December 2 weekend – The weekend really started on Friday as
both Susan and I stayed home from work sick.
My sinus infection which started Thanksgiving week had progressed in a
bad way and Susan had a fever and various respiratory ailments. We were a sad lot and I spent much of our
time on the couch while Susan spent mostly sleeping. I had bought a PS4 earlier in the week so at
least I had something to occupy my time.
Saturday was our 19th anniversary of going
out. I wish I could say we spent a lot
of effort in celebrating but we were still pretty miserable and our script was
mostly the same as the day before. We
did go out to a nice dinner at the Parker Garage which was great. My steak was amazing and Susan’s salmon tasty
and enormous and we shared a bottle of wine.
Susan wanted to get some shopping done afterwards but I was just not
feeling it so we went home instead.
Sunday I woke at 4:00 and didn’t go back to bed (this has
been a regular occurrence since I got sick as I would wake up coughing and
whatnot). I was planning to get Susan up
at 7:00 to finally do our shopping but she snoozed me until 8:00. We drove to Wal-Mart to buy food stuffs and
Christmas lights and then Home Depot for butt splices. It was an early day as we were to meet Jeff
at Great Beginnings for a late breakfast at 10:30. The place was packed but we only had to wait
a few minutes to be seated. Jeff arrived
a bit late but not overly so. We drank
coffee, ate tasty food, and talked about cars, video games, and politics. Eventually we made our way to our garage to
work on the Miata. We were very close to
finishing up the engine swap before Thanksgiving and were confident the car
would run on Sunday. Jeff and I set to
it while Susan worked on putting up some Christmas lights. When we finally had the engine completely
back together Jeff started the car and which seemed to be running poorly. I was a bit freaked out by the prospect that
the used engine was a dud but Jeff discovered that two of the coils on the
coil-on-plug setup weren’t firing. This
setup was a custom deal with us originally pulling the coils off of a Toyota
Prius and Jeff wiring it up. Jeff and I
hopped in the WRX and headed to Littleton Pull and Pay to find better
coils. We were successful and, once installed,
the Miata ran beautifully. In fact it
ran better than expected as, upon initial inspection, we knew the head could
use some work I was not willing to deal with at the time. Jeff exited stage left at this point and I
remained to finish swapping out the front struts. This took a couple of hours as I had to do
some alignment tweaks to one side and I’m not exactly quick at this type of
work. I was in a daze as I mounted the
wheels back on the car and took it off the jack stands. I can hardly believe the car is running again
and am excited to drive it around! I
finally figured out what to name the car.
It is called “Scrappy” as its heart (engine) is from the scrap/junk
yard. We spent the remainder of the
evening watching Netflix and Amazon Prime shows with Bella on the couch.
December 9 weekend – The big deal this weekend was a Black
Rhino party we were hosting. This was
the second year we threw this specific shebang and we were to have a large
crowd. Prepping the house was a
monumental task and we working on it off and on over the preceding week. Susan did much of the cleaning in the house
and I spent much of my time organizing the garage. Saturday morning we got up and immediately
went about finishing up. Susan swept,
dusted, and then washed the floors while I wiled away in the garage. Late in the morning we finished up our areas
and took a break to drop off Scrappy at Tires Plus for an alignment. After stopping to pick up ice I cleaned the
guest bathroom and we both showered.
Around 5:00 I began cutting veggies and we laid out the food. The meal was an extensive taco bar with
shredded beef, shredded pork, shredded chicken, and fajita-style chicken as the
meats and a variety of sides and extras for guests to make their perfect
taco/burrito. Jeff was the first to show
up around 5:30 which was early enough I was still in the throes of preparing
food. Others began arriving after the
official start time of 6:00. The meat
was slow to warm up but once it was adequately heated food was served. In all we had around 21 folks in our house
eating, chatting, and drinking adult beverages.
I believe this is the maximum our home can abide if everyone stays
inside (though if the weather was nice out we could have accommodated many more
in the garage like at our housewarming party).
The gift-exchange was to occur at 9:00 but everyone was present and
accounted for at 8:00 so we started then.
