Like Salt in a Wound

I don't really have anything that would be like salt in a wound...I just really wanted to say that. ha ha.

How my Thursday went down:

--Stopped by somewhere to get notarization
--Work all day
--Set a new record at lunch; McDonald's burger=3 grissles...Yuck!
--Dealing with customers, even after we were closed
--Long drive home...traffic was bad
--Relaxed for about 40 minutes with Rebecca
--Helped Rebecca make dinner...ginger chicken with rice
--Began painting on the guest bathroom and hall closet at about 7:45pm........stopped at 11:30.
--Was exhausted....so collapsed in bed right after that.

No wonder the week has flown by. I have done something like this all week.

In This New Year, I Am Resolute

I never really get into the whole "New Year's Resolution" thing, but rather I am constantly trying to improve myself. I am always working on things to better my life, as well as the people around me. I know I am really hard on myself. I get it mostly from my mother...who is terribly hard on herself, about everything. Guilt is built into some people more than others. She and I happen to be two of the people with it built in. Guilt can be good sometimes, if it drives you to be more than you otherwise would be.

Some of the things I have resolved to work on recently include: (Mind you, these are in no order of importance.)

1. Keeping the house picked-up
--too often, I just let clothes/dishes/papers stack up. It is really just me procrastinating to do all of that, but I am trying to work on that. I really want to have things "picked-up" when I go to bed. It makes me feel better.

2. Not delaying...doing it immediately.
--I guess this kind of ties in with the previous point, but it was worth mentioning as its own point after all. ha ha. I want to be one of those people that does something that needs to get done immediately. Then, I can sit back and relax for the duration of time left to accomplish the project, whatever it may be.

3. Be a better husband.
--This could be in so many ways. It is not that I treat Rebecca poorly, but I just constantly want to be better. What is something that I can do for her TODAY? What is something that will make her life easier? What are things I can do and say that would build her into a better person? How can I serve her? In what way can I earn even more respect from her?
--All of those questions run through my mind constantly. I want to really be the best husband I can to her. I want to surpass all of her expectations. I want her bragging to her family and friends. I am sure it will be an endless pursuit, for I am not a perfect husband (not yet, anyway). I will continue to strive for that though.

4. Read more: In general and more specifically, the Bible.
--I have to admit-I don't like to read the Bible. It is kind of like trying to swim through a lake of Jello. It is just too thick sometimes. I have to do better though. Also, I just want to be a well-read person. I want to have tons of knowledge from reading things...like Pop.

5. Getting more consistent sleep
--I don't know that this one will ever happen. I seem to be able to stay in this two day cycle. I can stay up late because I am just wired one night. Then, the next day, I am worn out and I have to get to bed at a decent hour. On those days, I cannot seem to get enough sleep. Then, another one of the hyper nights comes, and I stay up late. I don't really know what it is, but I will try to work on it a little bit. I want to try to be in bed more consistently at about 10:00, so that Rebecca and I don't struggle to get up (as much) in the mornings. It makes for a tough day for her when she starts the day out in a rush. Just puts kind of a damper on the morning.

Well, there it is.

**Oh, and credit must go to Andrea over at "Just Sayin'" for this idea.
--Check out her blog too:
http://www.unwoundandfree.blogspot.com

The Cutest

Well, the title says it all...she is the cutest little thing in the world.

All day, I kept watching Rebecca. She would walk by, or be doing something, and I could not help saying to myself, "Isn't she just so cute?"

We were out at The Ranch today for a Mexican lunch and some quality time with the Fam. We would just be around the house, doing various things. I would look at Rebecca, and just kind of make that knowing sound in my throat. It was me saying, "Hmmm. I am one lucky guy."

I truly feel that way. I am very lucky to be with someone that is as great as Rebecca and that loves to be with me. There are no words to describe that, even though I am trying right now.

Dogs, and the Problems that Follow

Dogs are cute. Sure. However, they don't serve enough of a purpose of entertainment to get a pass on this rant.

There is always this barking in the distance. Every time we go in our bathroom, we can hear the distant barking especially clearly. I thought it might be the house next to us. They do have dogs, but it is not theirs. They are very well behaved....the people and the dogs. ha ha.

