Month: December 2012

Out With The Old

We’re spending a quiet, well inside at least, New Year’s Eve at home. No parties requiring bean dip for us. Me in front of the PC watching a fuzzy ESPN stream of Clemson vs. LSU from a European server and Donna on the couch reading a Daniel Steele novel with the movie Enchanted on as background.

With the Leaf antenna screwed into the dedicated UHF port on the preamp and the rabbit ears connected to the VHF port over the air free TV was just fine watching the NFL on the 3 channels that it shows on. Including the previously pesky FOX54. The real test will come next time we are in the middle of a rainstorm.

The End Zone Entourage League’s season finished up yesterday. I made the playoffs with my mediocre 7-6 record because unlike last year when only the top 4 teams got in, this year everyone got in. I’m pretty sure that the owners of the top four regular season teams are not happy with me as Commissioner because one of the changes I made was that all 12 teams made the playoffs. Those top 4 did get a bye-week, but three of them promptly lost their first game to the underdogs. And the underdogs had their day in the Championship game as the 4-9 regular season #12 seed beat the 5-8 #10 to take home the coveted Trophy To Be Named Later.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1188

We’re Gonna Need A Bigger Antenna

Our Leaf antenna manages to outperform the cheapo rabbit ears. The signal is somewhat better and we now get the SCETV’s 3 channels, but FOX channel 54 and it’s secondary channel are no better. When it is cloudy and windy, all except for the NBC stations channel can get pixelated. So I ordered a pre-amplifier.

It arrived Friday and when I came home from work the first thing I did was hook it up. Wow, waste of 20 bucks. Maybe it helps on some channels, but it didn’t improve the one channel, UHF 54, that we really needed the help with. Sigh. How much is my time and hassle worth to ship this item back?

What is really odd that the folks at TV Fool.com say I should have no issue with channel 54…

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1187

Tetralogy

For Christmas in 2007 I asked for the Bourne Trilogy as one of my gifts. Almost every year since it has been a holiday tradition here on Boardman Road, Dunbarton Oaks, Aiken to watch the three movies. This year was no exception, but with one exception.

The Bourne Legacy came out on DVD on December 11th so we watched the “4th movie” of the trilogy. I’m pretty sure that next year we will stop at #3 The Bourne Ultimatum. I don’t know what to think, it wasn’t a bad movie, I don’t regret the 2 hours spent watching it, but it wasn’t very good either and being a BIG fan of the first three movies certainly didn’t help. The ending was very abrupt, almost like they are expecting to make another movie with these two characters on the run, but judging by the money figures on IMDB that’s just not going to happen.

A Holiday Message From The Life Of Brian Staff

Christmas Lights

Please accept — with no obligation, implied or implicit — my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable tradition of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your preference.

In addition, please enjoy a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2013.

Who Knew?

All,

Last year after Christmas we picked out our Christmas cards for this year, sue us, we’re frugal. We found them at Kroger and there were 4 different sized cards in each box all with the same style. Donna sat down as she does every year writes out the cards and I place the stickers and stamps on each envelope.

Turns out there is a minimum size envelope that can be run through the automated sorter machines at Post Offices and one of the four sizes we mailed was too small. So over the last 4 days, we have gotten your cards returned to us with various notes attached on the envelopes from “This is too small and undeliverable” to “Additional 20¢ postage required.”

Instead of trusting the additional 20¢ we opted to buy regular stamps and place your cards in regular sized envelopes, so sorry for the lateness of our Christmas greetings.

We got back 9 cards and we think there was a total of 10 of the small sized envelopes. The missing one might have gone to Canada where we hope the natural politeness of the Canadians applies to their postal service and it will get delivered anyway. If it ends up going to somewhere in America, someone on our list will be greeted by a USPS delivery person ransoming the Christmas card for 20¢

Merry Christmas,
Brian & Donna

Sticker Shock

Another hour in a Lowe’s shuffling cabinets around on a computer screen. We settle on a counter top, man-made quartz for the greatest heat resistance (because we are so used to plopping pots from the stove onto the current tile) and some floor tile ideas. Now we have some video game looking renderings and a price sheet.


I showed the guy how to copy the image file on his screen and paste it into an email, but the 2Meg file size exceeded the limit Lowe’s would let him send per message, so these are cell phone pictures of the computer screen. I adjusted the white balance and perspective as best I could to get them to look like I remember them looking like in the store.

The cost of just the cabinets, no installation, and counter top with installation came to 80% of our ideal budget and 60% of our max spending limit. Yikes!

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1186