I was posed with a dilemma upon moving into our new house. Our media room doesn't have a light fixture in it. Oh, it had a light switch on the wall, but after trying the four outlets located on each wall, we discovered that none of these outlets were actually controlled by the light switch. Good ol' new mexican electricians. Okay. I thought I had solved the problem by putting a torchiere in the corner next to the couch so we could turn the light on while sitting down. The light itself is connected to a little box that transforms the light fixture into a "touch light" of sorts just by touching any metal on the light. Good enough for this lazy american.

But then I realized that my and the Mother Unit's eyes were beginning to suffer from eye strain. The problem: there still wasn't enough light in the room to watch tv easily.  Also, the spot that the torchiere was in prevented us from having a place to put our drinks (read: late-nite margaritas) while watching the ol' boob tube. Also, the Mother Unit and I have been watching a LOT of HGTV. So I present to you my solution. Its called (drum roll please....)

THE HOUSEDAD LIGHTBOX!:

Mother Unit was not pleased with my around the corner, ninja-camera abilities. What the hell kind of ninja am I anyway? I didn't even get her face. Oh well.

My old job, Form Plus Function, had a sale this weekend. 40% off. I was like "Hell yeah! Now I can finally afford the exspensive ass stuff this place sells!" I jumped in the old Pontiac and picked up a nice end table. It originally had a cubby hole sort of thing on the type and a drawer for storage on the bottom. That is until I broke out the drill, screws, and my findings at Home Depot. There is a short video (that hopefully should load quickly) at the end of this post showing this piece of "art" in action. Anyway, here is the list of items that were needed to build this bad boy:

a. (2) 12" fluorescent light strips that can be linked together.

b. (1) piece of plastic. Remember the plastic that covered the long, rectangular florescent lights in your elementary school? You know, the kind that scratched your hands when you hit it while standing on your desk? Well, they still sell the light covers for those at Home Depot in 24"x48" sheets. Awesome.

c. Drill, wood drill bit, screws, and some cheap door hardware.

d. (1.5) baby-and-mom-free hours

So here goes: You take the drill and aforementioned bit and drill a hole through the back of a $162.00 East Indian hardwood end-table from Jaipur. Go ahead. Its fun mutilating expensive furniture. The hole has to be big enough for the cord that will connect the two light strips. After that is done, take a light strip and mount it to the backside about 3 inches from the top of the piece. Make sure to not use a ruler or a level. Its more fun making holes with the drill only to find that you were off by an 1/8 of an inch. Four times. On one side. Do the same on the inside of the door-less cubby hole. Connect the two light strips together and plug them into an available outlet to make sure they work. Don't forget to spill Guinness on your fingers and rub the end of the plug with your hand. Electricity will be kind enough to make sure you never forget.

Now that you have the light strips mounted, measure the opening of the cubby hole. In my case, it was 15 inches square. This is were the plastic light cover comes in. Because its 24"x48", you have some room to play if you cut the plastic wrong or get mad and break it in half. I made my piece 16"x16" so that I would have some room to mount the hardware onto the wood and plastic sheet. After another 20 minutes of cursing you should be finished. Have a look at the video to see what I mean:(It will take about a minute to load, but its worth it. Check it out.)

I was clicking away on the old internets earlier this morning and came across this picture:

This is supposed to be the "new" KITT for the newly-recycled Knight Rider series due out in a couple of months. What the hell? A Ford? A MUSTANG? Now most of you know that the original was an early `80's Trans-AM, which was a pretty futuristic looking car in a world full of Yugos, Crown Victorias, and Cadillacs. Christ, I think a baby angel just died. I'm not sure how much better a concept I could have come up with, but I certainly know I could have done better than this as a replacement for the original KITT. I will reserve any and all bad thoughts concerning the actual show itself until I see the 1st episode. Until then, here is a picture of what the real KITT should look like. Enjoy and have a great Thursday.

Hey readers! Wow, I haven't written a post in a few weeks and it feels a little funny. Hell, I forgot my login info to my blog its been so long. Anyway, I have been extremely busy since the 1st of the year. Some of you may know that I moonlight as an amateur web designer in the wee hours of the morning. My programs of choice have been Dreamweaver, Flash, Kool Moves, and FileZilla as my main ftp client to upload content. I just started doing this sort of work last summer and have learned quite a bit in that amount of time. If any of you are interested, check out this sweet program I found for use with google analytics. It is a stand alone program currently, in beta, that can help any budding blogger/ web designer like myself. Here is a link. There are many other versions of this type of software, but I find this one to be the most user friendly.

I have been working on a couple of sites that are now live and you all should check them out! Give me some feedback on them if you feel like, because any sort of criticism would be good. Here they are:

www.adornhairstudio.com (The lady with the curly hair is the mother unit. This site launched roughly a week ago and I still have some work to do on it. -insert shameless plug here- If any of you need a good hairstylist, check out these ladies. They are top notch in the santa fe, new mexico area)

www.rosemaryromeroforcouncil.com (This nice lady approached me for a site and I was happy to help. She is currently running for city council in my town and she is super nice.)

