brianirish.com

I suppose the best point to begin writing at would be Thursday, when we (me, Nadia, Connie [my mother-in-law], and Karen [my cousin-in-law]) set out driving down to Massachusetts.

Thursday
The drive went smoothly, and we arrived around 4:30pm after leaving at approximately 7:25am. We had dinner, enjoyed some relaxation outside with a small fire, and picked up my cousin-in-law Wendy from the airport arriving from South Carolina. She would stay with us for the duration we were there as well. Got home, got to sleep.

Friday
The girls got up early and set off for the Wrentham Shopping Outlets, and ended up spending the day there. They had a great time (of course), and they all bought lots of things. Nadia even got me a couple of new shirts! Meanwhile, my Dad and I started the day around 8:30am as the rental guys came to setup our big tent in the backyard. It was nice to have them do it for us, so we would only have to setup the chairs and tables. We got that setup and done, jumped in the car and drove to Cindy’s Drive-In for lunch. Holy crap did I eat way too much there, but boy was it worth it. We made a few errands and drove back home, spending the rest of the afternoon in quiet relaxation. That night, we all went out to a nice dinner at Tavern on the Hill. I had a local beer called Otter Creek Stovepipe, it was a very nice dark beer. The steak was very good as well.

Saturday
The big day. The morning was spent shopping at the Holyoke Mall with my brother Chad and my sister-in-law Sarah, Nadia and Karen (more shopping?). We came home, had some lunch, and relaxed a bit until people began arriving for the reception. The reception was flawless, beautiful weather and fantastic food thanks to a great caterer my parents hired. There was a delicious cake as well, and you can see a photo of me enjoying it quite nicely. Once again, as was the case May 3rd the first time around, I was absolutely stunned by everyone’s generosity. All I wanted was for people to show up and enjoy the weather and the company, I would have been entirely satisfied. What everyone did for us is beyond words of thanks, and beyond general kindness. The party wound down around 10:00pm or so, as people lazily left the comfort of the fire to get to the comfort of their own home. What a day, indeed.

Sunday
The worst day of the trip, only because leaving your family behind in another country really isn’t very pleasant, but I’m confident that we’ll see them again quite soon, and definitely before the end of the year. We left around 9:20am, and got in around 5:00pm or so. We dropped off a few things at the house, and checked out the new lights that were installed by an electrician while we were gone (they looked great, pictures to come). Then we all joined up with my father-in-law to go out to dinner. I think we finally got home around 8:30pm, and we slept incredibly well that night.

Yesterday and today was spent cleaning up things at the house, and finishing the paint in the master bedroom. I also installed the pot lights in the family room, and the light bulbs in the new chandelier in the living room.

I also want to give a congratulations to my former co-worker and friend Laura, who recently bought her first home with her husband! You can check out her blog here: Laura’s Arthouse.

Alright, that’s all for today. More to come soon.

Today I’ll be picking up a few new lights for our house, one being a chandelier, and also a couple of kitchen lights. We’ll install those sometime next week. I’m going to be rolling on our first coat of paint for our master bedroom today as well, as Nadia and her father did all of the trim work over the weekend. If I remember to bring my camera, I’ll take some photos when I’m done.

Nadia, Karen, Mrs. Lui and I are all hopping in a car tomorrow and heading over to my old stomping grounds bright and early tomorrow morning to celebrate our wedding with my family (sort of a second wedding reception, if you will). I absolutely cannot wait to see everyone again, it’s been too long! I have a lot of relatives coming from all over, even one from South Carolina to see me and to meet my beautiful wife for the first time. It’s going to be so much fun, but the fun only lasts for a few days as we have to pack up again and leave on Sunday morning. C’est la vie.

So there probably won’t be any posts for the remainder of the week unless I find some time while I’m back at home in Massachusetts. Cheers.

Here are just a few pictures of the painting that we did over the weekend.

So on Friday we got our keys to the new house, and we began to clean up the place to prep for painting. Yesterday, we managed to paint the entire family and living room, and I’ve got to say it looks really great. Pictures will come soon as I will bring my camera with us today, and for those of you living in the US, you’ll be happy to see the color choices.

There are a couple of things we need to do before moving in entirely, like install a shower head in the second bathroom upstairs, and fix the hot water in the sink in the same bathroom. We also are going to change the water pressure for the house. Once that’s done, all we have left to do is cleaning and moving in the furniture.

Okay, off to paint the master bedroom!

Today we get the keys to our new house! We’ll be picking them up sometime this afternoon and we may even get to start the painting today as well.

Exciting times!

Nadia and I are going out to dinner tonight to celebrate our friend Pam’s birthday (Happy Birthday Pam!) with her and her husband Geoff. We’re going to The Keg, a personal favorite steakhouse of mine. It should be a pretty good time!

I’ve taken on learning a new programming language: Perl. It’s not in any way a new language, as it’s been around for years, but it’s still widely used, and I figure it’s a great language to list on my resume. It’s primarily used as an OOP (object oriented programming) language, but through the use of CGI it can be used in web applications. Not only that, but Nadia’s Uncle (Hak) gave me a couple of books on it that he’s not using anymore, so I’ve started to read them.

