A Little House Update

I met with the construction foreman for the house last Thursday (May 12) and we went over the drawings. We found several things that needed to be corrected, but nothing was too terrible. Tonight, on the way home from work, I decided to swing by and see if any progress had been made and it looks like they delivered some concrete and re-bar for the foundation. The in-slab plumbing looks complete, but I don’t see any electrical done yet, so I think that’ll need to be done before they pour.

Re-Bar

We also decided on the exterior colors. We’re going with color scheme #3 (Poco w/Slate). Here’s a rendering of our actual model with the colors (or, as close as I could guest-imate):

Front Elevation Rendering

It started raining a lot today, and it looks to be this way for a few more days, so I’ll probably not check back in on the house until next week.

Quick Cap Recap

Sunday we went and saw Captain America: Civil War at the AMC West Shore. I’m not going to spoil it for anyone and go into details, but I loved it and would like to see it again in the theater. It was a long movie, but flew by.

Yesterday was a big day – I resigned from my day job. I have something lined up. More to come.

I’m now going to spend time organizing all of the comics we bought on Saturday.

Full of Renders, Comics, and BBQ

I was able to get the final render for SCS047 off to Carl this morning. I found that supporting an alpha channel in the animation required QuickTime using the Animation codec with a depth Millions+ of colors.

Today was Free Comic Book Day. The whole family participated as we visited Emerald City Comics in Pinellas Park and The Comics Club in Brandon. We got a ton of stuff that I’m too tired to list here, but all-in-all, got some fantastic deals and bunch of fun reading material (and games!). We grabbed some food at a BBQ kiosk outside Emerald City and some Mexican at Vallarta’s in Brandon later in the day.

After all of that, since Melissa was back in town for the last day or two, we took her by the new house. Nothing’s changed since the photo’s I posted yesterday, but neither of the girls has been to that neighborhood since January, so it was fun to have them see the progress.

Gonna crawl into bed and try to find some fights on TV.

House Photos

We swung by the lot today and saw some of the early work. The basic framing where the slab will go is complete and they’ve run most of the plumbing.

Cari standing where the master bedroom will be.
Cari standing where the master bedroom will be.
Standing where the property line is. We'll have a decent backyard and pool.
Standing where the property line is. We’ll have a decent backyard and pool.
Looking out toward the front.
Looking out toward the front.
In the front yard, looking into the lot.
In the front yard, looking into the lot.
The plumbing for the master bathroom sinks (foreground), master bathroom shower and tub (midground), and guest bathroom and laundry room (background).
The plumbing for the master bathroom sinks (foreground), master bathroom shower and tub (midground), and guest bathroom and laundry room (background).

All Sorts of News

A lot has happened since my last post. I’ll start with the more mundane…

I had trouble rendering SCS047 and guessed it was a Windows issue with my main workstation. So, about a week ago, I reformatted the box and re-installed everything. Since this is pretty painful to do, I thought it might be nice to make my C: drive an SSD, so I bought one and installed it. I made my old 1TB HD a secondary drive and installed less-used software to it. I also had a bunch of unused RAM laying around, so I upgraded the machine from 8GB to 16GB. I’ll most likely up it to 32GB in the coming months.

I got everything shiny and new, fired up LightWave and … the application crashed again. So, I decided it was time to upgrade from LightWave 10 to LightWave 2015.3, which ended up curing the problems. SO, I got back into the project again…

Work on SCS047 is moving along. I got approval from Carl on several ideas and changes to the final logo. I rendered it yesterday, but the final Uncompressed AVI file was not playable for some reason. I restarted the render again today with it outputting to the local SSD drive instead of the network share I put it on yesterday. There’s still another 35 minutes left. Fingers crossed.

I got word today that they broke ground on my new house. I’ll be swinging by the lot tomorrow to see where they are and take pictures, which I’ll post up here soon.

I finished upgrading my second ESXi instance. I’ve added a 5TB HD and extended the internal SATA ports to eSATA so I can hook up both an external 2TB HD and an external 3 TB HD. These will be JBODed and used as a local backup disk to compliment the cloud backups I’m doing. This box needs to be upgraded to 32GB of RAM in the next couple of months too.

And lastly, I accepted a position at a new company doing IT. I will be resigning from my current job on Monday, May 9. This has lit a huge fire inside me to start completing projects, etc. Feels good to know there’s a light at the end of that tunnel. More to come…