THE PEOPLE MUST HAVE THEIR DAN MILLER

and I think you know who you are….

RON PAUL FOREVA BABY!!!!!!!

“I’m Yertle the Turtle! Oh, marvelous me! For I am the ruler of all that I see!”

Yes, folks, it’s time for another installment of new house pics!!!

That is of course a picture from the back bedroom, looking out towards the back yard. If you look closely under the carport, you can also see the riding mower that I got for the free laptop

We were there yesterday. I was working from home and told folks that I was going to do some stuff at the new house at 10. They were supposed to be bringing the crane to put the roof trusses at 10, and I wanted to see it. I was going to take some pics as well as try to get a video of them putting one up. I took a kid with me to check it out, but as is the norm with construction, the crane didn’t show up. Guess they had some problems with the weather. So we amused ourselves by playing King of the Mountain.

So here we are today. Roof is on as you can see. The shingles and such are not on yet, but they got all the trusses and have it almost completely sheeted as well. You can see behind the backhoe that they have also built the half-roof that is over our bedroom. The architect’s design said that it wouldn’t exactly line up with the existing roof, but they were able to get it done, so that’s nice.
Here’s a front shot.

Here’s a shot from across the street. You can see the cool tri-peaked effect that I was going for. I think it worked out very nicely and will of course look even nicer once it’s all sided and such. Carolyn was annoyed that the pic does not have the front window (they haven’t cut out the opening yet), so I used my MS Paint skeelz to draw one in. You can also see my Ron Paul sign. It will also look better once the decorative attic vents are put in on the addition (to match the ones over the front porch). That will be another way to try and make the addition look more like it’s all one house. Obviously when you’re adding this much to a house there’s only so much you can do but we wanted to try and make it look like all one house as much as we could.

So, some time after taking these pics I went to go into the house. They had taken the ladder down and so I was hefting my way up into the back door opening, and naturally my camera fell out of my pocket into the basement hole. So I had to go get that, which was… fun.

They have taken out the wall of the house between our old and new bedroom.

Here are two pictures standing in the old house, at the door that went into the master bedroom. It’s hard to see it all, but it’s about 15′ long now. About 6×6 of that (near the bottom left of the bottom pic) will be a walk in closet.

Here’s a pic of the upstairs bathroom. You can see the sink area and then the door into the toilet / tub area. I am not sure that these dimensions were done yet, but they are going to check on that and adjust if necessary.

Here’s the front left bedroom and then a shot out the window. Because of the way that the roof is by this bedroom, it has to have kind of a cut out in order to have an egress window.

Here’s the back bedroom. This is the window that I took that first picture out of.
Here’s the front-right bedroom

And this is from the top of the stairs (that don’t quite exist yet). To the left is the back bedroom, to the right is the front-right bedroom, and to the right (off-pic) is the front-left bedroom (with the cut-out window). Straight ahead will be a linen closet.

Here is a picture of the roof trusses.

As many of you know, I like 11s. My favorite time is in fact 11:11. Every year, on November 11th, we have a party at 11:11:11 11/11. It lasts one second. It’s good times. Though I have to say it’s not SO MUCH good times that I make an effort to stay up till the 2nd 11:11 (p.m.).

In fact, everyone around is invited to my house in 3 1/2 years, on November 11, 2011. Mark your calendars now.

In any case, my car has been inching up towards such a milestone. Since not only am I dorky enough to notice this, I am dorky enough to grab a picture of it, here you go:

And of course, because I am even MORE dorky, I happened to notice when I hit 111,000, and I quickly reset the trip odometer, making even MORE 11s.

I’ve of course been keeping my eye on it for awhile. Last night I saw that I was about 10 miles shy, so I put the camera up on the dashboard so I wouldn’t forget. I went to the new house in the morning and then went off to work. I knew I couldn’t go on the highway, so I went an alternate route. With about 1/2 mile to go, I pulled into a subdivision. I inched my way down the street, and then when I thought I had gone far enough, I turned around. There was a lady out there giving me the evil eye like I was casing the joint or somethin.

Of course, when I got back out to the main road, I was still a tenth or two short, so I had to turn around again. So when I turned around for the third time, the lady was still eyeing me. There was a little kid out waiting for the school bus, so maybe that was her kid and she was making sure I wasn’t trying to kidnap him or something. I probably looked weird shoving my camera into the dash of my car…

Yup, the new house is awful cool. Let’s start with some overview pictures of progress - these were all taken yesterday in some awful cold weather. It was not quite booger-freezing cold (and yes, that IS a technical term), but it was pretty cold. Low temperature last night was 2.