This portion of the Black Rhino rules is the same as any White Elephant
with everyone picking a number and opening presents in that order. There were two steals per item and the person
who picked the number 1 was able to swap with someone else after everything was
opened. The gifts were great overall and
there were many “ooo’s” and “aw’s”. The
sole exception was Jeff’s gift which was several nested boxes wrapped in duct
tape and zip ties. The joke was that the
smallest box contained a written note to check the inside side of the largest
box for $50 in cash. The whole
experience took around 10 minutes and required the use of scissors, dikes, and
much consternation. I believe the gift
exchange portion of the night went on for over an hour. Soon after most guests left for home while the
few remaining (mostly my work peeps) stayed to play Cabo. We had fun playing through an entire game
after which Susan and I finally were left alone (around 2:00 in the AM). Bella was doted upon quite a bit throughout
the evening and was exhausted from the attention. We were pretty tired ourselves when we
finally lay down in bed to sleep.
Sunday was unfortunately an early one for us. We had a CO-RX meeting scheduled on the north
side of Denver for 9:00 and had to be up by 7:30. We ended up barely getting out of the house
with enough lead time to arrive at Valerie’s office on-time. As I’m now the RX Director I got to direct
our meeting which felt productive and lasted until after 11:00. After the meeting we dropped off Pitt at
Todd’s shop for some odds and ends to be fixed.
Then on the way home we stopped at Tires Plus to pick up Scrappy. Unfortunately no alignment was performed as
they wanted to repack the front bearings and tighten the axle nut first and
needed my authorization. As my phone doesn’t
currently inform me of missed calls if a message is left (also, it doesn’t tell
me I received a voice message) I didn’t know they’d already reached out to
me. In the end it didn’t matter as I
would have told them not to do anything anyways. Once home I jacked up Scrappy and pulled off
a wheel to take a look before deciding to not delve deeper at the moment. I ordered two new wheel hubs and had to wait
for them to arrive before accomplishing more.
Our plan for the afternoon was to nap and generally relax on the couch
but I felt antsy and directed my energy to our car port. The prior owners had used the car port as a
horse stall and left it uncleaned and essentially full of horse manure. I had cut out the wire fencing some time ago
but left the gate post and door. After
removing the gate door from the post Susan had the idea of jacking up the post
using a floor jack and large bolt.
Unfortunately the post was rotted and simply split around the bolt. She then suggested I wail away at it with our
largest sledge hammer. I did so and
found the wood broke better than expected under my onslaught. I managed to break and smash the wood below
ground-level which was awesome. Not
satisfied I used a rake and flat shovel to muck the remaining refuse as best I
could. I filled around eight wheel
barrow-loads worth of stuff which I dumped behind the car port. Fortunately after six months this muck was dry
and only smelled like hay. Susan was
concerned about where I piled the stuff and there’s a possibility I’ll have to
move it again but, for now, its location is fine. This effort took some time and when I was
done I declared the car port open to porting a car. I will likely have rock delivered to cover
the floor and keep mud at bay but my work was done for the day. We spent the remainder of the afternoon and
evening hanging with Bella on the couch.
Such a great weekend!
December 16 weekend – This busy weekend began on Friday
afternoon for me as I took the tow rig and picked up two large tool boxes from
Lowes. Each weighed 250 lbs and fit
together nicely on the front end of the car trailer. Purchasing and loading the boxes wasn’t bad
but the traffic to the stores (no location had more than one tool box so I had
to make two separate purchases at two different Lowes stores) and home was
miserable. I believe I spent around
three hours driving to and from. Once
home Susan supervised offloading the boxes and helped remove the cardboard and
install the casters. It was 7:00 and
cold by the time we finished so we called it a night without loading anything
into the new tool boxes.
Saturday we didn’t get out of bed until 9:00. I brewed us tasty coffee and we made a list
of things to accomplish over the weekend.
It was a mighty long list but I was confident in our listing
abilities. I headed out to install new
front hubs on Scrappy while Susan Swiffer’d the house. Around 10:00 roughly four tons of recycled
concrete was delivered via a big ol’ truck.
