joshkelahan.com

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.

Well, not a lot has happened since my last post.  The latest in the string of annoyances is that when they switched my coworkers and I from salaried to hourly, they had to reset our benefits. Well the dental provider got the termination notice, but not the renew notice.  I found this out yesterday when my dentist called and said that deltadental was refusing to pay for my recent filling.  So I called and yelled at benefits, and they said they would call me back, but they haven’t yet.  I get really sick of having to fight for the things around here that I am supposed to get by default.

In other news, I have officially hired a Realtor (finally, yeah I know), and am really starting to look for a place.  I got pre-approved last week.  Its kind of exciting I guess.

My mom got some of these topsy turvy things, so for mother’s day I got her $23 worth of tomatoes and dirt.  The place she hung these things, I don’t really think they will grow, its right behind a tree, and I don’t believe there is much sun there.  In fact, the tree blocks from the North and West, and the house blocks from the South and East.  She may as well have hung them up inside, but we’ll see I guess.

So funny story.  A week ago I was invited to go to my brother’s girlfriend’s graduation lunch out in Chesterfield, MO.  At first it was supposed to be at Olive Garden (OG), but due to threatening weather, they moved the graduation to later in the day, so the lunch got changed to brunch. So my sister the social coordinator for our bunch called to let us know that the event had been moved to IHOP. Now don’t get me wrong, I like IHOP (a lot more than OG), but I thought it was a little strange that it would be moved from OG to IHOP.  But whatever. so I drove out to Chesterfield, and was sitting in my car at the IHOP.  I of course was really early, I always am.  But I started getting worried cause I didn’t see anyone I knew after a while.  So at 10 minutes before the thing was supposed to start, I went inside.

I still didn’t see anyone I knew, so I asked the host, “hey I’m here for a graduation party, lots of people.” He said he hadn’t sat any parties, and wanted of course to know how many.  So I called my brother and was all like,

“So, where are you guys at?

“Where are you at?”

“I’m waiting for you guys here at IHOP, if you know how many people there are going to be I can get a table…”

“Why the hell are you at IHOP?”

“Uh…cause I was told this thing was moved from the OG to the IHOP.”

“Who the hell told you that?”

“Amy.” (that would be my sister)

“Heh, no, its at the pancake house, not IHOP”

“Uh..whats the difference?”

“The place is called ‘the original pancake house, its just down the street.”

“Oh, okay, I’ll be there in a few.”

So on my way out to the car, I called my sister, who had been going crazy trying to get ahold of my parents cause they were supposed to pick her up, but she didn’t know if they knew they were supposed to pick her up. But of course my parents don’t actually carry their cell phones with them, instead they generally just leave them at home.  In any case, I let my sister know we were not going to IHOP, but instead the pancake house, and should she ever get picked up, this is where we would be.  The pancakes were pretty good, I would definitely recommend going there if you like pancakes or omelets.

Afterwords we all went over to my sister’s boyfriends house for a little while.  It was a nice place, but what do you expect for Chesterfield? After a while my parents and my brother left for the graduation ceremony, and my sister decided she wanted to go to the Butterfly House and she wanted me to come along.  So I did.  I had never been there before, so it was interesting, though honestly, not worth the $6.  You can check out some photo’s my sister took while we were there.

After that, my sister’s boyfriend, Neal, wanted to show me this bbq place called Annie Guns.  It was a neat place I guess, but honestly, it is just a store where they sell food. I don’t really care all that much.

Well, I think this post is long enough now.