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The office is coming along

We went to Ikea while we were in Minneapolis for a wedding.  I had heard a lot about Ikea, and most of what we saw was some fairly good quality stuff.  There was some dorm room quality stuff I wasn’t too impressed with, but for the most part it seemed to be an excellent value.

We settled on a Galant desk system for the office.  Unfortunately, one piece of the desk top is too big to ship UPS, so the shipping cost was going to be $300…  and we had driven Lisa’s car instead of the pickup.  Oh well.  I have ordered all the frame and leg pieces, and will be making the desk top myself out of some birch plywood.  The only part giving me any concern is a large radius cut for the top, and how to treat the edges.  I’m leaning toward some hot-glue veneer edge band, mostly because of that radius.

In the mean time, the floor is looking good and my buddy Stu tells me some satin polyurethane will touch up the finish if I need to do any trimming or sanding.  Have not gotten on the air yet, but it’s coming one of these days.  Oh, and the Fusion averaged about 36 MPG for the trip.  38 on the way up with a tail wind, 34 on the way back with a headwind.  It was getting around 36 each way on the east/west legs, with a slight crosswind.

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A new office

It’s nice to get out of the basement!

For the last couple of weeks I have been working on a new home office.  We took the carpet out of one of the empty bedrooms, painted the ceiling (thanks, Rob!) and walls, and I put in a bamboo wood floor.  After putting the trim is back in place, I ran phone, Ethernet and coax cable to a wall jack and moved my work laptop up here.  Now all I need to do is find some suitable furniture, as the computer table I am borrowing is really not the right height.

It’s looking like I may finally get a working ham station too.  There is a good sized window over the back yard, with a good run to two maple trees.  I had plans to run a number of end-fed half wave wires to the trees, but have decided to just run one end-fed wire instead and use a tuner.  I managed to toss a temporary run of around 70′ or so into one of the trees, and the rig’s internal tuner managed to match it OK on several bands.  Haven’t tried any contacts yet, maybe if I get a chance today.

Of course now I have to clean up the basement area where I had been working.  Ugh.

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Spammers suck.

This morning I came downstairs to find over 100 SPAM comments had been posted to my blog overnight.  None of them were ever visible, of course; I don’t allow comments to be seen until I have seen them first, and that is the exact reason why.  So far I have had one real comment (thanks, Lisa!  I love you, too) and several hundred spammers trying to publish links to God only knows what.

Screw ’em.  I have a delete button, and I know how to use it…

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Fusion Hybrid, 3 months in

Well, we’ve had the Fusion Hybrid for roughly 3 months now, with a little under 3600 miles on the odometer as I recall.  This car continues to perform extremely well.

Saturday we took it to Hastings to watch the Broncos soundly defeat Briar Cliff (34-20, and the game was not as close as the score would indicate).  From Omaha to Lincoln we were in heavy Husker football traffic, moving at a steady 65 MPH.  I think we were in a pretty constant slipstream with the solid line of cars and trucks, we got 43 MPG between our Omaha fill-up and the far side of Lincoln!  Amazing.  Our overall mileage for the 299 mile round trip, including some in-town driving in Hastings after the game, was 38.6 MPG.

I wasn’t exactly nursing it along; we drove at the same speed we normally would have, other than the Omaha-Lincoln stretch.  There we drove as fast as possible, which was 65 MPH.  After we cleared Lincoln, I had the cruise control set for 70 for the rest of the trip out and back.  We stopped at the Stangs’ house to pick up Buddy on our way home.  I figure we used less than $19 worth of gasoline for the trip, and less than half of what my truck would have used.  In fact, we probably got almost the mileage we would have gotten on the Harley.

As for the features other than fuel economy, the car is still impressive.  Lisa likes the rear view camera and early warning system when backing out of places; it’s pretty nice that the car will pick up approaching vehicles and warn you before you’re able to see them in a crowded parking lot.  The sound system is great, and we’re even getting used to using the Sync system occasionally.  The hands-free Bluetooth is nice.  We’ve loaded several CDs into the car’s internal jukebox hard drive; my only gripe there is that while you can play music from a USB drive, you can’t transfer the files to the jukebox.  Oh well.

It’s a keeper.

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Shooting at The Bullet Hole

Played a little hooky today; I took an hour and a half to take a trip to TBH with Pete and his friend Austin.  We managed to come home a couple of pounds lighter, having gone through 100+ rounds of .40 S&W, 50 or so rounds of .44 Magnum and a couple boxes of .22 ammunition.  Much fun was had by all, and I think I may have brought home more .40 brass than I started with for a change.

The guy in the next lane had a suppressed .45 and a suppressed Walther – didn’t see whether it was a .22 or a 9mm.  On a bright note, it looks like Titegroup works quite well in the M&P .40 Compact, so I can go ahead and load up a bunch of rounds with that.

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The French Cafe

We’ve seen a lot of restaurants come and go.  Many follow a path that is, by now, rather predictable.  We saw it with Colton’s most recently.  A new restaurant opens, and it’s great – great food, great service, nice decor, etc.  We go there fairly frequently (for us anyway).  Then something happens; the food quality falls off, service gets sloppy.  Pretty soon we don’t go there any more, and more often than not the restaurant ends up closing.  So, it’s good to know there are some places that have not lost their edge over the years.

If you have not eaten at the French Cafe recently, you really do owe it to yourself to do so.  Lisa and I had our anniversary dinner there.  It’s really the only place I can think of that has remained consistently close to flawless over the years we have been going.  Our most recent visit was every bit as impressive as our first.  The service was spot on, attentive but not intrusive.  The food was beyond excellent — where else can you get French onion soup that good, and escargot?  Nowhere that I know of, not around here.

The menu is fresh, not just the same thing year after year.  Tony and Valerie Abbott keep things new without getting too far out in left field.  I can only hope they keep it going at the same outstanding level until they can pass it along to someone who will do as good a job.  I hope to have our 50th anniversary dinner there too!

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Ford Fusion Hybrid

Well, we’re now the proud owners of a Fusion Hybrid.  Nice car!  The highway mileage is around 35-36 so far, and about the same in town.  It’s supposed to get better as the car breaks in, we’ll see how that goes.

the new car...
the new car...

All the toys; heated seats, LCD for the nav, radio, backup camera, and other displays.  The sound system is pretty good, sounds great – but no HD radio?  What were they thinking?  That’s really pretty much my only complaint, though.

Lisa at the wheel
Lisa at the wheel

Smooth, quiet, adequate power and then some.  500+ mile range on a tank of gas, so far (we haven’t filled it yet).  10,000 mile oil change interval.  Plenty of room for even tall people in the front and back.  Looks good.  Drives quite well, and they didn’t skimp on anything that we’ve found – right down to the fatter-than-expected Michelins.

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Going forward

I think one of my least favorite little bits of corporate doublespeak is “going forward“.  We no longer plan for the future, do things from now on, or talk about beginning now or starting tomorrow.  “Go-forward” seems to have also replaced most adjectives.  Nothing is new, it’s “go-forward” – likewise, nothing is old, it’s “legacy”.

I’m in a meeting this morning.  12 minutes in I had already lost count of the number of times the speaker mentioned the “go-forward solution“, the “go-forward organization“, “go-forward method“, or the apparent favorite du jour -  “from a go-forward perspective” and “on a go-forward basis“.

I can only hope this particularly insipid bit of drek falls out of fashion soon, though I suspect it will be replaced by something equally stupid.