Heyhey,
Back from Germany. Nothing terribly exciting to report. It was grey and rainy the entire time I was there, and never more than about 60F. The bulk of my time was spent driving people around in a minivan. We got two days off to go out and see things. Drank some beer and ate some pretzels. Then back to driving my van.
Gonna be back to work here soon, should be fun. I'm ready to get back in the swing of things. TERA has kicked off, so already been playing the hell out of that. Wifey got us tickets to go see Avengers on opening night in 3d IMAX, so stoked about that.
Hopefully my jet lag will cut out soon.
<3
-T
Back from Germany. Nothing terribly exciting to report. It was grey and rainy the entire time I was there, and never more than about 60F. The bulk of my time was spent driving people around in a minivan. We got two days off to go out and see things. Drank some beer and ate some pretzels. Then back to driving my van.
Gonna be back to work here soon, should be fun. I'm ready to get back in the swing of things. TERA has kicked off, so already been playing the hell out of that. Wifey got us tickets to go see Avengers on opening night in 3d IMAX, so stoked about that.
Hopefully my jet lag will cut out soon.
<3
-T
It has come to my attention that I've been... less than active here recently. Truth be told I'm just less than active socially all around these days. Severe case of "Damn kids, get off my lawn!" setting in. But for those of you who still care, I'm doing well. Working a lot, playin' video games in my free time, pissing Sid off on a regular basis... you know, the norm.
My military career is almost to an end. After doing active duty, I transferred over to the reserves for a stint. Now that too is ending this year. Still have to do one last hurrah in the form of a three week trip to Germany, but after that I can count my days left in single digits.
One of these days I swear I'll do more than just skim my groups and friends blogs every few days. But it's just so damn convenient having all the latest new/gossip dictated in a constant stream from the wifey. It's like my own personal "Best Of SG" highlight reel.
Y'all have permission to prod me via Sid if I'm not updating this monthly or so.
<3
-T
My military career is almost to an end. After doing active duty, I transferred over to the reserves for a stint. Now that too is ending this year. Still have to do one last hurrah in the form of a three week trip to Germany, but after that I can count my days left in single digits.
One of these days I swear I'll do more than just skim my groups and friends blogs every few days. But it's just so damn convenient having all the latest new/gossip dictated in a constant stream from the wifey. It's like my own personal "Best Of SG" highlight reel.
Y'all have permission to prod me via Sid if I'm not updating this monthly or so.
<3
-T
Another year, another pink balloon.
I'm surprisingly less bummed by turning 30 than I thought. But then again, I've been telling people that I'm 30 for months now. I generally start around the new year, so it softens the blow by the time March comes around. Still, I think I'm now officially too old to be dating 18 year old girls. Plus there's that whole being married thing...
Too poor to go to the strip club, so it's bar trivia and bowling. Y'all know the deal.
<3
-T
I'm surprisingly less bummed by turning 30 than I thought. But then again, I've been telling people that I'm 30 for months now. I generally start around the new year, so it softens the blow by the time March comes around. Still, I think I'm now officially too old to be dating 18 year old girls. Plus there's that whole being married thing...
Too poor to go to the strip club, so it's bar trivia and bowling. Y'all know the deal.
<3
-T
I'd like to preface this story by saying that A) Only in Colorado, B) You can't make this shit up, and C) If this story amuses you as much as it amused me, congrats on being an epic nerd.
On my drive in to work today I got stuck behind two cars. In the left lane is a big white Cadillac SUV. The SUV has a McCain/Palin sticker in the back window. The SUV also has a license plate with the last three characters of WMA. In the center lane next to it is this beat up, crusty blue Toyota. The Toyota has one of those blue "Coexist" stickers with all the religious symbols making up the letters, and the last three on the plate are OGG.
If you're waiting for the punch line... that was it. Move along.
<3
-T
On my drive in to work today I got stuck behind two cars. In the left lane is a big white Cadillac SUV. The SUV has a McCain/Palin sticker in the back window. The SUV also has a license plate with the last three characters of WMA. In the center lane next to it is this beat up, crusty blue Toyota. The Toyota has one of those blue "Coexist" stickers with all the religious symbols making up the letters, and the last three on the plate are OGG.
If you're waiting for the punch line... that was it. Move along.
<3
-T
There's nothing new or exciting going on in my life, but I'm tired of seeing zombie Trevor. Halloween is over, Thanksgiving is over, might as well put up the Christmas decorations.
Ho ho meh.
<3
-T
(p.s. I know the picture is a few years old now, but it's still a favorite of mine. That, and I'm too lazy to take a new one.)
Ho ho meh.
<3
-T
(p.s. I know the picture is a few years old now, but it's still a favorite of mine. That, and I'm too lazy to take a new one.)
My project for today, complete with illustrations:
So, one of the running issues with out koi pond has been filtration. We've got a pump that runs up to a waterfall, but no real filter box. What we've been doing so far is sticking a foam prefilter block on the intake of the pump. The problem there is that the block lives underwater so it's hard to take off when it gets all clogged up with pond goo. It's also difficult to put back on, which led to the Pickles incident. To top it all off, it just didn't work all that well.
After doing some research, I decided what I needed was a canister filter. A little more research led me to find that canister filters are freakin' expensive. So, time to jerry rig my own.
