A Milestone Of Sorts

Posted on by Jordan

Not too much to post about today, but I wanted to observe that, according to site-meter, there have been over 1000 visitors to heatherandjordan.com!

given the number of ways browsers can be hidden from sitemeeter, its not a hugely meaningful number, but interesting none the less.

also, Heather and I got the picture DVDs burned over the weekend. Now we just have to figure out a way to mail them safely. I also uploaded the entire CD worth of pictures to the website, but as I feared the order is a colossal mess, and we are still trying to decide what to do. Plan A would be to re-order the pictures in the gallery, plan B is to cull the album down to a handful of our favorites so they aren’t so painful to sort.

I will keep you posted 🙂

-Jordan

Finished A Few Things!

Posted on by Jordan

Ok, so its going to be a short list… But I am still excited about it.

Over the weekend, Heather got the finishing touches on the picture CD that has been in production for months now! We still have to burn copies, but having the pictures all together, edited and in order is a huge step. I hope to upload them to this website soon, but may end up settling for a Picasa web album as I know Gallery is going to mess up the order of the pictures. I don’t really relish the thought of fixing the order one-by-one in their clunky web interface when there  are over 500 pictures in the album.

The second item is my car loan! Its an amazing feeling to be done paying that off. Heather and I were planning to aggressively work on that loan, as per the Dave Ramsey school of thought, but we were afraid it would take much longer to actually knock anything out. We are very grateful for the generous gifts people gave us for the wedding, allowing us to get a huge head start on that.

-Jordan

Didn’t Make It to Oz Last Night

Posted on by Jordan

The weather forecast was pretty dire yesterday afternoon. As the evening progressed, the sky to the west started to look rather dire too. Heather and I were setting on our bed, looking out the window while keeping one eye on the weather maps via. the laptop. We have a rather good view looking west, there is basically nothing blocking our line of sight for miles.

At some point during the more exciting part of the storm, I started pondering the fact that our apartment was rather exposed. The complex is named “Whispering Hills” I started thinking of new, more accurate names:

  • Wind-Raked Hills
  • Wind Buffeted Hills
  • Roaring Hills

I am sure there are more, but I can’t seem to think of them right now. In the end, the storm didn’t amount to much more than some wind and rain. I was thinking the entire time that I should take pictures, but the lighting wouldn’t have been great, and wind is remarkably hard to photograph. It would have been ideal to have some sort of web-cam rig doing a picture every five seconds, then I could have stitched together a video showing how quickly it got dark, then light again once things blew over.

-Jordan

Mid Week Updates

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I went to the dentist today! I really don’t have much of a story to post. Its odd though, I went almost six years without going to the dentist, and when I finally went in had a grand total of two cavities. Six months later, I go back in and have two more cavities. The worst part is that I eat so much less of the kinds of things that would encourage tooth decay now. The only consolation is that the cavities were declared “minor” whereas the ones I had before required hours of grinding to remove.

In less dental related news, I feel really guilty about not having pictures posted on the website yet. Heather nearly had the photo set for the CDs ready, and I was going to load the same set to the website. Unfortunelately somehow I broke the smoke and mirrors that Picasa uses to do its “I auto-save as you work, but don’t write out to disk until you click save” as you edit pictures. Lucky for us it only damaged something like three pictures. Between that and the sheer number of thank you cards Heather still has to author, enthusiasm for the photo project has been pretty thoroughly sapped. I still hope we can get something started on that before the end of this week.

-Jordan

Decorating

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Heather claims that we are *done* decorating the apartment now. That statement comes with the implicit disclaimer that once she gets wedding pictures ordered, we will get to take down all the frames on the walls and load them with new pictures.

