Chris​Hubbs​.com

I wait far too long between blog posts, and then I find myself searching for interesting things to write about. I guess my life, if not boring, is at a minimum mundane.

I’m adjusting to actually being in the office all week this week; it’s been about a month since I did an actual five-day in-office stretch. It’s not too bad.

Took Andrew and Rebecca out for dinner last night, then they watched the girls while Becky and I went to see the new Pirates of the Carribean movie. My take on the movie: parts of it were quite fun, comic even, and it certainly hearkened back to swashbuckling movies of old. My main grip with it was that it didn’t really resolve much; it was too directly setting you up for Pirates 3, which will come out next year. It felt much more like the end-of-season cliffhanger on a TV series than the satisfactory conclusion of a movie. But still… Johnny Depp is hilariously over the top.

I picked up a Virgin Wireless cell phone yesterday to be my travel phone. Roaming is horribly expensive on our current US Cellular plan, and we don’t really need it often. However, now that I’m traveling more for business, it’d be nice to be in touch for less than $0.69/minute. So I now have a pay-as-you-go phone that I’ll use for my travels. It has a Cedar Rapids number, which I’ll be happy to give you if you’re wanting to keep in touch with me while I’m on travel.

What else?. The folks and Aaron are coming down this weekend to celebrate Laura’s birthday. Andrew interviewed for a job here in Cedar Rapids yesterday; it sounds like he’ll be living here and taking some classes as Kirkwood this fall. I heard rumor that Aaron may be looking at moving to Florida… but haven’t heard anything specific yet.

So that’s the (mundane) news from Iowa today. When I think of something more interesting, I’ll be sure to post it.

Yeah, that dream. The one where Andy Osenga and some other unidentified people are holed up with me in a house (not my house, dunno what house it is) when bad guys show up with guns. We call 911, but the cops are in on it, so no help there. We are tricky, though, and manage to escape out the back way. We run behind a little hill and hide and we’re laying in the water in this lake, peering over the hill, watching the bad guys search through the house.

Maybe the bad guys were looking for the automatic weapons that we had found hidden in the attic of the house; they were up there in the rafters next to the 100 baud modem. I don’t know the answer to that one.

What does it all mean? I report, you decide.

Yesterday I had an unhappy occurrance. I had stopped at Quik Trip to get some gas on my way to work. When I got back in the car and turned the key: nothing. No lights, no radio, definitely no engine turning. I checked the basic things I know to check (battery cable connections, fuses, etc) and found nothing apparently wrong. So I coasted it down from the gas pumps into a parking spot and walked the 6 blocks home and took the minivan to work. Soon I got a tow truck called and since my preferred mechanic was booked full until Tuesday (a day on which I plan to be on the road), I had the tow take it to the local Saturn dealership’s service department.

Two hours later I get the phone call. They checked everything out, my alternator is fine, my battery is fine. However, I had a bad connection with a battery cable/terminal. So they replaced it, and now the car starts fine, even better than before. However, they did notice that a motor mount had collapsed and needed replaced. I did a quick bit of investigation, ascertained that motor mounts are probably important, and had them replace it. So by 3 pm they had sent a nice lady in a courtesy car to pick me up, and upon my payment of around $200, I got a car back that had a new negative battery cable, a new motor mount, and an oil change.

What I had not realized was how much of a difference the motor mount made. The engine just feels tighter now. It accelerates better. It’s just all-around improved. I took it for a spin up a few exits on the interstate last night with the windows down and the cool night air in the cabin, and it was glorious. Oh, and the car ran really nicely, too. I think it’s ready to make the trip to Nashville next week.

If you’re ever buying a used car, I could recomment the ‘99 Saturn SL - at least, my ‘99 Saturn SL. We bought it 5 years ago, have put 70k miles on it, and so far the only two repairs have been an oxygen sensor back in ‘03, and now the motor mount. That’s a level of repair I can handle.

Having been disgusted with my lack of exercise for a while, and having been challenged by my wife’s initiative to start swimming on a regular basis, I bit the bullet yesterday and set my alarm back an extra half-hour so I could get up and run to start the morning. Yesterday morning wasn’t too bad - I was ready to get up at 5:15, I did about 2 miles in 20 minutes, and felt pretty good. Woohoo!

Fast-forward to this morning. 5:15 seemed much earlier. I was sore. But I argued enough with myself to go ahead and get out of bed and do it again. But my heel was hurting this time; it felt like it was rubbing funny against my shoe, enough to hurt a bit, but I didn’t think there was much to it. Finally I sat down on a park bench about half-way through my run, and found that I had a bloody sock to rival Curt Schilling’s. Bummer. I guess it was worse than I thought. So I’m wearing my sandals to work today, and I’ll have to figure out what to do with the shoes this weekend. I’ve had ’em for 3 years or so, but haven’t worn them that much - they should still be in decent shape… oh well, I’ll figure it out this weekend.

