Whee! It's a house!

We finally got our home! It's small, and broken, but good. Yes, good.

Ok, not really broken. Just needs a few issues taken care of.

We did get a brand new roof out of it, after all.

The front, of course.

We got the keys early this month, and we've been planning our angle of attack for getting it ready to move in to. As such, we spent most of this weekend ripping up the carpet in the living room and laying down laminate in both the living room and dining/kitchen. Initially we had planned on just making sure everything was clean, but then got a really good look at the carpet and it went a bit like "nooooooope!"

As Isabeau points out, the color of the carpet tends to hide the horror in pictures.

After we had pulled up the carpet and found this,

We have tentatively decided to redo all the floors!

And so, we spent all of Friday and Saturday laying down underlayment and laminate flooring!
It was pretty hard work and my knees still haven't forgiven me (I even used kneepads...), but the end result looks great! We rented a big saw from Home Depot for making cuts and now I want one. >.>
Unfortunately, Makita's tend to be very pricey, and it's going to be a while before we can buy a 500 dollar saw...I am however, buying myself a nice Dewalt drill!

Dining room, complete with teh Isabeau!

We didn't take a lot of pictures while we were working, mainly because we were focused on working...So mainly I'm posting the finished (or mostly finished) project. We still need to do the baseboards, dividers, and do some trimming on the underlayment.

Kitchen, duh.

Living room, complete with bored to tears children...

It rained pretty good on Friday, so the kids were cooped up all day, without much of anything to do.
Saturday it cleared up a lot, and was sunny and almost warm, so I cleaned up broken glass (mostly bottles in a firepit...) and we let the kids play for a while. The kids LOVE the backyard, which I don't have any pictures of...I will take some next time I'm there (which should be tomorrow, I need to replace the wax seal on the toilet).

That's all for now! Going to try to keep things a little more updated.

Work and Life!

Got a lot going on these days...

Last week I transferred to the newly established Swing shift at work, which came with a small promotion. I am now a Working Team Lead which is essentially a field promotion while they see how I handle it.
So far, not difficult. The entire swing shift is myself and two other gentlemen. Our shift runs from 3:30pm to Midnight, though one of the gents only stays till 9:30 Mondays through Thursdays.

Originally, the plan was that I would be running the Shipping department, but instead I am being trained for most of the different departments on the production floor! Currently I spend most of my nights working as a technician at the test benches, primarily thermal testing units. I do spend some time bouncing around the place throughout the night. Do a few hours in the test area, run over to shipping and drive the forklift around, run back to test...repeat.

The expectation, however, is that the swing shift will be growing to a full fledged shift with all departments running. When that happens I will have a head start towards getting a serious promotion. I've managed to impress a number of people in the building, so I have reasonably high hopes for the future.

So this and more have kept me very busy. I haven't had much time for a lot of hobbies, but  I have painted a number of mechs that I recently purchased.
I picked up the Bounty Hunters Companion Lance (which includes a Phoenix Hawk, Primitive Shadow Hawk, Cauldron Born A, and a Javelin), a Locust, and a Toro.
I've managed to pain the two hawks, the locust, and the Toro.

First the Hawks!

The Locust

And lastly, the Toro! Which I'm pretty proud of!

Lastly, one of my co-workers is a pretty big geek. His particular passion however, is for Legos!
He called me back to the maintenance shop a couple days ago to show me this.

No banana for scale, but the Brute garbage can in the background should give you an idea...
The thing is remote control, and has an engine in the back with working pistons.
Ran him somewhere around 250 bucks!

Christmas Time! And Battletech!

Christmas has come and gone again.
This year was pretty impressive in many ways. We ended up buying the biggest tree the kid's have ever had, there were piles of presents under the tree, and Santa really delivered this year (especially for Corwin!).

All of the kids got Lego sets (some came from Santa), the older kids got a Discovery Channel microscope, lots of books, the stockings were full of treats.
Jen, Paul, and Fyodor sent the kids a second generation Disney Infinity Avengers starter set for the Xbox 360 (all of the kids are nuts for it!)

And then the kids woke up Christmas morning and Corwin found this.

It's an Aircraft Carrier. The two boys flipped out when they saw it, and I don't know which of them plays with it more. They fight over it almost constantly too. It is quite large, though the picture doesn't really do it justice.