Not to say that I dislike the decorations we have, or even minded putting them all up, I just didn’t realize we needed so many.

decorating

That’s me, hanging one of a number of stars we just recently added to the walls in our bedroom. The decorations look good now, and will look great once we have pictures of people we actually know in the frames! 🙂

As of this past weekend, I finally found a home for every last wedding present. The weekend before that, I spent a fair amount of time hiding cables and computers. Before I got married I honestly couldn’t think of a reason you wouldn’t want over-sized computer cases, and who cares what color they are, as long as they have good airflow and the internal layout is easy to work with. As it turns out, huge blue glowing PC towers are offensive to the apartment decor. Also, the idea of CAT-5 cable running to all corners of the apartment was a tough sell, I did manage to hide it pretty well. Maybe Heather is just graciously ignoring it…. I wont ask 🙂

I am still trying to track down a replacement TV connector for an NVIDIA 7800, and our media center will be hooked up and running on the TV. Heather has the decorations looking amazing, sans pictures, and we don’t have huge piles of sutff in the corners! It seems like we should have people over to visit just to see how nice it is now, but a two bedroom apartment can get pretty crowded… So I won’t invite everyone over at once 🙂

-Jordan

Mishaps With Sharp Things

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This post started out as just talking about a knife from last week, but my slow posting rate mixed with a slip over the weekend has expand today’s topic.

First off, the knife! Heather and I got a lot of really nice things as wedding and shower gifts. One of those things was Pampered chef knives. Well technically, the knives weren’t a gift, the gift money from the shower paid for them… but yeah, close enough.

I should start off by saying I really like the knives in general. They are really nice! Very sharp and the handles are, for the most part, comfortable in my hand. The problem is with the parring knife, the blade is extremely fine, so thin its like having a handle on a cut down razor blade. It’s so sharp it kind of made me nervous to begin with, and for some reason the thin sharp blade seemed hard to maneuver. I was cutting the eyes out of a potato, and really not too happy with the knife, somehow the balance felt wrong, and it was hard to control. Instead of cutting neat circle-plugs around the eyes I kept having the blade gouge out across the potato as I was trying to turn it. I suppose it didn’t help I was a little unnerved by the fact I was so tired I hurt, and I knew how incredibly sharp the knife was.

I did, however manage to finish preparing things to go into the crock-pot that night. I was washing up the parring knife it slipped out of my hand, fell maybe four inches tip first into the steel bottomed sink, and bent the leading 1/8th inch of the blade.  It was a sad moment, I was somewhat glad I hadn’t tried to grab the knife or something… As tired as I was right then my reflexes would have been bad enough to probably make a real mess of my hand trying something like that. On the other hand I was pretty mad at myself for dropping the knife. In hindsight I am kind of annoyed that the knife could destroy itself that easily.

My second great mishap, again came from a shockingly sharp new kitchen implement. I was peeling potatoes Saturday night, and somehow let my left index finger slip up into the path of the peeler. A few seconds prior to that I had been really enjoying how amazingly fast and easily the peeler was going over the potato. I was thinking to myself “wow I guess peeling potatoes isn’t so bad when you have a nice sharp peeler.” Then it took a bite out of my finger!

I now have one of the deepest cuts I have given myself in years, and from a very sharp implement! It managed to cut its way out as I was reflexively pulling away, so there wasn’t any flap of skin, just a bite gone out of my fingertip. Every time I changed band aids it was still bleeding profusely, even 18 hours later.  It did eventually stop bleeding, but it was a really clean, deep cut.

-Jordan

Workout

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Heather and I have started another workout challenge! As some of you may remember, we did one of these back last spring. I can’t remember exactly when we started it, but I know it was really cold then too.

Two days in, and I think that having both of us in the same bed isn’t going to sabotage getting up early. I was afraid that would make it far too easy for us to talk each other out of going to the gym. I suppose I shouldn’t say too much a few weeks of this and we may feel differently 🙂

It is really sad how quickly I seem to lose my edge with weight lifting and cardio workouts. I am basically starting back at zero for endurance and lifting strength. Time will tell how quickly Heather and I can bounce back up to the level we were at when we ended the first challenge.

There are starting pictures, but I can safely say those will not *ever* be featured here… Unless perhaps Heather and I have dramatic results, and even then… don’t hold your breath.

Ignoring the lack of sleep, it has been nice to get out and doing something… I feel like cabin fever is starting to set in. We had a wonderful few days of nice weather, and now its too cold to do anything outside again. I guess “getting out is kind of a misnomer, but going to the gym is at least out of the house.

