Absoblogginlutely! – IRL

I forgot to post in the blog (Kristen beat me to it) that we have a new car – bHelsbyBug. This name came about after a guy at Siemens used to call me beHelsbyBub – something I thought rather amusing, and therefore the car is now known as this too. Pictures of bHelsbyBug are uploaded at Flickr. This link will have more pictures as we take them. I was going to take the car out this afternoon to various places around Dublin to get some shots – but no sooner had I finished working in the house, it starts to get very very windy and a storm is about to blow in. has started – it’s now thundering – no rain just yet.

The rest of the day it has been roasting – I’ve been working in the cats room putting in the (almost) finishing touches to the baseboard (skirting board for the uk readers) and trim on the floor. I only have the caulking to go now to cover up the few gaps from the incredibly uneven walls. For those of you ever considering replacing the skirting board, get a proper nail gun – it works great.  I borrowed mine from one of the guys at work and it really made a difference in getting the trim in tight to the walls and very quickly too – highly recommended.

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Saturday was sad as we had to say goodbye to the Velez’s who were going back to Oregon.  We caught up with them for breakfast in Panera.  Kristen gave Josiah a toy cellphone – almost identical to Tracey’s, which was a big hit. Hopefully the  noises it makes doesn’t drive them batty on the long drive.  We took several photos (start on flickr) which came out well. I was hoping my gorillapod would work, but the camera is too heavy for the lightweight gorillapod (it was the cheap $10 one – free at buy.com with the google checkout discount) so I had to use the pod’s legs to prop the lens up and hope that it was pointed in roughly the right direction.

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Kristen had a brainwave a while back to go see Jonathan Coulton in concert in Cincinatti – I took Thursday afternoon off from work and we drove the long boring drive to Cincinatti.  The cool thing was that Kristen had volunteered our services to work on the merchandise table before and after the show so we got free entry and a chance to meet with the bands (although they were both spent time with the fans after the show).

Paul and Storm were absolutely hilarious – most of their songs are funny and some are just weird, some are just “huh?”. They also joined in with Jonathan’s songs too in the latter part of the concert – again some of his songs are rather strange (giant squids?) and some are just funny, but well worth going to the concerts if you can.

As we were sitting at the back of the theatre, none of my inside pictures came out very well although the video did remarkably well (although it would have been better with a tripod!).

Video of songs from each of them on youtube (18+) and a couple of photos on Flickr.

The best thing was that I also had Friday off so we went to see Ironman at the cinema which was really good – well worth seeing if you haven’t. We stayed right until the end of the credits for the “extra” and I was pretty disappointed – I was expecting some sort of blooper reel. We also saw the trailer for the Dark Knight film – looks really good too, and seeing as though my work’s nickname is Batman, I just have to go see it.

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Apparently in Canton OH you can get a $250 fine for not cutting your grass and in really bad cases you could end up in jail for a month – which begs the question – whats going to happen to the grass whilst you are in jail? Doesn’t a jail sentence defeat the object?

In related news, we’ve almost fixed our ride on mower. About a month ago the tire came off the front wheel on the mower. I tried getting straps to wrap around the tire whilst inflating – that didn’t work. I called up Lowes and they told me to contact the store as their average tractor repair is $250!  I went into the store and they advised me to buy a new wheel – I did, but the only one they had was for pre 2005 models and the axle was the wrong size. So back to Lowes again to try and get the correct wheel. They couldn’t work out how to order the part so this afternoon Kristen went to Mr Tire. The first person she spoke to said they couldn’t help but someone else overheard and said he could fix it. About 10-15 minutes later he came back with the tire on the rim and didn’t charge us either – so Mr Tire is highly recommended! I now just need to get a replacement cotter pin and put the wheel back on – then wait for it to stop raining.

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Work had a social on Saturday which mainly consisted of races around the office block on GoQuads – small gocarts. We all had a great time as can be seen in the videos on youtube and the photos on flickr of the qoquad races. In this clip Cesar didn’t stop in time….

And for a special treat for my work colleagues (and their roommates), watch Matt and Linda

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