Bathroom re-do

We're getting started re-doing out downstairs half-bath. We're still finalizing some choices, but this is roughly what we're working with:

• White bead-board-looking cabinet from American Woodmark at Home Depot. Ordering this takes 3+ weeks, but will wind up costing us about the same as the in-stock vanities they had (which we didn't really like and which were the wrong size). The opening for our vanity is 35.5 inches. Vanities come in 33 and 36. The man at Home Depot* was helpful on this area -- he told us to get the 33" and use filler to make it fit perfectly (he says that's what he would have done over decades as a carpenter). I hope we can follow directions.
  
• We're still debating sinks/faucets, but this is our latest idea. Classic white sink, chunkier faucet. I think we'll wind up doing brushed-nickel as our metal color/type. We'll have to get a new light, towel holder, etc. too.
  
• The walls will be some shade of greyish-green. TBD exactly. Probably from the Eddie Bauer paint collection at Lowe's (we tend to find things in their palette that work for us).
  
• For art, we want to feature a few of these postcard-prints that Matt bought years ago and which we both like.

Right now, the bathroom is red. Not just red, but "murder red." It's honestly a great color, just not so great for a small bathroom. The walls are a bit rough - had been wallpapered before - so we're going to have to skim-coat them, we think. The old vanity/marble-y top have seen better days. And, the toilet needs to be replaced -- we've replaced it's internal parts a few times, and it now just flushes on it's own randomly. We're not in love with the tile, but it extends into the kitchen, so we're leaving that for another day.

We'll work on the demo tomorrow, and hopefully the new vanity will be here in a week or two. This means a few weeks without out half-bath, but we're excited about the prospects of having it redone!

I'll post before & after pics later!!

*For those in Austin/Cedar Park - from our experience, the employees at the Home Depot on 183 near Lakeline Mall are far more helpful than those at the Arbor Walk location near Mopac & 183. Both the cabinet guy we talked to this time (Jerry) and the appliance guy last time (can't remember his name, unfortunately) rank among the most helpful employees I've ever seen at any store, period. At the Arbor Walk store, you're lucky to get somebody to stop gossiping with colleagues to acknowledge you.

Links: bigger impact

Links about having an impact bigger than just me:

• Child sponsorship in six words. I saw this come across my twitter feed today: can you summarize what it means to sponsor a child in just six words? I tried, but haven't come up with much. I wrote to our Compassion-sponsored child (in Nicaragua) and our World-Vision-sponored child (in Swaziland) yesterday.
• 40 days of water campaign. I'm not sure I'd really sign on for this, but it's an interesting idea. Maybe I could do 40 days of water & unsweetened iced tea (i.e. no mountain dew...) instead. :)
• Love is the movement - (visit twloha if you're not familiar). I'm thinking about making this the theme for my pi-rho rocket this year. Maybe that's a little too serious, though.
  

Links: Food

Recipes and techniques I want to try:

• Pan-Crisped Potatoes (from Mark Bittman at the NY Times)
• Roasted chicken breast (cooked with two pans - from The Cooking Loft on FoodTV)
• While I'm mentioning The Cooking Loft, I also want to try her Mac & Cheese.
• Chicken & Green Sauce (with tomatillos - this is more concept than receipe - found via Mario Batali)
• Enchiladas Suizas (Rick Baylee recipe, from Sur La Table; now that I know I can get what looks to be authentic creama at HEB, I should try this one)
• Lava Cookies (like molten chocolate cakes)
• Lasagna rolls from Giada on Food TV. I tried these once before and liked it overall. I think I want to review how America's Test Kitchen did manicotti recently and combine that technique with the flavors in this dish. Might work (or might not).
• Piquillo Pepper Pesto from Bobby Flay for HGTV Dream Home (skip to middle of page). Matt used this recipe as a jumping-off-point for our a sauce for our Valentines's Day dinner. He substituted Anaheim peppers, and it was delicious.
  