-Jordan

Tech Notes

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I have been looking into all kinds of data synchronization tools as of late. My primary goal has been to ensure downloading a camera onto one computer in the house would result in the pictures being available to the other computers.

In my looking around I found Live Mesh Not really the tool I was looking for, because it keeps a copy of the files on an online server. I am really excited about using Mesh to keep a folder synced between my work machine and home for keeping notes handy, getting pictures where I can grab them for blog posts, etc.

Back to the home network, my primary tool is SyncToy. It’s not the most user-friendly tool, so I don’t think Heather will adopt it as something she manually uses, but I have been able to schedule sync jobs from my machine. I hope to have Heather’s Vista laptop doing the same soon. There is a rather large side project involved, where I get to manually merge two huge photo collections before I can actually turn this thing loose with live data.

I turned WinRar loose on Heather’s primary picture collection (there is another one of pre-college pictures), and after a little over an hour of compressing, the .rar was roughly six gigs. That’s just the backup in case something horrible happens when I start merging pictures later this week…

Once that is all up and running, I think there are some cool Windows Home Server plugins that would do web-albums with a lot less hassle than what I am running on this website. I will have to look into that. Not to say its really hard to use Gallery… no I take that back… I don’t find it hard, Heather always gives up because it takes a lot of fiddling with things to make it play nice when you are setting things up or adding pictures. Here’s hoping the WHS plugin will be nicer 🙂

-Jordan

The Kansas City Reception

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The last wedding related event is complete!

And what a fun event it was! I haven’t had time to get any pictures cleaned up to post, but wanted to get a post up anyway…

Heather’s parents did all the work to put together a reception for us in Kansas City. The timing was about perfect. Five weeks after the wedding, Heather and I had time to recover, but were still kind of in the wedding mindset I think.

The only negative was the weather. I suppose you could argue we got lucky with the wedding, but it was still annoying to have the only snow in months land on KC the day we were expecting people to drive in from all over to see us. Fortunately, the snow wasn’t too bad, and to our knowledge, nobody had any trouble outside of having to drive slower.

The event itself was kicked off by loading roughly 30 Gutschow friends and family into a bus, and driving to the location of the restaurant. Heather had expressed some skepticism as to the necessity of a bus before the event, but it turned out to be a really fun addition to the day. The mood on the bus was a lot of fun, and it gave a few more minutes to see people before the official event.

Once on location, Heather scrambled to finish up an epically long slide show of wedding pictures wile I configured a projector to display it. We managed to have everything ready before the official star time.

Once things got underway, everything kind of became a blur. It was so nice to see everyone, and I still cannot believe how quickly time passed. We never had time to talk to anyone as long as we would have liked, and probably failed to get around to everyone we should have. The number of people there was amazing, considering the snow, and the fact that many of the attendees had also been at the wedding. Heather and I were amazed by the dedication and support people showed towards us.

After the official event, we rode the bus back to the house, for more time with family (mostly Gutschow, but my parents and a few others came too!).  I can’t say as I really enjoy being the guest of honor at any event, but it was laid back enough to be rather enjoyable.

Heather and I cannot say how grateful we are to our parents, for everything they did to make the events surrounding the wedding, not to mention the wedding, come of better than we could have ever hoped for. We are also glad its over, as fun as it was, this past weekend left us both exhausted 🙂

-Jordan

note: The slide show from this event will be the core of a web album in the making, coming “soon”!

Other Projects

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While I have been messing with computers, Heather has been decorating… A lot. Our apartment is really feeling like a home now. One of the really cool things she has done was to find a way to display some of the cards we got from the wedding.

img_0964

Using the same glue that was used for the pictures decorating tables at the reception, Heather covered the top of her desk with portions of cards. The resulting surface was anything but smooth however, so we purchased a slab of plate glass to cover the desktop with. it looks really good.

The other major project Heather has been working on is a huge collection of pictures from the wedding. That is basically done, and was previewed at the KC reception over the weekend. It now falls to me to get those lined up to go onto DVD’s and up on the website, but that should go quickly as soon as I find time 🙂

-Jordan