Front of the house - that is looking at the addition (obviously) - what will be the family room. There will be a 2nd story on top of that part of the addition.

Here’s a back view - looking at the back where there will be a mud room opening up into the family room. That big opening will be a glass sliding door that will open out on to our new deck (which will be located approximately where the big pile of debris and backhoe are)

You can’t see it - but right behind that backhoe is a massive pile of dirt (leftover from digging the basement). One advantage of near-booger-freezing cold temperatures is that the dirt doesn’t turn into mud and get all on your shoes. So I hobbled up on to the top of that pile and snapped a picture of the 2nd story (or what has been started on it). I also proclaimed that I was “KING OF THE HILL” and nobody disputed said claim. So one of the load bearing walls of the 2nd floor is up (you can see that there). The other one I believe has been built but not put up. It will go to the left of the one in the picture. To the right will just be roof to match the existing roof pitch (over our bedroom).

Now, let us move inside, shall we?

That’s inside looking up where the stairs will go up.

That’s standing in the mudroom area, looking at where the stairs will go down, then into our master bathroom (no access from this side), then that’s the extension of our bedroom on the far side (you’re looking west here)

Here you are looking north, out the back door of the house. You are in the family room, and you can see the half knee wall that will separate the mudroom from the family room. If you look closely, you can also see the sweet archway having already been framed in.

So there you have it. I will, of course, continue to update the masses.

So I tried to post these last week when I took them (twice), but Blogger was being gunga-gaaish, and not accepting the pics. I would also like to point out the first two entries one receives when searching for “gunga gaa”

Here is the first floor sub-decking, as looking at it from the NE corner

Here is a shot looking NE from the NW corner.

And here’s a shot of what it looks like underneath the decking - this is the basement. It’s kind of a mess down there and you can see the old back door down there.

I know that these pics probably make you kind of giddy, if you’re into that kind of thing. They certainly make me very excited. But let me just tell you that as awesome as these pics are (and they are awesome!), they are NOTHING compared to how freakin awesome the house looks now.

They’ve got the first floor walls up now (including interior ones), and many of the second floor floor joists. The old house exterior walls have been torn out as well as some of the roof.

I was there yesterday afternoon and it was just so awesome. I was just walking around inside the “family room” and I seriously could have stood out there in the cold for hours. It was that cool. I’ll try and get some more pics shortly.

So I have had some pretty odd dreams in my life. I’m sure I’m not alone - most people have some weird ones. Whenever I think about dreams, I am always reminded of Carolyn’s saying: “You know how whenever you have a dream seemingly random people just show up in your dreams? Well, what I want to know is who is having dreams about ME?!?!”

One of my most famous (to me) dreams occured probably 15-20 years ago. I remember it was just very vivid and very odd, but unfortunately I cannot remember the details anymore. I was talking to Jim, and I thought for sure that he would remember but he failed me. I believe his exact quote was ” I’m sorry if I failed in my task to remember your dreams :-). I can’t even remember my own :-)” He then proceeded to tell me about a dream he just had where his girlfriend’s mom was convinced he was a pimp and in fact said “it’s obvious you’re in the prostitution business.”

For the life of me I could not remember this dream of mine, but after thinking about it for awhile, I believe it had something to do with me delivering newspapers and featured the punchline “So that must be why they call him Daddy Warbucks“. Feel free to suggest plausible scenarios that connect those 2 pieces of information.

Anyway, I had a strange dream the other day. In it, myself and a group of other people (possibly family / friends) were inside some house and hiding from Darth Vader. So the door to this house is kind of rickety and won’t close right, so we are all trying to keep it closed while the Dark Lord of the Sith is trying to gain entry to the home.

Then I say “I don’t know why we’re bothering to try and close this door - he can just Force it open”, meaning that he could use the Force to open the door (and probably choke us from 20 feet away). But then I realize that it could also mean that he could physically force the door open and I thought “Ooh I made a good one!!!”. I can’t even escape stupid puns in my sleep!!

I’ve been told that in dream-interpreting, Darth Vader is one of the most frequent embodiments of “evil” so perhaps this is telling me that I am concerned about evil getting into my house and how to keep it out. Errr somethin.

I am just Captain Blog Poster lately!

It was kind of a throw-away line in my basement cleaning post, but one of the goals that I have for the upcoming year is to do at least one productive thing in the evening. We got rid of our TV almost a year ago, primarily because we found that to be a major evening time waster. And for awhile, we were pretty productive in the evenings. We finally finished remodeling our kitchen as well as other various redeemable tasks.