The rock wasn’t exactly what we had in mind but we agreed it would suit
our purpose just fine. After the rock
was dropped in a pile close to the car port and the guy left I went back to
working on Scrappy while Susan replaced a fuse in the one of the strings of
lights adorning a small tree on the west side of the house. Susan soon had to leave to take Bella to the
vet for a booster shot and I stayed to finish the hubs and start shoveling rock
into the car port. Susan then took Bella
to Pets Mart for a Christmas toy and afterwards met me at Tires Plus for a
second attempt at getting Scrappy aligned.
Once back home I shoveled furiously and Susan continued cleaning up the
house. After a time I was satisfied with
the rock in and around the car port and Susan helped with the final touches
before backing Tia inside for a picture.
My lower back was stiff from the effort but we were happy with the
results. It was around this time Tires
Plus called to let me know they were finished with Scrappy. On the way there we stopped for a late lunch
at Chili’s (we were both very hungry).
Susan ended up piloting Scrappy home while I made a quick solo trip to a
packed Costco for wine and meat for the next week. It was soooo busy. After we unloaded my bounty from the car
Susan helped me back the tow rig in its spot at the far corner of the lower
40. We were both spent at this point and
called it a day. The remainder of the
late afternoon and evening consisted of us hanging on the couch with a happy
Bella.
Sunday had me up and out of bed before the sun was up (I
think I got too much sleep the night before).
I used this time to play video games while Susan slept on. Around 9:30 I bugged Susan out of bed and
made us coffee again. We had more
shopping to do and decided to tackle it before anything else. Thus we went to the Lone Tree Wal-Mart for
food stuffs and Christmas gifts. On the
way back we decided to burn through some old gift cards at Texas Roadhouse so I
drove us down to Parker. Somehow between
me knocking over my water and having a new waitress we enjoyed yummy
steak. Through some luck Susan’s order
was partially wrong so she got to bring home ribs to eat at dinner. So much win!
We had to make one more stop at Safeway to acquire gift cards and then
we were finally home. We needed to
figure out rallycross trophies so I hauled the large plastic bin containing all
of the smaller donation trophies into the garage. We had received several dozen small and large
trophies months ago with the intent we were to repurpose them for
rallycross. We spent the next couple of
hours disassembling trophies into piles of trophy components. After a few more trips to the freezer for a
couple of the larger trophies to cannibalize we felt confident we could
generally make due for the 2017 awards with what we had. We were also very cold at this point. Susan hopped online and ordered cool tops for
all the trophies and some new bases. The
existing bases she soaked in the sink and then scrubbed to remove excess glue
from old name plates. Susan also cleaned
some of the other components on the couch.
While she was productive I spent my precious hours surfing the web and
then playing video games. Such is how
things go in our house on occasion.
Looking over the original to-do list was satisfying as we’d crossed off
most everything on it. I feel like it
wasn’t very long ago that our weekends largely consisted of us hanging out on
the couch. This particular weekend was both
productive and satisfying.
Christmas weekend began early for us as both Susan and I
took Thursday and Friday off from work.
Thursday I was up early and played games while Susan slept in. Eventually I coaxed her out of bed with the
promise of coffee late in the morning.
The only plan for the day was to see Star Wars at Alamo Drafthouse at
1:00. We arrived a few minutes early and
ordered food and wine (we love this theater).
We both enjoyed the movie and Susan’s burger was the bee’s knees. Susan suggested we make the trek down to see
the Dawn house afterwards and I acquiesced.
I had to make a quick stop at the Roxborough Safeway for headache
medicine as I had a whopper of one. We
then crept through the old neighborhood and verified our rental house still
stood and not much had apparently changed since we lived there (except at
Safeway where they finally had installed self-checkouts). The evening was spent on the couch with a content
Bella.
