Prepare thyself for merriment.

Teresa Stencils

Teresa is painting the guild symbol on a tabard to be worn at the Renn Fair. The name of the guild is Veritas, and the guild symbol is a gold flame.

Off to Rennfest!

Teresa and I are (soon to be) on our way to the Maryland Renaissance Festival! We're going to stay with some friends who live near Washington D.C. and enjoy a weekend of eating Turkey Legs and seeing people dressed up in fancy medieval gear and stuff. I'm pretty excited. Our hosts may even be putting together some costumes for us, since they do this more often and have extra stuff on hand. That sounds silly at first, but where we're going, it won't be silly. At least I hope so.

I've always enjoyed fantasy. From books to video games to the fascination with swords and knights. But I've never actually made it to a Renaissance Fair. There was one called King Richard's Fair that was held near Boston, but we never went because we didn't have anyone to go with, and it was more my kind of thing than Teresa's. Well now we have someone to go with, friends of both of ours, and even Teresa is a little excited about it which makes me happier about it all too.

The trip is about 7 or 8 hours up, but I'm taking the day off from work tomorrow so we can spend two whole days there. We'll spend tonight in Greensboro and then drive the rest of the way in the morning. It's been a long time since we made a trip just for fun and not just to see family, or to move. Some of our best memories are of traveling places during college, and seeing new things. We've been cooped up too long. Time to get out.

Speaking of getting out, the weather turned all Autumn like this week. After the rain cleared up on Sunday it's been nothing but chill breezes and lazy sunny days. I love it. It's my favorite season. And my hope is that soon it will frost, and then the grass will stop growing. And then I can have two to three hours of my life back on weekends. Wait, I mean, darn, I won't get to be outside with that awesome lawn mower of mine I talked about. Shucks.

Dan Luckman Theme Song (Remix)

Several, several, months ago, I took a commission from my sister to write a song for my dad. I make up a lot of music as I go along while playing the keyboard a lot, but I never really write anything down, or remember it when I come back to the keyboard later. It's always just for fun. I took this opportunity and wrote something fun and catchy with some things about my dad that my sister and I have experienced and love him for.

At the time I had just gotten a Powerbook with Garageband. I didn't really know how to use it and ended up just recording the song while playing over the lap top microphone. The quality was bad, and I wasn't so great and singing and playing together but the idea came across and my parents and my sister loved it. At least that's what they told me.

Well today after church, I was inspired to play my piano again and decided to try and understand Garageband a little better. Dad's song loaded when I opened the program, and I started thinking about ways I could improve on it. So here's what I did. I added drums and a bass line, then recorded piano and vocals on separate tracks so I could do one at a time. I also used an external mic as opposed to the on on the laptop. This all culminates in a remix of the Dan Luckman song which I am absolutely thrilled with. It was a lot of fun.

This one's for you dad. Love you.



Lyrics:
Hey look who's that over there?
Watching NASCAR in his La-z-boy chair
Drinking Henry Weinhard's Root Beer
Don't worry you have nothing to fear
From Dan Luckman

Works at Fred Meyer down the street
Selling produce to all that he meets
His sidekick Dax at home at his feet
Faithful forever, she really likes meat
From Dan Luckman

He's your best friend
He'll be with you
Until the end
He's Dan Luckman

Once in a while he'll come to you room
Say he's a terrodactyl and then he'll screech real loud
He'll make you proud

Then he'll play his air guitar
It's not that good but you'll still laugh
Cause it's so bad
And he's your dad

Yes, he's crazy, it's true
He'd wear Hawain shirts every day if he could
Goes out on his boat, to catch fish
Brings them home to make a tasty dish

He's Dan Luckman
He's your best friend
He'll be with you
Until the end

He's Dan Luckman
He's your best friend
He'll stay with you
Until the end

He's Dan Luckman

Our Smoky Mountains

This is a view of our new place from the street. That's the front door and the living room window. On the left are the master bedroom windows. There are two drive ways, one on either side, and that's our garage back there on the right, but it's mostly for storage and lawn equipment, not for a car. The staircase you see goes out to the street, so we don't really use it much, but it looks nice. One of these weekends I'm going to work on removing weeds and brush from that front yard. We're responsible for yard maintenance, so I figure I should take it seriously. Teresa just bought me a rake and shovel too! Isn't she thoughtful? Oh, and by the way, this picture was taken just after mowing with my fancy electric mower. If you look real close at the front door, you can see Hannah wondering what I'm doing.

Here is the back of the house. That door leads to the kitchen and the windows are to the 2nd and 3rd bedrooms. The larger bedroom will be a guest room and study. The third bedroom is slowly becoming a music room where I have my keyboard and stereo and various other items that don't fit anywhere else in the house. Again, I had just mowed the lawn, so it looks real nice. It had gone three weeks prior to this. It did take me two hours though. Even with a nice lawn mower, the lawn is just big. Speaking of the lawn.


