If you have Firefox 3, and you’re annoyed with the auto-play “feature” of espn.com (where you load the page and you have the ESPN anchors blaring away at you about last night’s Royals/Mariners game), then you should install this plugin:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1765
The auto-play feature will be disabled.
In honor of our 3rd anniversary, I bought a domain:
http://doesdanloveerin.com
The answer (in case you’re too busy to visit the site) is: YES.
If you look on our anniversary (Nov 20), you’ll see a picture of us under the chuppah.
This past weekend my family flew into Philadelphia for my second cousin’s Bar Mitzvah.
While we were there, we stayed at the Four Seasons Hotel (ooh-lah-lah).
As soon as Erin and I got in, we were very hungry. We asked the concierge where we could get a good burger. He recommended a place 6 blocks down from the hotel. It was a place called Rouge’s. I was a bit skeptical since it cost $15, but they had a display on the front of their restaurant that said their burgers were one of the “20 burgers to try before you die”.
That seemed like a pretty good endorsement, so we went in to give it a try. The burgers were indeed great. To paraphrase Pulp Fiction: “I don’t know if they’re worth 15 dollars, but their pretty fricking good hamburgers”.
That night, we were surprised to see that the Red Sox (who were in town to play my favorite team the Phillies that weekend) were staying at the Four Seasons.
Manny Ramirez, David Ortiz, and Curt Schilling were all staying at our hotel!
I didn’t want to bother them since they were obviously just trying to relax (or perhaps because I was just timid), but my sister was fearless and caught Manny in the elevator and asked him for his autograph. Since she didn’t really care about the BoSox particularly, she gave me the autograph.
On Saturday, the family went to Joey’s Bar Mitzvah and the party afterwards.
On Sunday, my family went to Citizen’s Bank Ballpark to watch the Phillies/Red Sox game. I sat in left field and watched the Phillies finally stop their 5 game losing skid by winning 10-5. (Hooray!)
Toward the end of last week I actually got out of the house… in stark contrast to just reading books (I’m already up to 18 for the year)
On Thursday night, I got a call to go to the Ben Folds concert at Raleigh Grand with a coworker from my old job at webslingerZ… The concert was pretty good (although I’ve seen better performances from him).
On Friday night, I received complimentary Hurricanes tickets from my current employer Red Hat and took Abby and Steve to see the ‘Canes secure the Southeast Division title over the Florida Panthers (mostly due to a poor play by the Panther’s goalie).
And on Saturday morning, I finally put the old condo at Weatherstone on the market (with our realtor’s help).
Erin and I just bought a house:
See some pictures of our new house
We’d like to give a big thanks to Jo Wiles (our agent) of Guld and Associates who helped make it happen. (As well as our parents who know a thing or two about house-buying and maintenance)
Now, there are two things on our agenda:
We need to sell or rent my old condo at 108C Weatherstone Drive. $750/month would be what I charged for rent or we would be willing to sell the condo for $115,000. If you know someone who’s interested, send them my way. I’d be interested in references if you would like to rent.
We’re also looking to move in to the new place by February 5th so that I can continue my streak of hosting Super Bowl parties.
I was able to accomplish the goal I set in early 2004 this year.
The list says 52 books, but that includes a couple of children’s books that I have a hard time counting toward my goal.
Strangely, 45 of the books are Non-Fiction, 7 books (including the two children’s books) were fiction. That’s more skewed than I would have thought!
Some time ago, I went on a weekend rafting trip with my (then-new) employer Red Hat.
During that weekend, my wife decided she had had enough of the wallpaper in our upstairs (primary) bathroom and proceeded to tear it down. This required taking down the mirror and the other fixtures that were on the walls.
Her plan was to prime the walls and paint them.
That was a year and a half ago.
As of two weeks ago, the walls were still bare and the bathroom had only been (partially) primed.
This is why if you’ve seen me over the past year and a half, you’ll notice that I have a lot more (and scragglier) facial hair than I ought to. This is the reason! It’s really hard to shave without a mirror.
Erin and I had both took some time to try to fix the bathroom, but it just ended in frustration. For my part, it was a big job and I’ve never painted a room before and didn’t want to mess it up to the point that I hurt the property’s value.
Anyway, we had Mr. Handyman fix our bathroom in half-a-day and I must say it does look better than the wallpaper did.
Our first goal was to stop at the ESPN Sportszone, get some food and watch some Sunday football. Too bad everyone else had the same idea and we ended up too far back in the line to ever hope of sitting down.
When we last left our intrepid heroes, Erin was getting high blood pressure from overheating and they were sleeping in a rat-trap…