Where the Schmidt hits the fan
I had a very long, very stressful night last night. Denise got in a rather nasty accident with the Explorer last night. She appears to be fine, except for some bumps and bruises. Thank God for that!
Unfortunately, the Explorer wasn’t so lucky. Oh well, it had always been a beater anyway and now its been officially put out of its misery. And it gave its life for a good cause.
I spent the last couple nights rewiring a good share of our furnace room. A little background, when they built our house they installed a very basic thermostat. It wasn’t even programmable. But after a gas bill that I would consider to be excessive, it was time to change that.
I could’ve just swapped it out for a $20-30 5-2 programmable model you can get anywhere but that’s before I heard of the Honeywell IAQ from the fountain of all knowledge. It’s a state-of-the-art system that controls everything to keep it running as efficient as possible. You can only find them on eBay since they’re only sold to contractors. But since the cheapest I saw them for on eBay was $130, I had to talk to the wife. After telling her the whole story with absolutely no bias whatsoever (I swear!), she surprisingly said, “well I live with a geek, we pretty much HAVE to get the cool one!”
Fortunately, I managed to snipe one off eBay for a mere $96. Tonight, I got the fun of drilling a hole in the side of the house so I could run an outdoor temperature sensor. Check out the attached pictures. This little beauty is now controlling our furnace, A/C, humidier and air exchanger.
(No comments about the outside temperature!)
That’s right, the big move-in day is tomorrow! We have our final walkthrough this afternoon and Denise and I are beyond excited!!
A couple days, a successful surgery and a healthy chunk of change later, our little patient is home and doing fine! She gets her bandages taken off on Friday. Then her sutures get removed in 10-14 days and she’ll be good to go. She’s supposed to have “restricted activity” for 8 weeks but if today is any indication, she may have other ideas. Oh well, at the very least we’re keeping her from doing any jumping.
Oh, and she also successfully went #1 and #2 outside today!
Apparently discontent with the already high number of changes in our lives recently, Denise and I took the plunge and decided to get a puppy that we both fell in love with yesterday. She’s a 10-week-old American Eskimo/Papillon mix named (Captain) Morgan.
Oh, but that’s just the start of the adventure! After only owning her for a mere 2 or 3 hours, Denise came back downstairs with her after showing her to her parents. As she was bending over to put Morgan down, she suddenly kicked away and fell awkwardly onto the berber carpet downstairs. She immediately started to yelp loudly and her front paw seemed to dangle oddly.
So… off to the vet we went. We learned that she had a clean break of the two bones in her lower limb and she’ll need to have surgery tomorrow. As you can probably imagine, that won’t be cheap!
It’s now 11:30pm and we’re home… puppy-less. She’s staying overnight at the vet and probably tomorrow as well. Denise is obviously a little broken up over the whole matter and she feels a little guilty for “breaking our puppy”. But hopefully in a week or so, she’ll be good as new. Both of them. 
For those that didn’t know yet, Denise and I are building a house up in Blaine. We were fortunate enough to stumble into a really good situation and we’re really excited about it! We have a tentative closing date of November 26th or sooner (obviously we’re really keeping our fingers crossed for the “sooner”). They should be able to give us a firmer date in a couple weeks when it all gets framed in.
So far, we have the beginnings of a foundation complete with basement walls. They just backfilled it a few days ago.
After a series of delays for various paperwork-related reasons on the buyer’s end, we finally closed on the condo and moved out yesterday. We’ve now officially taken up residence (temporarily) with the in-laws in Cottage Grove. We expect to get some good news from the bank within the next couple days on the short sale we’re pursuing up in Blaine. So hopefully we’ll be living here a month at the most!
For some post-move pictures of the condo, click here.
About a week and a half ago, we completed a task that we began over a year ago when we undertook a whole series of home improvements… we finally put our condo on the market. Quite shockingly, we got an awesome offer on it a mere 3 days later! And just like that, a 12-year chapter of my life will come to an overdue close when we move next Thursday, 7/10.
Making the transition somewhat difficult is the fact that we may not be able to move into the house we fell in love with last week up in Blaine until the middle of August, although that could possibly change (knock on wood). So the tentative plan is to have the movers store our stuff while we shack up with Denise’s parents which is, unfortunately, way down in Cottage Grove!
