Thanksgiving (Chow)

We need to start having more people over for Thanksgiving. This year, despite the hardships of our rather crappy new kitchen with few if any workspaces for real cooking, we managed to turn out entirely too much food that we had no chance of consuming. Besides the turkey, it stuffing, and a separate vegetarian mushroom stuffing, we had a crusty creamed spinach, mashed cauliflower, baked potatoes and yams, roasted brussel sprouts, scalloped potatoes, home-made cranberry sauce, two roll variations, and some curried yams. I think that covers it.
Not to mention the obligatory French onion soup I have to make but wouldn't touch if you paid me. And then of course the leftover dishes...turkey chili, risotto, etc. Can't wait until our parents live close enough to eat some of this stuff!

Office Reborn

This Thanksgiving thanks to a visit from SAM I was finally able to move my desk into the room that is supposed to be my office. The massive and heavy barrister's desk couldn't make it through the door, which is one of the reasons I cut a big hole in the office's wall.
I had to build a device to keep the desk from destroying the drywall at the bottom of the hole since there was no way two people could dead-lift the desk.
I also needed to pick up a second furniture dolly so we could move the desk from the far bedroom to its staging area in the family room. The desk would only fit in one orientation, and it cuoldn't rest on its curved decorative front, so the fronts of the drawer sections were the only viable transport points.
Once in the family room we flipped it on its 2" thick slab of a top and lifted it up onto my carpet-covered temporary shim.
After that it was pretty easy to slide it into the office and lower the other end onto the floor.
It actually turned out to be pretty easy once the plan was in place.

(My father is to thank for suggesting how two old and feeble men could maneuver the desk into place on their own. In gratitude I have made sure he wasn't one of the movers.)

And So It Begins

The wife had a confirmation ultrasound yesterday and sure enough there was an few pixels of proto-heart fluttering away. Our tech zoomed right past some pretty decent shots of the 6 mm blob several times before finally settling on this nondescript smudge, but presumably we'll get slightly more interesting pictures in the next year or so.

Now all the chocolate belongs to me.

Rehoming Largely Complete

We ended up in that hotel for a lot longer than anticipated, but we are finally out and ensconced in our new permanent residence. Even better, our old residence is finally off our hands only slightly under a month after its closing was originally scheduled. We may even receive the money for its sale at some point!

Our new home is dangling off the tail-end of an older gated community in unincorporated Windermere. The view above is from the master bedroom, across the huge walled lanai, and down the lot to a little pond where we saw a wood stork the other day.

The house is empty but for a few statues, which will be corrected -- perhaps over-corrected -- tomorrow. It is also in need of continuous updating for the next several years, so we are really looking forward to AM moving down here to join us. Initially though we are going to concentrate on getting some fencing up for the dogs and knocking a desk-sized hole in the wall separating what will be my office space from the family room.

What a relief!

La Quinta Sweet La Quinta

We've made it intact from Chicago to Orlando without losing a single animal! Now we're stuck in a hotel for an undetermined duration of no less than 2 weeks. Hopefully we won't eat each other.

Southward Ho!

NDM has accepted a new job at Disney's Animal Kingdom in Orlando starting at the end of August. Finally, some blessed relief from our hot and humid Chicago summers :-) We'll be moving down sometime about the third week of August. If anybody wants to buy our house in Westmont, don't be shy!

Loremo

If I thought that the Loremo was coming to the US any time in the next decade, I'd be planning on this for my next car. There are two doors, the front and the back, and you step into the car (video). Sadly, it doesn't look like this car or any of the alternative plug-in vehicles are going to be readily available to the consumer for years and years yet. At least not in the U.S.

Adjust Your Set

Why isn't there a basic cable channel that shows an endless loop of HDTV calibration instructions? It could air pluge patterns to properly adjust your brightness and so forth. While this wouldn't be quite as awesome as a 24 hour channel that did nothing but fact-check the previous day's excreta of politico lies, it would be at least slightly awesome and is much more easily achievable.