So anyway, now I’m at work feeling a little bit sore. But that feels good - much better to have sore muscles than to be feeling fat and lazy. :-)

That’s actually not a bad thing, just a statement of fact. Had a nice weekend; installed a screen door on the side entrance to our house. It went pretty easily, but I ran down the batteries in my drill and had to wait until Sunday for them to charge up so I could finish the job. Note to self: pick up a cheap electric (plug-in) drill sometime so that doesn’t happen again.

Sunday was nice, church in the morning went well, then finished the aforementioned screen door, then later on we took Laura to the splashpad at the park. She’s still a little bit scared of the water, and quite a bit intimidated by the throngs of (larger) kids, but she’s figuring it out and getting braver. I have to keep reminding myself that she’s not even 2 yet. Amazing. Then we came home and I washed all of the nasty tree pollen and junk off the car, Laura helped with that, too. Give her a wash rag and she has all sorts of fun. Becky took some pictures, if they turned out I’ll have to post one.

It was awesome sleeping weather last night; it only got down to about 70 in the house, but the humidity was really low. Nice to have the windows open again and the a/c off at least for a day. Now it’s Monday and back-to-work time. This afternoon is softball… it will be fun to play again after a week off for the holiday. I’ve got Andy O’s The Morning playing on the iPod for about the zillionth time since I got it, and it’s still good. Probably even better than the first several times. More good stuff to appreciate each time. You’ll probably get tired of my raving about The Morning before I get tired of raving, so just get used to it… or go buy the album and joing the raving maniacs. :-)

No, wait, it’s Tuesday. It just feels like Monday. It was very very hard to get out of bed this morning. It was cool and there was rain pattering on the roof. But no, I had to get up and come to work. When I got to work, I found out that I’m losing a good engineer off of my project. Double-grrrrrr. And now I have meetings for pretty much the rest of the day: 10:00, 11:00, 1:00, 2:00, 2:30… the last three all overlap. Just another day.

On the bright side, you should go over to Andy Osenga’s website and listen to the cut he’s got up there from his upcoming album. It’s amazing. He’s finally taken the chance to really rock out on this one, and it sounds great. I have this album pre-ordered, which means I should be getting it in a couple of weeks… I can’t wait. But hey, I have to. :-(

Give me a three-day weekend, and do I post any? Nooooo. But it was a very nice weekend.

I had all of Friday off from work. Friday morning I woke up with a very, very sore back - the kind of sore where you can’t bend over to reach to flush the toilet because it hurts too much. The back is still sore today, but it’s better than it was on Friday. It gets looser during the day, to the point where it’s not bad at all, but then it starts all over again in the morning. I’m headed to the chiropractor again today to see if he can help. But enough griping. I sound like an old person.

Friday morning we decided to go garage saleing. Normally this isn’t a very exciting thing, but it was a nice morning, and I figured I could do the driving and Becky could shop and we’d have fun. At the second sale we stopped at, I noticed an electric bass and bass amp sitting out there for sale. I couldn’t resist going to check them out. After some drooling, I made an offer of $100 for the pair, and the gal took it. So now I am the happy owner of an electric bass and amp. I wish I could provide more detail on the bass, but there’s no name printed on it anywhere. I opened up the back of it, and still, no name. The woman said it belonged to her father, and I’d say he’s had it for a while; the insulation on the wires isn’t plastic, but rather that woven stuff that I have seen on old wiring in houses. The amp is an old Roland bass amp, about 30" square. All in all, it sounds good. There’s a bit of a buzz, but I think the cable connecting the bass to the amp has a bad connector. I’m gonna try a new cable tonight. I don’t know when all I’ll have opportunities to play it (other than for my own fun at home), but I’ll find times. And for $100, I couldn’t pass it up.

Friday afternoon we went out for lunch and then did some clean-up at home in preparation for Ryan’s visit. He showed up around 4 pm. We had a great time seeing him this weekend; Ryan, I hope we didn’t work you too hard!

Saturday morning we borrowed the neighbor’s pickup and procured a load of topsoil and a load of compost from the local garden center. All that dirt went into the planters behind the garage in preparation for the strawberries that Becky was ready to plant. After that was done, I tilled the garden so she can get some tomatoes started. Then we crashed Saturday night.

Sunday morning was the usual two services at Noelridge. I was unexpectedly without either my flautist (sick) or my bass player (car in the ditch the night before). Regardless, the music went OK. Always a joy to celebrate the resurrection with our brothers and sisters.

Ryan headed home Sunday afternoon and we didn’t do much the rest of the day. Now it’s Monday and I have to deal with a full five-day work week this week. :-( But ignore me, I’m whining again. Fortunately, this week my evenings should be much calmer.