A New Year

I have discovered that the ultimate way to wake up in the morning on the first day of the year is to the sound of hammering. It can't be just any hammering, but hammering on a house that is destined to be one's very own home. Noting that it is hammering that is being done on New Year's Day, which by most people's accounts is a holiday produces an added dose of joy. Every day that they work is one day closer to the day that I will be able to move in.

New Year's Day means resolutions, right? Considering the profound success of last year's resolution (I can't remember what it was.), I have decided upon not one, but three, this year.

#1 Lift weights on a regular basis. (This might have been last year's.) If the frequency is once a month, I'm all set.

#2 Try to avoid overeating such that I burst. Or even feel like it.

#3 Do not succumb to impulse purchases. Do not buy a Handspring Treo 600.


Actually, I thought of a couple of other good ones, but I've forgotten what they were already.

Last night I went to a New Year's Eve party. That was great! For the first time in forever, I didn't glumly sit around thinking about how everyone in my time zone was having fun except for me and my immediate family. Before I was even sure that my brother was having more fun than I was. This year, however, I enjoyed scrumptious food, such as baked Brie and homemade creme brulee while being entertained by three toddlers running around like wild and crazy monkeys. I also narrowly escaped being forced to sing karaoke one more time. This was the first time I'd actually ever seen a karaoke machine, so the risk was higher than ever before.

I went over to the house this afternoon. It is really looking fantastic. The braces are in place in the vaulted ceiling in the great room, so I finally have a good idea of how high the ceiling will be. I've always known it would be 16', but seeing really is believing. Now that the windows are framed I know that the view will, indeed, be spectacular. Well, maybe it won't be spectacular, but at least very awesome.

View of the window wall on 1/1.

Braces in the ceiling of the great room.

This is how the house looked on 12/31.

Cell phone Confusion

The main event of today was going to the AT&T wireless store to return Siemens car charger that arrived with my parents' Sony Ericsson phones. Lots of irate people were in line to be helped, so my dad and I waited for a while. I perused the model selection and quickly determined that they did not have a Handspring Treo 600. Well, quickly is probably an exaggeration, because there were lots of people standing in the way. As we had assumed, but wanted to confirm, Cingular does have a roaming agreement with AT&T, so there shouldn't be any roaming charges within the Carolinas. I like the advantage of being able to make calls practically anywhere with Sprint, but AT&T has cooler phones. We hope that the plan also includes nationwide long distance. According to the AT&T wireless website, it should be included, but the slick brochures that we picked up at the store said that it was not included. Hopefully the website was just updated more recently. It would be so nice if this were stated in the account information, rather than our having to guess.

I'm still feeling like I should consider looking into getting a new cell phone eventually. I must resist!

Lots of progress has been made on the house in the last couple of days. It's really looking good. It turns out that I'm going to have "regular"/"French" doors in the great room, as opposed to sliding ones. The low profile sliding doors weren't available. I think they will be easier to use, so this may not be a bad thing.

House, Food and a Movie

I went over to the new house today and saw the progress that's been made. It continues to look great. Not a lot has changed over the Christmas holidays, but that's perfectly understandable. One of the most interesting things that I find about the process is how the house, which is just under 1900 square feet, seems to change size during the different stages. It's all an optical illusion and I'm thankful that people warned me about the effect before the building started. When only the foundation was finished, it all looked very small. When I drove up to the house when just a few of the walls were up, it looked small, but when I got out of the van and looked around, it looked like a decent size. Now it's looking huge and individual rooms feel different from how I expected. My studio, for example, looked on the floor plan as if it would be long and narrow, but it's actually nicely proportioned. The nine foot ceilings probably help with that.

I only had a few minutes to take a few pictures and then I headed off to see a movie with a friend of mine. We wanted to see Something's Gotta Give, with Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton. Once we finally got a parking space, the movie had sold out. From what I noticed, it was the only movie that sold out. We decided to just eat dinner and call it a day. We should have better luck tomorrow, since we bought tickets while we were there.

One of the advantages of being at a shopping center, like Southpoint in Durham, is that restaurants seem to be open all day long. It was around 3:45pm and Big Bowl was roughly half full and filled up by the end of our meal. If I remember correctly, Big Bowl proclaims to have Chinese, Vietnamese and Thai cuisine. I'd been there once for lunch before and I had the Crispy Orange Peel Shrimp, which were excellent. Despite the fact that I wanted to try most of what was on the menu, I decided to have that again, because I'd liked it so much. We also split a combo order of potstickers, with three chicken and three vegetable dumplings. It came with three sauces, a duck sauce, the standard soy ginger sauce and a creamy sesame. I thought all were excellent, but I was surprised how much I liked the sweet duck sauce. I was also surprised at how good the vegetable potstickers were. I'd heard friends recommend them before, but this was the first time that I'd ever tried them.

Of course, the shrimp were nicely crisp and tangy, just as they had been before. I also had a glass of their ginger soda, which was very good. It tastes strongly of real ginger and lime juice, a lovely combination. Before, I had tried their iced hibiscus tea, which is basically red zinger. While I enjoyed it, it's not nearly as good as the iced red zinger that Pyewacket used to make,because Big Bowl added the sugar to the boiling water, just as you would make regular southern sweet tea. After some experimentation a few years back, I determined that you have to make the tea and chill it so it doesn't get diluted by the ice. Then you add the sugar afterwards. Red zinger is acidic enough such that the sugar (Sugar in the Raw is best) will dissolve, with stirring, when it's cold.

Not long after I got home, my parents and I took one more step forward toward joining the 21st century or even the previous one. We ordered our first pay per view movie! Direct TV was offering a coupon for one free movie a month, December through February. We saw Anger Management. I thought it was pretty funny and it was the first Adam Sandler movie I'd ever seen. I was pleased with how easy it was to pick out a movie. It certainly beats forgetting to take a movie back to the video store!

This was the view from the garage entrance on 12/28.