everyone else has seen the local fox - I’ve not seen it yet :-(

Ur doin it rong.

Posted on September 1st, 2008 in photos by Andy

Today’s lolcat had a funny picture - all the more funny as the litter box in this photo is the same kind that we got - thankfully none of our cats have tried this yet.
cat

Rock Band Ultimate Set List

Posted on August 17th, 2008 in RockBand by Andy

Kristen and I started playing the Rock Band Ultimate set list - all of the standard 58 Rock Band songs 1 after another.  We got to 29 and have paused the game for tea and a rest - we’ll probably continue tomorrow so lets hope the power doesn’t go out overnight.  So far we’ve easily got 5 stars for each song, I’ve had a couple of 100% on the drums and Kristen has had several on the guitar.  My problem is the base pedal on the drum doesn’t always register and on the songs that has a lot of bass pedal action, the kit moves across the floor as I’m playing so I have to keep moving the chair after it in the middle of the game.  Winston thinks that because I am sitting down I am ready to pet him so about 20% of the songs I have another excuse for not getting 100% - after all how easy is it to drum with a cat walking all over you?

The toilet’s fixed.

Posted on August 17th, 2008 in diy by Andy

A couple of weeks ago I finally decided to investigate our phantom flushing toilet. As the toilets in the US are nothing like the UK (really they are not!) I looked on youtube for some help. The first answer was to brush the rubber flapper seal to get rid of the crud that had gathered on the seal.  I tried that, but all that happened was that my hands got covered in black stuff due to the rubber disintegrating - so if you try this and get black hands, you might as well stop as it’s not going to work.

So the next stop, two weeks later (today) was to take the old flapper off and get a replacement….Took me a while, but I eventually snapped the flapper attachment off the base unit, wrapped it in a bag and went to Lowes. I’m glad I took the old unit with me as I didn’t realise there were so many different types of flappers. It didn’t help that there were two versions of the American Standard (which is a bit of an oxymoron if there are two standards) flapper - it turned out I had type number 5 - but only by comparing the units shape and size.  However I then found that I could buy just the flapper seal itself. So risking this not solving the issue I purchased it, took it home and pulled the old seal off - note to anyone else looking at doing this - when the seal pops off it will spray water and rubber everywhere….I think I cleaned it all up…

Couple of seconds later the new seal was on and the toilet hasn’t flushed itself since. Saved me a plumbers bill, water and a new toilet - thanks to Kristen for putting up with the tank lid off for so long!

More balloon photos uploaded.

Posted on August 16th, 2008 in photos by Andy

Sun reflection from balloon launchThis morning I got up early (especially for a Saturday) at 6am and headed out to Marysville Airport where there was hopefully going to be an unofficial balloon launch.  I had no idea what time they were going to launch, but as I was driving down the road I was overtaken by a van with a basket on the back so I knew I wouldn’t be that late!  I arrived just as they were ready to leave for another launch site so I joined the trail of vans and headed out to shoot some photos.

I’ve uploaded them to Flickr to my Marysville early morning balloon launch.  I hope to get to their night launch/glow this evening so more photos will be uploaded later too.  In the meantime I’ve created a collection of Balloon photos on flickr.

British Invasion pictures uploaded too.

Posted on August 10th, 2008 in Events, photos by Andy

I’ve uploaded the photos from the British Invasion concert held in Dublin, Ohio from 27th July. The band plays a mixture of English hits such as the Beatles, Rolling stones etc. They are very good and also played at the Balloon glow last night too which was an added bonus.  For more information see the British Invasion Band website.

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