House Update: Office and Theater Room

The office

Next comes two of my favorite rooms.  The office is where I spend most of my time, as it has the computer and my cards in it, and has been decorated in a sufficiently geeky manner.  (It's really the only room in the house I have complete control over.) :)  I like Star Wars, by the way.  The office is actually the biggest bedroom in the the house, but it made the most sense as the office - it was the only one that had a cable connection in it, and we didn't see ourselves ever using it as a bedroom.  There's a bit of unused space presently.

Theater room

As soon as we saw the family room downstairs, we knew what we wanted to do with it.  Thus, the theater room was born.  In January, we purchased a 60 inch Sharp LED TV, and hung in on the wall.  We bought a Blu-Ray player a little bit later (though I only have one Blu-Ray presently: the first Hobbit movie).  We also have our Wii plugged in here (playing MarioKart on this thing is pretty great fun).  We have since then bought a love seat, and moved part of our upstairs sectional couch downstairs, as the full sectional couch did not fit into the theater room.  Megan brought her large VHS movie collection, and we put up shelves and bought a DVD shelf.  We then put up several movie posters of some of our favorite movies.  So yeah, it's a pretty great room, if I do say so myself. :)

Theater room

The office

House Update: Closet and Library

Finished closet

The next project for the house was a closet remodel.  Our bedroom is next to the "library", and we've decided that it will never need to actually be used as a bedroom.  My wife came up with the idea of basically moving the closet from that bedroom, so that it is part of our bedroom instead.  We asked Jim from Vail Builders, the same guy who did our kitchen, what the cost of the closet project would be.  He quoted us at about $3300, a bit more than we were hoping for.  Thus, I used the experience gained when helping my brother Erik finish his basement, and took on the project myself.  Since materials totaled around $300, we saved about $3000 doing it ourselves.

Finished closet

I started this project slightly after being laid off in April, so I had lots of time on my hands to complete it.  It ended up being finished over a period of about 3 weeks.  It involved a few steps - creating the opening in the bedroom wall and installing the door, and creating a frame for the library wall, and finishing that wall.  After lots of cutting, spackling, and painting, the project was complete.  Certainly things are not as clean cut, straight, and pretty as if we had paid someone to do it, and imperfections abound, but we saved a lot of money on the project.  Side note: the closet door was a double in the library, and became a single in the bedroom, due to us not wanting to move around an electrical outlet.  It certainly could have been done, and probably very easily, but alas, it worked out.

Library - after

Library - before

The new closet became my closet, and all my clothes are now there, and my bureau was moved down to the spare bedroom.  The last part of the closet project was the setup of the inside - I bought and cut down several large shelves, and cut down the pole for hanging clothes.  It can certainly handle a lot more clothes than I own, but it works pretty well for me.  We then painted the bedroom grey, with a blue accent wall.  The library was then fitted with several large bookshelves.

It was a fun project, and gives us a little more room in the bedroom, plus more wall space in the library for bookshelves.

House Update: Kitchen

After - appliance garage and pull out drawer for bins

So, the first big thing we did on the house was have some work done on the kitchen in April.  We had a contractor (Vail Builders) push back the wall in the kitchen (reducing the size of the adjacent bedroom, the library), and add in additional kitchen cabinets on each side.  One side is the pantry - lots of wide, deep shelves.  The other size includes a pull out drawer for the trash and recycling bins, and an "appliance garage", along with some extra shelving.  It was an expensive project that took about four weeks to complete, but it certainly adds a bit of space to the kitchen, and that was one of Megan's complaints about the house.  It also added room for us to open our freezer door completely.  We then painted the kitchen red.

Before

After

After 

Pantry

Been A While

The day after my last blog post, I was laid off from my programmer position at Helgeson Enterprises in White Bear Lake, Minnesota.  I had been there for 11 months.  It had been, overall, a decent job, though I wasn't sure if I was going to want to stay there for all that long anyway, though it would have been nice to have another job lined up before leaving.

Thus begun my hunt for a new job.  I have gone nearly three months without finding something, but I'm sure something will work out.  All in God's timing, though I often wish he'd hurry himself up a little bit. :) Anyway, I've had several interviews, including at TCF Bank, Goodwill/Easter Seals, Dunwoody College, and LPS.  I felt pretty good about each of those, but nothing came from it.  TCF did have me back for a second interview, though, so that was good, even if they called me the day after to tell me they were passing.

I've gone nearly three weeks without an interview now, and I admit that I've started to get a little discouraged.  Something will certainly work out, and God is in control, and I usually don't just sit around thinking about it, but I've started to lose a bit of sleep over it, waking up in the middle of the night, wide awake, unable to go back to sleep.  It's silly, really.

At least I get unemployment - only about half of my normal salary, but it's still something.  Also, having all this time off has allowed me to do a bit of work on the house.  I will be (hopefully) posting several posts in the near future, showing some of the work I've done, and talking about the work we still have to do.

Having the time off has also granted me some time to work on writing.  I am currently working on a more detailed outline for The Anarchist Chronicles trilogy, and when I am pleased with that, I will begin writing book one.  Hopefully creating a detailed three-book outline will help the overall story.

I assume I will find another job at some point, though I sometimes wonder if this is God's way of telling me that I need to change things.  Maybe I need to focus more on writing.  I'm very tempted to submit my novel Queen of Men to literary agents very soon, to see if anything comes from that.  But we will see.  Other times, I wonder if this is a good time to go back to school and get my Masters degree, but that would possibly/probably require taking out additional school loans, which I'd prefer not to do.  Ah, who knows what the future holds.

