This NY Life

Well, I’m here at work, which has been kind of unsettlingly quiet for the past few weeks and typing this post when I should be doing my status report. If a tree fell in the woods… I don’t know.

We went swimming in the building pool this Saturday and it was great. It’s just really relaxing and every time we go, we always say we need to go more often. Hopefully we will make that happen. The pool is 75 x 35 feet and enclosed and as Will says, no bugs can get in it.

PSP comics are a pretty cool idea and some of them look quite interesting. I’m still working my way through Watchmen, about 3/4 of the way done. It will be really interesting to see how they make the rich stories from the book come to life when they finally get going on the movie.

The Simpsons movie opens on July 27 which reminds me of one of my favorite scenes.

We went out to Mike and Kathy’s for lunch on Sunday and had a great time just hanging out eating, drinking beer, catching up, etc. We even got in some co-op Guitar Hero II action.

I have a renewed interest in R/C cars, though I think I’m a little bit more in love with the whole building procedure than the driving of them, probably because of the lack of space to drive them in. I went to storage and go out the two 1/18 scale cars I have. One of them is complete, with a BMW M3 body, the other is mostly done except for some of the electrics. I have to solder the motor leads and attach the speed control, attach the receiver and clean up the wiring with zip ties. Also I have to paint the body. I have a VW Beetle body shell that needs to be painted, maybe silver.

It’s strange, I think I’m drawn to things that I dont have space for because recently I have been checking out a few sites on Vespa restoration. I think this would be a great project, but only if I had a garage, some place to work on it, etc. Perhaps some day. I love the process though and could read about it for hours.

Recently we cancelled out NetFlix account. While we love the idea and convenience of being able to have a movie on hand all the time, its not too fun when you get psyched up to watch a movie (Match Point in this case), put it in and watch for about 45 minutes then it craps out on you. I took out the disc, cleaned it well, put it back in and still had the same issue. Then I broke the disc in frustration, I think I kind of frightened myself at that point and sent the disc back to NetFlix as damaged. When called about the issue, after waiting on the phone for 15 minutes, they had no problem letting us go as customers. We realize that discs get scratched, but they had nothing to say to us besides “OK, I can cancel your account”. It’s amazing they would rather lose a GIVEN $9.99 a month for a potentially very long time then do something for us. So, therefore, we joined a neighborhood DVD rental place with a good selection of movies ($4 per rental) and with the very few movies we watch in a month, this seems like a good plan. I did remember to print out my NetFlix queue though.

Beer update: Part of the beer has been bottled. When the yeast has run its course by eating all of the fermentable sugars in a beer, additional sugar has to be added to aid in carbonation. I had a case of clean bottles and after adding priming sugar to the still beer, bottled up a whole case. When I was almost done bottling, I realized that I had more beer than bottles. I bottled on June 24th and have let the rest of the primed beer sit for a few weeks now while I had a chance to gather more bottles (drink beer, rinse and save the bottles), this week I plan to re-prime and bottle the rest. The reason I needed to let it sit was to make sure that the priming sugar was all eaten up in the remaining beer. If too much priming sugar is added, exploding bottles could happen, and I don’t really want warm flat beer with shards of glass exploding in our apartment. Maybe if we had a house though, see above…