Saffron got a large Lego set, and I also gave her a CD/Radio Boombox all of her own. As well as a copy of Peter and the Wolf, narrated by Patrick Stewart. She's been listening to it, while reading a copy of the book I got when I was close to her age.

All in all, everyone got lots of presents and had a pretty good time. Bobo and I got plenty of goodies as well. Cooking stuff, cool books, the Agricola board game (which we got to play finally. Complicated, but fun  and every thing makes sense after you work your way through the rules).

I was also able to finish painting most of my new Battletech stuff that I got earlier, as well as my the tanks that I've had for a while. I decided to paint them all as a mercenary company (who's name is yet undetermined). The paint scheme matches with my Griffon and Battlemaster 'mechs as well, which gives me a current roster of six mechs and 4 tanks. I made a list of mechs that I still want to aquire as well...it's rather long. I guess it shows my tastes as well, because everything on it is from the 3025 readout.

Here's some pics of the finished mechs.

Group Shot!

Cataphract, Hatchetman and the two Marsden II heavy tanks

Marauder, Enforcer, and the two Patton/Rommel heavy tanks

I'm thinking about naming the outfit The Crimson Thunder Company

Corwin's Birthday

I'm horrible at this. My excuse is work, of course. Keeps me to busy to remember to update things properly.

But it is that time of year! Corwin's Birthday and Christmas!
Corwin is five years old now. Almost as hard to think about as Saffron turning seven in October. For his Birthday, Isabeau and I took everyone to the local Bullwinkles, where I had conveniently won a $50 gift card the last time we were there. The kids had a great time playing in the Fun Fortress, especially Osric who found a ball pit full of giant balls bigger than himself!

He had a great time. Then we played video games, a couple of prize games, and mini golf (sorta).
Then we went to Red Robin for a Birthday Dinner. Which was entertaining. We went on the Sunday that the Seahawks played the Niners, so the entire staff was dressed in Seahawks paraphernalia.
And every tv was playing the game of course. Corwin was entranced by it. First time he saw what was happening, he exclaimed that they were wrestling over the ball! And now they're doing it again!
It was fantastic.
Earlier in the day we did presents and the kids played pin the tail on the pony.

Saffron had made the pony.

All in all, everyone had a pretty good time.

Saffron's Birthday, Bullwinkles, and Halloween

In just three days it is going to be Saffron's birthday! Seven years old already...

Yesterday I took Saffron and Corwin to the Bullwinkles Restaurant and Family Fun Center (they still exist!) in Edmonds for lunch and an hour of playing games. This is the second time we've gone. It's not as good as the old one in San Jose, but I wasn't really expecting it to be. On the other hand, in addition to the video games and ticket games, the also have a mini golf course, laser tag, bumper cars, bumper boats, batting cages, aerial jungle gym, bungie jumper, and possibly a couple of other games...it's pretty big! The food there, while not five star, is not actually that bad. And the staff is pretty friendly too.

Last week I finally made it out out of the house to go and do something geeky! I made a Meetup account and managed to join (and attend) a board game day at the 'Round the Table Gamer Pub in Edmonds. It was this locations second meetup, so it's still pretty small, but the Group (named Inclusive Geekery) is pretty well established so I expect it to grow. I'm signed up to attend the next one on November 4th as well.
In addition, Bobo and I played Battletech last night for the first time in months, which was quiet nice.

And lastly, Halloween is right around the corner! We've been getting our first real taste of Washington weather this week as well. Lots of rain, and some strong wind (gusts up to 60mph!).
The weather is supposed to be wet on Halloween, which will be exciting. Isabeau is hard at work on Saffron's Elsa dress

Here's Saffron is trying it on for size! Saffron decided that she wanted the coronation dress.
Corwin is going to be a Robot, and Osric is going as Buzz Lightyear.

Life in general, Warcraft in particular

It's Nuts.

And as a result, I keep forgetting to post.

Things haven't really changed much since the last post, though I did stop by one of the local game shops to ask about Battletech. It's called Mogu Games, and as far as Battletech is concerned it was a bust. They still have a few items on clearance but no one plays regularly, so if I want to do Battletech again I'll need to start hunting on web for groups (or start my own). There is at least one other game store in Everett that I want to check out, and if I can find a group looking for a noob then I might start playing 40k instead. I have magnetized the turrets on my Patton/Rommel tanks, so now I can start painting them! And I can magnetize my Marder tanks as well. Painting them will be interesting.