Here is the back yard. It's fenced on the sides and at the back, which you see here, but not the front to either side of the house yet. I'm working on fixing that so we can let Hannah out without a leash. Supervised, but free to run. I'm pretty sure if we just left her on her own, she'd find a way out, but it would be nice to be able to play with her out there. The yard is sloped. High at the left, and low at the right, so it's really easy to mow going one direction, and lot harder going the other.


And this last picture is the view from the South side of the house taken from our front porch. If you're facing our front door, as in the first picture, and turn 90 degrees to your right, you'll see the mountains. It's really pretty. And in the mornings and some rainy days it's either completely obscured by fog and clouds, or you can see them lingering around the mountain tops. We're not sure, but we think that large gash in the mountain top might be preparation for a road leading to the new Tiger Woods golf course that they're building somewhere around there.

So that's our new place from the outside. Eventually when we get a couch and set things up how we want it and it's all clean, I'll take some inside pictures for you all to see. Speaking of a couch, we did some more shopping in Asheville and didn't really find anything. We did however revisit a store in Black Mountain and Teresa kept coming back to a couch she had tried out several weeks ago. It may end up being the one. I'll keep you posted since I know you're all riveted to the Luckman Couch Search 2009 adventure.

My New Electric Mower

So with our new house comes a huge yard. Well, maybe not huge, but big. Bigger than any yard I've had I think. Certainly since leaving Alaska.

Teresa thought it would be great to get a non gas powered mower. Better for the environment, less maintenance, slightly higher initial cost, but you save in other areas. Cool. Well, since we're trying to save money, we usually hit up Craigslist first to find stuff on the cheap, and she found something for a very good price. 25$! And it wasn't gas powered either. Neither was it electric.

Yes, we got a "Reel" mower. Get it? Reel?

Anyway, I mowed our big, no, huge yard our first weekend in the new house. I took 3 hours. That's a long time. But on top of that, the yard looked awful. Anything that was longer than 4 inches didn't get cut because it just laid down as the mower ran over it. This wasn't working out.

So a couple of days ago we found a fairly good deal on a barely used electric lawn mower. It had a 100 foot outdoor extension cord that came with it too, so I called the guy and went out to take a look at it.

The lawn mower was in Sylva, which is 30 minutes West of Asheville. I work in Marion, which is 40 minutes East of Asheville. So I drove for over an hour to get to this place. By the time I had arrived, I was determined to purchase it simply becuase I'd already come that far out. The seller was really nice, showed me how to use it, and I talked him down on the price a little bit. Enough to make me not feel too bad about the cost of getting there. So I loaded up the mower and headed home. There she is. A 12 amp, electric lawn mower. Comes with a bag and mulch plug and everything. Last night I took it out and did just the front yard, the most visible areas of the yard, and it worked really great. It took a bit of getting used to mowing with an extension cord following me, but after a while, it felt pretty natural and I never was in danger of running over it. It cut the gross really short, which I like, and didn't leave a lot of large grass clippings laying around. I guess it cut them up really fine.

It still takes me a long time to get the yard mowed though. I guess it's just that big. I'll tackle the back yard this weekend. I just hope 100 feet is enough to get to the back corners! Still need to get one more piece of yard equipement though. Our front yard has some areas I can't reach with the mower, so I'm looking for a weed eater to get into corners and the edgings of a fence. Criagslist, here we come.

Now, does anyone want to purchase a reel mower? Works great for small yards, and short grass.

Settling In

The house is wonderful, or at least I think so. It has it's quirks. The basement is kind of shabby, and the overall plumbing needs some kinks fixed, but it all works. The yard is a lot bigger than I was expecting. And by that, I mean the mowing size of it. It looked nice when we bought it, but I didn't realize how much yard was there until I walked every square foot of it with a scissor blade lawn mower. Yeah, no power, no motor, just a rotating blade and me pushing it. It was cheap, and we thought it would work, but it just doesn't cut the grass very well. Perusing craigslist for better one this week.

We still don't have a couch, so that's high on our priority list as the living room seems very empty without it, and we still haven't figured out where to put everything until we can figure out how big the couch will be. Our bedroom, the dining room, the kitchen and the bathroom are all in place. We have a washer and dryer down stairs that work well. All that's left are the two other bedrooms (which contain lots of boxes at the moment) and the aforementioned living room.

This weekend will be spent couch shopping, as well as some other household things. Hopefully I can find a cheap lawnmower to mow the yard with so I don't have to use the manual one. I've also got to start looking into fencing the yard at the front so we can let Hannah out without being on a leash, and still be reasonably certain that she's contained. I don't really think she would run away, but she would chase after any kind of animal or something that caught her fancy. I don't think we will ever train that out of her. Might be part of her beagle/hound instinct.

Speaking of Hannah, I believe we've successfully trained her to sleep on her mat on the floor in the bedroom now instead of on the bed. That's a pretty big step. She'll still get on the bed during the day if we don't watch her, but she's now sleeping all night long on her mat. Woohoo! When we get a couch, it will also be a no dog zone. Hopefully she picks that up as quickly as she learned not to sleep on the bed at night.