GarrettBartley.com

With my employment anniversary coming up on 2/21 and 5 days still left that don’t roll over to the next year, I got an extra day head start on the weekend and have been going non-stop since.

It all started at 8:00 AM on Friday. I woke up, showered, and went straight to the bank to cash some checks. Then, I dropped off rent money and a contribution to the carpet, counter tops, and dishwasher installation fund. On my way home, I stopped by Lowes to pick up more Newport Gray (which is actually a very nice blue) paint and some more brushes. After getting my paint area prepped, I went to Panera to pick up lunch and met Amy at her house at 11:30. At 12:30, I left Amy’s house and went to Volvo for my 52,500-mile oil change. Once the hour and fifteen minute oil change was done, I went home and met Kristen to uninstall and re-install Adobe CS3 on her MacBook Pro. I made some coffee and we chatted a bit while waiting for it to do its thing. After Kristen left, I started painting primer on the shelves until Matt showed up with his truck. We moved a few hundred pounds of dead computer parts and other miscellaneous junk into his truck to be taken to the dump. Once Matt left, I cleaned up and headed to Amy’s to relax for a little bit. After tucking Amy in, I headed home and finished covering the shelves with primer. Friday finally came to a close around 2:30 AM. *whew!*

Saturday was a bit slower-paced. We drove up to Nashville several hours early to visit with ISO (Ian, Susan, and Olivia–ISO sounds cool, though.. ISO, OSI, IOS, all geek terms!) and Amy and I visited the Apple Store in Nashville. Let me be the first to tell ya, the Apple Store in Green Hills Mall is Nashville is less than exciting. I’m pretty sure that they were exceeding their max occupancy and it was stifling hot from all the bodies and computers generating heat. Amy wanted to get her iPod Nano checked out, but there were probably 20 people in line at the Genius Bar for support. The one cool thing the Apple Store has going are the roving employees that can check you out on the spot. They do, however, lack a way to print receipts right then and there. I purchased a plastic case for my iPhone and we got out of there in a hurry. After the Apple Store, we hit up Charbucks for mocha frappuccinos and went back to ISO’s. When we got back, Ian was hauling branches from a fallen tree. I chipped in to help and we got it moved from his back yard, over the fence, and then up the sidewalk for collection later this week. After lazing around for a little while, chatting with Susan, we left for the hockey game. It was pretty exciting, especially for a Coyotes game. Hordichuk got in a good fight and we won in overtime. Not bad! I’ll have to see if I can find some highlight footage of Hamhuis’s save on a goal. If he ever gets booted from the NHL, he has an alternate career option in MLB. After a sleepy drive back to Chattanooga, I passed out.

I woke up today (Sunday) and got right to the painting. I wanted to get as much done as I could today so that there’s less to do on Monday and Tuesday. I got one and a half coats of paint on. I didn’t get to paint the bottoms of the shelves as I’m just going to flip them upside down to make that easier. I did manage to get a full coat on everywhere else and applied a second coat to all the big surfaces that I could paint with the 3″ brush. After nearly 5 hours of painting, I put up laundry and bathed. I called and cancelled on Adam’s Superbowl party to relax a little with Amy and hit up the grocery store, K-Mart, and load some more boxes into my car. When I got home, I unpacked both boxes labeled “Food” into the cabinets. I somehow managed to make about 98% of the contents of the boxes fit into the cabinets. However, if you want anything out of those cabinets, you’ll be hard-pressed to find it. I think if you take one item out, it will destabilize the whole setup and come crashing down on top of you. I think we’ll have to work on re-organizing that later.

That’s about it up to this point. A few camera phone pictures are below . . .

Matt’s loaded truck

The Shelves

The Apple Store in Nashville

Crappy shot of pre-game video at the Sommet Center

Amyceratops in the car ride back to Chattanooga

Food!