THE PEOPLE MUST HAVE THEIR DAN MILLER

Well, we’ve been spending some of our evenings cleaning out the basement. It really is amazing the amount of crap that we have been carting around for (at least) 5 1/2 years.

We’re nearly done and it is amazing how big our basement is. And clean! Maybe when we’re done we’ll take some pictures.

I have been trying to be good and down-size some of my stuff, and have succeeded for the most part. I do have 2-3 boxes of “keepsakes” – but I’ve gotten rid of some of the stuff, and at least the stuff that I did keep is now in nice plastic water-tight boxes.

One thing that got the axe today was a copy of a Mormon “good one” from my mission called the Book of Lemuel. I thought to myself, “Self, there is approximately a 500% chance that this is on the Internet somewhere”.

Ayup.

Another thing that didn’t make the cut was my good ol’ Dan Miller for Council sign.

But it got a pic for posterity.

The background, for those of you who don’t know. Back in the day (I’d say 1993 or so), a gentleman named Paul D. Miller was running for North Olmsted city council. As is typical for folks running for office, he put signs around town urging people to vote for him.

I forget who had the idea first, but my friends and I ummm borrowed some of his signs. We figured out that if you took the D from his middle initial, the a from Paul, and turned the u upside down, you could spell Dan Miller for council.

I put one of these signs in my front yard, and probably my favorite memory is that one of my mom’s friends (Julie Jakuszeit or whatever her last name is maybe?) called up my mom after seeing the sign and said “I didn’t know Dan was old enough to run for council!?!?” Good times…good times…

As Carolyn pointed out while we were cleaning, this sign once held the position of honor above our bed (on Fenwick). Oh, how the mighty have fallen!

I would also like to point out that I got all the way back upstairs and realized I had taken a picture of the Paul D. Miller side and had to go back downstairs

As I have mentioned before I recently switched exercise log providers from Active.comSuckyWebsiteMcSuckerson.com to RunningAhead.com. And of course, by “switched” I mean that the aforementioned sucky website took over the site that I was using, “converted” all the data, and made us start using their website, which sucked in comparison. Oh, and they lost (or at best misplaced) half my data.

As I have not mentioned before, I seem to like to start my blog posts with “As I have mentioned before” or some similar turn of phrase. Just thought I’d point that out.

Anyways… I finally got around to updating the little link on the side of my blog to point to the new site. I also renamed it from “Dan’s cycling log” (which had itself a few months ago been renamed from “Dan’s running log”) to “Dan’s exercise log”.

One of the other cool features of RunningAhead.com is that they provide a few cool “widgets” to put on your blog. I have put one on there listing my last 10 workouts. You can see it over on the right of the blog with the links. So, at the time of this writing, you can see that my latest workout (this morning) was 2.3 (actually 2.26) miles running followed by 200 yards swimming. You can see that I have also done some “elliptical” workouts. This is Dan-speak for “other”. That is one of the things I don’t like – there’s no place to put in custom workouts. They have an “other” section, but you can only choose elliptical or spinning. So my “elliptical” workout on 1/3 was weight training and the one on 1/1 was for playing football (I have chosen to convert exercise like football or basketball at approximately a 50% ratio – so I played football for a little over 2 hours, so I counted that as 1 hour of exercise).

They also have a blog widget where you can put total distance and time on your blog. This would have been very handy for my 1000 mile goal (completed with room to spare!!), but the tragic flaw is that it only allows you to display one method of exercise, rather than the sum of all of them. So I can show that I’ve done 1113.9 miles of biking (since I started), or show that I’ve done 140.4 miles running, etc., but not the sum total of all of them. That’s actually my major beef with the site in general – it seems like it was primarily designed with a one-sport athlete, not a ultra-cool triathlete like me

Thought I’d treat you folks to a little action on our new house.

This was after they took the tree down and were preparing to pour the basement.

We had some cold and rainy weather, so it took a week or 2 for them to finally get some action here. Astute observers will notice that the new basement is about 2 feet lower than the old basement. They’ll pour a knee wall there on what will be an interior wall, and then regular concrete walls around the outside. And won’t it be fun to have a basement window from the old basement to the new basement

Stopped by there this evening, and they were pouring the walls baby! The walls will set today and they will remove the frames probably tomorrow or Sunday. On Monday they will pour the knee wall and put in a floor drain, and then on Tuesday they will pour the floor for the basement.

Funny (creepy) list I found of 15 “amazing” coincidences.

Pretty freaky, though the cynic in me would be interested in some proof…

Was looking around, and noticed that in the 4th quarter of last year (well, really the last 2 months – from 10/29 to 12/31) I biked 562.8 miles (and ran that final backwards 0.8 miles)

563.6 miles over 62 days is 9.09 miles every day. Subtracting the 9 Sundays that I did not run it’s 10.63 miles per day. And I actually only worked out 36 of those days, for an average of 15.66 miles per workout day.

As first noted here and then expounded upon here, here, here, here and here I am in the middle of snagging a free laptop.

Just because my last post (containing the pic of my first arrived rebate check) in this vein was on October 1st, I do not want you to think that all is not well in laptop-land!

The checks have been trickling in, and just before Christmas I received (what I thought was) my last bunch of checks. With the holidays and all, I did not get around to entering them into my handy-dandy spreadsheet until today, when I found that I am still down 1 rebate! I checked it online and it says Invalid due to missing confirmation email (the lamest excuse of all the ones I received)

I emailed them just now and expect to have it validated shortly. The weird thing is that my spreadsheet says that it was validated 9/25/2007. So either CA validated it and then invalidated it (wouldn’t put it past ‘em) or I put the wrong entry in my spreadsheet and never actually re-validated this one. I may get screwed because it’s been so long since the submission, but I will keep at it.

My initial expense for this deal was $1,256.49. With the 57 rebates I have received, I have gotten back $1,620 (and hope to receive an additional $15 shortly). I also eBayed the 2 printers and got $69.32 between the 2 of them (after subtracting eBay and Paypal fees and actual shipping costs). I keep meaning to put the software up there but the market isn’t that great for them (especially since this is the 2007 stuff and the 2008 stuff is now out)

I aim to trade the laptop for a riding lawnmower.

All in all – the best deal ever!!! (so far)