The Final Christmas Get together

The Dishers and the Lumans at the Dishers.

Once again we returned to my parents to have dinner and exchange gifts with my dads side of the family.

My grandpa and grandma ‘butchie’ as they are reffered to, because my grandpa always called me ‘butchie’ when I was little.

My uncle Mike and aunt Karen, cousin Jeremey and his wife Glenda and son Ivan. My other cousin Jeff and his ficticious wife ‘Amanda’ is it? Didn’t come, something about the stomach flu or something. I still haven’t met this wife of his.

Glenda is pregnant so Ivan’s getting a brother in the summer.

Robin and Ken were there with Emery and Sofia as well.

Again good food, good beer, good times. Lots of gifts. Ivan got a sword, what more does a boy need? 🙂

Photos are in the gallery:

[Click Here]

Michael is taller than Jeremey now, but so are most people 😉

Aunt Karen and Uncle Mike are looking good, as are Grandma and Granpad Butchie.

Tea Parties

The girls used their gift certificates to Toys-R-Us to buy yet another tea party set.

The next day when mom was out shopping with grandmother they had themselves a little tea party. Maggie even made french toast to go with it.

Photos in the gallery:

[Click here for the Tea Party Gallery]

They mostly cleaned up after themselves and everything. 🙂

E-Check, it’s finally over.

What a waste that was.

For 10 years now we’ve had to take our cars to the e-check place, give up $20 (or more if you failed and got to do it again).

For us, we’ve had at most 4 vehicles at some times, that’s an extra $80 ever two years. All of them in good working order. Better than a good portion of the vehicles around the area where we live. Yet E-Check doesn’t seem to keep them off the road.

Why is that?

Our former 1991 Nissan pickup probably shouldn’t have ever passed, but it did with surprisingly low numbers every time. The guys would just look at the test results with amazement every time. Who was I to argue? On the other hand I’d been forced to fix our van on more than one occasion simply because the tail pipe had rusted out.

Good riddance E-Check. Yet another bureaucratic mess created to solve a problem that didn’t really exist in the first place.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t doubt there is a smog problem at times, but I don’t think you can pin it on cars of a certain range, then exclude ‘vintage auto’s’, and exempt trucks over a certain weight, and cars that simply can’t be made to pass.  That’s right, you can fail 3 times, show a good faith effort in getting your car to pass and you’re good to go.  All you had to do was fail 3 times and have receipts for work done.  It was all a tax to begin with.

That doesn’t solve the problem.  You can’t convince me that the big diesel trucks chugging out big plumes of black smoke aren’t the ones contributing to the smog and I’ve yet to see someone pulled over who’s burning transmission fluid and leaving a cloud behind them.  Take care of the true issues and leave us common folk alone.

Construction update

We’ve moved forward.

We’ve found someone we’re happy with at least to get started.

The first steps in our fix up the home project include a new roof, gutters and soffets repaired.  I’m not sure if that’s how you spell soffets but we’ll go with that.

That’s the first step prior to finishing the Attic and turning it into a bedroom for Michael.

This also includes the addition of two sky lights in the attic, including one that opens so we’ll keep our roof access.

At the same time we’re getting new front and back doors.  The carpenter is also going to re-open the 4 attic windows which were windows once and were sided over.  And put in 4 new windows so that we can put a window air conditioner up there if need be.  (I’m sure we’ll need to).

Now we’re dealing with what doors and what window patterns in the door(s).  I really have no opinion on this, honestly.  But for some reason C thinks I should have an opinion.

🙂

Dishwashers suck!

After removing the LG and returning it and installing the Kenmore Elite here are some additional observations.

The LG is built like a tank. The Kenmore more like a Yugo.

The Kenmore is supposed to be quiet. But it’s not, nothing like the LG. Nothing at ALL like the LG. But again you buy a dishwasher to wash dishes. I only ran the Kenmore thus far on a Quick rinse cycle to make sure the dang thing didn’t leak. It doesn’t rattle or make any grinding noises, but you can hear it moving water around in there.

Personally, to me that says it’s washing things. The LG was so quiet, that perhaps it was simply being too gentle.

Installation: Because the Kenmore isn’t a tank, and doesn’t use every square inch of available space it’s much easier to install, except for the wiring. What ever bright engineer put the electrical box on the extreme right with the screw recessed in the back right, and didn’t at the very least make it a Phillips should be fired. It’s hard enough putting this back laying on your stomach let alone up against a wall under a dishwasher. But to have a slotted screw and to be recessed so far that you can’t get another hand on it to hold it is ridiculous!

Of course this means you also can’t get as many dishes in this thing, it’s not a super-tall-tub.  pffft.  It cleans twice as fast so we’ll run it twice thank you.

Now it’s up to Claudine, will she stand for such a noisy $700 dishwasher.  I have my doubts.  But I’m about at the end of my dishwasher installation career.