I thought Friday was completely free and told Susan this
when she finally rolled out of bed late in the morning. Such was not to be as I’d forgotten about a
Christmas party our racing friends the Rickli’s were hosting that evening at
their home. This didn’t change most of
what I’d intended to accomplish during the day (nothing much) besides that I
now had to take a shower. We ordered
Jimmy Johns for dinner before heading out to Neil and Carol’s just in case
their food was iffy. Their home was
welcoming and they had a nicely adorned Christmas tree. There was a large variety of finger-foods and
a large supply of wine (yay!). Susan
wore a Christmas shirt along with battery-powered Christmas lights and looked
adorable. We chatted with the Ricki’s as
well as other friends we don’t see very often while we wined and dined. It was a nice time and we stayed later than
I’d imagined we would. We finally
ventured home after 10:00 to a relieved Bella who seemed to have caught a brief
bout of the crazies as soon as we walked in the door.
Saturday began relatively early considering the late night
before. We were to meet Jeff for brunch
at Great Beginnings. As per usual there
was a wait for seating but it wasn’t long.
Also as per usual the food and coffee was yummy. We decided to spend some time working on
Jeff’s Miata in our garage so Jeff went to his home to get his Miata and we
went to ours to wait for him. I spent a
few minutes doing one or two things to Scrappy before backing it out of the
garage. I’d installed new brakes all
around and rotors and sway bar in the front earlier in the week. Jeff’s work was of the solo-variety so I
spent the time moving tools from the old tool box to one of the new tool boxes
while Susan worked on cleaning and then assembling trophies. Eventually we made a trip to pick up
additional tools from Home Depot (I had a gift card to burn), hamburger stuffs
at King Soopers, and car stuffs at Advance Autoparts. It was getting pretty chili and we didn’t
spend a whole lot more time in the garage before I grilled hamburgers and we
went into the house to eat. After dinner
we watched Grand Tour with Jeff which was fun for all of us. Afterwards Jeff headed home and we finished
the evening with Bella on the couch.
Twas a nice Saturday.
We actually got up somewhat early on Sunday to make a
Christmas shopping trip to Walmart (evidently now spelled without a
hyphen). Our list of food stuffs was
long and we came home with many bags of groceries (I believe we bought
something like 66 items, a large number for us). We’d picked up rotisserie chicken for lunch
and ate as soon as the bags were unpacked.
At this point I ventured into my room to figure out some Christmas songs
to play and record for Stewart and Lee.
Susan decided to spend what was left of the morning preparing for our
Christmas day meal. After a time I came
out to the living room to record. It
took surprisingly long to find, practice, and finally record the songs. Susan gave constructive feedback through
rolled eyes and corrected some of the lyrics.
I even got her to sing along on one song while holding Bella who licked
Susan throughout essentially the entire time (so cute). It was late afternoon when I finally finished
recording my last song. Susan baked an
apple dessert and brownies for the next day which came out looking great. She also whipped up orange jello which we
dutifully traded off stirring every ten minutes so the fruit would be evenly
distributed. Our slow internet made
uploading the songs a chore as it literally took several hours to get them onto
YouTube (it’s not like I had to hand-crank anything but it was still a bit
annoying). It was totally worth the
effort and I was only mildly chagrined with my performances (Susan made up by
being very embarrassed for me). We spent
the last of the evening watching classic movies (Shawshank Redemption and The
Green Mile) with Bella.
Christmas morning was another early one for us as we had to
prep and start the turkey cooking. This
was a joint effort as I rinsed the bird in the sink while Susan prepared the
bag and rub. We successfully had the
turkey in the roaster and cooking by 9:00 which was perfect time-wise. Then followed a time of cleaning and
preparation of various other food stuffs.
Karen and John arrived right on time at noon followed soon after by Kari
and Alvin. Karen had brought stuffing to
bake and Kari potatoes to boil and mash into mashed potatoes. We set about to preparing the last of the
food and talked about this and that. The
plan was to eat at 1:00 and I believe we were happily munching away at around
that time. We agreed everything was
tasty and we stuffed ourselves on the bounteous delights. A period of digestion followed where certain
members of the family napped on the couch while Susan and I cleaned up. We chitted and chatted about this and that
and watched the songs I’d recorded the day before before sitting down for a
game of Cabo. John and Karen hadn’t
played in quite a while but had the hang of the game again in no time. Alvin vaulted himself into last place immediately
before devastating everyone by successfully pulling off a kamikaze which put
him firmly into first place which he held onto for the remainder of the
game. After John crossed over 100 we ate
a bunch of dessert before heading back to the living room for more
visiting. Soon I was divvying up
leftovers and Susan and I were left alone with Bella. We had a wonderful Christmas! I should also note that Kari and Alvin’s doggo
Ringo was present. He was largely a good
dog throughout the day.