First thing I did was pull out one of my old plastic canteens and use my dremel to drill a bunch of holes in it. Then I attached the canteen securely to the pump in place of the prefilter. Now it no longer does any filtration, it just passes dirty water from the pond up to the waterfall and back down to the pond. But it will no longer clog, and nothing can get stuck on it.
Next step was to grab an old broken pump I had and fix it. Twenty minutes taking it apart and some superglue took care of that.
Now for the construction of the canister. With a budget of exactly zero dollars, I scoured the house looking for a suitable "canister" to use, and happened upon one of those big 100 blank CD spindle thingers. As luck would have it, the spindle itself was hollow, so it killed two birds with one piece of junk. One quick cut with the dremel lopped off about an inch of the spindle to move to the bottom of the container. A bit of superglue and Magic Putty (thanks Billy Mays!) attached that securely, which then got attached to the now fixed pump. Inside the container went some gravel and chopped up spare filter. The end result being this:
I'll allow a few moments for laughter at my crude drawing.
...
Okay, so the water enters the pump and gets pushed down to the bottom of the canister. It circulates through the gravel, slowing the speed of the water and dropping the heaviest of any pond goo. The water continues to push up through the filter media, losing the rest of the pond goo along the way. When it reaches the top, the now cleaned water escapes from the holes I drilled around the top edge.
Now, in theory, by adding bacteria packs to the canister, the pond goo will break down inside the can. This will result in nitrogen and minerals. The nitrogen will encourage algae growth inside the can, which will be eaten by the bacteria, and so on and so on. End result being a self cleaning, self sustaining pond filtration system.
This is what I do for fun.
<3
-T
So, one of the running issues with out koi pond has been filtration. We've got a pump that runs up to a waterfall, but no real filter box. What we've been doing so far is sticking a foam prefilter block on the intake of the pump. The problem there is that the block lives underwater so it's hard to take off when it gets all clogged up with pond goo. It's also difficult to put back on, which led to the Pickles incident. To top it all off, it just didn't work all that well.
After doing some research, I decided what I needed was a canister filter. A little more research led me to find that canister filters are freakin' expensive. So, time to jerry rig my own.
First thing I did was pull out one of my old plastic canteens and use my dremel to drill a bunch of holes in it. Then I attached the canteen securely to the pump in place of the prefilter. Now it no longer does any filtration, it just passes dirty water from the pond up to the waterfall and back down to the pond. But it will no longer clog, and nothing can get stuck on it.
Next step was to grab an old broken pump I had and fix it. Twenty minutes taking it apart and some superglue took care of that.
Now for the construction of the canister. With a budget of exactly zero dollars, I scoured the house looking for a suitable "canister" to use, and happened upon one of those big 100 blank CD spindle thingers. As luck would have it, the spindle itself was hollow, so it killed two birds with one piece of junk. One quick cut with the dremel lopped off about an inch of the spindle to move to the bottom of the container. A bit of superglue and Magic Putty (thanks Billy Mays!) attached that securely, which then got attached to the now fixed pump. Inside the container went some gravel and chopped up spare filter. The end result being this:
I'll allow a few moments for laughter at my crude drawing.
...
Okay, so the water enters the pump and gets pushed down to the bottom of the canister. It circulates through the gravel, slowing the speed of the water and dropping the heaviest of any pond goo. The water continues to push up through the filter media, losing the rest of the pond goo along the way. When it reaches the top, the now cleaned water escapes from the holes I drilled around the top edge.
Now, in theory, by adding bacteria packs to the canister, the pond goo will break down inside the can. This will result in nitrogen and minerals. The nitrogen will encourage algae growth inside the can, which will be eaten by the bacteria, and so on and so on. End result being a self cleaning, self sustaining pond filtration system.
This is what I do for fun.
<3
-T
Getting ready to head up to Ft. Collins for a couple of weeks to do my reserve annual training. Yippee. In prep, I decided it'd be fun to shave my head all the way down. The result was this:
People immediately let me know that they hated it and/or that I looked like Moby. So for giggles at work I've been intermittently wearing this terrible wig that someone left in the back room:
It was rather amusing when one of my coworkers told a customer that I was wearing a wig, so she walked over to me mid-appointment and snatched it off my head. The lady I was helping looked shocked for a moment before I assured her it was all in good fun and that I didn't have cancer or anything.
In other news, I went to get my new ID card done the other day. While I was waiting for it to print, the lady making the card asked me (with no real preamble) if I believed that people can fall out of love. A somewhat odd question to ask a random stranger in a customer service environment. But yeah, I think you can.
<3
-T
People immediately let me know that they hated it and/or that I looked like Moby. So for giggles at work I've been intermittently wearing this terrible wig that someone left in the back room:
It was rather amusing when one of my coworkers told a customer that I was wearing a wig, so she walked over to me mid-appointment and snatched it off my head. The lady I was helping looked shocked for a moment before I assured her it was all in good fun and that I didn't have cancer or anything.
In other news, I went to get my new ID card done the other day. While I was waiting for it to print, the lady making the card asked me (with no real preamble) if I believed that people can fall out of love. A somewhat odd question to ask a random stranger in a customer service environment. But yeah, I think you can.
<3
-T
