Tag Archives: life

2020-2022 mega update

It seems somewhere along the way I’ve lost my passion/time for updating this blog. I personally blame getting the bike as now I have yet another exciting way to spend rather limited amounts of available time, but it’s probably largely thanks to the massive renovations we undertook in 2020-2021 which has such sucked up any spare time.

When we brought our house in 2014, the roof had been flagged as a likely problem and due a replacement. Naturally we had zero money after buying the house, so managed to bodge the roof along for a few more years with some improper use of silicone sealants and managed to squeeze out another 6 years of life, but in 2019 it got to the stage where it was clear it wasn’t going to be possible to bodge any more and would need the long overdue full replacement as we were starting to experience leaks that could no longer be patched around.

So we bit the bullet in late 2020 and kicked off a replacement. Given we’d need scaffolding for this project, we decided we’d roll it into part of a wider renovation/upgrade project and do some other big ticket items on the house at the same time and wrap it into a small loan extension on the current mortgage whilst rates were sub 2.5%.

Before the roofing work started, we made the choice to remove the natural gas connection from the house. Ripping it out had multiple benefits:

Firstly we needed to remove it before the new roof went on as the old gas cylinder hot water had a flu that went up and through the roof, and we didn’t want to cut a hole in the new roof for an old system that was due replacement. So it needed to come out as the first step.
Secondly all our gas appliances dated back to the 90s and all were end of life with various quirks and features. We had an old unflued gas heater that we’d never used for health reasons, the old hot water cylinder and very fickle part broken gas stovetop.
Finally for added incentive, the gas lines company were starting to be jerks and pressuring us to move the gas meter on the street due to new health and safety rules preventing them from checking the meter where they had originally installed it. There was some disagreement between them and us about who’s problem that was, but we were looking at many thousands of potential costs to rectify if we lost that argument.

We had no love for gas for cooking, it’s expensive to keep with line charges and is also a fossil fuel and having pipes full of explody gas in an earthquake zone has never filled us with confidence. So we were more than happy to rip it out and replace.

The first big challenge was that our old 170l gas cylinder was located inside the house. The hotwater cylinder installer really really wanted to install the new one on the outside of the house which would be very easy, but IMHO would have looked visually terrible given the layout of our property and not really having a hidden utility space where something big and ugly like that could be located.

To fix this, I ended up demolishing the entire cupboard that existed around the old hot water cylinder, providing a space for the new cylinder to go in and then rebuilding a new cupboard around the installed cylinder.

300l electric cylinder going in after demolishing the old cupboard

An electrical cylinder can never get more than 100% of theoretical efficiency using electrical resistive heating. So given my love for heat pumps, we paired this new cylinder with a heat pump hot water system to give us a lower running cost solution with potential efficiencies around 300%.

Essentially there’s a small outdoor heat pump unit (like you would have with a typical mini-split system). This pulls heat in from the environment and turns it into hot water. Unfortunately the technology still requires a sizeable cylinder to act as a reservoir hence why we still have a standard 300l cylinder inside, but I hope that at some point they evolve the technology to the point where it can run tankless and be a drop-in replacement for an instantaneous gas boiler.

We looked at some different brands/options. Some brands required their own special cylinders, this seemed to be the models which pumped refrigerant from the outside unit to a special coil inside an interior tank. Instead, we went for a Reclaim which pumps cold water directly to the outside unit, then pumps back hot water in/out of the “solar hot water” ports on most off-the-shelf cylinders. Should the cylinder or heat pump ever need replacing, there are a number of options that we could swap either out for, and not be tied to a single vendor.

We also kept the ability to be able to failover to the element inside the hotwater cylinder. The electrical circuit has a bypass switch to flip between either the heat pump, or the cylinder’s built in element if a fault ever occurred with the external heat pump.

So far this solution has been working really well, power bills are low and the reclaim unit is very quiet outside. In fact, with the move from gas to electric, our household energy bill decreased on average, despite electricity generally being quite expensive here in NZ.

We then had the scaffolding put up. We were going to need scaffolding edge protection for the roofing work, so decided we’d use the opportunity to also get the house painted which meant scaffolding and walkways around the house.

Scaffolded and ready for re-roof and re-paint

Whilst a single story, the back side of the house is high enough we ended up with a three story scaffold. The cats found this whole assembly very enjoyable and spend more than a few nights climbing all over the place.

