Anthony Rants

Hey, I am still alive! I have heard through various sources that many of my readers wondered what could possibly be keeping me so busy? Well, it has been a combination of things. Firstly, work has been really busy for the last few months. As the proverbial Dutch boy, I have my fingers in many a project. Secondly, working on my beer brewery has taken up much of the rest of my time. Then of course there were the incidentals, a couple of weeks ago I had all four of my wisdom teeth removed after one of them got really inflamed... and then there were lots of leaves to pick up, firewood to split, a house to unpack, etc. and so forth. But, things have finally calmed down and last weekend, I brewed my first batch of beer on my new setup. I did ten gallons of a cream ale that should be ready in a few weeks. Everything functioned as expected for the most part, I have some tweaks to make here and there, but I was really pleased with how my setup worked out.

Christmas kind of came and went this year, sandwiched between all of the various things that are going on... but one thing is for sure, I made out like a bandit! A couple of weeks before Christmas, as a present to myself for being so brave for the dentist, I bought a 50" high definition plasma tv (it is pretty awesome), and then for Christmas, Anna got me an Xbox 360 and that is really awesome. Nothing like listening and watching 15 year olds kick my ass on Halo 3 in high definition 50" glory. We celebrated Christmas at our house in Champaign this year, Anna's mom, sister, and her sister's boyfriend were here. I think we all had a really good time. Christmas with my parents has yet to be scheduled as it is awaiting Dad's return from the desert, but I am looking forward to that as well.

The majority of our house is finally unpacked, Thanksgiving saw to that. We also moved up from hand-me-down furniture to our own furnishings which really makes it feel like a new place (not too mention how much more comfortable all the seating is!).

Well, not much else is new, but I suppose with all of these changes, some sort of pictures would be in order... I'll have to give an IOU for those... and I suppose I could make some sort of fruitless promise to keep my blog more up to date... maybe I'll save that for a New Year's resolution :)

Matt and Kate have been teasing us lately on all of the "fun" things we get to do, from painting to crawling around in blown insulation to run wires. When I was younger and I had to help my parents with such tasks, I think I looked at them the same way Matt and Kate look at them... but now that I am doing these tasks for Anna and I, there is something more to it. Maybe it is just the novelty of being able to change anything we want or maybe it is the gratification of feeling like you got something accomplished... whatever it is, I hope it doesn't wear off anytime soon because we have lots more things to do! :)

Today we're going to continue painting and I'm going to mow over there for the first time... and in another first, I'm going to carry my camera along so maybe I'll come back tonight with some pictures to share.

Well, for those of you who didn't know, on June 15th we closed on our very first house. The closing went well, so well in fact that because of some credits and such, the sellers ended up cutting us a check to close the deal. Immediately after we got done signing all the papers, we picked up a bottle of Two Brothers Opus 10 and went over to the house to celebrate. Later that afternoon, Anna's dad arrived from Missouri to give us a hand with the most immediate task of repainting the rooms. If you remember the house from the pictures we had up, many of the rooms were painted for children and while Anna and I are quite young at heart, we were looking for something with a bit more sophistication in the area of decor. Anna's dad brought a power roller and lots of motivation, so much so that we got all of the rooms primed and even painted the ceiling in the family room (it was looking a little dingy)... but that wasn't all, we also did first coats of color in two of the rooms. Overall I think we painted the equivalent of eight rooms that day and after some burgers and beers at Murphy's I think we all slept very well.

But alas, Anna's dad had to get back to fighting crime in Jefferson City, and we had to get back to our day jobs. We really appreciated all of his support and hard work though, it made for a really smooth start. Since then we've continued the painting, rewired the outlets in the bedroom we chose to be our office (they weren't grounded), and installed crown molding in the master bedroom. We still have quite a few doors and trim to paint, but we hope to finish that up this weekend.

One thing that we immediately noticed at the new house is the temperature. It is so much cooler than the house we live in now and we aren't even running the air over there. We think it may have something to do with the mature trees or maybe all the insulation in the house or maybe even the gable fan in the attic... whatever it is, it is really pleasant. Hopefully the trend continues and it is warmer in the winter as well. Speaking of mature trees, the previous owners left us a little note explaining quirks of the neighboorhood and of the house and one of the things they told us to get prepared for was the unreal onslaught of leaves in the fall... I don't remember the exact number of bags they said it took to collect them all, but it was immense... anyone want to barter raking for beer in the fall? ;)

In other news... Anna now has her very own blog, http://www.annaraves.com, in the coming weeks I hope to get her setup with some sort of a unique theme based on her guidance; during the same period I hope to fix anthonyandanna.com (I accidentally overwrote the only copy of the site's index that I had). Oh well, I needed some impetus to update it anyways I suppose.