R. Andrew Love's Blog

Well, I have put off blogging long enough. The first half of this week I was in St. Louis for work (the company has a fair sized office complex in St. Louis). I had to train a couple of people on some programs I finished earlier in the year. After the five hour drive, I was pleased when I arrived at my hotel. I stayed at a Marriott right next to the St. Louis International Airport, as in 1,500 feet away from the airport. I lucked out and got a corner room on the fifth floor. So, I had a huge window along each wall of the corner. This meant I had a prime view of the airport. I have enjoyed playing flight simulators for years, so naturally I enjoy watching airliners landing & taking off. Yes, I know I am a geek.

Anyway, I was there for two and a half days of meetings. Interestingly, it just so happened that the company had some Cardinals tickets (Cards vs. Brewers) they weren’t using (the customer service department there regularly gives out baseball tickets as incentives for high customer service scores for the employees) and the group of people I was meeting with and I caught the game on Monday. As you can see in the image I hijacked from Wikipedia, the second incarnation of Busch stadium has a wonderful, open view to the St. Louis skyline. We had pretty good seats as well, along the third base line about 15 rows up on the bottom level. Unfortunately, the wonderful venue just couldn’t compensate for the 95 degree game time temperature with a billion percent humidity. It was miserable weather, but the game was good. So, overall it was a good trip.

On a completely unrelated note, I found out the other day that Nashville will have a Weihnachtsmarkt(a Christmas street market if you didn’t know) this Christmas. NashvilleChristmasMarket.com states that “Beginning this year, Sister Cities of Nashville and partners in our sister city of Magdeburg, Germany will bring a month-long traditional Christmas market to downtown Nashville during the holiday season. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve, Nashville’s Hall of Fame Park will be transformed into a holiday village, where visitors can enjoy German food and drink specialties, experience holiday music and entertainment, and purchase authentic German ornaments, nutcrackers, puppets, and other crafts.” I am excited to see how authentic it is going to be. Magdeburg was my last area on my mission. In fact, if you have never heard the story about some Nashville-Magdeburg sister city events that happened while I was there, you can read about it here.

Well, we have finally gotten settled in. This weekend Kara and I went through the pain and sorrow of moving from our apartment to our new house. Everything has been moved and the apartment cleaned and handed over to the landlord. It is nice to have more room. This morning, the cable internet and satellite was set up. Both the cable guy and the satellite guy arrived today on schedule (the end of the world must be near). In fact, Kara said that they were here at the same time. At least we can watch some TV while unpacking the myriad of boxes we moved.

I figured I’d take a moment to mention a recent accomplishment (I know it is sad to call this an accomplishment, but oh well). I bowled my first 300 in Wii Sports. Woo Hoo!

Anyway, on a more important note, we are finally closing on our house on Monday. Kara’s been boxing things up all week. After getting the house, we will have a week and a day to get moved out. I can’t wait to get this all over with.

Kara and I decided it has been too long since our last hiking outing (read about our past hiking adventures here, here, here, and here), so this Memorial Day we did a little hiking. We went out to Long Hunter again. This time we selected the Inland Trail loop, which as the park trail map says, "passes through a dense, rich, hardwood forrest and climbs to a wooded hilltop."

The map also mentions that this trail has small karst formations. I found the karst topography most interesting, whereas Kara was not particularly impressed. After completing the loop, we also wondered onto another trail by the shoreline that links several picnic areas together. All together, we walked about 1.33 miles, which is outlined in the map below. Of course, it wouldn't have been complete if I hadn't taken the camera along. Check out the pics in the album titled Long Hunter Inland Trail in the gallery.

I guess it is time for my monthly post (that’s pretty sad isn’t it?). Anyway, our weekly visits to the house are going well. I have posted the latest pictures. If you’ve been following Kara’s blog, you would have seen weekly updates here, here, here, and here. Everything seems to be coming along well. Go to the gallery and take a look at the pics.

