So… Globedomain blows. My previously-awesomely-cheap host decided to stop delivering my email for a week and took FOUR people to figure out what happened and restore it. Needless to say, I was taking my $3/month elsewhere! I’ve had problems with them both times I’ve renewed for the year (they forget I paid, and four months later send me an overdue notice and disable my account?) and should have done this a LONG time ago. It’s just a pain in the arse to move everything.
Two months later, here I am using Namecheap for my hosting as well as for my registrar. Yes, it’s unfortunately more expensive, but I doubt I’ll ever have a problem with them. Already they seem to understand that (gasp!) I would like to receive my email.
More on the pain in the arse that is moving a website: I never, EVER want to deal with MySQL again–and especially not moving Wordpress. My theme got mangled in the process and presented me with a lovely white screen as my homepage until I beat my content out of it. Ok, I just forced it to use another theme. It’s not as easy as just copying a folder from A to B unfortunately.
Another casualty of the process was my image gallery. I neglected to save my database (again, I hate MySQL!) and it looks like I’ll have to reinstall Gallery2 or figure out a good way to move it.
I have a bunch of photos to post and will definitely do so in the coming days 
Yay for having my website back!
One thing that has been hard to get used to being out in the middle of nowhere (well, compared to a metropolitan area of FOUR MILLION PEOPLE) is the vast amount of wildlife. Unfortunately, a lot of that wildlife isn’t very nice. Take, for instance, the giant shroom in the sandpit back yard:
Yay for opiates? These darned things are all over the place, EXCEPT where the centipede grass has fully woven itself together. If you’ve never seen this stuff, it’s quite strange. The “runners” run themselves all over the frigging place and make your yard look hideous until it has sewn together a blanket that prevents anything from growing up underneath it. If you can get it to that point (hint: irrigation system needed), don’t step on it. This “grass” doesn’t take kindly to being trampled on. More on grass at a later date.
What it doesn’t prevent, however, are fire ants. These things are EVERYWHERE, except in the house, thankfully. It’s the one bug that hasn’t seemed to find a way in yet. Here is a prime example taking its loot back home:
Speaking of home, don’t kick these:
Here’s how fire ants seem to have gotten their name: if you disturb them, they come out like a swarm of bees (I have experienced this) and proceed to bite/sting like crazy (which I have not yet experienced. I fled.). Supposedly it feels like your legs are on fire, according to the resident Floridian.
I wasn’t prepared for the GINORMOUS spider attached to the back deck, however:
Mr. Banana Spider (aka the Golden silk orb-weaver), at an earth-shattering length of FOUR (+/-1) INCHES, was quietly waiting for lunch. Supposedly they’re petrified of roaches (scaredy spider? go figure), so the next time I find one he’s getting tossed into the web 
But the meanest, blackest, evilist thing around is easily this guy:
The Black Widow (Insert horrified scream) is apparently pretty common around here. I’ve seen 3 since we moved in, although none of them have been inside (yet). Supposedly they’re also big fans of the nuclear plant that I work in. But these guys aren’t too fast and they don’t hold up well to being smacked with a stick:
Back when we were looking at houses (and when Sam was complaining about closets), I made the mistake helpful comment that I could build whatever storage she wanted and not to worry about what was there at the time. Well, here I was with yet another 3 day weekend from my 4-10’s schedule at work and I was tired of looking at all the boxes on the floor of the laundry room. Sam immediately piped up and said she wanted a big bar to dry/hang stuff on along with some shelves. After a few hand movements and more wish list items from her and some actual measurements from me, the idea of a shelving system for the laundry room was born:
I took a “Julia Scan” (you with the big Canon SLR know what I’m talking about) of this thing that I loosely call a “plan” for your viewing pleasure, or your scathing comments. After a few hours at Lowe’s, a store that is receiving an increasing percentage of my paycheck, I finally had all the materials necessary to build the darned thing. Due to the small car syndrome of our garage, we had to have a couple bozos at Lowe’s make a couple cuts so that the 8ft boards would fit in one of the cars. The less-than-helpful employee told me that it would be $0.25 a cut… to which I was a bit annoyed. Home Depot does it for free, and when you’re spending $250 in their store, it’s a wee bit insulting to get nickeled and dimed at the register. Thankfully the lady at the register neglected charge us It’s the principle of the matter. Anyway… we finally made it home with all our warez and proceeded to unload the truck Protege:
