Saturday night my parents took Katie and I to see I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change at the Greater Lewisville Community Theatre. They had been talking about it about a month or so ago and mentioned it to us. Then they offered to take Katie and I out to dinner before and that sealed the deal for us. We are both really glad they invited us, it was great. It was rated PG-13 for language and just like most action movies they managed to use the one instance of the F-word in a very strategic, and completely hilarious, situation. If any of you have a chance to see it then I would highly recommend that you do. Guys, be forewarned, it is a musical. However, it is totally worth it. You will cry laughing at some points.
Author Archive for Jared
After Katie and I got home from dinner tonight I thought it might be a good idea to go through some of my stuff in the office. I was not prepared for what I would find. I came across a CD of work I had completed for a web design or graphics class I took my senior year of high school. Talk about blast from the past. To cease the delay and let you guys have a great chance to make fun of me, here it is in all it’s glory, my final semester project:
Disclaimer: The only things I changed were some spelling and grammatical errors. Everything else was as I originally formatted it almost 10 years ago.
Little Girl to Dad: “Daddy, you need to get married again so that I can have a new step-mom.”
…so I guess you need more than one?
Tags: OverheardToday I just had one of those weird flashback moments. You know how sometimes you are driving while listening to the radio and you hear a song that, Boom, takes you back to a very specific time in your life or place where you first heard it? Well, that kind of happened to me today, except it was with food and not music.
Katie had made me lunch and while I was munching and watching a DVR’d episode of Man vs. Wild, the one where Bear gets stung in the face by a bee and his whole head swells up, I ate some Cooler Ranch Doritos and I had one of those flashback moments. I was magically transported back to elementary school. One of the summers of elementary school to be exact.
When I lived in California for the second time I distinctly remember my Mom putting me in summer school. I can’t recall exactly why, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t because I needed to get caught up in anything. Well, during recess they always had some concession stand open, or something close, and Mom would give us some change or a dollar once in a while and I always got myself a bag of Cooler Ranch Doritos or a Bomb Pop.
So there ya go. I was 7 or 8 years old again today while eating lunch.
Tags: Family, History, RandomThis was Operation Organize Garage. I was able to recruit my Dad for OOG. The main purpose of the project was to build shelving on a ledge next to the water heater. I used all materials that I already had. These were either left at the house when the old tenants moved out or they were scraps that I kept after finishing Poker Table #2. We made three new shelves out of the center piece that was left over from having cut the 4″ bumper or railing that I put on the top of my poker table. The crescent shaped supports were the rounded off corners that were left from cutting the 4′x8′ sheets of plywood for the poker table.
When my Dad showed up he had a 3′x6′ piece of pegboard that was left over from one of his garage projects. What we had to do here was cut out seven pieces of scrap wood in 3″x3″ squares to go directly into the studs. Then we secured the pegboard onto those scraps. The reason for this is to give some distance between the wall and the pegboard so that you can put in pegs without having to tear up the wall from jamming those pegs in. The rest, they say, “Is history.”
I have this as proof to Mike that the dartboard he got me as a groomsman’s gift from his wedding over a year and a half ago is getting some use. I did the proper measurements to make sure that the bullseye is the regulation 5′8″ off the floor. We then marked the distance you have to stand away from the board for throwing the darts at both 7′9 1/4″ and 8′ since both distances were in the instructions.
Here is how I built Poker Table #2: The Way More Expensive Than I Thought Edition…
This is a multiple page post and the links to the next portion of the article are at the bottom.
I drew my inspiration for this table from Mark Junell.
I started out with three sheets of 4′x8′ plywood, one nice, and two particle.
Cutting The Wood
I used a wooden yardstick and created a jig by drilling a hole at the 24″ mark to place a pencil in for drawing the rounded outer corners to make a (near) perfect half circle on each end of all three sheets of plywood. I measured the first piece and then used it as a template for cutting the others. In some of the photos you’ll notice I marked the corresponding ends with crosses so I could keep things “straight.”
Here you’ll see the first piece resting on my Mom’s rolling footlocker full of horse equipment. This thing came in handy as it served as my sawhorse for all of the cutting.
After cutting the ends off with one of my Dad’s many jigsaws we used on this project.
Here are two pieces laid up against the garage door. The “ring” on top is the 4″ wide rail that will eventually be wrapped in 1″ foam and then vinyl. The piece behind it will serve as the base that everything will either screw into or rest upon.
The next few photos you’ll see my progress of mounting the folding table legs.
This is the “nice” piece of plywood. This side up right now is not the good side so it’s where I made all the measurements so I wouldn’t be marking on the nicer side. The measurements here are 1.5″ from the end for the bottom rail cap and 9″ in from the end to make the racetrack.
The next two photos are of the 8 T-nuts that I drilled holes for and screwed into the nice sheet of plywood. Don’t worry, this will be later covered up by 1/4″ foam and the playing surface felt. It is resting directly over top of the baseboard that has the legs on it. This is how the felt center piece will be secured to the base so as to not slide around.
This was to keep the smaller rail cap piece from snapping in two as I made my cuts going all the way around. Since it was just my Dad and I working on the table at this point we had to get creative to make sure everything was supported properly.
When I was making the cuts we realized that alot of vibration was caused and that created a need for some downward pressure so that my Dad could concentrate on holding up the board as I went around making my cuts so we used two 45lb plates from his workout bench. They worked like a charm.
Here you will see a picture of three jigsaws. We started the project using the one on the far right because my Dad told me that the one in the middle had burnt up on him but he still had it for some reason. Well, we managed to break a non-replaceable part that held the blade in place on the first one which forced us on to the middle one. It was working just fine until it managed to get really hot and started SMOKING. It was an awful smell and rendered it useless once and for all. This led us to make our second trip of the day to The Home Depot to purchase a third jigsaw. We found ourselves the most powerful one and man it was like a hot knife cutting through butter. Had we been in possession of this bad boy the entire time we would have been able to make all the cuts we needed in about an hour or so.
The next two photos are both of the bottom rail cap and the racetrack cut from the nice piece of plywood.
The next two photos you’ll see of what eventually will be the padded rail. These two pieces are the 4″ and 1.5″ pieces that I previously cut. When flipped over the smaller 1.5″ piece will act as a cap around the nicer racetrack piece.
This is a shot of the nice side of the racetrack piece awaiting stain and polyurethane.
