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When we relandscaped our yard three years ago we ended up with a large sloped area in the front yard.  We have invested quite a bit of effort putting in various plants and flowers.  It is quite a sight in its full summer glory.

Now that fall is full upon us, things are scaling back, but the Marigolds are still hanging in there.

 

When I “retired” from Intel in May last year I looked forward to taking some months off, then looking for part time or temporary work opportunities.  We really did enjoy the next 15 months, which included much travel and various projects.  In early summer this year Intel asked if I would be interested in helping out with their upcoming development project.  I said I would and started working in early August.

I’m not a regular full time Intel employee, or “blue badge”, as they call them, but a “green badge” contingent worker.  Technically I work for Kelly Services via a Statement of Work from Intel, and am paid hourly wages.  Intel anticipates the project will go for at least a year, and probably far beyond, if I want to stay with them.  I started out at 3 days per week as the project ramps up, and am at 4 days per week now.  I would like to remain at 4-day work weeks, with rare 5-day weeks during peak times.

I’m working with the same group and people as I did before, so I’m quite at ease in that regard.  However, I’m doing mostly different things than I did during my career, so I’m no longer the confident expert, and it can be a bit stressful and frustrating at times as I learn new things and try to be more productive.  But in general I’m pretty happy with the arrangement and Intel is a great working environment.  I get a lot of satisfaction being paid directly for each hour I work.  The pay rate is very attractive, though counting benefits I did make more money as a regular employee.

Here is a recent photo looking out the 3rd floor windows at Intel.  The fall colors are kicking in, though they will more varied and dramatic later in the month.

This was our 2nd annual Halloween outing at Chipotle restaurant.  They serve any customer in costume with a “Boo-rito” for only $3.  I’m wearing my authentic Arabic clothing, Suzanne is a cowgirl, and Daniel a singer/entertainer.

Then we went over to the Blairs.

We postponed our Thanksgiving feasting and celebrating, and spent a long day painting the condo, and continued on Friday.  Most things required two coats, and it is always tedious touching up near the ceiling, baseboards, and door edges where the roller doesn’t reach.  We’ve consumed almost five gallons of regular eggshell wall paint, plus some enamel for the window sills and borders.  We’ve still got the kitchen and one bathroom to go, using semigloss paint.

While somewhat tedious, painting is a very satisfying and fulfilling task.  You see the attractive results of your efforts.  Everything is looking so crisp and clean.

I finished up two audiobooks while painting.  On Friday I forgot my mp3 player so spent a few hours listening to some great music via Pandora on my iPhone (Pinback and Coldplay styles).

The only thing I shopped for on Black Friday was a washer/dryer set from Home Depot.  They were already on a good sale–I was hoping for something more on Black Friday, but nothing more was gained.  They will be delivered the week after next.

So, new family room carpet on Monday, then we hope to clean things up and get it rented right away.  Perhaps it is a mistake to invest so much effort and emotion in the condo.  While we take such pride in ownership and improvements, many renters will abuse properties.  One property management professional advised me to always view a rental property as just floors and sheetrock, and not get emotionally attached.  Well, so much for that.

Some of the window sills in the new condo have paint which is chipping or flaking.  The worst one was just over the kitchen sink.

I used a putty knife to pry away loose paint, and tried sanding the result.

 

I decided to get more aggressive and remove all the paint, and applied some paint remover.  I scraped this off 30 minutes later with mixed results.  I ended up scraping it all off with a putty knife, a rather difficult and tedious job.  Then I sanded it all nice and smooth and applied a primer coat.

One good result from this effort was the ability to take a large paint chip down to the paint store where they have a tool to read the color from a customer’s sample and provide a formula to match it.  This yielded a color similar to Navajo white and we decided on this color for all the walls and trim (baseboards, window sills).

We applied some of this paint to an existing surface of this color and we can’t tell the difference between old and new.  This gives us the option to repaint a wall entirely (like those of a different color), or to simply touch-up areas with the original color that need it.  We are amazed at this technology and are pleased with how it is turning out.

 

I have memories of various home improvement projects over the long Thanksgiving weekend.  In particular, I recall Suzanne and I hanging wallpaper on more than one occasion.

This year we have several ongoing projects with our newly acquired condo.  I have already replaced the garbage disposal and fixed the refrigerator and leaking toilet.  We have some carpet replacement scheduled for next Monday.  The big project is repainting almost all the interior walls.

While shopping for paint the manager at Sherwin-Williams offered to give us a contractor’s account, since our rental property is our business.  This gives us everyday discounts on all paints and accessories, and is a smart move for them because we are inclined to buy all our materials from them.

Here are some photos at the start of the project.

 The family room had a pleasant slight gray-green wall paint, which we liked well enough.  But we figured we should go with a standard off-white paint for everything, rather than try to match it for touch-up painting. The kitchen has a darker brown paint. One family room wall is also a darker brown color. The master bedroom had two colors, including this red wall.The second bedroom was also two colors.

All of these colors were interesting enough, and would be great to personalize a home. But for a rental we want to go with a mainstream off-white for a clean, compatible look.

Due to a variety of circumstances, we became full owners of a townhome in Tucson, AZ, in the summer of 2009.  The real estate market had dropped quite a bit so our initial attempts to sell it for our desired price were unsuccessful.  We decided to keep it as a rental and became absentee landlords.

