For me, the thing that dominated the year was my new “job” as a consultant. I’d done some consulting before, but in 2004 I managed to string together almost an entire year of work. Mostly half-time, so it wasn’t quite the income I would have liked, but I was able to pay the bills, and that’s pretty amazing. Really, all the credit goes to my primary client, Nicely Done Solutions, where the majority of my work comes from. They’ve kept me busy, and I hope to keep doing work through them for some time.

That dominated my day-to-day, but my biggest accomplishment in 2004 was my five year wedding anniversary with Rochelle. We have many more of those in our future, if we can both resist the temptation of butter.

After a frenzy of traveling in 2003, we mostly stayed at home in 2004. A short trip to Boston, where Rochelle was attending a conference and I was eating cannoli, was the furthest we went. We also made our traditional Thanksgiving visit to Rochelle’s family in Texas. And our longest trip was a road trip down to Palm Springs, where we stayed for two weeks in a condo, while Rochelle wrote the culminating papers for her Masters degree. (Which was Rochelle’s biggest accomplishment of 2004, successfully completing her Master’s program. All over but the paperwork. Yippee!) I mostly loafed around and read a couple of books; in fact I think that was the only fiction I read all year long.

I did get a chance to enjoy more fiction than those couple books, though, by finally giving Audible.com a try. Rochelle started her subscription to the service last year, and has really enjoyed listening to the audio books on her player. When I gave her an iPod mini for her birthday, I inherited the Audible.com Otis player she had been using, and started using it while I was driving. While the Otis sucked, the audio books are fantastic, and there is no better way to enjoy them than on a digital player; CDs and tapes are more expensive, and you have to constantly change them to keep going. Not with the iPod, or even the Otis, which can store almost nine hours — or hundreds of hours for the iPod.

We continued to improve our home with a number of projects, including replacing the solid wood back door with a wonderful wood door with glass panels that lets in far more light. In spite of the glass, with the redone (and now straight) door frame and new weather stripping, the kitchen is much warmer now than it was with the solid door we replaced.

Also in the kitchen we added a display shelf along one wall, to better show off the ridiculously large collection of champagne bottles we’ve amassed. I’m sure we’ll have to purge the collection at some point, but for now it’s fun to have them all in a row, and know that we’ve found and enjoyed some really fine wine in the last couple of years. The bottles on the shelf are only from the last two years, but it represents far more champagne than I drank in my entire life before Rochelle.

We painted our bedroom from top to bottom. Rochelle picked out three new colors that matched our antique bed frame, and over the course of a week, we stripped and repaired walls, and painted painted painted. The results are not perfect by a long shot, but it’s still a tremendous improvement for us.

Also in the bedroom we ended up replacing all but the headboard of that bed frame, which lowered the mattress and gave us a much more stable bed. The antique bed frame itself was quite solid, but the queen conversion kit that came with our McRoskey mattress replaced the solid side beams, and made the bed horribly shaky.

The biggest improvement we made was replacing the old, grim gray carpet that Rochelle picked out 10 years ago with new carpet that is warmer-toned, and coincidentally hides cat stains far better. That went into our parlor, office, and bedroom, as well as the hall closet, which we somehow omitted from the hardwood floors project a couple years ago.

In the office, we replaced almost all of our furniture, getting rid of our desks and a chrome shelving unit, and replacing with much bigger desks and some standard shelving from IKEA. They’re not perfect, but they look a lot nicer than what we had before, and work a whole hell of a lot better with the computers, etc., than the old stuff did.

We didn’t eat out as much this year, and so we discovered fewer new restaurants than we usually do. We still found a few, including Saha, where Rochelle’s favorite chef from last year went after he sold and left our favorite find of 2003 (which is no longer particularly special). The cuisine can best be described as Arabic fusion, and combines Middle Eastern spicing (the chef is from Yemen) with French technique. It’s extraordinary, and everyone we’ve taken there has agreed that the prix fixé dinner would be a bargain at twice the $27 it currently costs.

On the topic of food, I took HomeChef’s “essentials” cooking course (4 hours one night a week for 12 weeks), and had a blast. I made a lot of the food at home during the course, but haven’t cooked as much as I’d hoped to after the class ended. Still, I probably cooked more in 2004 than in 2003, which is a trend I’d like to continue in 2005.

We only threw one party in all of 2004, and it was on the last day of 2004 (more on that in another post). Shame on us. Look for that to change in 2005.

On the technology side, I got a new computer, my first laptop, and have really enjoyed the new mobility. Before the current generation of PowerBooks, I always felt that getting a laptop was too big a compromise. There’s still a big performance gap between the PowerBook I got and Apple’s professional desktop systems; and my hard drive size is limited compared to what’s available in full-size systems; and the PowerBook’s screen is quite a bit smaller than what I had before; etc. But with the current laptops, the hardware has advanced so far that what you get is more than good enough, and the trade-off of headroom I don’t need for mobility I want is now possible.