New Year’s weekend
Saturday – we slept in late (especially Susan). It’s so nice Bella lets us do this. When Satchel and Tweetie were young they
would get us up very early in the morning.
I was up before Susan and, after spending some time playing video games,
went out to the garage to putter around.
Susan came out shortly thereafter and helped here and there as we worked
to organize the garage and put up some shelves.
Soon we decided to disassemble the remainder of the donated trophies and
set to it. This took some time and we
sat outside in the sunlight to help Susan keep from freezing. Finally we finished and loaded up a couple of
plastic bins and boxes with the components we wanted to keep and stored them
all in the freezer. After we were done
we set about to taking down the Christmas lights on the house. I was on the ladder plucking them off while
Susan managed the freed strands. This
didn’t take long as we’d employed specialized clips throughout and soon we had
two more boxes for the freezer. We decided
to leave up the lights on the one live tree and also brought around the two
plastic trees to accompany it for a time.
We’ll get those taken care of eventually. At this point we went out to eat dinner and to
do some shopping. Chili’s was the chosen
restaurant and the food was fine. It
seems we’re often sat next to the kitchen entrance at this location. Not sure why but perhaps we look like we
wouldn’t care. I believe next time I’ll
ask for another table. We were going to
stop by Walmart but settled on Target as it was right down the road. We bought New Year’s food stuffs before
heading home for an evening on the couch with Bella.
Sunday we (surprise) slept in a bit. Well, Susan was able to stay in bed while I
was up early again with my weird insomnia.
Eventually I made us coffee and Susan eggs before we decided to take a
shopping trip. We went to the Harbor
Freight over by Santa Fe on Hampden for their New Year’s sale. We LOVE Harbor Freight. It’s like a toy store for adults. We hit the Walmart practically next door
before stopping at Qdoba for a late lunch.
Once home we spent some time preparing for our small New Year’s gathering
and entertained ourselves playing games and watching TV with Bella. Dinner was to be at the Saltgrass Steakhouse
in Parker with Kari, Alvin, and Jeff at 7:30.
I wanted an earlier reservation but they weren’t able to
accommodate. We ordered a shrimp
enclosed in jalapeno popper appetizer which we all agreed was yummy. To a person we ate fillet steaks which were
fantastic. None had ever been to
Saltgrass and we all agreed it was a nice place. Good food and a quiet atmosphere. We do wish the service was quicker but I
suspect it was intentional as part of their planned experience. We finally got back to our home right around
9:00 and set about to imbibing adult beverages.
Alvin brought his Raspberry Pie game emulator thing he’d received from
our Black Rhino and he and Jeff spent some time figuring out how to get it to
work. Eventually we were swapping a game
controller around and playing retro games, many of which were from the 80s. It was surprisingly fun for all including
those just watching the action. Right before
midnight we tromped outside to make a racket and for me to pop a Champaign cork
to 2017. It wasn’t long after that Susan
and I were alone with Bella who had been so cute all evening. Susan was inspired to pull out her Nintendo
Classic console and played Mario Brothers until later in the morning. Twas a great New Year’s!
The first day of 2018 (and the last day I’m writing an
update about for 2017) was largely spent relaxing on the couch with Bella. There was more sleeping in followed by late
coffee around 11:00 (first time making French vanilla which we both enjoyed). We ate leftovers and unfrozened chicken wings
and did some light cleaning from the night before. It was a wonderfully calming day and a great
way to finish the long weekend.
2017 was an interesting year for us and marks the sixth year
I’ve been keeping this journal of sorts.
There were so many ups and downs and laughs and tears though I do
believe the good times vastly outnumbered the bad. We both are looking forward to what 2018 will
bring.
