long live the autococker...

After eight faithful years of service, my Autococker is no more. At the last paintball outing, the cocking rod snapped - leaving me with a very sentimental paperweight. Alas, it's time to move on - it'll be hard to expect the same accuracy from any of the new electronic markers, but I was clearly outgunned in the rate-of-fire department.

So, after a few days of online research rendered useless by a 10-minute conversation with Jason at Paintball Wizard, I am now a proud owner of a Dangerous Power G3 marker. You gotta admit, it's a bit sexy:

We'll see if it shoots as well as it looks, though.

yard sale: lessons learned

We pulled it off - we've had our first very own yard sale! It was something that we kept on delaying for a while: either the weather wasn't right, or we were busy doing something else. In the meantime, useless junk kept on accumulating everywhere, most noticeably in the garage.

I was so excited about this purging process that I woke up an hour early - this is on a Saturday, too. Even before I had breakfast, I started pulling boxes of mismatched plates that we'll never use, old PS2 games, cables, books - and arranging them on a couple of tables at the end of the driveway. I even converted an old door slab into a makeshift display space and started piling things up on the stairs. Susan joined in to help out, rescuing some kitchen utensils in the process:

Right before 9AM, I went out to hang the signs that I carefully scribbled with a huge Sharpie the night before. Guided by a traffic map that I sketched out, I tried to make sure that I channelled pretty much all the cars passing by the downtown into our little dead-end street. Apparently, the scheme worked - a steady stream of bargain-hunters kept us busy for most of the morning.

People do vary. Some where very nice and stopped by to chat even if they weren't buying anything. Some haggled down to the last cent (c'mon! who does that!) And then there were some who just drove by, made a U-turn at the end of the street, and went back up the hill. Can't please them all!

So, what are the lessons learned?
- a wheelbarrow is mighty useful for carrying items back and forth from the garage
- little post-it stickies work well as price labels
- def. need lots of change ($1 bills)
- dropping down the prices at the end of day just to get rid of stuff does the trick - we should've done it earlier!

So, all in all, the garage can breathe easier, we're $86 richer, and hopefully some people will use our stuff instead of having to buy new things. Everybody wins. Especially the dude who got the yellow seats from my del Sol for $15. May he find a way to ride them into awesomeness.

the dish

There are those that claim to find fault with the married life. But "those" are not taking the positives into the account. Take, for example, the feast that Susan cooked up for me on Friday. For starters, we had French green beans and baked sweet potatoes with cinnamon. Next came the roasted chicken seasoned with garlic and herbes de provence, with a side of spring pasta with zucchini and carrots. Finally, as if I wasn't stuffed, Susan unveiled the dessert: fruit medley with white chocolate. Owie. I'm still recovering.

back to paintball

After a hiatus of a couple of years, I went back to paintball, and now I don't even know why I stopped. I've played twice in the past two weeks, and had a heck of a blast.

During the first outing, the ref took a few pictures on the field, and happened to snap one right after I hung the flag. Woot!

more home improvement

Let's see, how about something else to impress Mr. Eugene Katz... ah, here, the shed saga!

The roof on the shed was so mossy that I couldn't even tell what the original color of the shingles was:

But this was before the July 4th weekend. Two full days of ripping off old shingles, replacing rotten plywood, and putting all new roof goodies in place, and here we have Shed 2.0:

For better or worse, I went with the "high definition" look (I'm not kidding, that's what the shingles were called). It's supposed to be rustic... I dunno. All I know, it's better than what was there before - and I got to use my roofing nail gun!

update from the home improvement front

There is a reason for the shortage of posts lately - Stan has been getting serious about home improvement. The big project over the past couple of weeks was fixing gutters and replacing siding that was permanently damaged by the lackluster state of the old gutters. Things are looking much better, and the main water spout now culminates in a water collection barrel:

Free water collected in an enviromentally-friendly way... doesn't get much better than that!