Jenny and I are sitting here in our now-warm house. A few weeks ago, during one of the big cold snaps we had here, our furnace started to make a squeaking noise. Upon investigation, it turned out the noise was coming from the combustion chamber blower, which pulls cool air through the combustion chamber and then exhausts the hot air and gasses out the flue. It sounded like its bearings were going bad. We didn't have time to have it serviced right away, and it was otherwise running just fine, so we figured we could call on a day when I was going to be working from home.

Wow. The crazy multi-tagged post with a bunch of stuff that normally doesn't fit together. In short form: I finished the hall table, and now Jenny and I are getting ready for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. We're hosting my family on Christmas Eve, and Jenny's family on Christmas Day. It should be fun.

I simply ran out of time when I was writing my last entry, then I got busy with a bunch of stuff. Now here I am with some time on a fine Saturday evening. So here continues the tale of the new stove.

Well, several hours after the saga began, it is finally finished. Our new stove is installed, fully tested and adjusted. Read on for the gory details.

I am completely geeked. Jenny and I had decided to volunteer to host Christmas Eve dinner for my family (we do a version of the Polish Wigilia). I was already really excited that they agreed, and we've been getting things ready for that. Then Jenny suggested that we invite her parents for Christmas Day. In the past, we have always celebrated Christmas Eve at my parents' house and Christmas Day at her parents' house.

Click the picture for a bigger version, and to go to the album with the rest of the pictures from today!

It's been a busy couple of weeks here at the Jenny and Jonathan household. We've been bouncing all over the place doing Thanksgiving stuff, working on stuff for the house, and being generally busy. Today was great fun, though.

We had decided a while ago to go out this weekend to get our Christmas tree. We were unable to get a big tree last Christmas because we had just finished the living room a week or so before Christmas Day, so we were both eagerly anticipating this Christmas when we could get a big tree again.

Argh #1: Two of my old woodworking clamps gave up the ghost today. They weren't great clamps. I've been slowly trying to replace some of my oldest clamps with good clamps. My oldest clamps are some cheapy bar clamps from Home Depot that I bought back in 2000. They aren't all that strong, and the workmanship is pretty poor. I didn't know all of that at the time, though--they looked like fine clamps to me. One of them now has a permanent bend in its bar, which affects how far apart I can set the clamp heads.

We had a 100% homemade dinner tonight. We still had some meatballs and sauce left-over from the party last weekend. I decided that we'd buy some pasta today so that we could try to finish that up before it went bad. Well, after we got home from a little afternoon drive, I remembered that we had five eggs left from last weekend, too, and we had plenty of flour. A small plan was hatching in my brain. I first started a loaf of bread in the bread maker (the big oven is down for the count right now--it needs a serious cleaning after an issue with a pan that tipped badly last weekend).

I have been trying to figure out a good way to keep all of our favorite recipes in an easy-to-reach format. "The web" was obviously a good choice for us, but I wasn't sure exactly how to do it. I decided to use this same software that we use for the blog, but in a slightly different configuration. Hopefully, after we get a bunch of our own favorites up there, we'll have some other family members log on to contribute their own (hint, hint), and maybe they'll even find it useful for keeping copies of their own recipes in a convenient place.

Right now, the formatting looks somewhat different from this site. They will probably eventually match, but I haven't gotten that far yet. Take a gander and let us know what you think:

http://www.jennyandjonathangetmarried.com/lifeblog/cooking/

jonathan

Hmm. Technology and cooking as keywords for this entry. I'm probably going to make some automatic content categorization system explode.

Jenny and I both worked from home today. This is a great way to save on gas, and it lets us both get some stuff done around the house during small breaks in the day. I had this crazy idea the other day that I wanted to make homemade pasta one day this week. Today was the day. Woohoo!

I cleaned-up the kitchen before I started with work today. Jenny and I walked up to Eazer's in downtown New Kensington for lunch. We had a great lunch for not a lot of money, which is always a big plus. From there, Jenny went home and I walked over to Foodland to get some eggs and pasta sauce. They also had a loaf of Italian bread from a local bakery, so all that stuff jumped into my basket, and I headed home. After completing my work for today, I went upstairs to find our laundry drying rack, which happens to also work quite well as a noodle drying rack. I got all of the stuff ready and started to make dough. I decided that I'd use half white and half whole-wheat flour, which turned out to be a great idea. I always liked whole-wheat pasta, but it was always on the expensive side.

By the time all was said and done, I had made six batches of pasta, using an entire dozen eggs, twelve cups of flour, and a lot of hand cranking on the pasta machine. For dinner, I cooked the small pile of partial noodles that was left from the six batches, plus one whole batch of pasta. Yum. I love fresh pasta. I cut and bagged the rest of the pasta after dinner and tossed it into the freezer for future pasta goodness. That ended up making a ton of pasta, which is cool.

The other, completely-unrelated thing that I wanted to mention is that I'm now running the Gentoo Linux distribution on my laptop. I was running the Ubuntu Linux distribution, but it was overall pretty unsatisfying, and it had a tendency to frustrate me. Gentoo is much more down-to-earth, and puts me back in control of the system in a way that I like. Hey, I'm still a sysadmin deep down--what can I say?

That's about all from me for updates. It's getting colder here now. I finally had to turn the furnace on this morning so that we could work without our fingers freezing. All of the windows in the house are closed now. It is really feeling like Fall.

jonathan