And It Just Gets Worse

Posted on by Jordan

I suppose I should take the hint and stop complaining about weather on the blog. I said it was cold yesterday, and now today is not only colder, but driving to work required scraping my windows!

Scraping ice isn’t a chore I really mind that much, but doing it today was depressing. Its not even November yet, I didn’t want to start doing this every day quite yet. Then again, Saturday was nice enough I didn’t even need a coat, so I shouldn’t act like its going to be bitterly cold until March. The weather will swing the other way a few times I am sure.

I might have my projector sold, but it will be a few days until I know for sure. Selling off a few things I own, and cutting ourselves down to just one round of rent and utilities for the remaining time until the wedding is going to do wonders for our goal of paying off all our debt ASAP. Dave Ramsey would be proud I am sure 🙂

Only three more days until I move, and I am maybe 15% packed… you would think I could have used some of that time last week when Heather was gone to get that take care of, but I really didn’t accomplish much on that front. Moving is more fun if you wait till the last minute anyway, right?

-Jordan

(Doing these rambling multi-topic posts is messing up my nice clean plan for categories and tags, you would think the editor would crack down on that)

Brrrrr

Posted on by Jordan

Walking outside I start to think winter might be getting here soon. I am really not ready for that yet 😦

we might make it to November without snow, but its getting a lot colder all of a sudden.

Heather returned from her loooong trip to KC last night. She brought back all kinds of exciting things! Such as an example of our completed wedding invitations, and a really cool Nebraska Football themed quilt her mom made for me, given as a birthday present. I might get a picture of the quilt up at some point. The invitations you will just have to hope to be on the list to get one in the mail 🙂

I tried a recipe I found for some low-sugar peanut butter cookies yesterday afternoon. Had the dough all ready when Heather came back, and we tried a few fresh out of the oven. Sadly no pictures, but I trust you can all imagine a peanut butter cookie. The verdict? Splenda sweetened baking still tastes a little different than “normal” cookies, but they were really quite good.

-Jordan

Changes

Posted on by Jordan

Well…

I listed my projector for sale today. I don’t know how interested people will be in a slightly used projector, but I can say I don’t feel bad about selling it. It’s kind of exciting, one more step towards setting up a new household with my wife.

In other news, I drove past the local branch office of my bank today. They had a big moving truck backed up to the doors, movers all over, and all I could see were piles of boxes in the windows. It seems like that’s a bad sign, given the bank industry heath of late. Even if that branch is now closed, it works out well because I am moving in a week, so I didn’t really loose my local branch 🙂

-Jordan

Another Landmark Day

Posted on by Jordan

Its now three months until the wedding. October 24th – January 24th… its also 91 days until the wedding if the countdown I have been running is setup correctly. With two major holidays and my birthday in the upcoming months, I have a feeling they will go buy fast.

At the same time I haven’t seen Heather in almost four days, and won’t see her for another two! I know, I know…. we are both spoiled, but it just makes this week seem really long and I wonder what its going to be like once Heather is living in Blair.

In other news, I just found out Left 4 Dead won’t run on my gaming rig. I knew the day a game completely eclipsed my PC with hardware requirements was going to happen sooner or later, I just didn’t expect it quite yet.

Have I mentioned I will be spending my Friday night alone? blah… its just not the greatest day 🙂

-Jordan

Free The Music

Posted on by Jordan

Heather has a fairly good sized music collection on her laptop / IPod, and I also have a fairly good sized set of songs on my computer.

the problem is that everything Heather has is locked in ITunes, and to put it gently I don’t like that. One of my goals once we setup a household together has been to have every meaningful byte of data backed up at least once, if not twice. ITunes is going to be a huge pain in that regard, so I was hoping to figure out a simple way to get the songs back into MP3 so I could just burn them out to DVDs or back them up to the server I plan to build.

I wasn’t sure how hard that was going to be, but I happened to see an article on LifeHacker about getting files out of .wma (the Windows format, with all the same problems as .acc) and saw links to a few options.

With any luck, one of those programs will let me quickly and easily unify two music collections into one big happy pile of mp3s.

-Jordan

Social People

Posted on by Jordan

They might not be who you think they are 🙂

I was a little surprised by this Gamasutra article:

Study: Gamers More Likely To Date, Marry, Socialize Than Non-Gamers

55 percent of gamers are married, 48 percent have kids, and single gamers are twice as likely to go on dates in a given month than non-gamers. That’s according to the results of a new research study from IGN Entertainment and Ipsos Media CT

The study had a few other interesting facts, its a short read so I will just encourage you to go read it!

