Pumpkin carving and general fun
This weekend was a ton of fun. Saturday we invited my mom and sister over for some pumpkin carving, we do this every year and we normally do a lunch, dinner, or lupper along with cake and other festive treats followed by the pumpkin carving, and general goofiness.
This has become a great tradition now that we all have kids. Even our neighbor joined in on the fun. I truly enjoy just getting some time to hang out with them and teach the young ones how to carve up a pumpkin.
Sunday we decided to skip church since my mom was willing to watch the kids and allow me and the wife to have a date afternoon. It was a great time. Me and Jess never get to spend time away from the kids and although we love them to peices, having a moment to sit and enjoy a meal with your partner in life is a precious thing. However, you’ll probably laugh, we took our date at Chili’s and then went to Sam’s club to do the weeks grocery shopping 
Enjoy the photos.
Weekend Warrior – Home Projects Update
Over the past two years that we have owned this house we have done a lot to it. Even before we actually closed on the house we had to paint all the baseboards to comply with the type of loan we received. So far we have totally renovated the downstairs bathroom, and laundry room. Those were some tough but fun jobs. We have also upgraded several rooms with new lights, hardware, etc. in order to make the house look like we wanted it to. So this past week my wife commissioned her father George (aka the fixer) to come down and paint two rooms. My wife was very excited, as normally we have always picked paint from the $2 mismatch paint if it was close enough to the color we wanted but this time we bought top dollar high definition paint that was the exact colors she and I wanted.
The downstairs living room was to be painted about 3’ up the wall with a red merlot color and we will add chair-railing towards the end of this week in order make it look like wainscoting. I was at work while the painting was going on and I got a frantic call from Jess saying that while the paint looked fabulous the couch that we have had for more than three years looked horrendous together. She promptly told me that I will be needing a new couch and that she already had the perfect one picked out… Funny how that happened huh? I informed her that it would cost less to repaint the room than to replace the couch, she did not like that. But in the end once the paint dried she was satisfied to keep the couch in place for a while.
The second room to be painted was the upstairs. We picked up a card from the Eddie Bower collection at Lowes that had the exact bedroom we wanted so we got all of our colors from that. A dark blue wall color and khaki trim. The wall color is on and I must say it looks great. I can’t wait until next week when we paint the trim.
Next up is mounting our new 32″ LCD to the wall and sharing an exciting story about my new 40″ LED LCD computer monitor.
Thanks for reading
David Bates
A Robot That Mows Your Lawn?
As a little boy I watched the Jetsons and several other shows that told me that by the time I grew up I would have a flying car and most everything I needed to do could be done for me by a robot. I truely believed this and in early 2002 I was rewarded as the first “home robot” was introduced… I thought who wouldn’t want a Roomba? I shortly realized that most people thought it was a gimmick, too expensive for a toy, or used any excuse they could think of to pass off this miracle. I on the other hand could not wait to get one. I encountered one in 2003 at a job I was working and could not believe that this little bot just toiled away cleaning a floor while I was away doing something else… amazing. In 2008 I happened across a Roomba for $3 that’s right Three bucks! I couldn’t believe when the wife told me not to purchase it… I just had to. Even if it was broke I wanted to dissect it.
Well that $3 has went a long way in our household my wife loves her little robot and uses it almost on a daily basis to keep our downstairs floors clean. It still holds about a 2 hour charge and I have not had to replace a single component on it… not even a filter.
So now to my title, my trusty craftsman lawn mower (a hand me down of 14yrs) is finally not worth fixing and I need to purchase another. I don’t want to just purchase a lawnmower though. I would like to do away with that chore all-together. I would love to purchase a robo-mower, but even after the years of faithful cleaning our little $3 roomba has given her I can’t convince her that buying a robot to mow our lawn would be a good decision. She is willing to buy me a zero turn John Deere instead However I am not satisfied, I must prove that just like the Jettsons we can have machines today that make our lives easier.
So today I have decided to at least investigate how much it would cost for me to replicate our Roomba and make a DIY robotic mowing solution. If your interested stay tuned and I will post updates along the way.
Update 1: Nov, 13th Procured possible wheels and motor from broke RC toy of Daniels:
Update 2: Nov, 28th A list of Current Robot Mowers available for purchase:
RoboMow
LawnBott
AutoMower
Snowpocolipse 2009
The title of my post comes from a twitter saying I started because of all of the news and buzz going around the storm that we received yesterday. Every newscaster was making it seem as though this storm would be the end of the world. So I lovingly dubbed it Snowpocolipse09.
All in all we got about 5-6″ of snow with some ice mixed in. I have a lot of work to do scraping the driveway while my son and wife take an afternoon nap…
Enjoy the pictures below, I hope to take some more this afternoon.
Gearing Up for the Weekend
Well, HumpDay is now over and the weak is drawing closer to it’s end.
I still have a ton of work left to do at work and have plenty of things that need to be done for this weekends remodel. If you have been following along you will know that we had to halt remodeling our bathroom in order to put in a new water heater. link. So this weekend we plan on getting to phase three which involves plumbing and some framing… we are hoping to lay some tile this weekend but I doubt it.
Stay tuned it could be an interesting weekend.
David Bates
