History

I've been on kind of a history kick lately. Just finished reading Miracle at Philadelphia, which is a blow-by-blow account of the constitutional convention in 1787, based upon correspondence from the participants and records kept by James Madison and others. Now I'm reading 1776, which, as you might guess, is about the beginning of the Revolutionary War.

I've also become interested in antique maps. We recently ordered an original 1926 map of Springfield township, which includes a depiction of our lot with the original owner's name written by hand. The original owner built the house himself, housing his family in the garage while he and his brother completed construction.

This town dates back to at least 1686 (there was recently a house from 1688 for sale!), so there's plenty of history to explore. I'm really interested in learning more.

FIOS in the house

We recently switched over to Verizon FIOS from Comcast. Comcast was just too expensive--and they just raised their rates again. The guy was here to install FIOS today, it took him a couple of hours but so far so good. The internet is much faster; haven't watched TV yet so we'll see about that. The best part is that it's 35% cheaper than Comcast. After the first year the rate will increase when all the promotions expire, but even then it'll be cheaper.

Switched our cell phones too, no complaints so far. The rate was the same as AT&T but Michele gets 17% off each month because of working at Temple. Nice.

Movies and games

Watched Be Kind Rewind over the weekend--pretty good movie, not hilarious or anything but still funny at times. In a nutshell, it's about two guys who accidentally erase all the videos in a movie store and decide to recreate them on their own.

Played some Wii this weekend. Dr. Mario is still good fun, and now you can play it online against someone else with a Wii. Melinda when are we playing you? Also been playing World of Goo, which is a neat puzzle game where you build structures out of balls of goo in order to get the other goo balls to the end of the level. It sounds weird but trust me it's fun.

First snow

Got our first snow of the season today. It started overnight and there was only a little bit on the ground this morning, but we're supposed to get an inch or two.

You have any weekend plans? We're going out to watch the Flyers/Sabres game tonight with a friend, but then nothing else all weekend. Nice to have a quiet, do-nothing weekend for a change. Then all of a sudden it's Thanksgiving, and that weekend big sister and two NYC friends are visiting. Fun stuff!

Door results

When the guys installed our garage doors last week we had a webcam set up to watch. I saved a bunch of the pictures and made this slideshow of the progress. Pretty neat. We still have to paint the new wood they put up around the door on the right side.

Cold

It's only November 19, but man is it cold outside. It's 28 right now. I guess it's payback for the 70 degree day we had last Saturday.

Pals

Kitchen Nightmares

Anyone watch Kitchen Nightmares? It's on Thursdays at 9. Great stuff. Gordon Ramsay, British celebrity chef, visits failing restaurants and turns them around. The restaurants usually have some massive sanitary problems, or the cooks can't cook, etc. It's worth watching just to see Ramsay explode at the owners after finding out the kitchen's full of roaches or the cooks don't know how to make rice.

The UK version is apparently less confrontational and more about the inner workings of a restaurant, which also sounds pretty neat.

Doors are done

The new garage doors are installed. Took them more than one day, but they look pretty nice. I'll post a before and after this weekend.

New garage doors

Not the most fascinating topic, I know, but today we're having new garage doors installed. We're using the Overhead Door Corporation, and so far we are not pleased. They were supposed to do it last Wednesday, so me and Michele took the day off and my dad came up, so we could do some work on the house while they did the doors. Well, they called that morning to say the doors hadn't arrived at the warehouse and they couldn't do it that day. We had scheduled it almost a month prior! So Michele wasted a day off. We must get a better deal because they messed up, right? Wrong. Not even a measly $50 to show that they were sorry and were acting in good faith.

Then I have to call them repeatedly just to talk to the installation guy, who never calls me back. We didn't know they were coming today until he called me at 7:45am, while we're on the train.

Anyway, we have the webcam set up to watch the installation. Check it out.

The offseason

Funny article by a former MLB player on what they do in the offseason.

Testing out the photo album feature. This is from a zoo trip a few months back.

A new era

Hey all, this is my new blog. Moved over from TypePad, which was super slow and not worth the cost. This is free. My goal is to just write short little posts, not the long ones I did at the old site. That way I'll post more often. Sometimes I might just post a link to a news article or some other website, with minimal comments. We'll see how this goes.