While the title “Burning Down the House” might be a good name for an 80’s pop song, it is not good to do in your real house!
This all is because I decided to clean out the crawl space. Under the addition of the house they put in just a crawl space instead of a full basement. The previous owners still had some assorted junk hiding up in there and I have ignored it for 2 years. Tonight I couldn’t ignore it any longer and it all had to go. So I setup my work lamps, 1000 watts of lights. Probably over kill for such a little space but I wanted to see. Then I got the shop vac out and plugged it into the same outlet. After a couple of hours cleaning up I was crawling back out of the crawl space and noticed an odd smell in the air. Looked over at the outlet where the lamp was plugged in at and saw these small flames leap out of the outlet, then a puff of smoke, then more small flames. I flew out of the crawl space and was across the room pulling the power cords out of the outlet. Thankfully this was enough to stop the flames.
After this picture was taken I cut the outlet off and capped the wires for now. Then I remembered a conversation I had with my father-in-law (an electrician) when he looked at our breaker panel. He stated we needed to replace the panel because it was the first residential breaker panel they ever made and they were a hunk of crap. And then he made some statement like, you don’t have to worry about blowing a breaker because they won’t go in that panel, it will just burn. The panel has already been set to replace this spring.
Saturday night the wife and I went out to dinner at one of our favorite restaurants, Mediterranean Grill. I have only ever gotten just the pita from here and figured I would branch out and try something new. So the owner helped us pick some new items and the biggest winner was a salad Mujadara Fattouch. Since we had never had this dish before I scoped some on the wife’s plate hoping she would eat some first and tell me if it was good or not. She hesitated and not wanting to look like a chicken waiting for his wife try a dish first, I put and spoonful into my mouth. Immediately, my tongue was hit with bold flavors making my eyes open wide and my mouth smile. The wife tasted hers and was equally blown away by the fantastic taste and we proceeded to devour the dish like a pack of wild animals. This is a fantastic dish and highly recommended.
At this point the wife and I think we could make a whole meal out of just hummus and flat bread and our new favorite majadara fattouch!
Not to be out done, Maisy finally slowed down enough for me to take a few pictures of her. Normally she is running around the house at 220 MPH and she is just a little black streak. She is still full of kitten and is quite the opposite of Marv when it comes to energy levels.
We have a soft spot for grey tiger stripes so we have two of them. You can kind of tell from the pictures that Maisy is much more brown while Marv is more grey. Marv is also more striped while Maisy is more marbled. Both have the “M” in the middle of their heads.
I had the camera handy and Marvin doesn’t move much so it makes for a good time. You can see Marv was having a great time taking pictures.
Actually he kept falling asleep so I would make a noise to wake him up so I could take a shot. After a little while, I think he got more than a little annoyed with this game, I was cutting into his early afternoon nap and this would only make a mess of his mid-afternoon nap and could hamper the late afternoon nap.
Tonight is the biggest and brightest full moon of 2010. So even though the thermometer reads 10 degrees, I went out with my camera to take some pictures.
I bundled up as much as I could with still having my hands accessible enough to focus the camera and the ability to push the button for the shutter. I wish I had a better zoom lens because, oddly enough, the moon is still a really long way away. After 20 minutes, the exposed skin on my face began to hurt so i figured it was time to go in. Pulled the pictures off the camera and started looking through them, and I succeed in getting one half way decent shot.
Taking a photo of a light source is very hard to do.
I don’t know about you, but when I think of introducing a hockey team, I picture conjuring hockey sticks from electricity, destruction of shipping, blowing up MSU, destroying the planet and other insane things. Oh wait a minute, I have never thought about those things when I think of a hockey team introduction, but apparently the Alaska Nanooks have and create a whole video.
This is an incredible video of Volkswagen’s Transparent Factory where they produce the Phaeton. I have never seen a factory with a wooden floor, at least not one from the last 80 years. Amazing engineering.
The wife and I Tivo the PBS show Austin City Limits. The wife and I really like live music and ACL is a good show to show case acts that actually write good music. The episode that we watched tonight featured a band called Avett Brothers which oddly enough has a couple of brothers in the band. The performed a great set and picked up two new fans, we have their catalog of CDs on their way and we looked up their tour to see if they were coming around the area. They are playing in Ann Arbor which isn’t a bad drive, too bad it is on a school night and needing to get there on time and up for work the next morning makes that one less than possible. So if we decide to go see them on this tour, it will have to be Milwaukee.
If you want to see the episode, you can stream the program from the ACL site.
