travis' brain dump

Well, nothing really has been too blogworthy lately, except the stories i’ll share shortly. *shrug* It has been much more recent (those of you in the public world who don’t see the private posts) than June 16th since my last post. Again if you’re a friend/family/etc you can always request a login. 🙂 Things are still counting down for the wedding in December. So much to do still. It’s going to be an incredibly busy 5 months getting things around the house done before the end of the year. But it will be worth it. We can start the new year out somewhat relaxed hopefully and just enjoy being a family rather than putting out fires. *knocks on wood*

So…

Arwen shaved her head yesterday. Ok, so she didn’t shave it, but to my shock and horror, she cut a huge amount off. In the time it took me to post 6 resumes and reply to two emails, little Arwen the wonder monkey, scaled up onto the counter and on top of the fridge to fetch the scissors. She was a child with a mission and nothing was going to stop her. She proceeded to sneak upstairs and into the bathroom and go to work on her new hairstyle. No more than thirty minutes after I had last seen her watching TV in the living room, I happened upon her in mid-style. My first response was ‘ WHAT ARE YOU DOING!? ‘ to which she dropped the scissors, jumped over the toilet and dove into the bathtub. However humored I was, shock had already taken over and I was losing it. At least I held myself together enough to try to figure a way to resolve the problem at hand. I assessed the situation, sent pictures via mobile snapshot to Amanda and my mom and cried right along with her while I evened out the mess before taking her over to have the rest repaired by Shelley over at Arvada Hair Co. Shelley did an amazing job though and thanks to my mom for footing the bill. 🙂 Pictures of Arwen’s new do will be posted up in the next few days in the picture section.

In other news. Amanda got through some car trouble this week and I’m really proud of her. She went out yesterday morning to crank her car and much to her surprise, dead. Evidently her battery had corroded over pretty well and there wasn’t enough connection to conduct enough power to crank. Oops… 🙁 Well, she called up her brother who came over and jumped her car off and got it started. Sadly this wasn’t the end of the problems, just the beginning. Now her car was stalling and hesitating while she was attempting to drive anywhere and not acting very happy. She took her car over to her brother’s house after work for an oil change and to take a look at the problems at hand. No luck, the car still ran horrible. Tyler and I both suggested she take her car over to Autozone and get CEL code checked to see what the problem was. P1580 — At least it pointed to the problem right? Despite the fact the person at Autozone had NO idea what that code meant at least we got it. Luckily I had the chart with all the codes on it. 🙂 Well, good ole Volkswagen in all their German ingenuity can’t seem to make the throttle actuator alignment survive a dead battery. Go figure. So I had Amanda go over to Checker Auto and pick up a 10mm wrench (for the battery terminals) and terminal cleaner. Yay! After about 15 minutes the terminal clamps and the posts were nice n shiney and we let the car sit for a few hours to clear out any settings stored in the ECU. We got back on the phone and Amanda followed the steps perfectly to realign the throttle alignment actuator. She did awesome and wouldn’t ya know it? Car runs great now. :) The car still has a couple issues with it, but I’ll take care of those soon enough. Already know what those are thankfully and it shouldn’t take too much effort to fix. Hopefully we don’t need a new switch unit though. That wouldn’t be fun, but alas not the end of the world. Again proud of ya babe, you did great working on your car today. 🙂

Well, I think thats pretty much it. Other than that, things are going pretty normal around the house. Garden got all finished, lawn looks great, trees are pruned… outside is all done. lol. I’ve started working on the guest room again however. At the rate I’m going I should have it all done within the next couple of weeks. Just glad I’ve got everything needed to finish the walls. The new carpet, retiling of the hallway/entry and the new door will have to wait a little bit, but overall that’s easy stuff I can do on a Saturday afternoon so whenever I get some extra cash, I’ll knock that out pretty quick. Next major projects… two new windows for the front… Gotta knock those out before winter for sure. At least then I’m down to just one more main window (upstairs master bedroom) and the little windows in the bathrooms and kitchen… woohoo! 🙂

Well, it’s time to wind down for the night. Got a busy day tomorrow building a deck with Brett and it starts early.

later.