Another neighbor becomes the victim of cold weather

Well it looks like another neighbor's house has become the victim of the cold weather. Can you say "thermal expansion" folks? I guess many property owners have failed to understand the basic concepts of thermal dynamics when it comes to that most common substance WATER. Whenver water freezes it EXPANDS, hmmmm...curious. When this happens to a pipe that's on the outside of your house, you have all the elements to a disaster, a broken water pipe! I went outside this morning to shovel off a spot in the backyard for our dogs to "do their business" when I noticed a quiet hissing sound coming from our neighbor's house. I peeked over the fence and to my surprise saw that their outside sprinkler pipe had burst and was spewing out water. This must have been going on for quite some time because the water was frozen all around it, despite the fact that water continued to run all over the ice. Also, noteworthy was the huge pile of trash in front of their house on the street. Trash day was Tuesday and the trash people, it seems, refused to collect it. This probably had something to do with the fact that it mainly consisted of household furniture: I counted 2-3 TVs, a computer monitor, desks, mattresses, and other household furniture. Being the "good neighbor" that I am, I decided to go around the back of their house and attempt to shut off the water. I tried the first valve, nothing, the water continued to pour out. Then the second one: success! With the water off I decided to call the City water dept. to have them come and shut off the water to the house. I followed up this phone call with a call to the HOA to let them know of the huge mess out in the street. Not only does this mess make the neighborhood look bad, but obviously no one wanted the stuff given the fact that the monitors and T.V.s now had over several inches of SNOW on top of them!

P.S. oh yeah, when I saw "another neighbor", I'm referring to a prior incident that happened to the neighbor on the other side of us a couple of years ago. When the temperature drop outside combined with a blown out furnace pilot light, the inside house temperature dropped below freezing. This was enough to burst the pipe, JUST BEFORE the main water shutoff valve. The water dept. had to be called out in this case too in order to shut off the house's water and stop all the water that was leaking out into the living room, utility closet, and spewing out into the street from under their garage.

Learning to make my own DVD

Last night I played around with making my own DVD and it was kind of fun. I have been recording one of Nikki's favorite soap opera's "Days of our lives" with our new TV card. Trouble is the recorder doesn't seem to know when to shut off :-) So, then the files are so large there's no room for anything else.

I figured out how to save them to DVD and have made a few DVDs for Nikki so she can watch her shows when she's ready.

My Brother, Nathan, learned how to do all this years ago, but I never had the right computer gadgets to do it until now. It's kind of fun. I'm planning on making some more DVDs from family videos of the past.

-- Adam

Learning Twitter

Well, I heard on the radio today about "twitter.com" and I've read about it in passing. I decided to see what all the fuss was about. I googled it and read up an article on Wikipedia. Interesting. So, I signed up for an account and may try it out.

Facebook status on my blog! Cool, who knew :-)

Well, I just figured out how to post my friend's status on my blog as an RSS feed. Pretty cool. Who knew you could do that? (Well, I'm sure many of you did, but I thought it was pretty cool).