Tonight, I was getting dressed after taking a shower, and I heard the barking. I was determined to find out where it was coming from. I went out in the backyard and listened. I heard the barking in the distance. It was clearly not the next door neighbor's dogs. I went back in the house. I walked out the front door, still in search of the only annoying sound that the stupid animals can make. I walked down the driveway, and out into the street. I kept walking down our street, in search of the incessant noise. Five houses later, I found it. I found the blasted animal, barking away inside his fenced yard. It was just a constant, nagging bark.

I had never wished I had a blow gun more than right then. I mean, clearly I could not use my 9mm that is in the car...too many people would hear it. Plus, it is a little bit illegal to shoot it here in the city.

One of the kids that lived at that house opened the back door and stooped to pet the dog. Amazingly, the dog stopped barking for the first time in about 45 minutes. As soon as the boy went back in the house, it was right back to barking as usual for the mutt.

My theory is that this dog is spoiled rotten. Every time the owners put him out in the back yard, he just sits back there and barks until they let him. The problem is that this is usually over hours and hours. They may not let the thing in the whole night....much to our demise. Maybe the dog will become ill with something......soon.

Needless to say, I will not be getting a dog soon. Even if I did, I would have the sense and courtesy to train it not to bark all of the time. And truly, it would not come in the house!

The Dreadliest One Around

Dread.

It is such a weird thing. It can make you almost sick to your stomach. It is the anticipation of something bad that is going to happen, that usually doesn't happen. That is my case anyway. I usually get anxious with dread about something looming in the future. It is almost never as bad as it originally seems. I wish I could just look past it with an air of positive thinking. I wish it would not bring me down to the level it does. I think dread affects me so greatly, because I am a realist. I am not necessarily trying to be negative, but rather trying to look at life in a realistic way. Oft times, that is negatively. I do not directly set out to be negative though.

Dread is especially bad when you think something has passed, only to find out that the thing you are dreading, has come back again to haunt you. This has recently happened to me. I thought I was finished with something, only to find out that I didn't have all of the facts. I didn't have all of the information, and thus, I am right back to dreading my next course of action.

The Painted House: Vol. 2

I did not totally finish the painting in the front, sitting room and the living until yesterday. I still had a bit of touch up to do then.

When Rebecca left for work (the Everyday Gourmet) Saturday morning, all that was done in the living room was a little bit of "cutting in" the wall color, around the trim. By the time she came home, all of the color was on the wall, and in the tray ceiling too. I had not finished five minutes before she walked in the door.

Sunday, we got everything cleaned up. We put back all of the face plates. We rearranged some of the furniture, only to arrange it the way we had it in the first place. We thought we might like it a little different, but by the time we saw it, we just liked it the way it was. If something is not broken, don't fix it....right?

It took us a good 3 or 4 hours to put everything back together in the two rooms Sunday afternoon. We had to put all of the furniture back, sweep up all of the dust and other particles around, put out nick-nacks and rugs. It was quite the task.

As I am sure you agree, the finished product was a much-needed improvement over the old, tan interior. I hope to be able to do the rest of the house. We will probably have to do it one room at a time, but we will eventually plug away at the whole thing.

As far as the pictures go, the ones with the tan are the original color. I have already painted two coats of the bright white back onto the trim at this point. All of the trim used to be the same tan color as the walls.Then, you get to see the progression into much color in our main rooms. I don't really know which one we will tackle next.

Stay tuned for even more changes.

The Painted House: Vol. 1

I was off from work this past week. You might think that I relaxed or took a vacation, but that would be wrong. I did pretty much nothing but paint the whole time.

The people that we bought this house from, painted everything in here tan: cabinets, walls, trim. Yikes! We had been living in an apartment for about two years at the time we bought this house, and were so happy to see some wall color other than white, we didn't even notice it. After a couple of months here though, we started to tire of the incessant tan that glared at us around every corner and in every room.