-Jordan

Picture Location Problems

Posted on by Jordan

I just got word from Heather a few hours ago that we cannot take pictures at the art museum like we had hoped. The museum was going to be a pain to schedule, and I had some doubts as to how awesome the inside was really going to be for pictures, but its still disappointing to loose it as an option.

We looked at the Durham Western Heritage Museum as a picture option, but they also have a lot of hoops to jump through, and really lack anything compelling other than a few old benches. There are some really majestic things there, but they are all 80+ feet off the ground, therefore unhelpful in picture taking.

Our only remaining option now is the botanical gardens. The gardens have some really really neat areas that would make for awesome fall / spring pictures, and given a nice day, some cool winter pictures too. They have an indoor area, but we don’t yet know what the post-Christmas theme in there will be. It may or may not be a nice picture backdrop, and the indoor space is somewhat limited there anyway.

It would be nice to have a few more options for indoor picture locations in Omaha, but so far Heather and I haven’t come up with any. I think there have to be some local hotels or something that might have a fairly ornate lobby. I suppose we don’t need that much, how many people look at the background to a wedding picture? Still it would be fun to have something really cool to use.

If readers have any ideas, feel free to post them in the comments 🙂

-Jordan

The Pedestrian Bridge

Posted on by Jordan

Sunday night Heather and I decided to go for a walk, as we seem to be running a surplus of amazingly nice fall weekends right now.

Unfortunately, we were a little slow getting left to go for a walk and it was getting dark, making the neighborhood we were going to walk in sort of a bad choice. Our hastily composed plan ‘b’ was to head downtown to investigate the walking bridge over the Missouri river that we had heard people talk about.

Our first problem was we had no idea where the bridge actually was. The only directions we could remember was that you “can get to it from the ConAgra park.” About half the park is closed at night, so we walked a long ways around the park, going the wrong way hoping to find an open gate. We could see people walking along the path across the main lake, so we were pretty sure there was some way in. After giving up on our initial search, we saw the bridge peaking through the trees! The only problem was we had been walking in completely the wrong direction for over 10 minutes, and the bridge looked to be about 4 miles away. We also had no idea how to get to it still.

We walked across a few streets, under some bridges, and across a set of railroad tracks, finally getting ourselves onto the proper path to get to the bridge. From the path we could see that none of the obstacles mentioned in the preceding sentence were necessary, as there was a cool raised walkway that let you hop straight from the open half of the ConAgra park onto the path we were now standing on. I would recommend using the raised path after dark, our path was a little sketchy, and lacked sidewalks for about half the way.

All that got us only part of the way to the bridge, but at least we could really see it at this point. Sadly we didn’t bring a camera, so you are on your own to find out what the bridge looks like, but it is fairly cool in the dark. we walked across the bridge, discovered that you cant see much looking off the bridge in the dark, and that there isn’t anything on the Iowa side right now.

Heading back we found, for the second time that night, that the view retracing our steps was a lot better than it had been going out. You get a rather amazing view of the Omaha downtown at night when walking back from the Iowa side of the bridge.

Before heading home we spent a few minutes setting in the dark watching the big fountain in the lake at the middle of the ConAgra park. It made for the perfect way to end the evening.

you really can’t complain about having a day that broke 60 degrees, was as beautiful as Sunday was, and that you could set on a parkbench without a coat on, when it comes this late in October. I just hope this is a sign of weather to come, and we aren’t using up all our unusually temperate days before the wedding. It would be nice to get one of those freak 50-degree-plus days January 24th 2009 😉

-Jordan

With Apologies To My Mother

Posted on by Jordan

So this is a somewhat embarrassing statistic, but what good is a blog if you don’t post this kind of thing?

I was clearing out and sorting through a lot of the storage in my room last night, preparing for the move that’s coming up here soon. I ran in to a surprising amount of stuff that I haven’t used for over a year. That was a little sad, realizing I was storing all this stuff I had no use for, and then I found the irons.

Yes I said “irons,” as in plural, two to be exact. Both of them in mint condition, never been used, one still in its original box! I think my mom gave me one of them when I moved to college EIGHT YEARS ago, and the other she probably gave me when I got out of college. Its not to say I never ironed anything, I am pretty sure I used one of my roommates ironing stuff once back at my old apartment!

The moral of all this is that you can’t blame my mother if my clothes always looked a little wrinkled, she tried!

I told this to Heather last night, and she said she was pretty sure she had a new iron, still in the box somewhere in her apartment… so I am in good company I guess 🙂

-Jordan