Michael & Liz are Bloggable

If you haven't seen this Old Spice commercial, now is your chance.



Since we have DVR, we don't watch a lot of commercials, but that one has become classic. I think it's from the Super Bowl this year? The point of this post is not that by the time you are done reading, you will smell like me, however you should be so lucky. No, last night I tackled a problem on Liz's car and in the middle of it I exclaimed "I feel like such a man." I apologize for the ego in this post, it's artificial, strictly for humor, I assure you.

A few months ago the turn signal on her car started clicking. During normal car operation, whenever you hit the turn signal, it rhythmically clicks until you are done turning. Well not only did her car start making that clicking randomly while she drove, it wasn't a rhythmic click. So sometimes it would click fast and sometimes slow and go back and forth extremely quickly. It was super annoying but went away within days for no reason. That was good enough for me!

Then this past Sunday it happened again and she called me and said "Can you look up to see what this is and how to fix it?" It would drive a normal person insane, but fortunately she's the most tolerant person I know. But that's really all she needed to say. The thought to look it up to see if it was a common problem hadn't occurred to me until then. Turns out, with a 2004 Alero, it is a common problem (and with all the 2000 to 2004 models and all the same year models of a Pontiac Grand Am). Apparently they all used the same part and the average price according to some forums to get it fixed and/or replaced was roughly 300 smackaroos. But it's a free fix when you're a man.

I read online that it's caused by the faulty electrical connections in the "multifunction switch" and that you have to take apart the back of the steering wheel, clean off the connections on that switch and then put fresh "dielectric" grease on them and that will fix the problem. Challenge accepted.

So I unplugged the battery from the engine in case something terrifying occurred like the air bag going off while I was doing this and then took apart the dashboard/steering wheel:

At the beginning of the year, I put up our birdhouse again in the backyard in the same spot as last year. Last year the house was incredibly successful. We had two broods live in the house and successfully fledge. The total number of babies that fledged for us was 8. I might be dreaming when I say I'd like to beat that, but it would be very difficult and slightly out of my hands. We had no problem getting them to use the house. This year however, started off much much differently. This is the story of the Backyard Birdhouse Brawl.

In one corner we have the black and white bomber. The underdog from the south. Weighing in at .3 ounces, with a wingspan of 7 inches, it's the... Carolina Chickadee!

At the end of January we had two little chickadees start to make their way into our house. For a while they were just checking it out. Landing on the entrance and then immediately flying away. They set a few little scraps inside almost as if to claim the place. Then all of a sudden during one of the weeks in January/February, we saw the Mom and Dad chickadees going in and out of the house with pine and fur to build a nest. It might have been Daisy's fur, oh the circle of life. We looked in after just a few days and the nest had become fully built. It felt like they were going to make a brood any minute.

Then in the other corner we have the blue streak from the sky. The beast from the east. Weighing in at 1 whole ounce, with a wingspan of 11 inches, it's the... Eastern Bluebird!

The time frame is right around the beginning of February. Right when the chickadees have a nest fully built and it looks like they'll get a brood going, the bluebirds come by to check out what happened to their house from last year. The Mom and Dad blue birds land on the house, go in and start taking scraps out of the house. Spring Cleaning maybe? They take three or four trips taking nest scraps out out of the house when all of a sudden the chickadees show up... angry. Yeah, we'll go with angry.

All hell breaks loose. The chickadees start dive bombing the bluebirds and it looks like mini-planes strafing during a war. The chickadees successfully scare off the bluebirds and that's where the story pretty much ends.

For an entire month, until the beginning of March, there was very little bird activity. But no changes with the nest. No birds consistently coming or going. Granted we are working all day so we don't see everything, but based on evening activity, you can pretty much tell what's going on. The last thing we want is a wasted year with no birds living in the house. That would just be depressing. Any chance a fight like that and a half built nest from a scared off bird would ruin the house for the year? I wasn't going to take that chance, so I poured out the half built/half destroyed nest and left the birdhouse empty.

Since then, there has been almost no activity. A few scraps of pine were left in the house from someone, but no bird stayed around long to stake claim on the house... until today.

Today at lunch I saw bluebirds coming and going constantly. The Mom was building the nest, the Dad was just watching... typical lazy males :). Now we have a fully built bluebird nest and I am super psyched to get some eggs in there. Last years eggs showed up right at the beginning of April so we are right on time! Here's the nest that was built today (fyi, i know the picture is terrible and fuzzy):


Can't wait to see what happens... soon it will be time to get the Sparrow Spooker out again...

