Outstanding Week

Good work and good play

This has been an outstanding week. One of my favorite weeks in a long time. Much of that is due to Samantha. She has been here working and playing alongside me. We’ve been accomplishing a lot and having a grand ol’ time doing it.

Flowers (with pinhole filter on Olympus E-P1)

Warning, there are a LOT of photos in the rest of this post!


We’ve both been cleaning up around the house. My office and our bedroom tend to be the places where stuff accumulates. This keeps our living room in good shape, but my messy office always annoys me! So me getting my office in shape, and Samantha fixing up the bedroom (plus putting Lindsey’s gorgeous quilt on our bed) has made things really spiffy.

Around the house & remodel

Bathroom shelves – We added two new storage units right next to our sink counter-top. I think they make the room look much better and they also add a lot of storage via some functional shelves.

Crown molding – Crown molding has been one of our fav parts of the remodel. It is quick and easy to put up, yet it makes rooms/ceilings look gorgeous.  We only have about 60 inches of crown molding left to do, after completing about 96 feet. We decided to pick up corner blocks for our three most visible corners. They should look very nice.

Misc Happenings

Target practice – I’m looking forward to shooting some 9mm, .22, and maybe the shotgun too this weekend.

Flowers – I got Samantha a nice little basket of flowers from the florist in Alton (where I got measured for a tux, for Kevin and Shannon’s Key West wedding).

Carnations and various daisies!

Printer – Samantha’s Canon PIXMA 9000 Pro Mk II printer arrived and its prints are gorgeous! She’s pretty excited by it…

Unboxing the Canon! Ohh yeah! Glowing RedCanon Ink Cartridges Printing from Photoshop CS4 Samantha awaiting the first print! Samantha's print next to Getting Started Guide

West Plains trip – we needed to pick up the crown molding corner pieces so we went to West Plains’ Meeks. Along the way we split a tasty meal at Burger King and picked up much needed groceries and supplies. We also stopped by the Habitat for Humanity Restore in West Plains; they sometimes have some really cool stuff, and they’re always friendly and nice :-).

eBay – Samantha’s been listing our old photogear on eBay, after that will be old computer gear, and then finally the odds and ends. I really appreciate her doing the listing and she has taken some AMAZING photos of the items being listed. Part of our kitchen is currently a photo studio for the eBay photography :-).

Kitchen studio for eBay product photography

Also, one of our relatives showed me a surpringly cool eBay trick. The way he does it is rather ingenious, but very time consuming. I know a way to automate the process(via programming) and make it very simple. Hopefully this fall/winter I will have the time to write this program for him as a Christmas present, but keep it on the DL until then because I don’t want to prematurely get his hopes up!

Cooking

Samantha has been cooking delicious meals. For some meals she’s been emulating some of my favorite “dining out” entrees, but she’s actually surpassed those meals. For lunch today we had a delicious sandwich that is better than my favorite at Panera. For dinner we had (veggie) burgers that rival my favs from Red Robin and Burger King.

Mediterranean Veggie with Baked Beans

For dessert Samantha is making Whatnots! These are delicious little goodies that are like a cross between a brownie and a cookie. The oven timer just went off, but they’re not quite done yet :-(. I can hardly wait the adittional minutes ;-). I’m not the only person that thinks (knows) Whatnots are amazing. We took two big layers of them to a friends birthday party in Winona and they were TOTALLY gone by the end of the party.

We’ve had a bunch of other good meals too, both homemade and store-bought. My tummy is very happy I married Samantha :-).

Tasty salad for Samantha! Samantha getting food ready Tasty veggie burger and fries for me! Tiger butter popcorn!

Automotive

Today I changed the oil filter, oil, and air filter on our Element. It was about time to do the oil change, and this will have the car in good shape for Samantha’s drive to Bolivar this weekend. I am really liking the new tires that I had put on about 10K miles ago, they hold air amazingly well and they drive like a dream :-).

On another automotive note, some of our friends have a really nice sports car and I’m hoping to take some photos of it at some point in the near future. I’d really like to work on my automotive photography and their car would be ideal :-).

Entertainment:

  • We’ve also been watching some rather good movies: Meet me in St. Louis, Dakota Skye, and Slumdog Millionare.
  • All these movies have been on our tiny Samsung P400 LED projector that outputs a BIG image. It’s a very economical projector that uses minimal electricity and should have excellent longevity.

Websites and work

My new website Komparison.com has been doing well. Right now I’m mainly doing some research on how people are finding the site, and how it is doing in the search engines. Today I was really surprisedwhen one of the Komparison pages was in the top 20 on Google for “nutrition data candy“. This may seem like a rather generic term, but that’s the point, it means that Komparison is already (after less than two weeks) able to rank for some phrases with millions of results. So, this bodes well for the site as I keep improving the data and adding features to Komparison.

Weblogs.us has been nice and quiet lately. People are just blogging and doing there thing, there has been minimal tech support to do this week, yay!

Samantha has a couple good photo shoots lined up, I’m excited to see the results!

Weather

It has been rather cloudy for quite a few days now. However, yesterday we had some beautiful sunshine and that really made me feel good. The temperature has also been nice, so I can’t complain :-).

That’s about it for now

That’s a mini-roundup of some of what’s been going on. I can’t adequately put into words the nice feeling I have right now, but it basically just feels like things are going very well and I’m excited about continuing to make good positive progress :-).

5 comments

  • Elizabeth

    Very nice photographs and interesting narrative to go along.

  • J.D.

    Thanks Elizabeth!

  • zp

    haha,i like the delicious food.

  • J.D., you are so lucky :D. To be honest, reading this post makes me feel hungry now. Go for lunch now. (^~^)

  • I think I need to get back to life happening posts and your way of compartmentalizing it bodes well for my ADD brain (I don’t have ADD brain, just always tons on my mind)

    I worked up some things for Komparison I want to run by you, so I’ll get that tomorrow. Thank you so much for helping us with our new business venture. I’d be happy if we are half as successful as you’ve been, so we’ll cross our fingers there.

    Oh the Z. We were going to snap a few photos with the new cam this weekend, but just didn’t get around to it. Hopefully we can this weekend and give you something to drool about.

    Jes

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