Joe and Jamie's Blog

This past weekend Jamie and I went to one of her co-worker’s annual Christmas tree burning party out in Pawling. Annette and her husband Joe threw the party at their house with a bunch of their friends and neighbors. The party has become an annual ritual around this time since they moved into their home. This was the first time Jamie and I attended such an event, but it turned out to be very fun. I mean how can you go wrong with beer and fire?

I will say that it is absolutely amazing how fast the trees go up. It takes only about 30 seconds for all the branches to burn to ash. The heat gets so intense that you feel like you are getting a sunburn when you are 20 feet away, through your jacket, and over the 30 degree temperature outside. The flames easily reached over 12 feet with each tree, making it quite the spectacle of falling ash and smoke in the sky.

Can’t wait till next year!

It's amazing how high the flames get

Who threw the match in there?

Hot, hot, hot, hot!

It only takes a few seconds to completely go up

Its on FFFFFFFIIIIIRRRREEEE

While doing the bills tonight, I realized I just made the 30th payment on the car, completing the first payment booklet. I can’t believe it’s been two and a half years already. Seems like we just got the car in the summer. Well since this is our first car together I guess this is some sort of milestone, apparently important enough for me to blog about it.

Car payment coupon

2006 Acura RSX

It has been getting really tough lately. Yeah I know, old news, but its starting to get worse faster than before. So I just have to ask, how is everyone? Work has been doing great until now. There has been so many lay offs everywhere else that we just have less people working to mess their computers up. It’s starting to scare me because I would hate to have to get a part time job somewhere. That’s even if I could find a part time job out there now, which just adds to the scariness.

Well Christmas is just around the corner, something to look forward too. Good thing I did 90% of my shopping before Thanksgiving so not much left to worry about there. Online shopping has had great deals lately. I have always hated going to the mall on the slowest day possible, so you can imagine how I avoid the mall now. I just cant deal with that many idiots shoved into one area, drives me to the point of almost having a heart attack from frustration.

Sunday is our four year anniversary. Seems like it has been much longer. I have to pick somewhere fancy-schmancy to eat that we haven’t been to yet. I’ll remember to take some pictures of the restaurant I choose for all of you.

Hello world! Still here.

It has been a very long time since I last posted. Not really that long but too long for my liking. In an ideal world I would post every three days or so, maybe even everyday if I did more exciting things to write about.

Jamie and I have just been very busy lately with school and work, barely finding time to do anything. Besides the boring yard work and soccer that I already wrote about too much, there isn’t anything that I really can write about that anyone (including myself) would want to read. Oh yeah big highlight, cleaned the fish tank the other day; fun, fun. See what I mean, not quite a compelling story. I have been able to accomplish a few more websites and I am in the works to sell some domain names at serious prices. One domain can literally erase half my debt which would be awesome.

Thanksgiving is coming up and I believe we are traveling out to Long Island to our relatives on our father’s side. We haven’t seem them in awhile so it will be nice. Can’t wait for the food! This nice long weekend gives me some time to catch up on things and get squared away before I am bombarded with end of the semester tests over the following two weeks.

I will try and video the next indoor soccer game and see how it comes out, would be fun to watch it online. Now I just need some kind reader to send me a camcorder for Christmas so I can really video tape stuff and play it on the blog.

I guess you can say that fall is officially here, and I am late in posting it. It has been pretty hectic around here lately, so I am just getting to this post now.

This shot was taken from my backyard. I love how the three trees show a progression of the season changing over. Now is the time where I take way too many landscape shots, I just cant get enough of how nice everything looks in the fall, it is my favorite time of the year.

So with fall comes the weather change. I like it when its 50-60 degrees outside; just cool enough for a light jacket and still have the car window down. That reminds me, have to take those low-profile tires off the car before the snow!

Last weekend the family went pumpkin picking at Secor Farm in Wappinger Falls. We have been going there for the past few years. It’s a nice place that lets you go out into the fields and pick your own pumpkin. After making an afternoon of picking the perfect pumpkin, we has a quick lunch at the Daily Planet and then headed home to paint the pumpkins. Check out our great art skills!

