Those who have been reading along are familiar with the fact that we have been rehabilitating the house after the flooding from Hurricane Katrina. We have now officially entered the next phase, as our lovely contractor, who shall remain nameless, is now out of the picture. After a rather terse negotiation meeting on Friday to discuss the valuation of the work we didn’t trust his workers to perform adequately, a figure was agreed upon, paid and all pertinent contractual documentation issued. The main sticking point of late was the quality (or lack thereof) of the sheetrock finishing work performed. The workers managed to get it to the barely acceptable stage last week so we figured that this was as good as it was going to get. If any of you out there are living in the New Orleans area and are in need of a contractor, e-mail me and I’ll give you his name so you can avoid him like the plague.
The remainder of the work is clean up and reorganization. The garage is full of materials, boxes and stuff from Melanie’s father’s house, which we have been cleaning up (recurring theme) to sell. The deck on the lawnmower had more holes than Swiss cheese, so I had to take it off and bring it to New Orleans Machine and Fabrication for repair. Al and Johnny are very busy so it’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve been able to cut the grass, and it’s looking pretty bushy.
Meghan is back at school at Ole Miss and is in her final year (YAY!!!). She took an apartment this year, so at least we have someplace to stay when we go up to visit her this year. We are probably going to head up this weekend to catch the Ole Miss – Georgia game. It’s homecoming, and I hope the Bulldogs don’t wipe the field with the Reb’s. Ole Miss’ team is struggling a bit at present ;>.
Jourdan is in 6th grade now at Lake Castle in Slidell. He was all atwitter on Friday when I picked him up as he has been named to the Academic Olympics team for Lake Castle. His topic is social studies and he is extremely proud of himself and so are we. Nicely done big guy!
To all those out there that are Beta testing XMLPropWorks, you need to download the latest version as I found a bug that had been there from the beginning. It was nothing serious, but I had not been able to find it. It had to do with date fields and auto-updating upon entry in another box. It manifested itself by putting the date in the weight field the first time the tool was run on a part/assy with the sample set-up file. Use the same URL that I sent you in the mail!
That’s all I have for now. I will eventually migrate all the other content from Dubea.org to this blog tool, so stay tuned. I also have to update the photographs as it’s been a while! The website is going to be Topsy turvy for a bit while I get everything reconfigured. I discovered Thingamoblog, which is a really neat tool for blogging. I’m in the process of converting the old site over, and I suspect things will look a bit disjoint until I get done. But henceforth this is the page you will see first!
Later,
Chris