joshkelahan.com

This weekend was a busy one.  On Saturday, my dad and I cut out the old evergreens that were in front of my house.  I have never understood the purpose of putting evergreens right up by the base of the house.  Why do people want to hide their houses?  In this particular picture it looks a little dreary.  Thats mostly the tinting of my windshield I think.  In addition, we got most of the leaves and gumballs out of the front (stupid gumball tree), and pretty much leveled the front yard.  It still has some ruts in it down by the road from when the plumber had to dig up my front yard.  I’ll have to get a truck of dirt to finish the job.

I don’t really know what all I am going to put in my front yard now.  Later this spring my friend Jackie and I are going to go in together and get some blackberry bushes.  I don’t know if I want to put them between the sidewalk and the house, or in front of the sidewalk, in front of the door.  My idea is to partially obscure the front door, which I think would be helpful for when things get delivered and left outside.  In any case, I still need to get the stumps of the evergreens out.  I tried using a hatchet, but after 20 minutes, I realized it was pretty much a loosing battle.  I might try the chainsaw on them next weekend, but I don’t know if that is such a good idea, with all the rock that was around them.

Today, Sunday, I finally finished running  the power for my bedroom outlets.  Goodbye extension cord, hello working outlets.  It’s not so much that it’s hard work, its just time consuming.  Next on the power agenda is the front and back walls of the living room.  It shouldn’t be too hard (famous last words), with my giant flexible drill bit.  The only problem with the bit is that it really doesn’t work with the outlet boxes I have.  Not that I have a choice really.  3 of the 6 outlets sit directly above the trunk duct, the duct that supplies heat/air conditioning to the whole house.  Removing the old box is just easier, plus, because of the way there were installed, it means I get to use the reciprocating saw.  Fun!

Next weekend I need to start digging for the garden (I’m kind of excited about that), and cut up the old evergreen branches that are currently just stacked up in my back yard.  I ordered the veggie seeds a few weeks ago.  Some of them have come in, but the others have not.  I am getting a little antsy.

When I decided to actually buy a house, one of the things I had to have was a garage.  The reason is simple…I hate (HATE) having to un-bury my car when it snows.  Having to shovel the driveway is one thing…but shoveling your car sucks.  Anyway, when I bought my house, I made sure that it had a garage.

Right from the get go there were problems however.  When I moved in, there was no remote for the opener.  I didn’t really care much at the time. First off it was nice and warm out, so I didn’t mind parking outside. Secondly, they sell replacement remotes just about everywhere.  Three supposedly universal remotes that I can’t take back and $100 later, and I still don’t have a remote for the garage.  You know, pulling up to the house, getting out of my car to open the garage door, and then getting back in, and driving in can be a real pain sometimes.

Sometime in there my friends, Jackie and Chris helped me to rewire the office in my house so I could plug in my computer and internets and stuff.  We put everything in the office onto one circuit.  What I didn’t know at the time, is that one of the outlets was feeding the power for the entire garage.  I don’t know who came up with that idea, but its pretty dumb…I mean think about it. If you have your wiring running all over the place and a breaker flips, how to you know which one it is…I mean really.  Anyway, once the office wiring was done, I found out that I didn’t have any power in my garage. Suck.

So for the last few months, I have been doing just what I said above…drive up to the house, get out, open door, get in, drive in.  Its been a pain.  So a few weeks ago, my friends Jeff and Lisa came over, and helped me to restore power to my garage. WOOT! And now its so awesome, in that there is light out there, but still the problem remains with the whole opener remote thing.

In an effort to move past this, I went out last week, and bought a new garage door opener.  I had a coupon from Lowes for free install that was about to expire anyway.  Right from the get go, there were issues.  After I picked out the opener I wanted, it took me 45 minutes to find an associate at Lowes to get an appointment setup for the install.  I wish I could say that was the end of this ordeal…but its not.  So I finally got the thing and took it home.  Naturally, the installer couldn’t do it in the morning one day, so I had to settle for between 12-2 one day during the week.  Now I don’t live that far from work…but its still not all that fun to drive all the way home from work, especially knowing that I will have to drive back later.

