PhreeZone's home on the web

When we got our puppy she fit in the small end of her crate, now she needs the whole thing to sleep. It amazes me that in a short 3 and a half months she has gone from being a 6 pound puppy to being a 30 pound high energy missle. I’m going to post a few picture of Hana on here to show the difference.

She graduated from puppy school last week and we took her to the dog park for the first time today. She was a little wimp and spent the first 10 minutes trying to run way from the other dogs and tried to get back out the gate. Once she got into it she started playing with the other dogs a bit more and at the end she was sctually coming back to us when we’d call her if she wasn’t distracted by another dog running up to her during her voyage back. We’ll be taking her there much more frequently just since it is such a safe environment for her to play in.

Here is Hana at 7 weeks in her crate

Here she is at 5 months in the same crate. The kittes were in there too since Kristi felt they needed to get along better.

Here she is at 10 weeks

And here is 5 months

Hana graduated puppy classes. It tok 3 minutes to get these pictures and she was not happy getting them either.

As you can see she has a new toy around the house.

After 3 weeks of working the bathroom is done. I’m not sure I would do it again because it was just a pain in the ass needing to use the spare bathroom for everything and living in all that drywall dust for that long. The Project ran over budget almost from day 1 but I figured I needed to spend the money on it for my own enjoyment of the room and for resale in the future.

As promised earlier here are some photos:

In this one I just pulled the old panels off the wall. As you can see they were just glued into place.

Close up of some of the wall and floor damage the leaking water had done.

This shows the water damage to the 1/4 subflooring, this all got removed and replaced by cement backer board that will not rot ever.

Drywall coming down to remove the old shower floor.

Kristi pulling out some drywall.

Installing the new backer board flooring for a solid rot proof floor.

I used PEX pipe, so much easier then copper to bend.

Kristi after cutting open the new shower wall box.

I’m dry fitting the back wall to make sure it lined up correctly. I needed to shim it a bit to get it lined up in the end.

Walls are up and the hole was drilled for the plumbing to go through to mount the final wall.

Kristi hanging drywall.

Drywall is hung and screw holes mudded, I taped and mudded the edges after this one was taken.

Grouting the floor. I used the already waterproof stuff since it is just a pain to seal the grout on those 1 inch * 1 inch grids.

Floor done, walls painted. They are a light blue color.

Reinstalling the toilet, note the blue paint in my hair and the amount of drywall dust on the top of the cabinet doors.

Hanging the shower doors. These ended up being slightly wider then the old ones so its a bit tighter of an entrance but the clear glass look is a lot nicer then the hammered glass that looks so cheap.

Finished bathroom. The rugs really help pull it together and help a lot.

I’ve started to gather up the gear again for this skydiving season to try and rework my helmet to work better. Last year I was having the issue of when I had the stills at 18mm I was getting the edge of the video wide angle lens in the picture and it was distracting. My plan for this year was to use the Really Right Stuff L bracket on the XTi and move it forward just enough to clear in the shots with a little buffer if needed for a wider still lens in the future. In looking at my Flat Top Pro I’m seeing issues with it that I’d like to resolve. The first is that it currently does not have a cutaway system and I’d like to put one on at some point. The cost for that is over $100 for just the parts. The second thing is that I almost lost the helmet a few years back because the riser slapped the release on the side and it was only since I felt it and grabbed the helmet while it was still on my head did I avoid losing it. There really is no clean way to retrofit a protection mechinism into the current design to allow for easy release when I want it off on the ground but still avoiding the riser slap issue. Bonehead redsigned the FTP to include a protection mechinism after reports from the field that the helmets were popping off so that issue is now addressed on their new helmets but it does not help me at all.

I was thinking about selling my FTP and then buying a new one to get the updated release protection, the built in cutaway system and the rest of the goodies but thats over $700 and I think I could only get $250-300 for mine now and thats a lot of money to pay for the upgrade. The other option I looked at was making a CCM, one of the custom fit helmet designs. Its got a lot of advantages namely that it loses all the foam since it is custom for my head off the top. The big disadvantage to it is that the parts to make it are upwards of $600 and it takes a LOT of work. It would be a 3-5 week project. I now see that SkySystems has came out with their Vapor design that uses a lot of stuff from the CCM design but it does not have a cutaway has an optional $25 “quick release”.It has some issues since I was planning on putting a flash on the L of mt FTP at some point but the Vapor does not have an L so I’m out of luck there.

I’m going to spend some time this week trying to figure out what to do with my helmet to protect my camera investments this year.