I experienced a definite highpoint in my life tonight. The wedding? Not even close. I actually got to meet Chocolate Rain guy (Tay Zonday), perpetrator of one of the most viral videos of the last couple years! We were at Leeann Chin and he just happened to walk in. So, much to the embarrassment of Denise and my mom, I went and asked if I could get a picture with him…
For the uninitiated…
It’s good to be back but at the same time, it kinda sucks that it’s over. Here are some stats from the road:
Our full approximate route can be seen here.
Pictures can be seen here.
We had a blast at Six Flags Great America today! Although Denise hated the very first ride we went on, the Superman Ultimate Flight ride. Don’t get me wrong, Denise is no wuss when it comes to rides, she pretty much goes on them all. But she hates the ones where it’s only the harness that lowers when you get on that’s keeping you from a painful, messy death. And the Superman ride is the epitome of that.
Similar to the Batman ride (which we rode on twice and loved), where you’re hanging from the track, the Superman ride throws in an extra twist. Just before it starts, the chairs spin you forward 90 degrees so you’re facing the ground which, as the name would indicate, gives the illusion that you’re flying like Superman. I thought it was a blast but Denise, not so much.
And as long as I’m apparently reviewing rides, the Raging Bull has to be the freakiest roller coaster I’ve been on so far! The only disappointment of the day is that the new Dark Knight coaster was just days from opening! We’ll have to come back for that one. 
Anyway, we left around 5:30pm and drove a few hours up to Baraboo, WI, near the Wisconsin Dells.
Today was a travelling day. We drove from Cleveland to just past Chicago in Gurnee, IL, so we can go to Six Flags Great America tomorrow!
The big highlight of the day is that I got to cross another fast food joint off my list of chains that I had never been to, Fatburger. All in all, quite tasty.
We spent the afternoon today touring the Gettysburg battle site. The overcast, rainy weather matched the eerie feeling I got. The entire battlefield area seems virtually untouched since 1865 except for the monuments littered everywhere. It looks exactly like every picture/painting/movie I’ve ever seen of it. It sounds very corny and cliché but walking around out there you can almost see everything happening before your eyes and imagine what it must’ve sounded like.
After spending a few hours there, we headed west on a very picturesque drive through the mountains of western Pennsylvania. A few hundred miles later and we’re in Cleveland, OH.
We spent the day and afternoon hanging around Atlantic City. Among the highlights, Denise getting attacked by seagulls! Turns out the seagulls on the Boardwalk are fairly aggressive, to say the least. This is mostly because the little old ladies (which AC is FULL of!) insist on feeding them, despite the signs posted everywhere that explicitly instruct you not to!
Anyway, I unfortunately missed this whole episode but here’s how it was described to me. She was bringing her slice of pizza down the Boardwalk to meet up with me for lunch when she felt a tapping on her shoulder. She thought it was either somebody or something bumping into her shoulder but she turned only to find a very gutsy seagull sitting on her shoulder! Before she could react he had made a grab for, and got, a pepperoni off her slice. When she got to where I was, she was almost in tears. Don’t worry, she and I can laugh about it now. Well, I do anyway…
When we’d had enough of AC, we took a long leisurely drive (partly to avoid tolls) up to Philadelphia and across half of Pennsylvania to Gettysburg.
After walking what had to have been at least 5 miles yesterday, we got kind of a late start today. Once we got going, we headed towards Independence Hall. Since we were in Philadelphia and in need of sustenance, I just had to have a real authentic Philly cheesesteak. And there just happened to be a famous place right across from the parking meter we found called Sonny’s Famous Steaks. I ordered up a “Classic”… a cheesesteak with Cheez Whiz and fried onions. It was absolutely delicious!
After lunch we walked a few blocks to check out Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell. This kind of stuff has been especially interesting to me since I finished watching (and really enjoyed) the HBO John Adams mini-series right before the wedding. Before heading out of Philly, we just had to check out the Rocky statue. Ok, that was totally my idea but I dragged Denise along. We got our pictures with it too but I can’t really upload it yet since we’re once again without highspeed internet access. What is this? The 90s?!
Tonight we’re once again looking out on the ocean from a top-floor room. This time we’re at the Showboat Resort & Casino in Atlantic City, NJ.