I can't get a link to show up, alas, but we are taking a class on Thursday at Central Market. It's another Tex-Mex class (we don't really need these for technique anymore, but it's a fun date-night for us). This one will be: Tacos al Pastor, Carnitas, Posole con Puerco, Refried Beans, Guacamole & Salsa, and Mexican Pralines. YUM!

Restaurants:

• So happy that Saccones has re-opened in our part of Austin (we've been driving out to Round Rock since the old location burned). Our verdict (after visting on Thursday - during their "soft open" stage) is that the oven isn't quite hot enough and staff not fully trained yet. But, my mouth was happy as I bit into our meatball-and-pepperoni pie. The new restaurant, located just south of Anderson Mill on 620, looks more high class than the old 183 location (nicer looking finishes, not many Jersey-themed-items or license plates). Not sure if that's good or bad, though. :)
• Continuing to enjoy Cupprimo. I admit I haven't gone all-out on the cupcake fad (or has it passed out of fad status by now?). But, among the places I've tried, Cupprimo is the best. Their carrot cake (special on Saturdays) is excellent -- good cream cheese frosting that's not super-sweet.
  

Living in the future: Part 2A: Our Tivo got better

Last night, I realized there's even more to love about our Tivo. We can now download (or stream?) movies from Amazon (for a fee), and can get to a bunch of free programs, too.

The free programs we watched were from Mark Bittman (we've enjoyed his cookbooks, occasional television show, blog, and appearances on Spain: on the Road Again). We watched him make chocolate souffle last night. His style of cooking (minimalist, using good ingredients, and making tasty food) is good for me. (Tivo users can learn more here.)

We only watched one episode from Bittman -then moved on to Battlestar Galactica. We had 2 episodes on the Tivo at the start of the night - and added a third. We were recording the live episode while watching the prior ones, which by itself, is pretty amazing. I won't give any spoilers, but this season of BSG is really suspenseful. The entire series will be worth watching again someday, I think. (and hopefully by then, we'll be able to download episodes straight to our television)

Living in the future: Part 2:Tivo & Netflix

Follow-up to Part 1: Twitter & Flickr - today it'll be Tivo & Netflix

Tivo
I bought Matt our Tivo for his birthday about 2 years ago. Friends told us "Tivo will revolutionize your life!" and "It will make your tv-viewing so much more efficient." Turns out, this is one technology that lived up to the hype. We our Tivo. I've even found myself listening to the radio while driving and wishing my car radio had a rewind button. We can now keep life on our own schedule, and not feel pressured to rearrange activities to watch shows we like. Almost every night we use the "pause" button, to allow us to keep talking to each other - and re-start the live program later.

Overview of Tivo: The Tivo sits between your cable source (i.e. cable box) and TV. The Tivo is hooked up to either by a phone line or network interface and downloads a schedule (customized to your cable company & local area). You can set it to record programs (like a VCR, but so much better). It stores the programs on an internal hard drive, and (if you have the optional network interface) you can also wirelessly transmit those programs to your PC. With Tivo, you can also pause programs while you're watching them, and rewind & fast forward. This means that you can skip commercials (when watching recorded programs) and do things like rewind to catch things you missed (great when watching sports).

What I like about Tivo:

• Just about everything. :)
• Season passes are fantastic. With them, the Tivo will record every time a particular show is on, within the bounds you set (such as recording new episodes only). I noticed recently that I can force the tivo to even record extra time, which I've done for Battlestar Galactica (since for some reason, we were typically losing the last 30 seconds or so.
  
• The way the Tivo stores the programs really works for me. Our programs are stored in folders (one folder for Good Eats, one for Scrubs, etc.). We have ours set to sort those programs by what was most recently recorded.
• The Tivo program list marks programs with easy-to-understand colored dots. Green means "this will be saved until you delete." Yellow means "this could be deleted soon."
• You can specify when you record something how long you want to keep it, and there are plenty of options. We keep at most 5 episodes of Sweat Equity (and when the Tivo gets full, it may pull us down to 3 or 4 episodes for space reasons), but we keep every episode of The Office until we manually delete it (to make sure we don't lose anything).
• Skipping commercials.
• Tivo's fast forward and play buttons are intelligent. If you're watching commercials go by and then realize the program is starting and press play, it's smart enough to not just play right then (which would skip the first few seconds of the program). It rewinds a bit first, so you wind up playing the very start of the program. So smart!
• Our tivo also takes two inputs (one for regular cable and one for digital cable). It keeps both active all the time, which means we can record one show while watching another. Or, we can flip back & forth between two live shows (and use the rewind/fast forward buttons to skip commercials).
  