I took it upon myself to try to change some of that. I had already begun in the front room in our house. It is a sitting room, if you will. I had built the cabinet that I posted about many months ago, and begun to paint the trim back to white. I started there, and chose the living room as the other room to paint. We had already bought some paint colors for the walls in these two rooms. After finally getting both coats of paint on all of the trim (The final coat of trim paint too me 4.5 hours of solid painting one day...just in the living room), I needed to start on the walls. I have to give credit to Carla, one of my blessed siblings, for helping me out. She came over about three days this week to help in whatever way she could. She would bring her littlest one, or both of the children, and we would start to paint as they watched Cars, Ice Age II, or some other kind of video.

I am happy to say that I might be able to finish the painting (in these two rooms only) today. It depends on how the paint gods look down on me. Hopefully, I will have some great before and after photos for you all to look at.

Stay tuned.

Night Photography

I tried out some night photography last night with my new tripod that I got for Christmas this year. The result was pretty good, but I would love to improve upon it.

I was out at The Ranch last night, and just wanted to experiment a little bit. here is one of the images that I came up with. All of this light was only being emitted from a single street light.

I left the shutter open for 30 seconds, and it was able to collect all kinds of light, that we would not see with our naked eye. I could not even hardly make out this tree with my naked eye.

Glen and I have done some night writing, with flashlights and stuff, but nothing has turned out quite this cool.

If you look closely enough, you can see some stars shining through the tree. I think this is one of the dippers, whichever one is available to see during the Winter here.

Enjoy.

Samsung BD-P1500 (Add-on)

I was telling of all of the shortfalls of the recent Samsung Blu-ray player purchase I made. Well, I just realized that one thing was left out.

Sound:
It is very important to the movie-watching experience. I didn't realize until going back to watching DVDs on my Pioneer player that the sound is much better. It now seems like one of the things I left out when telling the shortfalls of the Samsung Blu-ray player is the lack of great quality sound. It's output was very sub-par. I had to turn my receiver up to volume 30 when watching a Blu-ray. This weekend, Rebecca and I watched some DVD's on the old player, and noticed that there was better clarity on the surround as well as other things...even at volume 15. That is significant.

Once again, wait out this technology. It is just not there yet. It may never catch up to some of the innovations that DVD's had, but let's hope it surpasses them all.....eventually.

Samsung BD-P1500

Where do I start?

Well, this is a totally inferior product. They should have never released it, because it was not ready for market selling yet. What am I talking about? It is only one of the top rated, reasonably priced Blu-ray players around.

Back around the time of Thanksgiving, Rebecca and I got the high-def itch. We went out and bought a 1080p flat screen tv, and wanted something to play high definition media on that television. We ended up on the Samsung Blu-ray player. We read a lot of reviews, and at the time, it was getting very favorable speeches.

About a week ago, we got a few Netflix movies in and tried to play one. A little side note would be that we switched our Netflix subscription to all Blu-ray. Why not? We had a Blu-ray player now. One of them would not play at all. It would not bring up anything on the screen. I thought that the disc was just damaged, and we sent it back to Netflix. It happens every once in a while, and I didn't really think much about it at the time. The next day, we got another movie in. We attempted to play this one....and it played. It played, the menu. I would get it going and tell it to start the movie, and it would act like it was about to play the actual movie, only to revert right back to the disc menu. I sent that one back to Netflix. We didn't really think anything more about it. We had a lot going on last weekend, and didn't not really take time to even watch tv those next few days.

This week rolls around, and we received a few Netflix movies again. I put one in, that we had sent back for a new replacement, only to find out that this one would not play either. I put another disc in there...it would not play past the menu. (Same as the week before.) Then, just to know what was going on, I put in The Dark Knight that I actually own. I had played this movie about twice without issue. It would begin to play, but with no audio. I thought it was the receiver, but everything else I have hooked up to it would play audio just fine. Ultimately, I decided it was the Samsung Blu-ray player. I hopped online to see if there was anything about these type of problems on there. Sure enough...there were....a ton! All of the reviews that we were seeing about the thing since Thanksgiving (when we bought it) were negative! People were saying they had the same issues as us....would not play certain discs...would not play audio.

