Ice Storm!

Posted on by Jordan

Omaha, got hit with an ice storm that slowly turned to snow last night.

By the time I got home from work, everything had a thin layer of ice on it, and the storm wasn’t showing any signs of letting up. It was really the kind of weather you stay at home and drink hot chocolate in. I didn’t have any hot chocolate though, so I went to the gym. Heather apparently also lacked hot beverages, and went to the gym in Blair. Getting home from the gym was a little exciting, but the advantage to driving when you shouldn’t is that there aren’t too many other cars on the road.

This morning, it only took roughly 25 minutes  to get enough ice off my Escape to consider it drivable. I think it would have been a lot longer, but when the engine runs that long it gets warm and makes a big difference in how hard it is to get the ice chipped off the windshield. I don’t know how my car was in the perfect place to get this effect, but the caked icy snow stuff was over two inches thick over my windshield and hood. I have never seen anything like it. Luckily it was really brittle, so it broke up fairly quickly, but I was still left with a conventional layer of ice covering the entire vehicle after that.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch… or I mean… In Blair, Heather was discovering her car wouldn’t traverse the farm roads at all. Local family members helped get her to work, but not until much later in the morning.

Hopefully we are getting all the nasty travel ending weather out of the way now… you only get one bad ice storm per winter right!? I can’t imagine another one come January, especially late January. 🙂

-Jordan

Holiday Activities!

Posted on by Jordan

Last night, Heather and I went to visit some friends, and decorate cookies. Its possibly the first ‘second annual’ thing Heather and I have ever done together.

I don’t know the exact date, but mid December last year, Heather invited me to her apartment and we decorated cookies with her roommates. It seems so long ago, I can’t quite believe only a year ago Heather and I were just getting to know one another.

Getting back to more recent events, we had a really enjoyable time doing cookies! Its always a joy to interact with a couple who really love one another. I am withholding names because I don’t know that everyone wants their name plastered on our website… The downside to interacting with a happily married couple is that they cannot help but remind us of the fact that we are not yet married. I wouldn’t say we were jealous, but it certainly made it seem harder to send Heather packing off to Blair at the end of the night.

Also, it is a week until Christmas! I don’t quite know how that happened, but perhaps I have been fixated on another fast approaching date…. Whatever the case, I realize I have to find time to actually wrap the pile of gifts I have managed to acquire, and run down a few more things before Wednesday. (and not necessarily in that order!)

-Jordan

Speaking of Winter

Posted on by Jordan

I mentioned the apartment being cold yesterday. It still is by the way, but what I wanted to post on today was the window situation.

back at the end of June, there was a major wind storm that knocked out power for most of Omaha for a few days. Some parts of town were without power for over a week. Lucky for Heather and I, she never lost power, and I only lost power for about a day. Heather’s apartment (now ‘our’) was however rather exposed to the wind. The storm did some impressive things to the building, such as tearing off siding and breaking two windows in the bedroom. They were double pane glass, so nothing to into the apartment, and functionally they were still windows. I took a picture of them the day after the storm:

img_0142

(well one of the windows anyway, you get the idea) As you can see from the picture, The window is very visibly broken. So visible we could see the broken window from almost a block away when we went out to look things over the next day after the storm.

Fast forward to November, and I move into the apartment. My first night sleeping there I could here a strange rattling sound coming from the windows. The next morning I peek behind the blinds, and there is still a pile of broken glass where the second pane should be! I have no idea how the repair team missed something so glaringly obvious, but nobody realized there was a broken window or two on the building after 4 months. I talked to the office later that week, and they didn’t doubt for a second how the window had been broken, or that it was broken. It took them over a week to actually get it fixed, but at least its fixed now!

The point of all this is just to say that I am happy the window is fixed now! I don’t know how much insulation value the double pane windows selected by the apartment actually provide, but it has to be better than the pile-o-broken-glass we had before.

-Jordan

Snow!