How Tivo could be better:

• Our Tivo's storage got full as I recorded something like 12 hours of The War, a documentary on PBS about 15 months ago. I just finally finished watching them. But, over the past few months, we'd reached the point where the Tivo's storage was full, so we couldn't keep as many programs as we wanted. I understand there's a way to hack and make the Tivo's hard drive bigger, which we just might do.
• I had a crazy idea to improve the Tivo this week. It already has built-in features to mark something thumbs-up or thumbs-down. If you record a program, it gives a thumbs-up, or you can manually mark things. I think it uses this info to offer suggestions of other programs you might like. I'd love to see this be applied when watching live TV. For instance, if you accidentially stumble across "Horribly nasty medical procedures show" the Tivo would be smart enough to not display images of surgery, but would instead say "Um, you really don't want to see this, do you?" :)
  

Netflix
Matt bought us netflix as a Valentine's gift a few years ago. We don't normally exchange valentines gifts, so I do kinda wonder if it was just an excuse to get something we both wanted. :) Netflix is essentially a mail-delivery video store. Rather than going to Blockbuster, you get DVDs mailed to you, which you watch and return in pre-paid envelopes.

What I like about Netflix:

• No late fees. Seriously a good thing considering how long we've kept a few movies.
  
• You keep a queue online of all the movies you're interested in. You can rearrange the queue at any time. When you return one movie, Netflix sends you the next movie from your queue. This has helped us keep track of things we wanted to watch, but would otherwise forget about.
• You can rent all sorts of things you probably wouldn't bother with if you had to pay for them rental-by-rental. (I.e. documentaries, exercise videos, television shows, etc.)
  

What I don't like about Netflix:

• DVDs come in flat envelopes (the mailing envelope is also your return envelope). This means they can't come with any of the art from the DVD. True, this also happens if you rent at Blockbuster, but at least there you could read the back of the DVD case before you rent it. (Though I suppose I could get all the info I wanted merely by going to my computer.)
• We might rearrange our queue, but by the time the movie arrives (which is sometimes as little as one day) we're in the mood for something else. That's what's led to a few movies staying at our house for months.
• I wish we had more capability to download straight to our television. Someday that may work better for us, I guess.

I think that Tivo will be here to stay. I think Netflix is too, but I think it will evolve into being mostly a download-to-your-TV type service. Mailing DVDs is remarkably quick, but not nearly as quick as it will be when I can download programming right when I want it.

Links: Cute, Creative, or Fun

Cupcake-themed art at Etsy. I love this one - zombies chasing after a cupcake. (initially found via notmartha.org)

"Fresh Vintage" quilt patterns from Fig Tree & Co. I haven't tried them yet, but the graphic design calls me.

Thimble Blossoms patterns. This looks like the perfect baby quilt (if only I had time to do that anymore!)

An easily-assembled 6-foot-tall rocket. That's not the one I bought for Pi Rho this year, however. For that, I'm doing the Super Bird. (High praise, by the way, for ordering via Apogee Rockets - we ordered Wednesday, and our kits arrived today).

Patchwork Pincushion project instructions. So cute!

Turns out there's a Freddy's Frozen Custard in the Austin area (in Cedar Park to be exact). I don't think their custard is as good as Andy's (in Springfield, MO) but it's still quite good - and they have a full menu (not just dessert).

