Happy New Year!!!

It's 2007 and little more than 7 months from the day when Lisa and I will tie the knot. Pretty exciting, huh? We had a great Christmas, with my parents coming down from Maine and all of us going to Lisa's parents for Christmas Eve. While my parents were down we brought out the list of things for my father to do for us. My father hates to just sit around, so having things for him to do is really just another example of how thoughtful and kind Lisa and I really can be :) First on the list was to install the new wood stove that we had delivered on Tuesday. This was a pretty simple job as it was replacing an old stove so all that needed to be done was to fit one piece of stovepipe to connect the stove to the existing pipe. That went quite smoothly. Next on the list was to stop the leak in our crawlspace. It was determined that the leak was caused by a pipe-tap that was installed by a previous owner to feed water to a refrigerator. This was removed and a the bad section of pipe was replaced. This also went quite smoothly as it was my father soldering the pipe and not me. I have successfully soldered several pipes since we moved in, however almost every time I have managed to fix one leak, another one would spring up in an adjacent faucet or fitting. It was like an old silent movie or a Three Stooges episode where they'd be plugging holes in a dam with their fingers and another would suddenly appear to squirt them in the face. That's the way it felt at the time anyhow. The third thing on the list was re-mounting the downstairs toilet. It's a wall-mount toilet and has been a pain in my ass ever since we moved in. I won't go into the details of why it has been such a pain right now. Let's just leave it at that I got frustrated at mounting the damn thing and half-assed it and my father had to redo it so that it could stand a chance of not leaking. I still have to re-seal it one more time but it is at least structurally sound now that my dad has taken the time to mount it correctly. I love my dad. The final item was repairing the wall that the dog we fostered chewed through. It started as a small tear in the drywall which the dog exploited to create a very big hole. I've been too lazy to touch it. Luckily my dad is anything but lazy and he's damn good with a drywall trowel. He made short work of patching the wall. The only dilemma now is whether to try and match the red paint and paint just the section of wall that has been patched, or to paint the whole damned basement. Maybe my parents will come down for memorial day again this year :P The only bad thing about our Christmas was the cold that Lisa's secret Santa gave to her and she, being such a giving individual, gave to me. I'm going to take some Nyquil(with a bourbon chaser) and try and go into a short drug-induced coma tonight. I'll add some pictures of the work that my dad did when I get a chance. For now I've got a coma calling my name.