The Family

This is along the same lines as ‘what is your horoscope sign’, but done with the Tarot.

Birth Card Calculator

So, what are you?

Well, Tomorrow morning Pat goes in for his neck surgery. It is a pretty complex operation. They estimate 6 hours.

So, I went snowshoeing for the first time. And it turns out that I’m not permanently injured! Very happy.

OK, the before pictures (before the camera died, so sad) are slapped up at http://ramona.4101.org. My favorite is 100_1678.jpg … very creatively named, yes. We hiked to Mills Lake – if you do a Google image search for Mills Lake, you can see what we didn’t have the camera to take pictures of. We saw Alberta Falls on the way there. It was very lovely, though frozen solid and snowed over. But I hiked straight up the waterfall (in all the snow). That was fun.

And All Very lovely.

But here’s what happened to make it all so memorable.
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Stumbling, i ran across a short video on how to build a camera stabilizer you can carry in your pocket, using a bolt, a washer, and a piece of string. I thought it looked like a good idea.

One of the things we need more of in our house is shelves.  We could use more shelves virtually everywhere in the house.  Currently there are two kinds of shelving we are thinking about:  garage shelves and book shelves.

Garage shelves would be used for storing all the boxes of stuff that most people would put in the basement/attic.  I haven’t really scoped out our attic for how well it would work for storage purposes, but I do know it doesn’t have any kind of flooring.  And I don’t have a ladder either.  Thus we’re thinking of building shelves that would be about 2 feet below ceiling level.  We have about 15-20 feet of space to cover with these shelves.  There are two options we see for this:  2×4’s and plywood or wire-frame shelves.  The wood option would be heavy and I’m not sure how to make it look good.  The wire-frame shelves are the same shelves we have in the rest of the house.  I have talked to other people around the block that have used the wire-frame shelves and they report no problems with putting lots of weight on them.

On the other front, we need bookshelves.  First, would ya’ll build in bookshelves or would you buy stand-alone bookshelves?  Building the bookshelves has the issue of having equipment to cut/trim/ect wood bought.  We would probably transport thing between our house and Victoria, as Christina’s folks have every woodcutting tool we’d ever need and the space to do the work in.  (they have a workshop setup for the work they are doing to restore a house).  Or we could try to find good pre-made shelves to buy and put in place.

So, I’m wondering, for those of you that have already done this, what does your experience tell you?

We know some folks that have recently moved into the Austin area.  When they moved up here, they already had a vacation home in the area.  Being that they wanted to be able to come to their vacation home to relax, it was totally furnished.  This worked well when they maintained two houses.  However, they wanted to sell their old house.  They sold off quite a bit of their furnature and a buyer requested that the rest of it stay in the house as part of the purchase.  Christina and I are one of the people who bought up some of their old furniture.

We bought two pieces of furniture from them: a table and a display cabinet.  They are both well taken care of.  The table shows more wear, which I would expect, but it isn’t anything that we mind.  (although one of their kids had a heavy hand when doing math homework; you can see their work on the table)

Here’s a few pictures:

Note the chairs laying on the floor.  We got a full six chair set with the table.  The table is about three inches longer than our old table, and this one has a leaf insert to make it even larger.  Next time everyone is at our house, there will be no problems getting everyone space at the table.

This is a closeup of the top.  Note that there are lights built in.  There are two lights in the top, and two lights in the bottom (not in this picture).  The shelves are glass.  Two of the middle shelves were broken when the previous owner was trying to take them out for the move.  I didn’t expect it, but he is going to get us new glass shelves to put in there.

Here’s another shot with the camera’s exposure time turned down a bit to see detail in the couple of items we’ve put up there.

The most awesome part of this was the price for these two solid wood, quality construction pieces:  price of rental truck to go pick them up, gas to put in the rental truck, and our time.