Another Week

This week just flew by for some reason. I guess when you're busy those kinds of things happen. Julie actually took a half day at work today but wasn't home much sooner than normal because she went shopping on her way home. Unfortunately she wasn't too successful as she only came home with a new swimming suit and she's been wanting work clothes.

Grace slept until 9:15 this morning so we obviously didn't do much of anything this morning. We went to blockbuster today to get our free rentals for returning our Blockbuster Total Access rentals. After that we had some lunch at McDonalds. Can you believe they actually told me they don't have double-cheeseburger meals anymore? You have to order everything separately. Anyway, then we ran over to my Aunt's work and dropped off our carpet cleaner. They are having company over the weekend and wanted to clean their carpets prior to the party. After that we ran to Target to get a few things including dinner for today. I just ended up getting some sirloin steaks to grill up and some mashed potatoes and green bean casserole.

I grilled the steak before heading over to the in-laws. It turned out pretty good, but the juice from the steak leaked in the car. I'll have to clean that up tomorrow. I've got so many things to do this weekend it's just crazy. I need to mow the lawn, paint some exterior trim pieces and replace them, pull weeds (just never ends), prime the shelves for the bookcases I made here in the office and another shelf I want to hang up in the dining room. Then there's cleaning (also never ending) and just general getting rid of junk. We plain have too much of it or I have too much. Julie doesn't save much, I'm the saver and boy do I do my part. I've also got so many unfinished projects. I guess I should make a list and start working on completing a few of them. Lists help me a lot. If it's not on a list I generally just forget about it.

I'm going to need to water the lawn on Sunday I guess. We have watering restrictions and can only water on odd days since our house number is an odd number. The other day I said that we got about a quarter inch of rain but we actually got a half an inch. That's not enough so I'll need to water since it isn't supposed to rain now for another week.

I've been getting good responses to my email campaign against Libertyville Lincoln Mercury. Thanks to everyone that has helped already. Please forward to anyone you know!

DirecTV...Morons?

Well today was Thursday and our only real plan was a play date with a friend of Grace's. We ended up canceling that because she was playing with some other friends and it would have been a huge struggle to get her away from all of those friends and over to her other friends house. So we'll have to do that another day.

Since we didn't have any other plans and nothing else came up we just hung out at the house today and played with her friend from across the street. "A" came over after lunch and everyone seemed to have a great day playing and whatnot today.

I was supposed to have a "Dad's Night Out" tonight, but as it turns out the only person that was going besides me couldn't go. So I just invited the neighbor across the street over for dinner at our house. We had some excellent burgers on the grill that I think I got from Oberweis Dairy. I would double check but our internet is out right now for some reason - probably weather related. We're getting some pretty good storms right now.

So anyway, these burgers are completely free of antibiotics, pesticides, etc. and the beef was vegetarian fed, etc. And they were very good! We'll have to get some more...as long as I can remember where we got them.

I never did get the lawn mowed today. I just don't feel well enough yet so I'll have to do it after the rains are over and the grass dries out again which should be in a couple of days - probably Sunday. So after dinner I ran to the library and checked out a book that they bought for me. I had asked for them to borrow it through inter-library loan and they said they couldn't get it and that she was going to put a request in to have it ordered but that was no guarantee that it would actually get ordered. Low-and-behold I got an email today that it was in. So that was exciting. It's called "Beginning ASP.net 2.0 in C# 2005" and it's a big book. I'm looking forward to reading it! Unfortunately the library closes at 9pm or I would have stayed there longer and relaxed as a break was welcome today. Our house seems to be the "community" home more and more lately.

So then I ran to Blockbuster and the post office and came home. Julie was surprised to see me back so soon, but I didn't feel like staying out too late as I need to get to bed and get more rest so I can feel better. So Julie turns on the TV and low-and-behold (there's that word again) the DirecTV-Tivo box doesn't work. So I call DirecTV and I'm on the phone with them for 30 minutes fixing the problem. Turns out that when we added the two new boxes yesterday, they deactivated this box. And I don't mean in such a way that they just turn it back on, allegedly it can never be used again. Which stinks because now we can't even sell it. They don't make the Tivo boxes for DirecTV any more. The only way to get Tivo now is with a Tivo box. So they tried to offer us $10 off per month for the next year. I said that's great but how are we going to record shows? So after a little finagling she was able to provide me with a new dual tuner DVR (not Tivo mind you) for free on Monday afternoon. So we'll be without Tivo for 4-5 days and I'll have to burn all the shows off of the Tivo to DVD (that I actually want to keep) and then we'll have to re-setup all the shows we want to record in the new one. The only good thing about this is that the new DVR has 200 hours of record time and our old one only had 70. So that will be nice, but it won't be Tivo which we love. I asked about a hi-definition DVR and she said that would cost me $300. Julie said no; But actually, that's a pretty good price. Especially considering it's not a lease, they would actually sell it to me which they don't really do any more. All their new equipment is by lease only on their website.

So it all turned out OK in the end, but we are without Tivo for a few days (which really stinks) and we won't have Tivo on the new one; it will be DirecTV's proprietary PVR software. I hope this doesn't turn out to be a horrible mistake.