Here is the sucker we are going to carve, its 35lbs and just perfect!

Once we cut open this bad boy I’ll be sure to have more photos.

I have some unfortunate news, Doodle has passed away.

When I woke up this morning Doodle was acting very strange. He was near the top of the tank barely moving, just floating with the current. I went near him, but he swam to the bottom so I figured it couldn’t be that bad. I started to research this while at work today and found several reasons why this could be happening.

1. Overfeeding or bad diet can cause digestive problems. – I rule this out because Doodle was new and he didn’t eat much at all. Bubbles comes to the top to eat and would eat all the flakes before Doodle got them. I also hand fed Doodle because of this, so I know he only ate a flake or two since Saturday.
2. Swim Bladder issues – I rule this out because he had no problem swimming around until this morning. So unless he developed it overnight (which now I think he actually did) then it wasn’t this.
3. Dirty water conditions – I still think this is why. Bubbles was in that water for two weeks before Doodle, so Bubbles was used to the conditions, Doodle was not. With just Bubbles all I did was change the water once a month which was fine, but now that there was two I should take out at least 15% of the water each week.

I had Jamie run to the store and get two gallons of water and change it out because of #3. Doodle responded better for a bit, but didn’t recover. Jamie went to the store to get test kits for the water when my mother found Doodle behind the filter on his side.

So farewell Doodle, we barely knew ye. You were the best looking Telescope goldfish Petco had, sorry you had to go.

Off to Petco to get some test kits now, possibly a Doodle2 later tonight….maybe Doddle Jr or Doodler, not sure how the sequel name will go yet.

[UPDATE]

Jamie and I went back to Petco last night and grab a test kit and then headed home. We tested the water and the pH, hardness and nitrate leves were just fine. Nitrite was a bit high and the ammonia levels were a bit more on the stress than safe side.  We plan to change out two additional gallons of water this weekend before purchasing another fish. I talked with the people at Petco for a long time last night, going over everything. I learned that we did pretty much everything correctly and that it could have been anything that killed the fish. They said that it could have just been the fish itself and that it probably wasn’t anything serious that would affect the other fish. I tend to agree with them now, especially after Jamie read that Telescope Goldfish are the hardest goldfish to care for. They are not recommended for beginners (that’s what we are obviously) and that they are prone to disease and die more often than others.

So we think we may hold off on the Telescope Goldfish again, unless we use our second smaller tank for it by itself. We now have our eye on a Black Moor or Calico Fantail. We’ll see this weekend which one wins I guess.

We upgraded Bubbles to a 10 gallon tank. He seems a bit more calm now since he has more room and more oxygen in the air. I think it was mostly the current in the small tank. We needed to aerate the small tank so he had enough oxygen, but that caused a bit of a current which Goldfish don’t tend to like too much.

Jamie and I have been eying some companions for Bubbles, so maybe more to come this weekend. For now watch another video of Bubbles in his new home.

Here are the past articles on this topic to follow along:
2008/03/23/a-little-housework-remodling-the-attic
2008/03/24/continued-house-work-in-the-attic
2008/04/14/progress-on-the-attic-project

Now as you probably notice this has been going on since March. Well from April til now nothing has gotten done except for maybe a few touches here and there. We both were way to busy on the weekends with soccer and work to get anything done. We don’t normally take this long to do simple painting, but eh, it’s done now.

Jamie and I wanted to finish painting our bedroom before school started, which was Monday. We did get it all done last week which was tough but great now that it is all finished. The colors came out nice and we are happy. Only thing left to do is paint the door and jam, but I am waiting for a day that I can remove the door to fix it up a bit. After we finish the door, there is just a section outside that needs to be completed, behind my clothing rack. This was a pretty inexpensive area to do, just a few gallons to complete the whole floor. Now I have to go finish hanging all the pictures again!