Posted on by Jordan

(If you really wanted to nit pic we had some dustings before, but they don’t count)

Today was the first snow of the year! I can’t say that I am really that excited about it, but its still kind of fun to see. It made the drive to work rather long and slow, but my fellow drivers were being cautious, and I won’t complain about that. It’s much preferable to the other alternative.

Also, it is still brutally cold, not quite the -4 we had yesterday, but today still saw negative temperatures. The thermostat in the apartment still says the temp is the same, but it feels colder. I think maybe there is just a bubble of warm air around the thermostat. On a recent trip to Blair I helped Heather figure out how to hook up the electric blanket her bed was equipped with. Right now I have to say I am somewhat jealous of her blanket, although I would settle for Heather staying with me in Omaha.

I guess it is kind of nice to have Heather in Blair on days like today, when driving conditions are questionable. She only has a few miles to get to work instead of 30ish. Sadly I can’t really think of anything else good about having her MILES away, but maybe the cold is inhibiting my creativity.

-Jordan

Cool Camera Hacks

Posted on by Jordan

I don’t know if I really understand photography well enough to really take advantage of this, but I just saw an article about a firmware override you can run on most Cannon cameras to get access to a *LOT* more information.

The article

I suppose this would all take more homework than I am willing to do right now, but I have always been fascinated by the potential in hardware beyond what the stock OS offered. I admit I didn’t read this in depth, but it seems like the entire thing is running in-memory, so you could play with it and not risk trashing the factory firmware.

The “if it messes up you bricked your widget” factor is what has prevented me from playing with any sort of aftermarket software mods for my phone, despite my burning hatred for the stock Verizon software.

Anyway, if somebody else tries this let me know how it works out! I hope to look at it more soon.

-Jordan

Tuxedos

Posted on by Jordan

I have not yet placed the order for Tuxedos for groomsmen yet, but I finally have info from everyone. Several of my guys took a while to get me their information, but really we still have tons of time for that.

I sat down today to type up the information everyone had given me onto a single document and made kind of an interesting discovery.

Well first let me back up, finding every one’s information turned out to be time consuming. In theory, I should have been able to grab it all really quickly, thanks to the fact that I had all the e-mails in gmail. I thought I had stared (gmail’s term for flagging) every e-mail that came in with tux info. Turns out I hadn’t remembered to do that. Well, no problem, gmail has really good search options I can just search for “tux” right? No because a few of the e-mails don’t actually say the word “tux” nor are they replies to an e-mail that does. So I figured I can just search for e-mail containing a term like “overarm” or “out seam” and get them all… Only several of the measurements were sent in as scanned images of the form the shop used, so there isn’t even any text to search for.

Eventually I found every one’s information, and started typing up my master sheet to hand off to the tux shop. That’s when I found out that apparently tux shops cannot agree in what order the measurements should come in. That may not seem shocking to you, but I had just figured that considering how long tux rentals have been around, they probably all used the exact same format for their measurements. They don’t… They don’t all use the same order for their measurements, and some of them don’t seem to use the same terminology. Beyond that a few places seem to have been more ambitious, giving 2-3 more dimensions than the other shops. It made it annoying when my goal had been to produce a listing of each guy with the exact same information after each.

roughly half the forms I was sent lacked shoe size. I guess the shops figured everyone knows their own shoe size, but interestingly enough, although I know these guys well enough to ask them to stand up with me in my wedding, I don’t know their shoe sizes. I guess I will be making a few phone calls over the weekend to wrap this process up 🙂

-Jordan

My Trip To An Alternate Universe

Posted on by Jordan

I finally got around to notifying the DMV that I have a new address today. There is a location somewhat close to my workplace, so I went over my lunch hour, hoping to get a new drivers license without having to wait too long in line.

my first clue that something was horribly, horribly wrong was when I walked in and there was no line. I was literally stunned, I just stood there thinking maybe something was wrong and they were closed. A very friendly woman behind the counter asked what I needed to do. This was the second sign something was not right, because it clearly was the Douglass County Treasury / DMV office, but my first staff interaction wasn’t getting growled at for failing to comprehend a form, or for being in line for the wrong (unmarked) desk.