Due to some poor organisation with the roofers, the project was supposed to be finished before xmas but ran over into the new year which lead to the frustration of paying extra rent on the scaffold over the holiday period, but it did give a good opportunity for me to use the break to fix up various carpentry issues before the painters came and started.

A whole chunk of the bargeboard came off when removing the old roof, cut a segment to replace it.

Our weatherboards are generally in good condition but had a few areas that needed attention.

I also installed corner-soakers, these small metal pieces that protect where the timber weatherboards join to stop water getting in. Primed them all with metal primer before the painters came and did a full paint of the house.

The butynol on the window boxes didn’t need replacing but it has been prone to causing dark streaks when there’s rain runoff. To fix, used the opportunity to apply a butynol primer and paint coat to seal the surface and stop streaks.

Whilst it took much more time, unexpected water ingress and stress than it should have taken, the end result of the re-roof is excellent. Our roof line is particularly complex and we have plenty of gullys and also a large butynol area in the middle that needed a full replacement.

I found our contractor super tough to deal with due to poor project management and comms but they sure did know how to build a roof. Checked everything against the NZ metal roofing spec and it all looks like they’ve done everything perfectly to code. Crazily enough, replacing an entire roof in NZ? No building consent required! So the home owner really is reliant on trusting the contractor to do the job properly and/or being capable of researching and validating themselves.

Most our entire roof is sarked (covered in timber) which made it easy to get around and work on it. And we had some other good luck, all the timber surface was still in excellent condition and didn’t need any work – with the exception of the butynol section that had been installed with ply that was too thin and so we had it upgraded to the proper standard.

It looks like a lot of our roof was still original, with the roofers pulling off heaps of horsehair underlay that has probably been there for close to 100 years. The steel sheets were super thick as well – in many ways the sheets themselves were fine, the issue was with rust around all the nail points and where the sheets lap/join. Over the decades water had gotten in and caused some serious corrosion in points.

New roofline nearing completion whilst in mid-paint

View of the new roof and the new paint scheme in action

Lawn suffering the effect of having steel sheets sitting on it for a few weeks.

The new roof is all done in pre-painted steel so there’s no painting needed for the first 15 years of the roof. It actually looked so sharp I felt bad that I was intending to keep and re-paint the beat up old gutters, so I ripped them all down before the painters arrived and then installed new ones myself at the very end of the project.

I ended up using Marley Stormcloud spouting which conveniently comes in a range of pre-coloured options that matched our roof and wall colours. There’s also a heap of good materials from Marley on how to install it, with the house being fully scaffolded I was able to do it with some help from mum in the course of a weekend.

And like the roof, the spouting being pre-painted saves massively on the labour and hassle and looks far sharper than anything I could achieve with retrospective painting.

Speaking of painting labour – the amount of work that our painting contractor put in was incredible. The cost of painting a whole house in NZ is eye watering but at least I could see where my money was going with this crew, there was so much prep work fixing joins, rust spots, sanding, etc before the actual painting started. Took a crew of 2-3 people about 2 weeks to do the whole house. I used Graham’s Painters in Wellington and was really happy with them.

With the roof, gutters and paint being done, naturally I decided to squeeze in a few more projects for the summer.

Lisa, having got tired of having now 3 different bikes inside the house, gave me an ultimatum that I needed to fix the old shed before I could buy any more bikes. Having looked at it in detail the verdict was that the old wash house / front shed was too far gone to simply repair and I brought a new made-to-order kitset shed that matched the original’s dimensions exactly to replace it. The team at Sanders Cabins & Sheds was able to alter the dimensions of their off-the-shelf product slightly and position the window/doors at the specific spots I wanted which was excellent.

The original wash house for the property. We also took the opportunity to drop the massive karaka tree on the right to really open up the space and trim the neighbours one on the left.

New shed floor going in on the footprint of the old one. I spend 2 days just digging the post holes to get these foundations in.

It took 5 hours for two of us to carry down all the shed pre-fab modules, the H5 piles, concrete and plywood interior.

Kitset shed finished except for the steel roof. The steel roof seems simple but that took another couple of days just to be able to get the sheets aligned right with the awkwardness of the location making climbing on the roof difficult.

Testing the shed for bike fit. Oh and did I mention the 2000Wh solar setup that I added to run the cameras, security, lighting and e-bike inverter?