SEVEN HOURS later…. a square, a circular saw, a drill, and a few obscenities made this thing come to life. Note for future reference: 3/4″ shelves are HEAVY. I put together one section outside, but the long section had to be built inside. The small section was heavy enough. Sam had fun holding boards while I figured out how to connect it all together without damaging anything or harming any small children. THE RESULT:
This thing isn’t going anywhere. It’s braced together in the corner and the shelf brackets hold the whole thing against the wall. Between that and the 3 1-1/2″ wood screws going through every joint, it should last a very, very long time. Next big project is mounting the projector up in the theater…
After you live in a house for a few weeks, you start to notice a few quirks here and there. Being the engineer/geek/quazi-electrician that I am, the wiring of this place had become quite baffling and eventually infuriating to me. What does this mean for me? Taking things apart. Since we moved in, there have been a number of switches in the house that didn’t seem to do anything, so I started pulling coverplates off all the switches and seeing what I could learn. We were able to figure out what many of them did by me walking around the house and Sam furiously flipping switches, but there were a couple that still didn’t seem to do a darned thing. This was one of them:
Notice that only ONE wire is connected to this switch. Most people would be scratching their heads right now thinking that it’s connected, but anyone that’s done any sort of home wiring would realize that the single wire is just the ground wire, i.e. IT’S NOT CONNECTED TO ANYTHING. Argh. This is in the living room next to the switch that controls the chandalier, so I’m guessing that someone origininally intended to put a fan in there instead of just lights. Ok, so at least we know we’re not just stupid. The electrician was stupid. Anyway…
In the 2 smaller bedrooms, there are 2 switches for each of the fans: one for the light, one for the fan. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Well it does until you go into the master bedroom and find two switches and one of them turns the whole fixture on and off. WTF? The other switch doesn’t do anything. It was time to pull out my handy-dandy Cosco extendable ladder again. I went up and started dismantling the ceiling fan, to find this:
Someone had replaced the ceiling fan a year ago and didn’t bother to split the wiring. That red wire is switched from that 2nd switch. There were a few obscenities regarding that one. I rewired the darned thing so that the two switches would control it. Or so I thought. I turned the power back on at the breaker only to find that the switch on the FAR side of the bedroom would turn on the light, but the switch by the door wouldn’t. Here lies problem #2: the original electrician didn’t know how to wire a 3-way switch! (A 3-way switch is a pair of switches that you can use to turn on and off something. Think of the switches you may have at either side of a big room or at both ends of a hallway). So I pulled a switch-a-roo (hehe) with a couple wires, flipped the power back on again, and VIOLA!, a fully-operational ceiling fan!
I’m just hoping that this is the end of the electrician’s electrical blunders, but I’m sure I’ll find more in a couple weeks when I start crawling around under the house to install all the network wiring.
When you have no furniture (and really nowhere in particular to put much of anything), you place things on the ground, run wires everywhere, and sit against the wall when you eat, as Sam is doing here:
Your printer ends up going above the fireplace since you’ll be getting internet run to that cable drop (initially)…
You kinda sorta have a setup to watch movies and listen to music in the living room…
Your home theater looks like a rats nest of wiring (although you really don’t care… at all… once you’re watching something…
And until your favorite person from Time Warner comes to bring your cable modem, the only way you can get internet is to leach wifi from the neighbors. But it only works in the bathroom. When you turn it a certain direction. At least there’s a “chair”?
These beasts are Genesis Physics Model III’s… and OOOH do they sound amazing! They just don’t make speakers like they used to. Luckily, they’re the EXACT width of a Mazda P5 and the combined depth of two keeps them snug between the seats and the hatch. The guy we bought them from in TN couldn’t believe how perfectly they fit.