Picture Game

Stolen from Carly, who stole it from Emily (who are both my cousins):

Directions:
1) Choose the 4th folder where you store your pictures on your computer.
2) Select the 4th picture in the folder. (or in my case, because there were no folder, I chose the 4th sub-folder, then the 4th photo in it)
3) Explain the picture.
4) I'm not going to tag anyone, if you want to play along, great!
~No cheating (cropping, editing, etc.) Have fun!!~


This is from 2007. We spent Christmas in Connecticut with my parents. We went into New York and (among other things) looked at the Christmas displays at Macy's. This is one of the display windows. I think this display spun around a bit (hence the blur). I don't remember the themes of the windows anymore, but they were a lot better in reality than in the photo!

Living in the future: Part 1:Twitter & Flickr

I've caught a friend saying the phrase "I like living in the future" a few times recently, mostly times when we're using some kind of new technology to make our lives easier. I was thinking a bit about that today, trying to decide if I really do like "living in the future" or not. In an attempt to write something coherent (unlike the randomness that has been my blog lately), I thought I'd make a few posts about the technology I use and try to come to some kind of conclusion about the costs or benefits.

Twitter
I started twittering July 9th and have only posted 126 updates since then. Compared to many people I know, that's nothing. But, I've found myself looking at twitter about 2x/day for the last month.
What I like about twitter:

• Easy mental break from work. I think it's healthy to take breaks at work, every few hours, to unclutter my brain and get ready for the next project. Checking twitter updates twice a day or so can provide that break for me. This is a bit like how many people go to someone else's office, not to talk about work but just to talk, during the day. Except, with me on twitter, it takes very little time!
• It can be a good way to motivate people. I haven't done a lot of this, but I see it going that way more and more. I've posted a few things on twitter lately that were really meant to movitate my colleagues (coworkers or volunteers), and I think it's working. I've posted things like "Really excited for XYZ" and found somebody later who wanted to talk to me about XYZ (which is exactly why I said something about it in the first place!). I've heard other people talk about this too - using twitter to say things like "my customer rocks" (knowing that your customer is among the people who follow you on twitter).
  
• It helps re-connection when having real conversation, since you already know "what did you do today?"
• It has helped me (a little) know what's going on with coworkers so I can help them. I think more of that would be positive.
  

What I don't like about twitter:

• Messages are too short to really be encouraging or give people the whole story.
  
• Some people write more than I can keep up with. I don't want to miss something good, but don't have time to check it all.
  
• Signal to noise ratio can be high. Some people seem to write about the mundane that isn't really worth the time to read. Sorry... I'm just not that interested in what you had for lunch today unless you're going to tell me where (i.e. restaurant review) or why (i.e. motivate me to pack my lunch tomorrow too).
• I often feel like I have to censor myself away from say anything bad (like I can't say "stuck in a boring meeting" or "really long day today and want to kill so-and-so") but that's probably good most of the time! :)
  

Ways I might use this technology more:

• I'd like to think more about using twitter to motivate or spark some kind of action in others. I wouldn't want to do that all the time (since too much is annoying) but I may try to do that a little bit more.
• I wonder if I had an iPhone (or something simliar and a more substantial data plan for my phone) if I wouldn't use it more, also.
  

Flickr
I've been using flickr for almost a year. I've been putting photos up on our website for years, and I still prefer our website for my travelogues - but flickr fits in my world pretty well. I like it a lot better than some previous generations of photo websites.
What I like about flickr:

• Really easily searchable - that's how I found the great pi pie recently. You've got to look at this.
• And, the searches works with Creative Commons Licenses, so I can find things to use (very infrequently) for presentations.
• Can designate photos to only display to friends or family.
  

What I don't like about flickr:

• I wish regular (non-pro) accounts could have more albums. I don't really need to sign up for pro (not enough volume) but a few additional albums to sort into would be nice.
  

Ways I might use this technology more:

• I like some of what Colleen is doing with the 365 photos - not sure I'd keep up with that, exactly, but it might be nice to post more slice-of-life things to my flickr account.

Overall, I can see both of these maintaining a place in my technological world - at least until the next big thing comes along.