Having dropped the trees and had the scaffolding picked up, we got a contractor in to re-surface the path (significantly cheaper than a full replacement of the slab)

New shed, new path and a few less overgrown trees

With the shed done, what else? Well we had a slight side quest to dig up and fix a segment of the sewer pipe. Like most activities that involve me digging, it took about 2 days of effort to get down 1.5 meters to where the pipe was located, but that sure bet the thousands it would cost to remotely re-surface the pipe.

Not sure those roots are supposed to be inside of the pipe…

And I had to learn how to plaster to fix the previous massive missing section of the kitchen roof that was damaged by the old roof leaking. Oh and you might notice that the kitchen has changed colour, that’s thanks to Lisa pulling off all the doors and painting them as well as fitting new handles.

New interior roof, new paint job. Still yet to replace the cork flooring, but it’s on the list…

We managed to complete the full set of projects (roof, scaffold, paint, path, shed, hot water, cooktop etc) for a bit under $100k NZD, but this was possible only by doing a bunch of stuff myself like the gutters, plastering, shed, digging and house carpentry. I had estimated that we’d run about 20% over budget with unexpected costs and that ended up being almost perfectly accurate. Stuff like higher than expected electrical costs, the decision to replace the gutters, other miscellaneous materials, etc.

Being smart about sequence of work events and shopping around for trades also helped massively. For more than one of the trades we received quotes that were twice as high as the ones we eventually selected. Sometimes you get what you pay for, but sometimes people are just taking the piss. Worth shopping around for these big ticket items.

My favourite was the painter who came to quote and turned up in a huff because he couldn’t park right outside the house (he just parked his ute on the yellow lines anyway like a classic tradie), proceeded to diss the house as “needing a lot of work” infront of me and then quoting twice as high as another firm. For some strange reason he didn’t get the job.

Finally, having finished up the bulk of this project I treated myself to a new car and made sure to get out a heap to make up for the prior summer being consumed entirely by the renovation chaos.

Relaxing after a 90km round trip around the Rimutaka-Wild Coast trail.

Aside from it’s bike carrying capabilities and gas thriftiness, one of the big aspects of buying the RAV4 2021 Hybrid was getting something with AWD for handling the mountains in winter – and then promptly only managed to spend 1 day up the mountain thanks to COVID-19 lockdowns. But I’m ready for 2022 season!

Where does this leave the house? In a pretty good state now. There’s always something more of course, I have some interior work to finish off and it’s looking increasingly likely that we’ll need to do a bathroom replacement in the next few years due to everything starting to reach end of life in there, but all critical stuff is sorted for now and we’ve gone through 2 winters now without water coming through the roof anymore which is nice.

And I got my bike shed at last! Which has been wonderful, finally cleaned all the junk out of the laundry and have a proper space for bike tools, parts and of course the bikes themselves.

Added some garage carpet to make it feel extra homely

I’ve even cleaned up the older tool shed so it’s actually possible to navigate and find things in there, so that makes two quite usable spaces which is really handy given we have a smallish house at around 140m2.

Downside of an older house.. this shed is almost entirely just tools and materials needed to maintain the house and property. So you get a cool shed but… end up filling it with stuff just to look after the house.

Completed view of the front of the house

eBike life

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Back in October 2018, I finally did something I’d been meaning to do for a while and got myself an ebike.

Two main reasons for this decision – Firstly the public transport in Wellington is useless so rather than taking the bus, I would walk or drive to the office, but I really wanted something faster than the 1 hour walk to the office that didn’t involve sitting in my car, getting frustrated at traffic and paying for parking. Secondly I really enjoyed getting back on a bike again a few years back when I tried an eBike at a demo event in Wellington so it seemed like a good source of fun activity.

I decided right away that it would need to be an ebike. Wellington is known for its hills and going directly from not riding for almost a decade to immediately trying to climb some of those super steep hills would not be likely to go well. I wanted something that could get me up the hills, but also be fun both on and off road, so I ended up looking at bikes that were a cross between commuters and mountain bikes.

I ended up getting a Moustache Samedi 27 XRoad 3. This bike is made by a french company and uses a Bosch Performance-line motor and battery system. It’s a cross between a mountain bike (suspension forks, suspension seat post, chunky tyres) but includes commuter features (luggage rack, lights, chain guard, etc) making it ideal for around town, but also taking on gravel and dirt trails.

