furiousBlog

This has been bouncing around for a while now, so you've probably already seen it. But, in case you haven't, here you go:

Pouring Ketchup: The full technical explanation

As the subtitle claims, it's an article that explains the physics behind getting ketchup out of the bottle, why it's so hard, and why most people do it wrong.

I thought this paragraph was particularly interesting:

Ketchup can be regarded as a highly viscous liquid, or a thixotropic (flows under pressure) solid. Neither term is exactly correct, but the problem is not what to call it. The problem is how to get the ketchup out of the bottle, in measured quantities, without making a mess.

Our listing is online. Check it out here or here.

Also, to show you how much work I've done in the backyard, I've created these before and after photos:



The fence really makes the yard seem smaller. New work done in the backyard: walkway from deck to fence gate, grass, flower bed barely visible in bottom-right. Also new is our crazy huge grill just to the left. It's wicked awesome. It's charcoal (cuz, if it ain't charcoal, it ain't a grill, in my opinion), and it has a big crank on the front to raise and lower the tray that the coal sits on. It's really unrelated to this post however.

The sign is up:



It's been up since Monday, but I've been too busy to take a picture.

Yesterday was filled with lots and lots of work. Cyndi planted some flowers and mulched the area by the front bushes. I laid sod in the back yard. It was a barren wasteland before, but now it's actually sort of nice. As I was laying the sod, though, I realized that there was no way to mow part of it due to the shed being in the way. Luckily, it's a pretty small patch, so it could be done easily with a weed-eater. Also, I caved in and called someone to install the AC compressor fan motor after I got a couple of good shocks (yes, I turned off the juice, but there's some wicked-large capacitors in there that had some stored up). The main problem was that the new fan motor had 4 wires, while the old one had 3, so I had to sort-of guess where a couple of them went.

I've decided to add a house-sale tracker to the bottom of all my house-sale related posts. Here's the first one:

I've added a new category called Life Stuff. I used to post bits about happenings in my life to the Random category, but now I'll use the other. I'm only posting about it because when I changed the category of a bunch of older postings they reappeared in the RSS feed and I wanted to let you RSS people know why that was happening.

So, last week we decided to buy a new house. We've been running out of space in our current house (3 bedroom townhouse), so we've been talking about it for a while. But, we had basically decided to wait for a year or two when I drove by a couple houses for sale and decided it wouldn't hurt to look them up online to see what they were going for. They were out of our price range (we think, the preapproval process is ongoing), so I started looking around at some other properties. To make a long story short, we found some nice single-family homes that were a little more affordable, so we decided to call a realtor and see if we could buy one.

We met with the realtor (a long-time family friend) on Friday to start the process and show him the house. As he walked through, he had a lot of suggestions for things we could fix to make it look a little nicer, in addition to the many mostly-finished projects that we now had to make finished-finished. So, since then, we've been working like mad to get the house ready for sale. There are about 30 items on our list, ranging from big stuff like finally fixing the outside compressor fan and door frame (you may remember these), to fixing wobbly iron railings, to more minor stuff like having fresh flowers around and keeping the house clean.

At any rate, the house goes on the market today. We'll be working on getting the remaining things done this week (unless someone buys it as is, of course--not a big chance of this, however).