The lady behind the counter was both friendly and helpful, and the other people working in the back all seemed to share her demeanor. It was kind of strange to say the least. I even made a mistake filling out the form and they didn’t mind at all. I did get a little greif for being 85lbs lighter and having about 80% less hair than what my old license represented me as, but that was all rather good natured kidding.

At no time during this visit was I able to see any clear signs of a dimensional rift, but I think it is clear that I was in one. The entire transaction, from first walking up to the desk, to having my new drivers license (complete with updated voter registration and vehicle registration address updates) took under 10 minutes.

I suppose the downside is that the Nebraska government in our universe has no record of all this, but hopefully the ID I was issued will suffice for all the things a person needs a state-issued ID for.

-Jordan

YAY For Hats

Posted on by Jordan

Its December and I finally replaced the stocking hat I lost moving over to the new apartment a few days back.

this may sound dumb, but I have been amazed how much warmer I am with it. I think I wore a stocking hat last year when it got cold because it seemed like a good idea, and maybe even because my ears got cold. Those were the reasons I replaced my hat, but I also discovered that the 10 degree days we have been having don’t feel nearly as cold when I am wearing a hat.

your thinking “why is this worth sharing?” and really I have no answer to that. However the cold was killing me, I kept thinking this winter was going to be the end of me. It just felt like I couldn’t hold up to the weather as well as I expected to be able to. I thought maybe loosing 60+ pounds could have been part of it. Somehow being in better shape seemed like with better circulation and whatnot I should hold up better to the cold, even without the extra mass to dampen the cold.

As it turns out, a good hat is all it took. At some point I will break down and wear insulated gloves too, but not until the temperatures is at least single digits… Hopefully I can hold out for the negatives before resorting to that. You have to save some way of counter-escalating things 🙂

-Jordan

Christmas Themed Weekend

Posted on by Jordan

Ok, so mapping the theme to our entire weekend might be stretching it, but Heather and I went to a holiday themed show Saturday night.

We wanted to try and go to some sort of holiday production in Omaha, and settled on “A Christmas Carol.”

The Omaha Community Playhouse does “A Christmas Carol” every year, or has been doing it for years I should say. This selection worked well for us as we were trying to find something that avoided holiday parties etc, so being able to pick a date that was early in the month was ideal.

I am not really an expert on live performances, but in my opinion they did a really good job. I honestly wasn’t expecting them to sing, but the singing along with everything else was good enough you never stopped to question why they were doing it. Part of me really wants to know more about how they do the scenery work, there seem to have been some rather clever things going on as they moved set pieces in and out. I don’t suppose too many people express interest in that though.

I should mention that it was also the first time I had seen the story preformed by anything other than muppets. My memories of the muppet one are kind of hazy anyway, but I think I probably had an advantage going in with no idea what to expect. I was just able to watch it. I guess, I knew there were suppose to be 3 ghosts, and “Tiny Tim” plus a few other high points of the story in there somewhere.

In conclusion, if you were thinking about maybe going to see this show in Omaha sometime, I can recommend it! 🙂

-Jordan

The Only Thing Missing…

Posted on by Jordan

I know I talked about decorating the apartment last week, but I wanted to post a picture of our little tree, and a few words. First the picture:

The tree is about three feet tall, nothing too exciting really.

It does however, represent the first time in the eight years I have lived away from my parents house that there have been Christmas decorations in my apartment. I cannot tell you how much it starts to make the apartment feel really home-ish, and warmer somehow. At the same time, it only makes me wish Heather and I were married more. The (our) apartment is really starting to feel like home, and yet Heather isn’t here.

yes, it is very possible there will be 46 more days of “oh woes me” posts like today, sorry 🙂 It’s our blog, and Heather and I are really feeling sort of like little kids waiting for Santa… Not really sure we can survive the anticipation much longer, and sure we will explode if we aren’t careful.

Hopefully Christmas provides some distraction 🙂

-Jordan