Eric M.’s Blog

So I had been thinking more and more about getting back into electronics. In highschool, and some in college, I really enjoyed working on electronics projects (like the resistors, micro-controllers, and circuit boards type of electronics), and I have a handful of project ideas (more on those later).

So I was talking about this with Sara, and she doesn’t really like the idea of me setting up a workbench anywhere in the house, so it was decided we are going fix up the back room of the garage.

We have a large 2 car garage, and it has a fairly large back room (10ft x 21ft x 8ft) that had previously been semi-finished. All the walls (but not the ceiling) are insulated, and the entire room has sheet rock, but it was never mudded and taped. I’ve already knocked down dry wall that was either damaged or in the way, placed a number of new outlet boxes, and ran some romex. Last night I finished wiring up a new circuit with some outlets. Next up I need to re-wire the existing outlets.

I’m still trying to figure out how best to heat the room. I’ve been looking at these blue-flame wall mount heaters, because they are cheap, but they are also vent-less, meaning they vent the combustion products into the room. Now there isn’t any inherent safety problem with that, in fact these things have been use for many many years (and are quite popular in the UK and Japan). They run very very efficiently (99.9%) and produce very little CO. But they do add moisture to the air (remember, fire makes water), and if improperly maintained can be hazardous. Unfortunately the other type of heaters, power exhaust, are quite a bit more expensive (~4x more after shipping and vent pipe), and are a bit more complex to install.

But anyways, I’m hoping to get all the demo, electrical, and drywalled within a few weeks.

So lets see what has been going on in my neck of the woods.

Two weekends ago (the 17th-18th) Sara and I hung out with Sara’s sister, Cathy. We headed up to a new mall in Clinton Township to just take a look. As a side note, I vote that an outdoor mall is a bad idea in Michigan…. Besides being very cold, it was an ok mall, nothing special though. We had some dinner at T.G.I. Fridays and headed back to our place. Cathy and I played drinking games on the Wii until something like 3 am while Sara napped on the couch. Sunday Cathy was very hungover, but we bummed around the area for a while, until she decided it was time for her to return home. It was nice getting to hang out with her again. We hadn’t seen her much in the last few months because she had a boy for a while, and Cathy had gotten aggravated at Sara at some point.

For Thanksgiving, Sara and I headed over to Sara’s parents house in Brighton. We got there around 10 am and Sara had some milk gravy and sausage while I had just some sausage. Sara, Cathy, Sara’s Dad and I all played a round of Monopoly. Cathy and I agree that Sara and Dad cheat… We also play some Uno. Of course Sara’s Mom whipped us up a ton of food and we had a wonderful turkey dinner. We played some more Uno, this time with Mom and watched Shrek the Third on DVD. I think we ended up being there until 9:30 pm or so.

Well, I’m still sorting those photos from the UK (hey, there are a lot of them), so a bit of an update.

So I was sick from Thursday through Monday with kinda flu-ish symptoms, which wasn’t fun. But, despite the illness we got some work done around the house.

Saturday we went to Home Depot to buy a new storm door to replace the broken on that was currently one the front door (we also bought the best toy tool ever while there). The old door didn’t latch properly, and during a windy night last year, blew open. It rip the mounting brackets for both door closers off the door jamb, and slammed into the awning, breaking the door and awning. Since then, that door has been inoperative, mainly because it was a pain to close; you had to lift the door so it would close, and then latch it with the deadbolt. In fact, we have had bricks piled on the front stoop for months from a previous project, because we were too lazy to move them out back, and we hoped it would let people know not to use that door. How our neighbors must love us…

Sunday we cleared the bricks away, and it only took about 6 hours to install with some help from Sara (mainly holding the door in place while I drove some screws in). While I was busy with that, Sara cleaned inside, then came out and did some landscaping on the side of the house.

Monday we went to Benihana for lunch, since it was Sara’s birthday, and I had my evening class from 6:30 to 9:30.

I preordered Super Mario Galaxy from Toys R Us because they were offering a $25 gift card if you bought it there. Irritatingly enough none of the Toys R Us in the area got them in yesterday, even though other stores did. I just called them though and they did get them today, so I’ll pick it up on the way home from work.

Well, back to sorting picks (and you know, maybe working some).

I’m still sorting through the London pics, so I thought I would post a couple pics from my friends family photoshoot.

The First picture here is the entire gang, (left to right, back to front) Chris, Dawn, Caitlin, and Lauren (who was a total ham the entire time ). Some more after the break.

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