In Case You Didn't Already Know Enough

So, I've been lazy and/or uninteresting lately, thus resulting in a definite lack of blog posts, though I have added a few entries to my other online writing endeavor, Don't Feed the Hypocrite.  Over the past several weeks, I've been slowly assembling the next in my series of facts.  Here are twenty-five more, after the original sets of fifty and twenty-five.  If you don't care enough to read on, I'll understand.  No hard feelings.

1. Geographically, my favorite state is Alaska.  Basically, I love mountains.
2. I am a grammar and spelling Nazi.  Pretty much whenever I send out an email or text message, I read over it at least once to ensure it to be error-free.  It drives me crazy when I find out later that I missed an error.
3. I am not materialistic, but I do have attachments to certain physical items, like cars and places I've lived.  I still miss my first car, even though I like my current car infinitely more.  If I had the space to store them, and a wife that would allow it, I just might hunt down each of my previous cars and buy them back.
4. It would take me forever to grow a beard, if it would ever happen.  It grows slow enough that I only shave every week or two.
5. Other than chocolate and peanut butter, my two favorite types of candy are cinnamon candy (like the "Fierce Cinnamon" Hot Tomales) and sour candy (like sour gummy worms).
6. I sneeze quite loud.  My wife refers to it as "screaming while I sneeze."
7. In elementary school, I once accidentally stabbed a fellow student in the hand with a pencil.
8. I'm a decent tipper.
9. I love chocolate and peanut butter together.  Growing up, chocolate was the more important of the two, but it has recently seemed quite possible to me that I like peanut butter more than chocolate.
10. I once cheated on a test in school by writing answers on a pencil.  I've also cheated on tests by typing hints and answers into my graphing calculator.
11. I was once threatened with expulsion from high school for installing freeware imaging software on school computers (a program I was using for one of my classes).
12. I once gave a demonstrative "speech" in school where I stood in front of the class, folded a paper airplane, and then sat down, without saying a single word.  I hated speech class.  (I've always thought that I'd rather write a 20 page paper than give a 5 minute speech.)
13. Despite my terrible shyness and social anxiety, I am surprisingly adept at smalltalk with strangers.
14. I can't whistle.
15. I love spicy food.  I'd like to try a ghost pepper at some point.
16. When I was young (around 6), I peed my pants a few times during baseball games, at least once while playing catcher, leaving a puddle on or around home plate.
17. I love games.  I've pretty much never played a game or sport I didn't like.  Even if I am not good at something, and get routinely defeated at it, I always thoroughly enjoy it.  While I am very competitive and like to win, it's the experience that ultimately matters, not really the outcome.
18. When I'm driving alone, I sing loudly with the radio, with my head and arms bouncing merrily to the music.  I assume I get all sorts of odd looks from people.
19. I'm a fiddler.  Not, you know, with a musical fiddle, but I'm often fiddling with something in my hands, like a pen or pencil or whatever happens to be lying around, especially when sitting at my desk at work.  This includes a small soccer ball I sometimes roll around my desk.  I also often sit with a pen in my mouth.
20. When I was a teenager, I had a dream that my father was chasing me with a pistol, trying to kill me.  After I got married, I had a dream that I killed my wife's dog with a large fork.
21. I've been to two proms and had two girlfriends (though calling one of them a girlfriend is kind of a stretch), and never once was it because I asked the girl out.
22. I love roller coasters, but I'm not a fan of the smaller rides that just spin you around.  I once threw up after riding one.  Right at the exit gate.
23. I love to laugh, and laugh often, sometimes at things other people don't find funny, and I then have no explanation for why I found it funny.
24. I'm not really a private person.  I don't care what other people know.  This includes things like money - my salary, what I paid for my house or car, and so on.  Most people don't like to share such things, but to me, they're just numbers.
25. I'm a computer geek who owns a cell phone that was outdated when I got it 3 years ago.  It has no data plan and no touch screen.  There goes my geek cred.

The Anarchist Chronicles

As I mentioned in a previous blog entry, I have started work on my next book, revolving mainly around a certain group of invisible people mentioned in my previous work, The Second Shadow.  The new book was going to be a prequel to that book.  I am now taking another step back, and am re-imagining the whole series, where the new book would be the first book, and The Second Shadow would likely be the third, and the series as a while would be either four or five books.  I am also considering renaming the series as a whole, from The Lords of Sargoff to The Anarchist Chronicles (which is the name of a book referred to in the series - more on that later).

I am going to work on a detailed outline of the entire series, to ensure maximum consistency, and to work in more themes that are at work throughout the series.  It'll be an interesting task.  Once I finish the outline, then I will be writing book one, and likely won't finish the series yet (as it makes more sense to work on other books that could be submitted to publishers, instead of using the time to write four or five sequels to a book that isn't published yet).  Some of the work is done already, as when I had envisioned The Lords of Sargoff as a trilogy, I had gone ahead and created outlines for book two and three, and of course, The Second Shadow is already written (though it would be completely re-written).

The Anarchist Chronicles is a book written by Lord Hamrin, an evil wizard in the series, full of his thoughts and experiences.  There is currently an excerpt from the book at the start of each chapter in The Second Shadow.  Part of my outlining process is basically to write The Anarchist Chronicles in its entirety, which will both help with those chapter excerpts (as I may continue to do the same thing for the entire series), and would help with consistency and the development of Hamrin's character.

So yeah, this is my current plan.  Not sure how long the outlining process will take, as I want it to be quite detailed.  So we'll see.  But I'm excited to get moving on it.