I pulled into my driveway about 30 seconds before the installer did.  What great timing.  I opened up the door for him, and he started looking around.  I stood there and waited.  I was really only interested in standing there until he got properly started, then I was gonna go inside and eat my lunch.  He measured the door, and distances from the opener to the rafters.  He opened and closed the door a few times.  He even borrowed my ladder, to take a look at something.  When he climbed down, this is what he said: “This sucks, cause I’m not gonna get paid, but I can’t install this opener here. First of all your door isn’t balanced. A balanced door takes the same effort to open it as it does to close it, and that’s definitely not the case here.  Secondly, who ever installed this door did it wrong. they bent the rail supports here, and attached the springs.  The high tension springs, which by the way are missing their safety cable, are further bending the rail supports, which is causing the rail not only to bend, but to torque as well.  All of this, is putting a lot of stress on the door, and an incredible amount of stress on the opener motor.  I would imagine that this would over time result in the opener dropping the door.  It sucks, I know, but realistically, you need to get a whole new garage door, rails, springs, etc.  I can’t install this today, because it would be a liability. “  And then he left. I had originally been worried that he would be late, or that he would take a long time, and that I would have had trouble getting back to work for the rest of the day.  He was there 8 minutes. And to confirm his hypothesis, I have seen the old opener drop the door twice.  I have always been right there though, and I have been able to catch it.

And so I am right back to where I started.  I have a garage, that I can park in…but I have to get out of my car first to do that.  If anyone out there knows a place where I can get a nice cheap door and get it installed with all the trimmings let me know.  This is really gonna suck on cold winter days.

This is my new buddy. He is a one year old Siamese (I think) with tabby markings.  He is a very sweet cat, and very social.  He talked to me from his kitty carrier the whole way home.  I was expecting him to be a little afraid of me, but the moment I let him out he was very affectionate.  On his first night at my house he was very timid.  He didn’t explore more that 10 feet or so a way from me at any time.  I walked him around room to room, and let him explore while I was standing there.  When I sat down on my bed, he hopped up, and declared it his own, as you can see.  He has been becoming a little braver bit by bit.  While he still cries if I go into the bathroom and shut the door, he can now be a whole room away without crying (as long as the doors are open).

I for one, am not good at coming up with names for animals.  My friends Jackie and Chris, who helped me adopt him, were calling him Zeus, but I think he is a little to timid for that.  And I don’t the god Zeus would like people rubbing his belly.  Alan recommended Cringer, as in the cat that he-man had in the cartoon.  I don’t think anyone would get it…hell I didn’t even get it.  My friend Robert, and his wife Alyssa recommended Phoenix.  My brother recommended mister mistiffelees, jazzpurr, plinko, tabasco, taboo, simba, mufasa, zebra and Layla killer.  All good names, but I think I’m going to go with my mom’s suggestion of Charlie.

MLK Bridge, St. Louis, MO. Courtesy Wikipedia Commons

I work in St. Louis.  Not downtown, not in the central west end, but somewhere in the middle.  Some people call it mid-town, I call it hell.  Anyway, I hate sitting in traffic, so for me, in the morning my best option is to go through downtown.  As far as I can tell, nothing in STL is open before 9am anyway, so all the downtown roads are clear.  Now there are really only two methods to get into downtown. One is the Eads bridge, the other the MLK.

For the past 4ish years, I’ve been taking the MLK into St. Louis on my way to work.  Sometimes it would be trafficy (technical term) but it was still a lot shorter commute than taking the Poplar.  Last year there was a high profile traffic accident on the MLK where an accident on one side crossed over the center line, and and caused a huge accident on the other side. People died.  It was sad.  Because it was such high profile, a change was going to get made, and it didn’t really matter what they wanted to do, it was gonna happen.  The bridge was to be made safer.

What they decided on, was putting a median on the bridge, no longer would vehicles be able to cross over and cause catastrophic accidents.  But it comes at a cost.  Those concrete medians are so wide, and the bridge itself so narrow, that putting them in meant that one lane would be lost.  So which to lose, one eastbound lane, or one westbound lane?  If we look at this from a safety standpoint, it doesn’t matter which lane we lose.  If we look at it from a traffic perspective, then almost immediately we see a problem.  Because the MLK dumps cars into downtown, if eastbound is backed up, then downtown gets gridlocked.  And if downtown is gridlocked, then no one goes anywhere.  Illinois on the other hand has a lot more space for traffic to sit.  And sit we will.

Everyday almost 30k vehicles cross the MLK (at least in the past). I would wager that 2/3 of those vehicles are semi trucks.  In the past it was 4 lanes merging into two lanes and going over the bridge.  Now those 4 lanes have to merge into one lane.  This sucks.  This means that no matter what, the traffic is going to be bad coming over the MLK.