Since I brought it, I’ve done almost 2,500km on it, all around Wellington. Typically around 7-8km return for my daily commute, plus longer runs in weekends for brunch or random bike adventures riding around the Wellington region.

It really can go almost anywhere – I’ll ride it up super steep hills or light mountain bike trails just fine, or ride to town in my jeans for brunch just as happily. It’s certainly reduced my car usage, I’ll much rather take the bike for any trip where I don’t need to take passengers or pickup any heavy amounts of cargo.

Around town I can cruise at 30km/hr comfortably. My model is EU-spec, so the motor doesn’t provide any boost above 25km/hr, but it’s not hard to keep it at 30km/hr in most conditions with pure human power, sometimes I’ll even get it as high as 50km/hr on the flat if there’s not an energy-sapping headwind.

Uphill isn’t so fast, but I can average around 15km/hr on almost any hill with this bike. Fast enough that I’ll generally want to pass most over cyclists, but not so fast that you can leave the cars behind sadly. For context, this is about twice as fast as when I ride the manual bike.

The real measure of speed is to take a look at the end-to-end performance once traffic, shortcuts etc are factored in. I recently raced the car from our home in Wadestown to Kilbirnie on a weekend and it takes exactly the same amount of time – 30mins – to go by car, sitting in traffic queues, or by bike and having fun (and exercise) instead.

Speaking of exercise – it’s hard to measure the benefits exactly. I’ve not lost as much weight as I would have liked (~10kg over 1 year), but my fitness is significantly improved, to the level where I now find activities like snowboarding, yard work and running much much easier to complete and I’ve even become fit enough to buy and ride a regular non-ebike mountain bike for the more adventurous trails that my ebike isn’t well suited for.

Probably the closest measurement I have is that when I first got my ebike I would ride it uphill in turbo mode (275% boost). Now I’m able to ride it uphill just as quickly in eco (50% boost), which is a big improvement in my physical power output. My model is a pedelec, which means it only supplies power in response to ride input – there’s no throttle or ability to ride it like a motorcycle.

For when I really want to have a workout – thanks to my ebike I’m now fit enough to ride this hardtail Merida Big Trail 600. Big fan of the boost-size tyres!

Really happy with the decision to get this bike, the level of fitness and enjoyment I’ve gained from it is worth every cent of the purchase price – which is really the only downside, these aren’t the cheapest bikes around at over $5k NZD which makes the barrier to entry a bit high for some people. That being said, you’d spend that in just over a year on carparking if paying casual day rates, so it’s a lot of money and yet at the same time, not a lot when you compare it to other forms of transport and it’s easy to justify return on investment with.

I’ve recently also converted Lisa over to the ebike life, so in the past of 12 months we’ve gone from being a 1-car household to being a 3-bike household. Lisa wrote about her experiences for ACC here, including her experiences with the excellent Pedal Ready course.

Taking the bikes out to get gelato. Lisa rides a Moustache Lundi 26.3, effectively the same motor + gears as in my bike, but a frame more desired around city riding and looking good whilst doing it.

I didn’t have too many issues getting used to riding around town so I haven’t done the Pedal Ready course myself, but I’d recommend it strongly to any nervous riders based on the feedback I’ve had from people who have taken it.

On the whole I think that Wellington drivers are a lot better than they used to be and I’ve not had many close calls. Also not much abuse – a little bit here and there, usually when I have to take the lane (eg Molesworth St) for safety reasons but are going slow (eg because it’s uphill), but I’m not sure if the relatively lower levels of abuse are due to drivers being more conscious than when I was younger, vs the fact that they don’t want to pick a fight with a large white male. I sadly suspect it’s the latter contributing for the most part.

Douchebag drivers aside, I feel Wellington is right at the verge of being a great cycling city. There’s been enough investment over the past decade to make it no longer a daunting activity with changes like green cycle boxes on most intersections, cycle lanes in some places (still not enough!) and 30km/hr speed limit in city.

