Mark's updates

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Jingle Bells

Since the last video seemed to work okay, here's Lonna singing her version of Jingle bells. She was singing it over and over last night in Walmart. I thought it was cute and hopefully she spread a little Christmas joy to everyone shopping, because she wasn't signing softly.


Boogers and sugar

In the South (or at least North Carolina), when adults kiss babies under their arms or necks, it is referred to as getting their sugar. So, Bryce has now started to get his own sugar so we won't get it from him. Sometimes he'll share, and sometimes it's all gone because he ate it all.

Both kids have also been sick often and so we have started asking Bryce if he has any boogers. Sometimes he'll come tell us when he does.

Here's an attempt at my first video blog.


Monday, December 10, 2007

Crown Molding

I decided that I wanted to route an extranet cable from our office to the XBOX 360 so I could play XBOX Live without dragging a cable through the two rooms each time I wanted to play.  So, I needed a way to hide the cable.  I came up with a pretty good plan to go in one wall in the office, out the other side in the family room, along the top of the wall to the other side of the family room and back inside the wall.  This meant that I needed to do crown molding in the family room.

 

I routed the cable and ran into a couple of unforeseen obstacles, but they were easy enough to work around.  I then wired the room for surround sound.  It was easy enough to do since I was going to do the crown molding anyway.

 

Then we went to Home Depot and picked out the crown molding we wanted and I came home and measured all the pieces I would need to complete the project.  By the way, LaDonna, with some help from me, painted the family room, and then realized the family room color didn’t go well with the old kitchen color, so we painted the kitchen as well.  After all the painting, I got started reading about how to do crown molding.  I found that I was in for more of a challenge then I thought.  We don’t have any 90 degree angles in our family room.  I read the website instructions a few times and didn’t understand it completely.  I read them again, again, and again.  I finally felt comfortable enough to try and start some cuts.

 

This blog would be 15-20 pages long if I went through all the mistakes I made.  Also, LaDonna talked me into doing the kitchen crown molding as well since the two rooms are connected without a wall.  Anyway, suffice to say, the crown molding is up two weeks after I thought it would be and I still need to caulk and paint.  I’m hoping to get that done before Christmas.

 

I think the final appearance will look okay, not professional by any stretch.  But for my first time, I’m okay with the outcome.