The good news was that the property had a number of merits–it was convenient to the University of Arizona, across the street from a rural farm, and was an end unit by the community pool.  And we have had no problems finding renters.

The bad news has been that, being remote, we had to hire a local property manager (at a cost of 10% of rental receipts), could not observe the upkeep and maintenance, nor do any repair work ourselves to save on expenses.  Further, the market tanked even further, with the market value ultimately dropping to 60 cents on the dollar.  Finally, we had one bad renter who damaged the property significantly, skipped on several months rent, and stole our near new washing machine.

While the monthly rent checks were nice, we became somewhat disillusioned about being landlords.  At a minimum we decided we no longer wanted to be absentee landlords and would sell the property when the current renters left.  We anticipate this within a few months and, after deciding real estate property was a decent diversification asset, we began our search for a local rental property to replace it.

We utilized an experienced real estate agent (with landlord experience) and various online tools, such as rmls.com and zillow.com.  It was actually kind of fun searching for candidate properties, and viewing the best contenders, with automated email coming twice per day.  We have been researching market value histories, and rental rates.  We made a full cash offer on one condo, only to get beat.  We identified another foreclosure that was tied up in the government FHMA system and jumped on it as soon as it got back on the market, offering $2K over listing price.  This time we won and closed on it last week.

Here are some photos of our new 2 bedroom, 2.5 bath rental condo.  It is a very nice unit in a classy neighborhood.

It has an attached single car garage.  Our unit is the near corner, all three floors.

This is the master bedroom.  We will repaint the walls and stretch the carpet.

This is the community building for the development.One of the nice walkways.Here is the family room/kitchen/dining room leading out to the deck.  We are replacing the stained carpet.The community pool with exercise gym to the right.Neighborhood playground.

Over the years we have accumulated over 5000 slides and 7000 prints from photographs we have taken.  We got our first digital camera in late 2003, so these photos cover our 33 adult years since 1970, and many from our families when we were youths.

To find or view these photos we had to drag out a box of prints or slides labeled by year, and tediously sort through them, or drag out a clunky slide projector and screen.  If we wanted to email them or edit them on the computer we had to convert them to digital by scanning them.

Two years ago I tackled the job of scanning all the slides, and wrote blog posts about that experience previously (click this link, and this one).

The prints were more problematic, as I was unaware of a high quality bulk print or negative scanner within my price range.  Our old flatbed scanner was in need of an upgrade so I shopped around and bought a Canon CanoScan 9000F.  This reasonably priced flatbed scanner included attachments for scanning slides and negatives, as well as automation helps for scanning multiple prints at a time.

This is a decent scanner, but doesn’t yield the top quality scans that a professional or dedicated photo scanner would.  I did sample scans to compare the results of scanning prints and their negatives.  I would expect scanning the negatives to be superior, but I found the results from the prints to be comparable.  And it was far simpler to scan prints, especially with the automation tools.

Next I had to decide on various scanner settings, such as sharpening, scratch/dust removal, and, most critically, resolution.  Most of our prints were 4″ X 6″, and I found 300dpi yielded optimum results, as 600dpi gave negligible improvements vs. the bloated file sizes and lengthier scan times.

Scanning 7000 photos was a laborious task, and I undertook it in April this year.  I set up my “assembly line” on a desk downstairs.  I used a brush to quickly wipe dust and debris from the prints before laying them down on the scanner bed.  Periodically I would clean the window on the scanner bed.  I wore white lint-free gloves.  I could scan three photos at a time, with the scanner software usually able to detect the separate photos and do individual scans of each (with separate resulting jpg files).  I filtered out doubles and prints with no value (terribly out of focus, or bland shots of landscapes, etc.).  I averaged about 30 seconds per print, so the total job required roughly 60 hours sitting at the desk.  I got through a few audiobooks during the job.

I’m generally pleased with the results.  We now have all our photos in electronic format for ease of access and saving for posterity.  We still have the analog formats stored in boxes.  The print scans are good enough for casual viewing and use–scanning prints has technical limitations.  I figure if I really need a super high quality scan of a photo I can dig through the negatives (no small task) to find it and get a professional scan done.  But it just wasn’t worth the expense and effort to make that investment for our full inventory of photos.

A huge remaining drawback for all our electronic photos is the lack of documentation for each.  I have them sorted by year taken, but I have nothing which indicates who the people are, or the location, or event.  With physical prints or slides this info is sometimes written down on them.  I know there are digital formats for including information on electronic photos, and this is outstanding for sorting and finding, but I don’t know yet how universal these formats are, both for use across multiple vendors and programs, as well as longevity as technology changes over the years.  I’d hate to invest countless hours inputting this documentation only to have it become useless some years down the road.  So, this task remains on my “to do” list.

This photo won a third prize at the county fair.  I actually thought this one was the best of my four entries (the remaining two received no awards).

 

This was taken about a year ago in our front yard.  It was not staged or manipulated in any way–totally natural situation.  Just a random leaf sitting partially in a pool of water on a boulder.  I like the colors and textures, and the angle of the leaf across the diagonal.

By the way, the photo yesterday was taken in late October, 2010, in Helvetia, Oregon (nice guess, Kristi–just down the hill from where you were married).  Those familiar with Oregon politics might have caught the sign promoting Chris Dudley in the governor’s race that fall.

Here is a photo I submitted to the Washington County Fair this past summer, and which won second prize in its category.

For the amusement of those viewing this post, I’d like you to guess the location and the time.