We also switched to a new DSL provider, Speakeasy, which is both saving us money and providing better service. We stuck with our reduced cable plan, which is $14 a month, and we (mostly) don’t miss the channels. At the end of the year, we signed up for Netflix, so we could get the movies back. Minimum cable plus Netflix is less than half what we were spending for our premium cable services, and gets us pretty much everything we want. Except for ESPN…

I made roughly 60 posts to this weblog. And I sold zero BeBoxes. Both of these numbers need to go up in 2005.

I gained back much of the weight I lost at the beginning of last year. That number needs to go down in 2005.

The cats all stayed healthy and happy, and we didn’t add any new ones. The number of cats in our house needs to stay the same in 2005.

And that was my 2004.

We didn’t do that. Instead, we decided that we couldn’t take the various stains on the light blue-gray carpet that covered half the house. (Two years ago we got rid of the other half, by putting in hardwood floors, which we are still in love with.) Time for new carpet.

Rochelle and David had already spent months finding just the right pattern and color, so when Rochelle’s twice-yearly ESPP kicked out a chunk of change, we decided to go for it. This involved moving everything out of three rooms (including, once again, the bedroom) for a day. And because of the noise and the strangers in the house during the installation, the cats liked this less than the painting. Let’s just say that Billie didn’t stop at puking this time.

But the carpet was fast, in no small measure because we weren’t the ones installing it. We were moving furniture back into all three rooms by the end of the day. We got a lot of the big stuff, but three months later, we still haven’t moved everything back to where it should go.

This is because we’ve decided not to move anything until we’ve decided where it really belongs. Which means we’re throwing out crap, giving away crap, selling off crap, taking crap down to the basement, etc.

To go with the lovely new carpet, we also bought all new furniture for the office. It’s all from IKEA, so it was reasonably cheap. Two bookcases, a three-level horizontal filing cabinet, and two huuuuge new desks for probably less than a grand, and the office is far more usable. And if we ever actually paint the office, it’s going to look really fabulous, too. Which will be good for me, since it looks like I will continue to be self-employed (gainfully, really) for a while. It’s almost to the point to where I could have clients visit!

In the last few weekends, we’ve moved a bunch of stuff to the basement, taken a bunch of stuff from the basement and either thrown it out or taken it to Goodwill, and generally spent a good 30+ hours working on house organization. It’s starting to feel good!

We also had a friend, who is a professional contractor, come and paint, stain, and varnish our brand new back door, which is really beautiful, with small glass panels framed in wood, and lets far more light into the house. The new door framing and brand new weather stripping mean it seals far better than the old door; in spite of being glass, the kitchen is actually 10 degrees warmer than it was before. This is going to be great this coming Winter.

Anyway, all of this is to catch up, and explain a little bit about why no posting. We’ve been really, really busy!

This past weekend was phase 1 of what will surely be a 5+ phase project. Colors were chosen, paint and tools acquired. Rochelle took Friday off, and we emptied our bedroom, and started prepping the walls. Which led to the second unfortunate discovery, that the wallpaper under the paint was sagging and bulging in places, and basically came off like peeling a bad sunburn. Three hours later, we had stripped off two of the four layers from half the bedroom, and sensibly called a halt to further destruction.

(Side note: the first unfortunate discovery came weeks earlier, when Rochelle went to start stripping off the wallpaper, and discovered she was peeling the paper off the front of the sheetrock that had replaced one wall. After she’d peeled half the wall. We became convinced there was no wallpaper in the room. We were wrong. The only place without wallpaper was where Rochelle started peeling. Unfortunate discoveries are a part of home improvements if your home is a Victorian…)

Saturday David arrived, took charge, and made us start painting what we could. Nothing is more motivating than seeing fresh paint on your ceiling and walls, and we got a lot done (while also going through three bottles and one magnum of sparkling wine).

Sunday, supposed to be the last day, it was back to the damaged walls. Lots of Fix-It-All and sanding. And dust. Lots of dust. This was a lot of work, and while we put a second coat on the ceiling and picture rail, and a first coat on one wall (which looked terrible, because we stupidly decided not to take off the last layer of wallpaper), we didn’t paint much.

Monday Rochelle went back to work, and I finished stripping walls, and then painted like crazy. Finally the room was starting to look good again. Tuesday saw the “final” coats of paint, followed by some hole patching, that will require, you guessed it, another coat of paint. I am very, very tired of painting.

Tomorrow I’ll paint one last time, one wall and some touching up, and tomorrow night, barring more unfortunate discoveries, we’ll move our bed back into the room, which should make the cats, if not happy, on the road to happy. (Ironically, the cats have not been taking the project well. Billie was so stressed out the first night that she, you guessed it, puked on the floor.)

Then it’s on to the parlor and office, both of which are bigger than the bedroom.

I think 2004 is going to be the Year of Paint.

DHI 56: Rochelle bought a lovely new toilet tissue holder for our redone water closet, and I installed it. It looks wonderful, and it makes the bathroom genuinely finished. No, really this time.

DHI 57: Rochelle’s computer is three years old, and one of the CPU fans started making the death rattle sound that means it’s about to stop working. Besides being incredibly annoying, sound-wise, when the fan dies the CPU overheats, usually with permanent consequences. So I scavenged another Slot 1 CPU fan from one of the hunk-of-junk computers that I have strewn around the house, and replaced the dying fan.

