June, 2009

If money weren’t a consideration, there is one car that might tempt me away from an Audi R8… the Porsche Carrera GT. This video shows why.

I’m not done with the garage project… I’m not even any further than I was last weekend. This past week and a half has been busy with wrapping up my summer MBA class and hosting colleagues from North Carolina, Texas, and Canada (in addition to work full time, etc.). But leave it to me to get frustrated with something and tackle it head on. I did that tonight with the HVAC system in our condo.

The problem is that the air conditioner runs for hours and hours. It has ever since we moved here over two years ago. The sun beats on the back of the condo all afternoon and the back inside walls are warm to the touch (having dark brown exterior walls that absorb all that heat doesn’t help). In conjunction with this, the return air ducts are on the floor of the main floor. Anyone with any amount of science background knows that heat rises so having the return ducts on the floor doesn’t do us any favors in the summer when trying to get rid of the heat. I actually measured the difference last night before bed and a thermostat at the floor close to the return duct measured a full 10 degrees cooler than the wall thermostat four feat up the wall. That explains why my feet are cold and the rest of me is warm when on the main floor. Its hard to sleep at 80 degrees and seeing that the floor was that much cooler pushed me over the edge.

I went to Lowes and picked up some ducting supplies. This is what I built: pretty cool if you ask me. You can see the two return ducts on the floor in the lower left and lower right.. and the thermostat on the wall. Within a matter of 10 minutes of setting this up, the wall thermostat dropped two degrees (it had taken 4 hours to drop it one degree prior to this).

Eventually I plan to run a return line up into the attic to connect to the peak of our vaulted ceiling and also another one to the ceiling in the bedroom. I’m also going to put one in downstairs near the floor to help keep the basement warm in the winter (another issue).. I’ll delete one of the existing main floor vents and use levers built into the vents to control settings for winter and summer. Man, I love efficiency!

I’m finishing up a great weekend as I type this. Friday night we held a cookout at our condo and had about 16 people show up for hamburgers and snacks. We had great weather for it and the only thing that could have made the evening better would have been a win in game 7 by the Wings. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be.

Saturday morning was the Brian Diemer 5k race in Cutlerville. Having went sub 20 on this course last year, I didn’t have any specific goal in mind. Instead, I decided to see if a friend of mine would be interested in a pacer on her way to going sub 25. She agreed and we came in at 24:51! Congrats again Jen! Phil also had a great run and came in a few minutes after us.

Saturday evening was the Local First Street party downtown. Featuring Founder’s beer and food from several local Grand Rapids eateries, the street party was hopping with the addition of live music on a stage set up at one end. Ran into a lot of people from work and had a great time chatting with some friends.

Sunday morning Kellie and I had breakfast with my parents at a new (for us) restaurant in East Town called Brandywine. The food was good and there’s something neat about trying out new places – and enjoying good company and conversation at the same time.

I spent the afternoon on condo projects and made some headway on the garage. I’ve got 8 batts in the ceiling, half the garage door covered, and some of the top edges of the garage done too.

I’m hoping to do the other half of the garage door myself but will need Kellie’s help to finish the ceiling… so it’ll have to be a time we both have available.

I also finished the electrical today with the installation of a switched outlet on the front of the garage. I bought a jigsaw from Lowes and love it! It made easy work of cutting the whole for the box. I hung a wreath and plugged it in for testing purposes tonight (I know – a wreath out in June is crazy!).

Lastly, I dug out the dirt and mulch covering the siding on the side of the garage and am planning to put in a walkway with the ground level below the siding. I have no idea why dirt was ever allowed to cover the siding but it’s now fixed. There’s a lot of damage done to the siding from this (as is evidenced in the picture) – but it shouldn’t get any worse.

Hope everyone had a great weekend!

I decided to gamble on using the new automatic upgrade feature of WordPress to go from 2.7 to version 2.8 released today. Looks like it took out part of the style of the blog. I’ll try to fix this weekend. For those of you reading in an RSS reader… ignore this post. :)

I’ve really been enjoying the home gym setup we installed in the laundry room of the condo a few months back. It’s so nice having it all at home and not having to drive to the gym and work around that in scheduling the day. It’s amazing how quickly we adapt to upgrades in life and how quickly we start looking for ways to improve upon those improvements. That’s exactly what I’ve been doing lately with the home gym. I can’t imagine having to go back to going to a gym but I’m already looking for ways to enjoy a home gym even more – I can’t just be happy with with I have.. I always look for the next better thing. Here’s what I’m looking at getting next:

This is the Half Cage Ensemble from Hoist Fitness (maker of the adjustable bench we currently own). This is (as far as I’m concerned) the holy grail of a compact home gym. In fact, this contraption has been awarded best home gym by several leading fitness magazines and groups for several years now. It has just about everything you need.

The only problem (other than cost) is space, or lack thereof. To fit this in the laundry room, I need to do some remodeling. We’re talking about moving a few walls and such. That’s how much of an itch I get to upgrade things… ridiculous, isn’t it? Yet those who know me well know that they can bet on a year from now seeing a picture on this blog of that machine in my basement. Count on it. :)

I started noticing a clinking noise yesterday while riding my RunAbout7 to work. It only lasted a while before disappearing but then reared again near home. Could it be time to grease the shaft drive already? Today I biked to class and back and heard the noise again. I definitely didn’t remember hearing that noise prior to yesterday so I did some googling on the subject.

Per Dynamic Bicycles, they anticipate having to grease the shaft drive about every 500-1000 miles. I have about 150 miles on the RunAbout7 so I’m not even close to that mark yet. Another sentence said every 3-4 months or 1-2 months if ridden hard. Hmm.. I’ve had it for 2 months now so I guess I could give it a shot.

I opened up the grease gun package I purchased with the bicycle and started assembling it (grease tube into gun.. check). It came with a strange looking attachment so I put that on where I thought it should go – no instructions so I just winged it. Evidently, the attachment allows you to use the gun on a zerk fitting, which is what the crank side of the drive shaft has for adding more grease. It slips onto and latches on the zerk fitting and amazingly, when the trigger is squeezed, grease doesn’t leak around the edges and instead feels to be forced into the sealed drive shaft. When I pulled the gun off, a trail of fresh grease was hanging out of the small hole so I can only imagine some was pushed into the shaft. I spun the pedals while applying.. not sure if that helped.

For the rear, there are actually two screws that need to be removed so that the access plate can slip off. Once done, the rear gear is exposed, allowing one to finger (or gun) grease directly onto the gear. Spinning the pedals again allows the grease to work into all the joints. I did this a few times, while trying between each attempt to pedal the bike (while hanging on the rack) to see if the clinking noise disappeared. No such luck. It never got any better. Feeling slightly discouraged, I decided to try riding the bike anyway. I put the dust cover back on the rear sprocket and took it for a spin.

The bike felt great! To my surprise, the clinking was gone and it rode smoothly again. It felt like there was less resistance in rolling and that’s always something I’ll take (since shaft drives have less efficiency than chains do anyway). Since it was dark out, I took advantage of the opportunity to test out the lights from Planet Bike too. The single LED headlight worked very well surprisingly! It projected a nice oval on the ground in front of me with good fade off to the edges. I feel like I could ride in the dark pretty comfortably on this bike.. if I had my Tifosi with clear glass for night visibility. The bugs outside were terrible!

Despite taking me 30 minutes to do all this tonight, next time will be quick. I could probably grease the bike and be finished in 2 or 3 minutes now that I know what I’m doing. That’s easy maintenance to do a couple times a year. It’ll be interesting to see how soon I need to do it again.