We leveled and trimmed out the upper cabinets on one wall. The keen eye will see some wiring hanging down behind the cabinet. That is part of the in-cabinet and under-cabinet lighting that I mentioned the other day.
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We’re moving right along with the kitchen. We leveled the base cabinets, installed toe kick and filler strips, and did some metal working to put in that nifty HVAC vent (yes, I’m going to paint it black). I’m starting on the upper cabinets tonight. They’re a little more involved than the base cabinets. We’re putting lights under each of them for the counter top, and inside each of the glass faced cabinets. Its a little silly, but we spend a lot of time in the kitchen, and really like it there. We will have 39 light fixtures in the one room though. 17 cans, above table fixture, above bar fixture, and the rest are a mix of the puck lights in and beneath the upper cabinets. It should look nice. Each set of lights is on a dimmer. Really, this is just us seeing what we like so that we can improve on the design in the next house. I will probably go with an automated lighting system to control the lights in the new home. Anyway, here is a quick peak at what its looking like. I’ll post more pics tonight after we do some of the upper cabinets.
Kathy and I put our new tile down this weekend. Yes, we have a lot of tile in our house. I’ll have more pics soon with the cabinets reinstalled, new sink, and hopefully new counter tops also. Olivia snuck into the video also.
I decided to upload some videos to youtube (instead of vimeo like we normally use). The quality isn’t as good, but its a much simpler and quicker process.
Dad and I picked this up last week to assist in the many projects that we want to tackle. These are pics right after it was delivered, and it looks 100x better now after dad put some elbow grease into it. Once we get it all cleaned up I’ll put up some new pics of it.
For those of you that care… here are the features:
4wd
4 in 1 (clam) bucket
9000+ lbs of lift on front bucket
25mph forward/31mph reverse
Heat & AC
We’ve had to rename the cat because that is what Olivia likes to call her. Abby is too difficult I guess, so Olivia calls her Adee. I’m very pleased with her progress lately and I really can’t wait until she finally tries to take a step. Daycare said that Olivia is the fastest crawler they’ve had… she’s also probably the baby that has crawled and not walked for the longest period as well.
Olivia woke up this morning, happy like always. Kathy brought her into the bathroom to say hi to me as I was getting ready. Stan was on the counter keeping me company as he normally does. Its funny because she did this same thing yesterday, almost. She pointed to Stan yesterday and said “kiki”. Today, she pointed and said “kitty”. It was great. That is her first real word. She’ll look at me or Kathy and say “mama” or “dada”, but she’ll also say “baba” sometimes. This time she pointed and identified what she was pointing at. My kid is so smart.
Olivia started pointing at stuff and saying “uh” the other day… out of the blue. She points at the cats, the light switch, just about anything she normally can’t get to. Yesterday she started standing out in the open with no support. She did it a couple of times and seems to be getting good balance. Any day now she’ll take a step. I’ll try to get a video of her standing up soon.
Kathy and I were talking, sometime in July, and decided that we hadn’t been to a good concert in a while. August normally wraps up concert season around here, so we started shopping around. We found some good tickets for a lot of different artists, both on ebay and stubhub.com. We narrowed the selection down to Heart or Styx/Kansas. I bought the first set of tickets that went on sale on-line for the Styx/Kansas concert and we ended up having excellent seats (4th row right in front of Tommy Shaw). We also had really great seats at the Heart concert as you can tell in the video below.
As you can tell from the video, Heart still puts on an excellent show and hasn’t lost a thing. Ann (the singer you morons) is 60 and her sister, Nancy (the guitar player), is 56. That isn’t old, but they’re not just over 20 like they were when they recorded a lot of their hits. The show was at the Ryman in Nashville, and it was a great place to have a concert. I think it used to be a church years ago. Heart actually just released a new album and they played some of those songs too. They were really good and were very similar to their old music.
Kansas was ok. It was good to see them, but I built them up a lot in my head, and I was a little disappointed. They’re also all 60+, but Steve Walsh (singer) has really lost his voice. I went to the concert only knowing what they used to sound like. We still enjoyed it, but I doubt they’ll tour much longer.
Styx was every bit as good as Heart. I’ve seen Styx before with Dennis DeYoung (the guy that started the band) back in the 90′s when he briefly toured with them. No one knew at the time it would be a brief reunion, and shortly after they picked up the new guy on piano and he’s been with them ever since. He does an excellent job and sounds a lot like Dennis, but isn’t crazy like him. They really put on a great show… so much so that we’re looking for another set of tickets to see them again next month.
Overall, we’ve had a great time and my mom and dad have really helped out a lot watching Olivia. I’m a little sad that she’ll never get to see any of these bands in concert. At least we have some video and some stories for her. I’m really fortunate to have seen a lot of the bands that I have. Kathy and I counted the other day and I’ve seen about 40 or so major bands in concert. I also really got a kick out of Kathy. She’s hooked on old rock and roll now and really likes bands that sing harmonies. She’s the world’s worse with band names and songs. I had to play her all of these band’s songs from youtube or amazon so she’d know who they were before we went. We now have all of their music in iTunes We will be concert junkies for a long time I suppose, but we’ve learned some lessons. For one, if it isn’t an outdoor or open seating, then buy the best seats you can afford. Security sucks and lets Joe blow pothead sneak up and squeeze in and smell awful and sing off key (listen at the end of lady). Get seats toward the middle of a row. I don’t ever plan on going to the bathroom, so I’ll deal with it. It’ll at least be a buffer for the drunk/stoned morons. If it is open seating, wear a t-shirt. It allows you to really swing elbows when necessary . I really think that we’ll stick to indoor concerts from now on if we can help it though. The sound is much better.