I just came home for another trip for work. This week I was in Atlanta. The week before I was in Chicago. It was kind of interesting because the week before my trip to Chicago you may have heard about the mass flight cancellations by American Airlines due to inspections of wire bundles in their MD-80’s. My flight to Chicago was on an American MD-80 and therefore this interested me greatly. Luckily, I dodged the bullet and all of their aircraft were cleared the day before I had to travel. Since taking my current position last July I have traveled 14 times. The remaining trips that are currently planned are in May to Atlanta and in June to Dallas.

Well, I guess I will give everyone an update about our house. Recently, we decided to build a house in the same development as and similar to the one we were looking at previously. We will get the house we want and have it exactly how we want it. So far, everything is in order and good to go. Therefore, we are exited. They recently started work on the house. Kara and I went out there with her mother as she was in town. I snapped a few shots for everyone’s enjoyment. Accordingly, I have created an album in our gallery dedicated to the topic. This album will hold all future pictorial updates on the progress of the house. So, go have a look (the gallery has been performing slowly lately, so be patient if it is slow; I’m going to have to see what the problem is one of these days).

I used my birthday money to buy a Nintendo Wii, which came in on Wednesday. It took me a while to acquire as I first attempted to find one in a normal retail store. Suffice it to say that they are hard to find in stores. I was getting impatient, so I resorted to looking at eBay. The reason why they aren’t in stores is that people on eBay are selling pallets of these things at a nice markup, thus running the tight supply dry. I (ahem…actually Kara) found a pretty good deal though. We found one guy that offered it as a Buy It Now for not too bad a price. The Wii sells for $249.99 when you can find one in a store. I paid $305, which when you consider I didn’t have to pay tax it’s not a terrible deal. As you can see in the image, I have started to hone my bowling skills.

I haven’t blogged in a while, so I found a good excuse to blog about something when I read this comic the other day (it’s a comic called xkcd). I figure that since most of my blog readers aren’t geeks they wouldn’t have already read this comic. Unfortunately, I am afraid that also means I might be one of the only ones that fully appreciates the humor of it. Enjoy.

This evening I made a subtle change to the blog. I decreased the font slightly to better match the rest of the site. When I migrated the entire site to the new template, I made the blog text larger than the rest of the site so the blog would look as much like the previous blog layout. I have finally decided that it looks better with a smaller font. It is still larger than the rest of the site, but only slightly. Therefore, the difference is less noticeable. All I had to do was change two characters in my CSS template. CSS make things so much easier. For those of you who don’t have a clue what I am talking about, I have one centralized style sheet that each page on the site references. So, when I wanted to make a style change, I changed the central file and the deed was done (much better than changing each page).

Anyway, I’ll stop babbling on about that. The past week or so Kara was in Havelock, NC visiting her sister who recently had another child. She was excited to see another baby. I am, however, glad she is back. There is a lot to look forward to for the rest of the year. This weekend we will be busy singing the Messiah, which is always fun. It just doesn’t feel like the holidays if that isn’t going on. Most importantly, I am taking vacation from the 20^th through New Year’s. That is going to feel great to take that time off and not have to worry about anything. During that time we will take a trip up to Maryville to visit Kara’s mom and come back home for Christmas. I can’t wait.

I have finally finished posting the pictures from our trip to Toronto. I arranged the images in four albums:

• Toronto
  • This album includes general shots around Toronto. One interesting shot I got was of Eaton Centre, a huge mall in Toronto. I made a panorama of nine pictures of the inside of the mall. It looks like it was taken with a fish eye lens.
• CN Tower
  • The CN tower was really cool. I took an over 270 degree panorama of the view from the tower. It is made up of 12 pictures that took Autostitch over 3 minutes to stitch together.
• Niagara Falls
  • Niagara Falls is one of those places that everyone should see at some point in their life. It was neat. I was able to create a panorama of both the Horseshoe and American Falls.
• Casa Loma
  • Casa Loma is a small castle in Toronto built in 1914. I was able to get a pretty good shot of the front of the building. One of the funnier shots in the set is the panorama I took of the library. Since Kara was walking through the library while I was taking these shots, there are more than one of her in the resulting panorama. Notice the “ghostly Kara” to the right of her.