Work is work. I've been doing overtime on a fairly regular basis, usually no more than an hour a day but it adds up. I've been doing Saturdays on a regular basis as well, from 6am to 12pm.


Isabeau and I started playing World of Warcraft again, partly just to have something nerdy to do together. There have been a ton of changes in preparation for the next expansion coming out, some good and some very bad (poor Hunters). One of the good things in my opinion is the Stat Squish. The last expansion in particular (but cataclysm too) saw an insanely stupid level of Hit Point inflation and what not, with some PCs hitting the 800k range. I had something like 620k, and the squish has dropped me down to about 77k. The seem to have fixed Protection Paladins a bit, because Darthic doesn't suck anymore, which makes me happy. Blood DKs however got a bit of the short end of the stick, having lost two of their main attacks, Heart strike and Frost strike. This leaves them a little short in the rotation which could be a problem as a tank. Hunters got pretty f****d though. Bobo is mad. So am I.
But enough of that.
One of the nicest things that changed is damage scaling. Going up against a lower level target usually didn't do much other than they couldn't hurt you very well. Damage went up a little, but nothing drastic. Until Now. Bobo and I two-manned the Lich King Saturday night, steam rolling through the raid in about half an hour, and most of that was spend healing the damn green dragon. The Lich King himself died so fast that we actually skipped phases. I kept waiting for him to kill us and it just never happened. During the airship battle, I jumped to the enemy ship only to have bobo hammer it so fast that it ran away with me still on board. I had to suicide. It was sorta like "Right! Time to whoop ass! Where's everyone going?!"
We had tried to do the raid just a week before the new patch, and it had sucked horribly. We kept getting to the airship and failing. We literally could not get past it. Then, a couple days ago I was helping Bobo quest on one of her alts, and I casually smacked a target for about 300k damage. From my tank. That's when we decided to try the Lich King again.
I also finished leveling Jafnharr up to 90, so there's that too.

I'm going save what else I have for another post, which I will start prepping tomorrow.

Until next time, Good Night!

Hello again!

I haven't done a new post recently, and the simple reason is that I have been way to tired to do one.
I haven't lost much weight at my new job, but it is doing great things for my withered muscles!

As such, I will try and make this a long post to get caught up with everything that has been happening.

First up, the new job.
I've been working for Magnum for about five weeks now, started out boxing units for the first three weeks. Once I started boxing, I found out just how much variety there is in these units. The weigh anywhere from 10 or 15 pounds for the mini units (I think these are more for RVs) up to 70 pounds for the big boys. Most units are for sale for the US, but a selection is for Europe as well, and gets special stickers to show it.
A couple weeks ago I got moved to the final testing station, and that's what I've been doing since. This next week I will likely get moved to the "High Pot" station and get trained on that. Once I have been trained on that, we will start doing a revolving stations setup, so that no one will get stuck doing any one thing for an entire shift. I look forward to this.
The facility has its own mini gym on site for any employees who feel like working out over lunch/breaks, which is interesting.
Also, I am the oldest person in the shipping department.  Not certain how that makes me feel.

Outside of work, things have been pretty quiet. We have been going to the Seattle Woodland Park Zoo on a regular basis, and picked up a membership on our first trip we liked it so much. Also, it is pretty inexpensive to visit/get a membership. It is a fairly large zoo, but the way it is laid out is very nice because it makes it feel like you have more space to yourself, with most of the popular exhibits spread out. We have taken lots of pictures, lol. Here are a few of our favorites. We all really like the wolves and bears. Every time we have visited the wolves have been hanging out right next to the fence.

Other than the zoo, last week we went to the local library where Isabeau and I got cards. Saffron got her very first library card as well! The library itself is really nice and the kids section has a large play area with toys to keep kids entertained.

As far as geekery goes....basically nada. What with working full time, I haven't had a lot of time to get out. Plus, what little free time we have, Isabeau and I would rather spend together right now. There will be time enough for geekery and all that.

I have been getting some painting done, however. I'll post pics of that later. Mostly working on my Orks. Bruce's Boyz just got reinforced with a couple purchases off ebay, in the form of a trio of Killa Kans, 5 Nobz, and a scratch built warbuggy (which was advertised as an ork truck, but is way to small, which is why no one else bid on it). I still have to paint my Stormboyz, Grots, assemble and paint my Trukk, the nobz, and the kans...I have a fair bit of orks...

That's all for now!