The Holt Blog

Tonight my best buddy Nate came over with his girl, whom we’ve never met before.  She’s great.  I’d say more about her, but suffice to say any friend of Nate’s is a friend of mine.  I trust his choices   Besides, he can comment and say more if he really wants.  We spent some time trying to fix Nate’s computer (see previous geek entries for the gory details).  To my surprise, I got most of his files onto my computer, with the exception of his music.  We were very happy about that, and did a little “geek dance” that only geeks can do when they recover lost data.
Then we went out for pizza and to see Amazing Grace, which just came out in the theater.  It was a very touching movie about the abolition of slavery in England.  Some great quotes in there about God as well.  Nate’s sister Laura and her friend (Nate’s roommate) joined us for the movie too.  It was the first time Jill and I had been out to see a movie in a long time.  Mostly we like to stay at home and watch movies, since there are no commercials, previews, crowds, ticket costs, and driving time.

Mom and I headed up to Maine Tuesday eve – We had this as our tradition every February vacation for the last few years. We had a pit stop in Waterville to see where Jayne works, then on to Hartland. The following day we had fun hitting the Goodwill and lunch at the Sea Dog Brewery. One of the highlights was going to their friends farm and meeting the animals. Check out this video of the crazy pigs playing with an empty paper bag!! Fun time had by all

We’ve been thinking about new windows for about a year now. Many moons ago we had some salesmen come out for this purpose. The first guy was a Newpro guy, which sells a great window, but at a huge cost. It would have been almost $2,000 for our two windows. A few other companies offered bids but we decided then we couldn’t afford it.

This year, my brother-in-law Steve offered to do it for us. Being a carpenter, he has access to order the windows himself and the skills to install them. This past week he’s been putting them in, here’s a few pictures:

And below is the semi-finished project. Steve is coming over tomorrow to finish up and put trim on the edges. Needless to say, we’re very happy to have windows that don’t leak cold air or condensate. Also, Jill is very excited to be able to clean the outside! Our old windows had 30 years of junk that had probably never been cleaned, simply because you couldn’t reach out there.

Last night we had our FeBREWary beer tasting!  It was fun. Like a wine tasting talking about and sampling different kinds.  I never knew there were so many! Ryan was awesome, our expert and presenter.  We had 6 different ones that we tried.  My favs. were the double stout and the porter.  Very fun night with friends and lots of MST3K shorts!

Big storm today! Jill and I both had school cancellations, so we have a free day on Valentine’s Day! Jill wanted a new drink, so we bundled up and walked to the liquor store:

Then we walked in tons of snow and bought some vodka, kahlua, and a teeny trial size brandy:

When we returned home, we cleared off our cars a bit, went in, and discovered our two furry felines camped out on Jill’s huge blanket she just finished: