We also had

a visitor on Super Bowl Sunday.This is Brownie. Not sure where he got that name….lol He is a great little dog.

The language barrier

Trench

Joseph and Donna sent the worker they use over to look at the trench I needed dug. He speaks no english, and we speak verly little spanish, and we do it poorly at that. My spanish consists of a few sentances: “No habla espanol”, “No habla engles”, and “como se llama” not too sure on the spelling of that one…lol. Basically they translate into I don’t speak spanish, I don’t speak english, and whats your name?

Luckily, we had Joseph and Donna to translate for us, so the description of the work we wanted went well. Essentially

Language Barrier

it is a 110′ trench that will be 20″ deep. Then we came to the price negotiation. The worker said he wanted $100. I shook my head and said “no”, but before I could say why, he offered $70. I said “no” again and counter offered with $125! I’m not good at negotiations! Seriously though, $100 was just not enough. That trench is a lot of work! At $125 I still feel a little guilty about it!

One thing we were concerned about was that we didn’t know exactly where the main high power electric lines run in my yard. I know where I think the are, but I’m not sure. There are also water lines near there also, but those, if damaged, I can easily fix. So Joseph and Donna took the worker to get some line to mark where I wanted the trench. While they were gone, me and my Dad decided the risk of the worker hitting an underground power line was more than we could live with, so we called Miss Dig to come out and mark them. This will delay the trench digging for one week.

When they returned with the line I explained what was going on and that there would be a delay for the trench. Donna asked if I could come up with some odd jobs for the worker to keep him busy today after he marked the trench line. I said
“sure” even though I really hadn’t planned on him doing anything else. With that they left to go to work, leaving the worker at my house…….The the fun began……How do you communicate to someone when you don’t speak the same language? I turned out to be more difficult than I realized. I had two additional tasks for him to do. 1. Drag some cut down trees from the back yard up to the burn barrel area. 2. Rake the courtyard. In addition, I had to run to the parts store to get brake pads for my car. How to communicate this to the worker? My dad came up with the idea of using a free online translator on the web. So we took those three sentences and translated them to spanish, and then back to english, just to make sure they said what we wanted. We printed it out and then, hoping the worker could read, took the translation out to him. I thought it was a good idea…..Indeed the worker seemed to be able to read, I think. He took the paper, looked at it, read some of it aloud, looked at me and said “manana?” Which means “tomorrow?” I started to say “You can do it today or tomorrow”, but quickly realized there was no point. The worker smiled at me, whipped out his cell phone, and called some one that could translate for us. So after passing the phone back and forth for a few mins, I thought we had it figured out. Then the worker said he was ready to go home….I think. He was either going to feed Donna and Josephs dogs, or he was going to eat them…I couldn’t quite tell…..lol He is supposed to be back today around ocho or nueve. At least I can count to ten in spanish…lol

Super Bowl Sunday

its all about the food!Home made Fried Rice! My absolute favorite food group! It is made up of rice, bacon, onions, green pepper, eggs and of course rice and soy sauce. It is easy to make and oh so goooood!
Of course you can’t have fried rice with out some lumpia to go with it.

Lumpia, our version anyways, is made of hamburger, carrot slivers, minced potatoes, and bean sprouts. It usually contains green pepper also but when Karen found out, she nixed that idea although she has been eating them like that for years….lol I think we started making those when we lived in the Phillipines back in….well it was a loooong time ago…..lol but we have been eating them ever since.After they are all rollled up, a few mins in the frier and the are good to go. A little duck or sweet and sour sauce to dip them in and you are all set! They are very good and a family favorite.
We had a nice spread for sure!
By the end of the game, everyone was on the verge of a food induced coma….lol
It was a good game too. I wanted the Saints to win, I was a minoriity in the house.

One of my favorite

things to do, from time to time, is Microsoft Flight Simulator. I’ve been a fan for, well as long as I can remember. I have Flight Simulator 98 somewhere around here! I am an aviation enthusiast in general. Especially commercial aviation.
One aspect of the flight simulator that I loved was making movies from it and posting them on youtube. Most of my 54 videos on youtube are FS related. My videos have over 130,000 views since I began posting them. Since its so crappy outside, and I would have to swim to my garage to work on it, I’m instead blogging about my videos:)This was one of my first videos ever. Some may remember President Bush’s suprise visit to the troops in 2003. But more than that, some may remember that back in the first gulf war, Iraq flew its air force to Iran to try and save its fighters. This is a fictional account based on a true story. In this fictional account, Iraq scrambles some of its Migs from Iran to try and shoot down Air Force One. It was made with Flight Simulator 2004, Lock on Modern Combat and Falcon 4.0(The best fighter game ever made)

This next one is one of my favorites. I spent weeks working on it to try and get the right “feel” to it. At 753 views though, it is one of my least viewed videos.