I’m really hoping the growth rate goes exponential and forces the council to really stop treating cycle infrastructure improvements as gradual side projects. I would particularly like to see proper segregated cycle lanes on all the uphill roads (eg Molesworth st) so that cyclists can ride at their comfortable speed without choosing between blocking cars or getting doored by people parked on the side of the road. I’m not a huge fan of the “shared” cycleways that the council has started putting in, I find they tend to end up with people randomly wandering around on the bike side ignoring the fact you’re wanting to go faster than walking speed but I guess they’re better than nothing. Ideally we need proper micromobility (bicycles + escooters + etc) lanes throughout the city at the same priority and space allocation as cars. Also really looking forwards to a proper bi-directional cyclelane on the proposed new sea wall heading out to Petone to open up the hutt valley to my weekend rides. The current “solution” of riding along the 100km/hr motorway edge isn’t something I want to try out anytime soon.

Given the combination of currently terrible public transport, affordable ebikes and goodish cycling infrastructure I think summer 2020 is going to be a record peak of bikes in Wellington. The cycle counters in Wellington have recorded the second highest number of cycle trips ever in August and that’s still full of cold wintery days when riding isn’t the most appealing idea.

Anyway this is a long overdue post regarding my ebike excitement, something that might actually be exceeding my interest level in tech right now. I’m also going to put together some notes about my recommendations if you’re looking to buy an ebike so will get those up on this blog soon hopefully the next post on here.

A reminisce of Auckland

Commuting in Sydney

How Jethro Geeks – IRL

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A number of friends are always quite interested in how my personal IT infrastructure is put together, so I’m going to try and do one post a week ranging from physical environments, desktop, applications, server environments, monitoring and architecture.

Hopefully this is of interest to some readers – I’ll be upfront and advise that not everything is perfect in this setup, like any large environment there’s always ongoing upgrade projects, considering my environment is larger than some small ISPs it’s not surprising that there’s areas of poor design or legacy components, however I’ll try to be honest about these deficiencies and where I’m working to make improvements.

If you have questions or things you’d like to know my solution for, feel free to comment on any of the posts in this series. :-)

Today I’m examining my physical infrastructure, including my workstation and my servers.

After my move to Auckland, it’s changed a lot since last year and is now based around my laptop and gaming desktop primarily.

All the geekery, all the time

This is probably my most effective setup yet, the table was an excellent investment at about $100 off Trademe, with enough space for 2 workstations plus accessories in a really comfortable and accessible form factor.

My laptop is a Lenovo Thinkpad X201i, with an Intel Core i5 CPU, 8GB RAM, 120GB SSD and a 9-cell battery for long run time. It was running Fedora, but I recently shifted to Debian so I could upskill on the Debian variations some more, particularly around packaging.

I tend to dock it and use the external LCD mostly when at home, but it’s quite comfortable to use directly and I often do when out and about for work – I just find it’s easier to work on projects with the larger keyboard & screen so it usually lives on the dock when I’m coding.

This machine gets utterly hammered, I run this laptop 24×7, typically have to reboot about once every month or so, usually from issues resulting with a system crash from docking or suspend/resume – something I blame the crappy Lenovo BIOS for.

I have an older desktop running Windows XP for gaming, it’s a bit dated now with only a Core 2 Duo and 3GB RAM – kind of due for a replacement, but it still runs the games I want quite acceptably, so there’s been little pressure to replace – plus since I only really use it about once a week, it’s not high on my investment list compared to my laptop and servers.

Naturally, there are the IBM Model M keyboards for both systems, I love these keyboards more than anything (yes Lisa, more than anything <3 ) and I’m really going to be sad when I have to work in an office with other people again whom don’t share my love for loud clicky keyboards.

The desk is a bit messy ATM with several phones and routers lying about for some projects I’ve been working on, I’ll go through stages of extreme OCD tidiness to surrendering to the chaos… fundamentally I just have too much junk to go on it, so trying to downsize the amount of stuff I have. ;-)

Of course this is just my workstations – there’s a whole lot going on in the background with my two physical servers where the real stuff happens.

A couple years back, I had a lab with 2x 42U racks which I really miss. These days I’m running everything on two physical machines running Xen and KVM virtualisation for all services – it was just so expensive and difficult having the racks, I’d consider doing it again if I brought a house, but when renting it’s far better to be as mobile as possible.

The primary server is my colocation box which runs in a New Zealand data center owned by my current employer:

Forever Alone :'( [thanks to my colleagues for that]

It’s an IBM xseries 306m, with 3.0Ghz P4 CPU, 8GB of RAM and 2x 1TB enterprise grade SATA drives, running CentOS (RHEL clone). It’s not the fastest machine, but it’s more than speedy enough for running all my public-facing production facing services.