But lately we have gone down a slide of laziness and unproductiveness. Not really the TV - even though that’s back, it hasn’t been used that much. I do watch some shows (mostly sports related) and we do play some Play Station (again, sports as well as DDR), and the kids do watch some movies, but overall, I feel that the TV is in its proper place in the house. Something nice to have and occasionally do, but not a “god”.

It’s been other things. Ranging from playing video games, or surfing the Internet, or watching shows online, or even “good” things like doing a puzzle or reading a book or whatever. I’m not some sort of Luddite and I do think that there is probably a place for all these things, but I find that I don’t feel good about myself if I realize that I’ve spent my entire evening just doing nothing. It usually feels good WHILE I’m doing it, but afterwards I feel like I’ve wasted my time. I’m sure I’m not alone in this kind of dichotomy.

Anyways, I’ve finally decided to do something about it And, as I like to point out, a goal that is not written down is just wishful thinking. So I am resolving that I will do (at least) 1 productive thing in the evening.

What defines a “productive thing”? There is no set definition - it can ebb and flow from whatever. This past week, we’ve been basement cleaning. I’d also count working on my business stuff or other home improvement projects or exercising. Tonight I’m going to play basketball and so I’m counting that (exercise baby!).

My other goal is that I will wake up with the alarm when it goes off. None of this snoozing and laying around in bed for hours. It is not any more restful, and it prevents me from doing other things I’d rather do - like spend a bit of time with the fam before I leave, and/or have enough time to hit the Y before work and that kind of stuff.

I have put some thoughts into some of these, and decided on these 2 to start with. I have avoided putting anything else on my “goal” list because I have heard that you shouldn’t try to do too many new goals at once because it becomes overwhelming.

Now of course comes the question of how to track it. Knowing me, of course it must be tracked, and in some “cool” way of course. Probably almost a year ago, I came across the website Joe’s Goals. What that does is allow you to put in any number of goals, and assign “points” to each goal. So then each day you mark whether you did the goal or not (and you can also have “negative” goals that cost you points), and then each day gets a “score”.

I did some things with the site back when I found them, but kind of lost focus with it. I re-discovered it recently and have spent some time over the past few days / weeks trying to figure out how to best organize things. Obviously there are a lot of different ways that you can set things up as far as goals go. One sticking point I had was how to best handle weekly and monthly goals. I didn’t want to “skew” things by getting a huge boost on one day because that just happened to be the day I went to the temple, or did my home teaching, or did a weekly planning session. I also toyed with setting a goal like “Did HT last month”, so that way if I did my HT in January, I would get to check off that goal for every day in February. I liked being able to set a bar as a “perfect” day, and then comparing each day to that ideal. I felt like having sporadic (weekly or monthly) goals didn’t accomplish that

In the end, I just decided to ignore that problem and just stick with 2 goals to start (both daily). I decided that satisfied the desire to start small, as well as allow me to measure the “perfect” day. I decided that at least for now, the “perfect” day is 10 points. So I get 5 points for waking up when the alarm goes off, and 5 points if I did one thing productive thing in the evening. My plan is that later on, once I’ve mastered these goals, that I can then add another one. So maybe I drop those 2 goals to being worth 2 points, and add a goal that if I eat less than 2000 calories in a day, I get 6 points. Again, 10 points is a perfect day. One housekeeping note - I also added a 3rd negative “adjustment” goal, with the idea that I could use that to fine-tune goals. For instance this morning, I did wake up and turn off the alarm. But then I lounged around for awhile. So I decided although I technically met the goal, I didn’t feel right about taking the full 5 points. So I gave myself 2 negative points, meaning I’ll get an 8 today (assuming I do something productive today).

And another cool thing about this site is that it also has a widget! So, just like my exercise widget, I have added my Joe’s Goals widget to the blog over there on the right, so you can all track how I’m doing. 2 slightly annoying things - it only has the 4 days of data (since I started on Sunday), and because one of my goals is done in the morning and one isn’t done until the evening, for most of the day, the graph shows a downturn (for instance now it goes from 10 to 3, because I haven’t done my 5 point productive basketball playing yet today)

More thoughts on the BCS championship game. As I mentioned over there in that post, I didn’t watch very much of the game but at one point I turned it on and it was halftime so I saw the “Allstate Alumni Kicking Challenge”.

In case you missed it, there were two kickers playing - one an alumni from Ohio St. and one an alumni from LSU. I don’t know if they were former college kickers or what but they definitely looked like they knew what they were doing. The rules of the challenge were that each kicker got 3 attempts. The sum of the yardage from each MADE field goal was added, and whichever kicker had the highest total won.