On occasion, I get the motivation to go through my wallet to get rid of the cards and papers and stuff that are worthless and not necessary to carry around. When it comes to some things in my life, I use a very uptight method of organization. Like in my closet, my clothes are organized by type and then organized together by color from there. All the clothes in my dresser are organized that way too. I don't know why I do that, but my wallet is just as uptight. I organize all my important cards in the same place and keep everything in order.

So when cleaning out my wallet, it got me thinking during the organizing, what is the most important things in here? If I were to rank them from most important to least important, what would the order be.

I don't know why this is blog worthy and it's probably one of the most boring posts I've ever made, but here is my list from most important card to least important card in my wallet. They were close calls and there were a few tough decisions. The ranking was based on importance of card, frequency of use, how long I've had the card, how easy it would be to replace, and how panicked I would be if I couldn't find that particular card. Here's the order:

1. Bank Debit Card
2. Red Cross Donor Card
3. NC License
4. AAA Member Card
5. Library Card
6. Health Insurance Card
   
7. Flying Saucer U.F.O Member Card
8. Blockbuster Member Card
9. Regal Crown Member Card (for movies)
   
10. True Value Hardware Member Card
11. Magens Bay Beach, St. Thomas, Admission Ticket (from 2003)
12. Frankie's Fun Money Card (thousands and thousands of tickets on it)
    
13. Rita's Ice Custard Cool Card (5 stamps out of 10 possible stamps)
    
14. Quizno's Gift Card ($6 on it I think?)
    
15. Shell Gas Gift Card ($5)

#11 is there because the admission ticket has a beautiful picture of the bay on it and it's always nice to see that when I open my wallet. Also it was one of the nicest beaches I've ever been to. The bay was so calm and the water so clear. You could go out 100 yards into the bay where the buoys are and dive down to the soft sand below. I am going to keep the admission ticket in there until the next time I go back.

I kinda want someone to ask, "why no credit cards?" ... oh the brain explosions that would occur. Here is one of the links I would post in response: What does Dave Ramsey say about Credit Cards?

Here is a little timeline of the first 3 minutes of owning our house back in March 2007:

minute 1: YAY We have a house!
minute 2: We should paint the kitchen.
minute 3: Wow, that sliding glass door sucks.

And then more minutes passed as we ignored that fact until about February of this year. We always hated the old blinds that we had to pull over in front of the door. We hated that the door didn't lock. We really loved that it let air into the house and we could actually see the blinds rustle as the wind blew outside... no wait, we hated that too. The top part of the blinds were held up by tape... FOR 3 YEARS. It's sad when an element of your house requires tape in order to function. I gotta give it credit though, bravo tape, you did good. There's really nothing about the old door that was good, it was all very very bad. So in February we finally went to Lowe's and got a new sliding glass door.

Here's the old one with no redeeming qualities (it didn't even slide smooth, it took effort):



The old door is made out of aluminum. According to the Lowe's installation guy, aluminum sliding glass doors are terrible and are always being replaced. The new door is made out of vinyl.

When going to Lowe's Liz and I had basically two negotiated specifications. I wanted a sliding glass door still (as opposed to french doors) so that we could have a screen for the nice cool Spring and Fall months. Liz wanted blinds in the glass so we wouldn't have blinds in the kitchen. I also really cared about the energy efficiency of the new door, so we got the most efficient door we could find within the realm of our specifications. Apparently the MOST efficient doors do not have blinds in the glass, but we wanted blinds. Here is what we came home with:



The last picture there makes it look like with the blinds down, it still lets the sun in. It looks that way just because the sun is up in the air and the blinds are turned down. If we turned the blinds up in the other direction, it'll block the sun completely.

I am very anxious to find out how this affects our cooling bill in the Summer and the heating bill next Winter. It has to do something. We already have the air off in our house now because it's so warm out, so we'll have to wait to see the monetary results.

So far we love the new door and I will never get tired of the slidey-ness... it's so smooth.

I use Google Analytics to keep track of traffic on our blog. It's clear that posting more often renders more hits and more visits. It's hard not to enjoy seeing that more people visit if you post more, no matter how crappy or self-involved the information is. But there is one feature of Google Analytics that is awesome. It can tell you whether a visitor came from a search engine and what they searched for in order to find your blog. So not only is this post in reference to hilarious Google searches, but Google searches that find this blog.

