a bit of alison and tony » tony

New Speed Record!

tony — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 21:57:11 +0000

My bike commuting is still going strong, and i’m loving it! Two days this week I set new overall speed records on my way home. I’m up to a moving average of 17.9mph, and a best total time of under 16 minutes! And if you’re wondering, my top peak speed is over 30mph. If you’re a geek like me and you like numbers, check out my stats table on the bicycle page. Since my last post, and thanks to andrew’s employee discount, i’ve pimped my ride with a rear rack and a Topeak MTX DXP trunk bag. The bag is expandable and fits all the various clothes, bike tools, gps batteries, U-lock, disc golf discs, ups packages, or whatever else I end up carrying around. The airflow is also much better than with the backpack and I don’t get nearly as bad sweaty shoulders and back. I also replaced the second set of pedals I broke with a solid set of used platform pedals from Andrew. I decided to try em a few days without the clips and that turned into weeks. It feels much safer, and I still have plenty of power. To round things out, I got a frame mount air pump, and a nice shop grade Specialized tire pump with pressure gauge (I’m running at about 60psi), and a spoke wrench. I also overhauled my front hub with “phils bearing grease.” I’ll have to update the gps plots with my latest speed data. On another note, this morning the cool temperatures were enough that I wore an extra tshirt under my bright yellow drivers-please-dont-run-me-over biking jersey. I didn’t really warm up until after the second mile. It had me wondering what the fall will bring weather wise, and what kind of new bike friendly clothes I’ll want to check out. If you made it this far through my ramblings, thank you for listening, and congratulations on your focus!

Light Show!

tony — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 23:19:49 +0000

After much ado, we finally got our whole ebay/light switch shenanigans worked out! Now we are the proud owners of a remote control fan/light dimmer switch in our bedroom! I installed it last night, and I like it so much Alison thought she might wake up in the middle of the night to find me playing with the remote… Andrea will be glad to hear I turned off the circuit breaker before I installed the switch… no sparks this time… The new switch replaced two analog switches, so until i can find a blank Lutron style rectangle filler wall plate I put an electrical outlet next to our switch… (see photo). It’s not quite ideal, visually, but it works anyway for the time being until Alison let’s me tear a new hole in the wall for a single switch box… neat…

Thanks, Yiayia, for the great gift!

We’ve got Gutters!

tony — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 00:58:49 +0000

We returned from a weekend out of town on Sunday to find that our new gutters had been installed! They match the house so well we didn’t even notice when we pulled in, I went back out to look after we found the bill in the mail! Hopefully now we won’t have so much erosion along the side and back of the house when it rains hard… We also chose to install screens on the gutters since we have so many trees around whose leaves would love to clog up our nice gutters.

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Nice Grass!

tony — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 17:24:03 +0000

Only 8 days since our hydro-seeding we have tiny shoots of grass shooting up all over the yard! It’s tough to see them since they are camouflaged in the green color of the hydro-seed mix. Interestingly enough, I also took a closer look at the hydro-seed mixture and I found some print on parts of it… I think it is recycled newspaper. neat! If you think you see $0.25 in the photo, you’re right. I dropped a quarter in there for perspective. The few larger shoots in the picture are not from the seed, they have been growing on their own since we moved in… You can see the new shoots have a darker color base and are greener on the tiny soft tips… I checked out the roots too, they are pretty long already, some over an inch! They say when the grass gets to be 3-4 inches tall it’s time to mow… we’ll see if we get there before it starts snowing. It’s been oh-so-nice to use the sprinkler system to water the yard and keep our new grass happy! It’s funny since even though i don’t have to wake up to turn on the sprinklers at 7:30am, i still like to get out of bed and watch them do their thing.

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Rain Gutters?

tony — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 17:20:13 +0000

I’ve been reading up a bit on gutters, since our builder (apparently) doesn’t put them on houses. We’ve got some erosion going on along the sides of the house where the rain falls. I was thinking about putting some kind of paver stones on the ground where the water hits, but i think gutters might be a better solution… It looks like a few of the neighbors have had them added, so it’d be nice to talk to them about who they had install them. I’m also considering putting some on myself, since there isn’t much to the job. The major challenge would be that the roof on one side of the house that needs a gutter is about 3 stories off the ground… It might be worth the savings to have somebody else to it so i don’t have to buy a ladder that tall! I wonder if I could rent one, hmm. Anyone installed gutters?

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The Sprinklers are In!

tony — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 02:05:26 +0000

I apologize to those of you who have been following our blog lately since we’ve been so busy we’ve been neglecting to write any new posts… Our latest greatest accomplishment has been installing a sprinkler system! We’d especially like to thank phil & peet for all the help on the project, and Mr. A. for lending us the soldering tools for the plumbing! Yesterday Alison & I finished filling in the trenches and raking out the uneven spots in the yard. I got the controller all wired up and now we are just waiting for the hyrdo-seeding guys to come out and do their thing. Builder Rick said on the phone they should probably be out next weekend… I’m very excited to get our new lawn going!

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