Seems to make sense - I’m not sure of the optimal strategy but you have to weight going further to get more points with not going too far and increasing your odds of missing.

LSU won the coin toss and went 2nd. Huston made from 43, and then Browndyke missed. And here is where I think Huston made a HUGE strategic error. Rather than move in to say 30 yards, he kicked again from 43, and missed. Browndyke made his from 43 and put himself into the driver’s seat. Huston made again from 40-ish but then Browndyke blew it and OSU won anyways.

Seems to me that had Huston gone into say 30 (fairly automatic I guess, depending on their actual level of skill but they seemed to both know what they were doing), that puts him up 73-0. Even if Browndyke makes a 50 yarder, Huston can put in another 30 yarder and force Browndyke to make from 54 to win. If that seems like not good enough odds make it 32 or 35.

Given that field goals get harder the further you go out, I think Huston made a monumental error and was lucky to win.

(Yes, I realize nobody cares and this will be one of those posts I make that gets 0 comments)

So last night was the big bad Bowl Championship Series National Championship game. Long title, huh? Wait, I think I missed a “Presented by Allstate” or a “dot com” or a “your mom”

Anyway, it was LSU vs. Ohio State. I have to say I am not a big Ohio State fan, but I marginally root for them. Growing up, I was a big Buckeye fan as there weren’t really many (any) major college programs in Cleveland. I remember having rivalries with my cousin Jef who was a Michigan fan, and whose Thanksgiving visits often coincided with the annual OSU-UM game.

After my mission and attendance at UC, I adopted the Bearcats and my like for OSU faded. Still, though, I remember one year where to advance some team I wanted to do well in the national scene (probably BYU), I needed Michigan to beat Ohio State. I tried to root for Michigan but just could not bring myself to do it. It reminds me of the (I believe ESPN) commercial that shows a guy with an Ohio State shirt on and a girl with a Michigan shirt on it. They’re on a couch making out and the camera shows them kissing for like 3-4 seconds. Then at the bottom of the screen it shows lettering that says “Without sports, this wouldn’t be disgusting” Good times.

There are a lot of Ohio State fans here in Cincinnati, and I talked to some of them at work about the game. Everyone was in full Buckeye paraphernelia mode. One of our consultant companies had sent one of the boss folks here (a big OSU fan) a tin of Ohio State cookies. I had a “Buckeye Chocolate Chip” one. It was good.

I made my prediction:

Ohio State 31
LSU 27
Number of annoying fireworks my neighbor (also a giant OSU fan) sets off after I’m already asleep: 10

Anyways, I didn’t turn the game on when it started since, as I mentioned, I was being “Mr. Productive Pants“. At about 8:15, I was upstairs and waiting for Carolyn for something, I heard massive cheering, hooting, hollering, and airhorning from out of doors. I thought “Hmm that seems early”. I checked the box score online and it was 0-0 on about the 2nd play. I refreshed and saw that Ohio State had rushed for a 65 yard touchdown. “Aha that makes sense”, I told myself.

After we got done cleaning the basement for the evening, I came back up and watched a bit of the game. OSU got out to a 10-0 lead but after that it was all LSU, who ended up winning. Which disappointed my neighbor I’m sure, but did not disappoint my lack-of-fireworks-loving self.

So Dan Miller is a very common name. Even though I was “fairly” early on the Internet, I did not ever even catch a sniff of danmiller.com

Back in the day, I used to keep a website of people named Dan Miller. If your name was Dan, Danny, or Daniel Miller, you could email me and I’d put you on the website. That got to be pretty burdensome so I stopped.

The grand Wikipedia lists 8 Dans, 6 Dannys, and 9 Daniels. There includes a 19th century congressman from Iowa, a Congressman from Florida, the guitarist from They Might Be Giants, and a singer from the band O-Town. None of those disambiguation pages list the main character from the (bad) movie Defending Your Life, whose name was Daniel Miller. And of course, I myself, despite being the world record holder for fastest traverse of 88 Ohio Counties, have so far in life failed to become the 2nd person from the NOHS class of 94 to have a Wikipedia page.

In any case, that is a lot of babckground to announce that the former Daniel Michael Miller II, a musician and rapper from Akron, is no more. According to this AP article, he has legally changed his name to “The” Dan Miller Experience.

From the article: His first name is “The” Dan, with the quote marks. His middle name is Miller and his last name is Experience.

Good times!!!!!