That’s all for now, folks.

The house will be ours this Friday. Going to Home Depot to get the buckets of paint today (and rollers), and this weekend we’ll be at the new house cleaning up and rubbing down the walls of dust for painting. Hopefully we’ll get a bunch of the painting done too, but there’s a lot to get done. We’re painting the family room, the living room, the hallways (upstairs and downstairs), and the master bedroom. Colors are a warm red for the living room (the first room you enter from the front door), shale blue for the family room, a light tan or beige for the hallways (staying with a neutral color there), and “sage green” for the master bedroom.

The painting will be about 80% of what we plan to do, the other 20% being new lights for the kitchen and bringing in all the furniture. I’ll most likely be going back and forth next week while Nadia is at work so I can get the work done that we need to before we head down to South Hadley! Oh boy I can’t wait… sucks that we’ll only be staying in Massachusetts for about 4 days (including driving there and back, so only 3 days really), but it’ll be time well spent.

Oh, here’s some huge news for me but not so much for anyone else really: Star Trek Online is in bigtime development now after being picked up by Cryptic Studios from Perpetual Entertainment. It’s release date isn’t known, but is estimated it could be as soon as Q4 of 2009… yeah I know that’s like a year from now, but whatever… haha. They have a gameplay trailer up too, and it’s footage taken directly from the game as they have it right now. No rendered scenes, no scripted playing. Pure demo footage. Gotta love it.

Oh yeah, one more thing. A while ago I posted some information on a collaborative idea called Cquestrate, which was about adding lime to seawater to reduce CO2 emissions in the atmosphere. Well one of the people who works for them actually visited this very website and posted a comment! Check it out here: http://brianirish.com/2008/07/21/cquestrate-an-interesting-environmental-idea/. Totally cool that he took the time to do that, in my opinion. Should be even more of a reason to check out their website! http://www.cquestrate.com/

Okay that’s all for me. Cheers.

Holmes on Homes

I never knew HGTV was such a worthwhile channel until I became a homeowner. By far, my favorite show (as Nadia is well aware of) is Holmes on Homes. In the United States, the show is on TLC I believe… Anyway, there are full episodes online from Seasons 5, 6 and 7 if you can’t catch any on the television. You can check them out here. Mike Holmes (the host) is invited by families to their houses after contractors have come in and f*cked everything up and left, often causing huge financial problems for the family. Holmes brings in his crew, usually ends up tearing everything apart (this is the most entertaining part, watching his reaction as he uncovers really shoddy construction), and rebuilds everything. His motto “Make It Right” is what he goes by as he delivers the final product, often going above and beyond what the homeowner was expecting.

Anyway, I could go on and on about this show, but you probably have better things to do. Yesterday morning Nadia and I went to brunch at Karen’s place with all of the cousins, as it was to serve as a “goodbye” to their house. Her parents have sold it and purchased a new house, so as they are very excited for the new house, they are getting ready to say goodbye to 25 years of memories.

A little bit of website work done today, going to begin working on taking down some shelving in our apartment to get ready for the move. Wow – only 4 more days until we officially own a house. Can you believe it?

Just got back this morning from speaking to our lawyer handling our new property purchase, everything is looking great. A couple of minor adjustments are needed as our mortgage has changed since he last heard about it, but other than that everything is in place and signed so that on August 15th I can pick up the new keys to the house! Very exciting stuff.

Yesterday was our close friends Aimee and Jason’s wedding (8/8/2008), and we had a blast! A very nice wedding ceremony in Aimee’s backyard, and a great reception afterwards at a restaurant. It took us from 7:30am until 1:00am the next morning! We both had a great time and are really happy for both Aimee and Jason.

Tonight we’ll be going out to dinner at our favorite Japanese place with some friends of ours. Note that although I have a favorite Japanese restaurant, it does not mean I have greatly expanded my taste of foods. They have a spicy chicken and a chicken katsu there that are really good (obviously, since it’s chicken), and that cater to my Americanized tongue. Still trying to get used to raw fish… (shutter)…

Well that’s about it for now, I suppose. Not much going on in my new politics blog, mainly because I haven’t felt the need to rant or rave about anything. I may be turning it from a neutral blog to a (candidate I support) blog, but I’ve yet to make my final decision.

And now, Robin Hood Daffy:

After a day or two of thinking that I want to start posting my thoughts on the 2008 Presidential Election, I realized that it probably would not be a good idea to do it on this website, and that a new, seperate website would have to be made so that these two worlds can co-exist peacefully.

Thus I have created: brianirish.com/POLITICS

I’m going to try to stay as neutral as possible while posting to that blog, as to not try to influence one candidate over another. I’ll be referencing facts from factcheck.org, a non-partisan website.

Feel free to voice your own opinion in the comments of the new blog, but please try to keep it quasi-civilized!