The last resort was to "update the firmware." You can download an update and put it onto a flash drive, insert that into the port on the Blu-ray player, and make everything better. That is according to Samsung anyway. I did that, and it got worse. That's right...worse. Now, if you put a disc in, it will not do anything. The little screen says "closing," but never moves past that point. I thought the firmware update was actually supposed to update the piece of machinery? That could not be further from the truth. It actually cause some sort of regression of the player, and made it go into complete lock-up.

Ulrimately, my point is to get you to save your money and don't waste it on this product. In fact, I would say, save your money and wait out the Blu-ray technology a little longer. It is great and fancy to say that you have one, but they are not even meeting even the basic technology standards that DVD players had 6 years ago.

I have a Pioneer DVD player that I got in 2002 that is also a receiver. It has been great. The only reason I moved away from it recently is that I wanted the high-def output for my new tv. Otherwise, I have been totally happy with the Pioneer. Something that I took for granted with the DVD players is there ability to bookmark where you are in a movie. This feature allows you to stop, pause, or even turn off the DVD player only to have it pick right back up where you left off the next time. I assummed this would be one of the very basic things that the Blu-ray player would do. I thought it would be backwards compatible with the technology of its predicessor. Not so.

It is a good idea, this Blu-ray disc. But until they improve on the technology and fine-tune the products that support it, I will be sitting this one out.

The Ulrich Christmas (Two Weeks Late)

It all began early in the morning. I could not sleep. It was like I was 7 again, and the anticipation of Christmas morning and all that ensues was too much for me to handle. I got up and prepared some coffee via French press. Rebecca and I gathered around in the living room to observe each other opening the few gifts that we got each other. We kept it small this year, because we got a new tv and some furniture and a blu ray player that we considered our Christmas gifts to each other. We had some snacks for stocking stuffers. I actually had a stocking here, but Rebecca left hers in Grenada when we were there a couple of weeks ago. Because of this, I had to wait until she headed to the bedroom, and then lay it all out over the mantle. It actually worked out quite well. Among the things that I gave her were a pashmina (scarf from London), some Hot Tamales, and some skittles. She also got me some candy, that was dear to my heart.

As for gifts, I got Rebecca a couple of books she had been asking for. I went over the limit that we said we would spend on each other by a little bit, but I like to spoil her like that. One of the books I got her is all about Christmas stuff from the 30's to the 70's. She has hardly put the book down, even to this day. I didn't know she would like that one quite so much. I am truly glad I picked it as a gift for her. She gave me a cd of Bela Fleck and the Flecktones that I was wanting, Outbound. Also, she gave me another book to add to my long list of things to read. It will be a few books before I get to that one, but I am looking forward to it.

After enjoying each other's company for a while, we showered and headed out to the Ranch. We were all meeting up there at like 9:00 for some breakfast. It was so good. Mom slaved in the kitchen making some of her famous homemade cinnamon rolls. They are delicious!

We started opening presents with everyone at about 10:30. The instructions this year were to take our time a little more than we did last year. It seemed like we just rushed through everything last year, and we didn't want to make the same mistake this year. It really helped with getting some great pictures. I appreciated that. In fact, there are too many pictures to put them all up on here. It would just take forever to upload and arrange them on this blog. The link to the Picasa page where they are parked is as follows:

http://picasaweb.google.com/bruceaulrich

(The album is labeled....."12.25.08.01")

After the presents, we all just kind of chilled out and played with our gifts. Yeah, that's right...we played with them. I got lots of cool stuff. I got some books, tools, photography stuff. It was great! I got a remote for my camera and I played with that for a while.

We ate lunch about mid-afternoon. It was yet another fabulous meal (which around there aren't, I ask?). We had a ham with some homemade macaroni and cheese. Also, some corn pudding accompanied the aforementioned items. Okay, enough about food.

This year was a little bit different than some of the years in the past. Russ and Marjorie were there to celebrate with us. They have come down for Christmas before, but it has been quite a few years. I was glad to have them there with us. It is always a lot of fun when you can just get a house full of people during Christmas.

Later in the day, the "guys" went out and shot some guns. That, of course, was lots of fun. We were shooting at cans, clorox bottles, and pretty much anything that moved....Lookout Mom!

Anyway, overall, it was a very enjoyable time. I hope that we can make some equally impressive memories next year. Until then...