At over 80,000 views, this is my most viewed video. Sadly the music was disabled do to copyright infringement.
It has over 400 comments also. For some reason it struck a nerve with many people in the Flight Sim community. I only made it to see if people could pick between the two version of flight simulator. One on the left and another on the right. You’d have thought, by many of the comments left, that I’d committed blasphemy. Many ofthe comments left were so vile I just had to delete them….lol

This video showcases the mighty Boeing 747 and it history.

Airbus and Boeing are in the throws of a battle of domination of the commercial airplace manufacturing business. Boeing is betting on smaller, more fuel efficient airplanes such as the 787, where as Airbus is betting on larger airplanes like the 380. This video explores this competition.

All of my videos can be seen here. Hope you enjoy!

Wow

I haven’t blogged yet if February! I’ve been pretty busy though. Working over time, getting ready for my parents to come out. Time is flying by. But I have 4 days off now. I coincides with what will likely be 4 days of RAIN!

I’ve been

informed that, in the spring, we are getting a horse. It looks much like the one in this picture. I know nothing about horses other than they like apples and carrots. Thats the extent of my knowledge.That and they make excellent fertilizer after you feed them! Fortunately we have a lot of horse knowledgeable friends that we have made here in Pahrump, so that will be good for the horse:) He is all or mostly black with one white sock. His current owner, due to the economic downturn, had to sell her ranch back in Michigan. She auctioned off all of her other horses, but could bear to auction this one. So my sister in law, who is close friends with the current owner, arranged for us to get it. That way, the lady that owns it could still come and visit with it on occasion. This spring she well be driving it accross country to our house. There used to be horses here. Infact if you look at the Google Maps street level photos of our house, you can see several horses here. We will see what happens……

Round two

of my tool shopping.First off is a Craftsman 10″ compound miter saw with laser. No more primative tools when my carpenters, I mean my parents, come back out in about a week. Only the finest in power tools for them!

I also bought a standard and metric set of large combination wrenches. While not absolutely necessary, as my large adjustable wrench covers all of them, they will come in handy! I also bought 4 other tools, blew through another $400 or so today at Sears, but being that it is Pahrump, their selection is limmited. So I have to wait for them to be shipped to the store. At least the shipping is going to be free!

Finally the sun has come back!!!! The rain is no more!!

The confusion is over….sort of

Apparently attaining Elite status at my work is not something that happens too often. No one was quite sure how it worked, how I would get my money, or exactly how much I should get. Its been almost a month now and although I did ask my boss about it a few times, I didn’t want to seem to be hounding him about it either. Tuesday he pulled me aside and laid it out for me. $1,300 the company would reimburse me for. I asked him if I could just charge them on my company credit card, really to save both of us a hassle of tracking reimbursement, and he said sure…no problem.
So here is my first instalment from Home Depot:
$465 up in smoke! Its hard to imagine spending $1,300 on tools. I’ve been working on forklifts now for over 2 years out here with about $400 worth of tool. Also my rig doesn’t have all “that” much room in it. But I am buying stuff that mostly will not be used everyday, I already have that stuff, but stuff that I sometimes think, wow this would be easier if I had this or that. Thats what I’m buying.

I also get like $200 to take Karen out to dinner, the company says this is for the time the testing took away from our time together! Dinner out is actually a line item in the handout. Plus, and Karen doesn’t know this and since I’m only posting it on the blog she will not find out until later, I also get a cash payment that is yet un certain. It should be about $700. Not a bad deal if I say so myself.

Sights

from today in Las Vegas and the trip home. I was on the west side of town when my day ended, so I decided to go home through Red Rock Canyon.

In this picture you can see the cloud that is hanging over rain soaked Pahrump. It seemed to actually reach down and touch the city.


Back home in Pahrump, or at Home Depot anyways.

And to think that I said I missed rain…..

Nothing worse, or cuter, than a thief

Carly stole Buddy’s bone last night. She is sneaky!