In other words, it currently sucks to be using the new card. I am trying to download the correct drivers from the ATI Technologies web site, but they’re totally fucked up, and every download link gives the same two-word error message: “Not Found”. Not helpful. Not impressed. ATI sucks. (For now, anyway.)

DHI 52: More computer work for Rochelle, installing Quicken 2003 onto her system. Another DHI will surely be getting together this weekend to work on initial configuration of our accounts, especially for online access and automatic downloading of information.

DHI 53: I reattached the smoke detector to the wall. We had detached it for the paint stripping work, because the heat gun kept setting off the alarm. We’ve been done with the paint stripping for weeks, but only this morning remembered we’d detached the detector. Oops.

DHI 54: I made a contribution to fund ads advocating inspections over war. If I help improve our country, my little corner of it will be better, too.

I’m not done with the week, yet, but wanted to post the link to MoveOn.org earlier, in case you wanted to help fund those ads, too.

DHI 45: I connected the TiVo and the VCR, so that we can transfer shows off of the TiVo to tape, for long term storage. Strictly for personal use, of course.

DHI 46: I paid $300 to the MasterCard, which sounds like a daily chore, except we just transfered all bill-paying responsibilities to Rochelle, and that $300 will completely pay off our credit card, leaving us with no non-real estate debt for the first time since our wedding/honeymoon/bathroom remodel (which was followed closely by the stock options fiasco/stock market meltdown, which was followed by 3 months of unemployment each). Now that’s a home improvement!

DHI 47: I finished moving this weblog to aldoblog.com, moving the appropriate files from one location to another, and setting up some redirects in Apache to make links to the old site continue to work. In the process I discovered I had not completed the DNS configuration for the aldoblog.com domain, so I finished doing that, too.

DHI 48: I collected more books to move into the water closet, this time all of our travel books. I found a couple more SF and food books to move, too.

DHI 49: I stripped off an old photo that had fused to our front window, cleaned with Windex, and then scrapped off the glue residue and the accumulated grime of 11 years on Haight Street with a razor blade. The front windows are now about 90% more clear — I can’t wait until tomorrow afternoon when the sun is shining through them, and I can see the improvements the best!

DHI 50: After much research (scanning log files), and even more dithering, I turned off my server-side spam filtering software, because it is apparently occasionally dropping random messages. This basically undoes one of my prior DHIs, where I implemented the anti-spam measures. Which kinda sucks, but then, how often do you get every home improvement right the first time?

You see, our house is more than 100 years old, and the foundation is original, and brick-and-mortar. A new foundation is going to be $75,000, a very scary number…but not as scary as having our house slide out into the street!

DHI 42: I finally got around to configuring aldoblog.com, so that this blog can move to a shorter domain name and URL. DNS now resolves (primary and secondary name servers), Apache recognizes it as a virtual host, and some initial redirects are in place to make the transition seamless. I still have some work to do, moving directories around, and setting up the real redirects, to move y’all over to the new location. That’ll have to come this weekend, though, when I can focus for a couple hours straight.

DHI 43: I coughed up $100 for our contractor when Rochelle was short of cash to pay him one evening.

The rest of my DHIs didn’t happen this week; I was too tired, or too lazy, or both. I plan to get back on track this coming week, but I haven’t yet decided what to do about the shortfall…

DHI 35: We had the missing gas line replaced yesterday, providing gas to our groovy vintage heater once again. But, the alterations to the gas lines required cutting off the gas for an extended amount of time, and blowing out the gas lines. Once hooked back up, our contractor re-lit the pilot light, but there was air in the lines, which caused the pilot light to go out on our hot water heater. In the middle of the night. Cold bath the next day. It took quite a bit of figuring to realize that it was air in the lines that caused it to go out, and make it hard to re-light, but I did eventually get the pilot re-lit.

DHI 36: While the hot water heater contained cold water, I drained it, to get the silt and stuff out of the bottom. Apparently you’re supposed to do this a couple times a year. So I did it.

DHI 37: Cleared off one side of my desk of the crap piled up there. The other side will be harder, a weekend DHI for sure.

DHI 38: I hooked up a $4 antenna to the stereo in the front of the house, so now we can listen to the radio when we’re in the office working on the computer. Or, hey, maybe someday we’ll have another party, and people can sit in the parlor, and, like, hear music!

DHI 39: I helped Rochelle hang curtains that our decorator picked up for us. We had to replace the old curtain rods, which were far too flimsy to support the heavier velvet curtains he picked out, so that was most of the work. It would have gone a lot faster, but both batteries for our cordless drill were dead.

DHI 40: We threw a small party at our house, our first in nearly a year. (We plan to do better in 2003 than we did in 2002.) This was a small gathering (10 people) with a focus on tasting fine champagne (more on this in a post tomorrow). Of course, there was a lot of cleanup and so on beforehand, but the DHI is really for inviting people into our house and making sure they had a good time. That’s a home improvement, in any sense of those words.