Just for kicks, I looked at Analytics about a month ago and started cracking up at what keyword searches find this blog. It's really unreal that someone can search on something utterly ridiculous and be pointed here. I guess they have to be pointed somewhere right? So I decided that I have to make a post about this. I have excluded the simple and more common ones like searches for "fulton blog" or something like that, but here are the searches that have found our blog in the last year, from the completely normal to the completely absurd:

• "bloggable" (13 hits by the way)
  
• "rascal flatts"
• "we are bloggable liz"
• "j-man and chandy"
• "my toes" "my ankle" "blog" "sprained"
• "this is not a taxi my friend"
• "this is not a taxi my friend, i promise"
• "also that mix cd... uh that i left on your doorstep was the last one that i'll be making for you. more or less"
• "bengals get no credit still"
• "bloggable pictures"
• "clearest ocean water near puerto vallarta"
• "donut sayulita"
• "Kidstuf in Cincinnati"
• "mazda3"
• "picture proving bengals missed field goal"

And this is hands down my absolute favorite:

• "Ochocinco Ray Lewis bar of soap"

This whole exercise of seeing what causes users to arrive at our blog got me thinking two things:

1. I think my blog posts need to be more descriptive in the title from now on so as to attract more hits and more people. I'm making the assumption that it's the title that matters, but that concept extends to the whole post really. It's not that I want people following us, it just humors me when people find our blog for almost no reason. Like instead of making a blog post that is titled "You Won't Believe What We Found In Our Hallway", we would instead make the post titled "Huge Yellow Mexican Cockroach Followed Us Home". (side note: that's a true and terrifying story, may be worth a post itself).
2. What ridiculous words, phrases, or concepts can I blog about in order to get Google to list this site as being #1 in the search. Would I have to make up a word like "Monstrocious"? I just came up with that on the fly, it's an adjective that describes an atrocious monstrosity.
   

Maybe in a few days I'll do a Google search to see if I'm the number one hit for Monstrocious. Score!

The garden building is mostly done...it just needs the topsoil now. This week the wood was installed along the fence and covered in landscaping fabric to avoid any chemicals there might be on the treated wood. We then broke up more of the existing dirt and moved it around so it's somewhat level. Since it's the first weekend in March and I shouldn't start planting anything until Mid-April, we are going to wait to buy dirt until the end of March. We went from a 0% chance of getting a truckload of dirt to a 1oo% chance because we started pricing it and it is significantly cheaper than buying the bags of topsoil.

Here are a few pictures of the progress:


Since I have a few weeks before the topsoil will go in, I'm going to start doing some research on types of seeds and planning out where I want everything to go. So this is where I need reader advice! Is there a particular brand of seed that has worked well for you? I've already decided not to start the seeds indoors because we have such a long growing season here, but if you have any experience doing it one way or another, I'd love to hear it!

Over the past week, my Mazda 3, lovingly named "WhoDey", has really showed me a lot of love so I wanted to post with a little love back. 4 years ago when I bought the car I was living in the townhouse with some friends barely doing any home or woodworking projects. Now my days are always filled with doing stuff around the house that requires a large car. I can't help but admit that there have been times when I've thought about cheating on WhoDey to get a truck or something handy like that. But WhoDey continues to amaze me with his versatility. (Yes WhoDey is a male, "Chad Johnson" is my navigation system and she is a girl, they're a couple).

There has only been one project in our house that WhoDey could not handle, and it was building the storage in our garage. The beadboard was just too big. But in thinking back on all the projects I've done around the house, it's incredible that WhoDey handled it. WhoDey took several tons of concrete out of the backyard to the landfill. WhoDey rebuilt our deck.

WhoDey is now building our raised bed garden. Last week he hauled roughly 130 25lb. stones from Lowe's to our backyard. Today he exceeded my expectations and hauled 9 8 foot boards, and get this, 3 10 foot boards. I did not think I could get 10 foot boards into it, those are CRAZY LONG boards. I was standing in Lowe's and thought, "there's no way, these will be hanging out the back". I was amazingly able to close the trunk the whole way without any wood sticking out. Check out his muscles:

Anyone who has been in the car, knows I try to keep it super clean, but these projects have come at a cost. Last week he got a little scratch on the leather in the front seat when the cover slipped out of the way of the stone and today he got a nick in the dashboard from the wood sitting on it. I do my best to take care of him, but those are unavoidable when doing what I'm doing. A car is a car, and it's meant to be used. I know that. But I still can't help but be very angry when I see WhoDey getting nicks and scratches.

At Lowe's this afternoon, I had two people in trucks smirk at me, as I started to load WhoDey with the wood. I hadn't started yet, and they gave me the look of "get a truck, that stuff's not going to fit". WhoDey had my back.