Instead of rushing this through, they should have stepped back, and done this properly.  In Illinois, the highways were put together to funnel traffic onto the MLK.  The Eads bridge, which also goes downtown, is nearly impossible to get to, because there is only one exit lane, and there is a stop sign at the end of it.  So no matter what you have to stop.  That means that the only other option is the poplar.  Now the poplar has 4 or 5 lanes, which would be plenty if they all just went over the river and kept going, but they don’t.  The right hand lanes have very dangerous exits, where you have to slow down to 10mph.  This slows down everyone on the bridge. GAH!!!!

Ok, so now lets actually step back and look at this.  The infrastructure is already in place to funnel westbound cars to the MLK.  So it makes sense to send cars over the MLK.  The Eads bridge is almost impossible to get to going west.  So what if we change it so that during rush hour, the MLK is only westbound, and the Eads is only eastbound.  That would give us 3 lanes going west (4 if we remove the new median), and 4 going east.

Discuss.

May 2009… that’s the last time I posted anything. I guess I’ve been a little busy.  Wow.  Its been an interesting summer.  I could start at the beginning and type my way through what I did this summer, but it seems like a waste. No, instead lets just go with the big stuff.  As many of you know (all 3 of you), for the past year or so I had been looking at houses in the St. Louis area. Mostly in the Illinois side.  On July 31st, I closed on my first home.  It was really exciting, and I am glad I did it.

My house

I have been very busy since then though. Lets see, I have been systematically upgrading the electric in the house.  One weekend, my friends Jeff and Lisa came over and helped me with some of the outlets in the living room.  And on another weekend, Jackie and Chris came over and helped me rewire the office.  Minus a few stumbling blocks (like the fact that my garage currently has no power) its been a very educational and interesting experience. I am excited to see what else I will learn.

It hasn’t been all fun though either; a week-and-a-half after I moved in the supply line from the city water main broke, flooding my basement and front yard.  There’s nothing really like seeing your front yard dug up.

So much for a nice front yard

As it turned out, I didn’t even have copper running from the main to the house, but rather galvanized steel.  The house is 50ish years old, so its not surprising that it had rusted.  I am just lucky that it happened when it was warm out.  I can’t imagine how much it would have cost if the ground had been frozen solid.  They ran new plastic pipe into the basement.  I guess cause is so far down, it will be insulated by the ground, and won’t freeze.

More recently, I got a new job.  I am still at SLU, but now I work over in the Law school.  So far, its been a lot better than my previous job.  I am hoping this job allows me to be more of the solutions guy that I am, and not so much of a mundane support person.

One day in June on my way home from work, I decided to go pickup a birthday card for a friend of mine. He is one of those people that gets freaked out that he is getting older.  I thought it would be a nice gesture. Anyway, on my way to the store, the sky turned blackish green and a tornado touched down.  I was a little freaked out, seeing debris flying all over the place.  Traffic was so bad because of the storm, I decided to turn around and just go home.  A birthday card is not worth getting tornadoed.  So I turned down a fairly main street, and as I did so, I noted that the road construction sign was shaking pretty badly.  I thought to myself, ‘wow, thats dangerous.’  How dangerous I didn’t really know yet.  I got a mile or two down the road before traffic came to a complete stop.  Now in this area, you would think that in a storm you would be able to get good whether coverage, but you would be wrong.  All the stations I could pick up were playing their normal afternoon music.  So I assumed it was just a heavy storm, no biggy.  As I sat there in my car at a dead stop, I noticed that behind me, it was getting darker and darker out.  It got so bad that I couldn’t see more that 2 cars behind me.  So I sat there, a little freaked out, watching weird things fly around until … POP! Something hit the back of my car.  I looked in the mirror, but it wasn’t the guy behind me.  So I started looking around, and through the moonroof, I could see coming up over my car an orange road construction sign.  Now there’s no way to tell if it was the same sign I had seen earlier, but I like to think it was.  It left a nice dent in the trunk of my car, and messed up the bumper too.  I am really lucky though.  If it had been a few inches higher, or if my car had been sitting a few feet back, it might have gone right through my back window.

Ouch

So today I am getting internet and satellite installed in the house (finally).  I can live without tv for a while (thank god for hulu), but living without internet has been very trying.  As someone who has been online pretty much continuously for such a long time, finding yourself with out it, is difficult.  The day of the plumbing problem I felt as if I were in a 3rd world country. No internet, no water.

Oh well.  I guess that’s all I have for now. Hopefully my next post won’t take me over 4 months to put together.  Oh and in case you didn’t get my email (all 3 of you). BBQ at my place this weekend. Call me.