So that's what I have been doing for the past few weeks besides watching my little one make her first set of two word sentences. (I have been feeding my little `un yogurt for breakfast lately and this particular brand -Brown Cow- has a picture of a smiling cow on the front. Have you ever heard a 19 month old say "Dada, Moo!" and point to the fridge in reference to yogurt? I couldn't stop laughing once I figured out what that meant.) So, I want to thank everyone for being loyal and coming back to a non-updated blog. Hopefully I can post more frequently and keep you all somewhat entertained with my daily goings on. Laterz!  

Its like I woke up from a work-induced, late-night funk and came back to reality. Six days and no post. I have all of these things I want to put from fingertips to keyboard, but its all this muddled-jumble of diapers and computer screens. But earlier today, I had salvation. Salvation in the form of high-definition and cookies-n-cream ice cream. I have been reading for the past week or so on the interwebs that Toshiba is planning on dropping the price of their HD-DVD players to $99. That's right. NINETY-NINE DOLLARS.

I've also been reading that Walmarts around the country will have indefinite supplies of these items, as well as Best Buy. So, 11 days after the un-advertised "sale" went on, I decided to trek out, daughter in tow, to the local outlets to test my luck. (BTW, I had also been reading that people are close to throwing punches at Walmart because of the scarcity of these discontinued items. Another good reason to wait. I don't need my daughter witnessing her dad freak out and kick an old man in the stomach because he tried to snatch the last hd-dvd player. But I digress.) Walmart is sold-out. So is Best-Buy. And Kmart. And Target. I had one last hope, a local place called Baillos (pronounced "Buy-yos"), a local electronics/ appliances store here in New Mexico. Thankfully, all of these places are within 2 square miles of each other, so it only took an hour to go to all these places.

I enter Baillos and see from across the store, on a table, in a box, a Toshiba HD-A2 HD-DVD player. Holy Christ. I look around to make sure no one else is looking at it. I needed to be sure that no geriatrics were eyeing me from the shadows. With Adriana in arms, I casually sprint to the box and open it up. The box was only closed half-way. There is a player inside. With a manual. And cords. And a remote. The salesman sees me looking at it and says "I was boxing that up for a guy that was supposed to come back a while ago, but hasn't shown up."

My response:  "I'll buy it right now, with cash."

His response: "You got it. $80 plus tax. This was a display model, so its kinda dusty, but we have so many players and it was barely even turned on."

I almost shit myself then and there. Luckily, I keep wipes in the car for these electronics-induced bowel movements. 80 DOLLARS. He sits me down at his desk and begins to ring me up.

"You have a beautiful daughter." he says.

"Thanks, we're gonna go play outside after this as a reward for being so good for the past hour and a half while I drove around town." I respond.

"I hear ya man. I am always trying to get too many things done on my days off. Are you a veteran?" the salesmen inquires.

I, for the first time in a long time, am speechless. I am dumbfounded. Why do I have to be "off work" to be out with my daughter in the middle of the day? I'm a stay-at-home-dad! This IS my job man! And don't get me started on the whole "army of one" issue. Damn!

"I'm a stay-at-home dad. I hang out with this one in the day and work at night or early in the morning. I'm no veteran." I respond.

"Oh....well...that's cool. I wish I could stay at home all day and hang out with my kids." Now I know he probably meant it like he wished he could, but it came out like he thought it wasn't hard. SAHD's, and mom's for that matter, have a very difficult job. Not only are we caring for small, accident prone little people, we make dinner, do laundry, go to the park, read, take naps (wait...leave out that last part ;o) Then a lot of us work into the wee hours of the morning.

I kept my mouth closed for the remainder of the sale, another first. I came back home and had a wonderful time pushing my daughter around our living room in an empty box. Then we played with rocks outside. So for any of you who think that SAHD's don't have a real job, that's okay. You're just jealous anyway. 

Okay. I was browsing the internets a few minutes ago and HAD to post this. I came across this GPS jacket for your kid. That's right. For your children. If you lose your child or your child decides to go AWOL and didn't leave a note behind, this jacket has a GPS locater in it. The jacket will send its location to a "base station" of sorts and then that station will alert your cell phone of your missing child's location. U.K. based-company Bladerunner is the maker of this device ironically. I would have figured that the US would have pioneered this sort of tech, but those silly Brits surprised me again. Does anyone else think that this is just the beginning of these chips going in all of our clothing and the government watching your every move, or am I just being paranoid? And what the hell ever happened to just "watching" you kids anyway? I don't think I could rely on a piece of machinery to tell me where the hell my kid is. That's just being a lazy parent.