It’s a vendor box as it enabled me to have 3 yrs onsite NBD repair support for it, these days I have a complete hardware spare onsite since it’s too old to be supported by IBM any longer.

To provide security isolation and easier management, services are spread across a number of Xen virtual machines based on type and risk of attack, this machine runs around 8 virtual machines performing different publicly facing services including running my mail servers, web servers, VoIP, IM and more.

For anything not public-facing or critical production, there’s my secondary server, which is a “whitebox” custom build running a RHEL/CentOS/JethroHybrid with KVM for virtualisation, running from home.

Whilst I run this server 24×7, it’s not critical for daily life, so I’m able to shut it down for a day or so when moving house or internet providers and not lose my ability to function – having said that, an outage for more than a couple days does get annoying fast….

Mmmmmm my beautiful monolith

This attractive black monolith packs a quad core Phenom II CPU, custom cooler, 2x SATA controllers, 16GB RAM, 12x 1TB hard drives in full tower Lian Li case. (slightly out-of-date spec list)

I’m running RHEL with KVM on this server which allows me to run not just my internal production Linux servers, but also other platforms including Windows for development and testing purposes.

It exists to run a number of internal production services, file shares and all my development environment, including virtual Linux and Windows servers, virtual network appliances and other test systems.

These days it’s getting a bit loaded, I’m using about 1 CPU core for RAID and disk encryption and usually 2 cores for the regular VM operation, leaving about 1 core free for load fluctuations. At some point I’ll have to upgrade, in which case I’ll replace the M/B with a new one to take 32GB RAM and a hex-core processor (or maybe octo-core by then?).

To avoid nasty sudden poweroff issues, there’s an APC UPS keeping things running and a cheap LCD and ancient crappy PS/2 keyboard attached as a local console when needed.

It’s a pretty large full tower machine, so I except to be leaving it in NZ when I move overseas for a while as it’s just too hard to ship and try and move around with it – if I end up staying overseas for longer than originally planned, I may need to consider replacing both physical servers with a single colocated rackmount box to drop running costs and to solve the EOL status of the IBM xseries.

The little black box on the bookshelf with antennas is my Mikrotik Routerboard 493G, which provides wifi and wired networking for my flat, with a GigE connection into the server which does all the internet firewalling and routing.

Other than the Mikrotik, I don’t have much in the way of production networking equipment – all my other kit is purely development only and not always connected and a lot of the development kit I now run as VMs anyway.

Hopefully this is of some interest, I’ll aim to do one post a week about my infrastructure in different areas, so add to your RSS reader for future updates. :-)

So I might have gotten slightly engaged….

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You may recall that this time last year I met a very lovely lady and becoming somewhat attached to her. On the 29th of January it was our 1 yr “official” anniversary, which we spent in Wellington.

I realised there’s nobody that I’d rather spend the rest of my life with than her, so last night I asked Lisa to marry me. And she said yes. :’)

Whilst this ring is not as pretty as a Linux server, I think Lisa did approve of this purchase more.

I love you Lisa – spending the rest of my life with you is an amazing, scary, exhilarating feeling all at the same time.

Realising that there’s someone in my life who cares about me as much as I care about them just continues to amaze me every day and I’m so, so happy I met you.

So yeah, I now have one very surprised but happy fiancé and about a million tweets from followers, friends and family. As we were in Wellington for the weekend, it worked out well, being able to see and catch up with many of our friends and my side of the family. (Thankfully she said yes, it would have been a very awkward weekend otherwise). ;-)

Still a lot of stuff to figure out and sort out, I had kind of assumed at this stage my work was done,but turns out there are weddings, life plans, cake testing and getting something other than seans to wear to sort out. :-/

We haven’t really made plans yet, but we’re thinking engagement of at least a year, before we make that final step (or she’ll get sick of me and leave by then and I’ll become (more of) an alcoholic reclusive geek), so it would be a wedding in early 2013. Unsure where, but sounds like Wellington or Hawke’s Bay

I know a few of you want to know how it came about, how I proposed, etc, I’m hoping Lisa will blog that in the next day or two along with some horribly cute couplesy pics once we get someone to take a pic that’s more public appropriate than the content of my phone’s camera.

I’m sure I’ll blog something more in the next few days, just wanted to get something up ATM. :-)