All I Want For Christmas is to Not Get Stitches! Oops, too late.

Hey everyone. So today for work I drove to Albany to pick up some more steel for a hammock that we're working on, and I get back to work and think to myself, "Should I get the steel out of the back of the truck first, or should I go eat lunch?" I decided I was hungry enough to eat lunch first, so I parked the truck by the studio and walked down to the house to eat. After lunch, I'm walking back up to the studio to get the steel out of the truck, looking down as I walked in case there was some ice or something I could slip on, when out of nowhere the steel decides it's going to hit me in the mouth. It hurt like hell, so I put my hand to mouth and ran my tongue along my teeth to make sure none of my teeth fell out, thankful that they were all still there. I pulled my hand away and quickly realized that almost my entire hand was covered in blood. I ran inside the studio and into Colleen, who heard the war cry the steel let out before it decided to gash my mouth open. I grabbed a towel and we headed to the family practice in Stamford where Colleen's Aunt works. Unfortunately, she wasn't in, but the other doctor was, so I got 3 stitches in my lower lip and a tetanus shot, and an order to eat soft foods for the next few days. Only soft foods?!?! Normally that wouldn't be a problem, but with Christmas in two days that's going to be really difficult. At least I get the stitches out on Friday, unless Aunt Sue looks at them before then and takes them out earlier. I was going to post a picture of the stitches, but they're pretty gross looking so I decided not to. Our friends Grace and Chris came and visited a couple weekends ago. It was pretty cool. We saw a coyote one morning when we were out for a walk and it scared Grace. It was kinda funny. Here are a couple pictures from that:




Hope everyone has a good Christmas!

New House

Hey everyone, here are some pictures of our "new" house that we're living in. Part of the house was built in the 1850's, then the rest of it was built around the 1870's. It's 3 floors, 8 rooms, two bathrooms, a living room, dining room, and a kitchen. It's pretty sweet. Colleen and I have two rooms that connect on the first floor, so we have a bedroom and our own private living room area. Our friend and "landlady" that we're living with teaches in Brooklyn for most of the week, so we pretty much have the run of the place. We're going to help her do some work on the house, our first project is helping her get one of the bathrooms ready to get the rest of the stuff installed in it. We'll be knocking a wall down to make room for a washer and dryer, and we're going to sand the floor to get that ready for some new tile to be laid. We're really excited. There's 26 acres for us to play on, plus a pond that will hopefully provide some swimming fun once it gets warm again. That's about it for now.


This is the front of the house from across the road. Some of the windows were being replaced today so didn't want to take too many photos of the front of the house just in case you all thought I was living in a house with no windows in part of it. So, as soon as the windows are done, I'll take a couple more pictures of the front.
Here's the back of the house from in front of the pond.
This is from a little ways up the hill behind the house. You can see part of the pond through the trees in the photo.
This one is looking from one edge of the pond towards the back of the house.

Nothing much

Hey all, nothing much is happening here. We're moving at the end of November in to a sweet, huge house that a friend of ours owns. It's 3 stories, quite a few bedrooms, and Colleen has gotten into the habit of telling everyone that it's haunted. It isn't, at least I don't think so, but it could be. But it is pretty big, and our friend teaches in Brooklyn for most of the week, so she's not here all that often. We're going to help her do some work on the house, and we'll get to save lots of money! I'll take a picture of it when we move in. Most of you will probably think it really is haunted, since all the trees here have no more leaves left and everything's gray and brown, so it probably won't look like the best house in the world, but it really is. We got 10-12 inches of snow a couple weeks ago, which was pretty insane. Our poor little car didn't like the snow too much, but it did fine. Funny thing though, it's almost impossible to find snow tires for our car. The Toyota dealer doesn't have them, and neither does the garage in town. So that's my fun project for this weekend while Colleen's working at the candle-makers. It hasn't got above about 45 for the past few weeks, and we've been getting a lot of rain. That's pretty much it. Nothing too exciting, but at least it's better than pneumonia, right Mel?

Lots-o-Pictures

Hi everyone. Today I went hiking by myself and had a grand old time. Only did a few miles, but it was a really pretty day, about 74, so it was nice to get out of the house.
These first 3 are from a from a trail called "Vromans Nose", that was pretty steep but not very long and it had ncie views from the top. The only issue was all the people from NYC and New Jersey, most of whom were rather loud and obnoxious. There were three people on the trail who were drinking beer while they walked. It kinda made me mad but at least they weren't littering.


The one above and below are from this place called The Old Stone Fort, which was built in 1772. They had all the really old gas powered hydraulic pumps and saws that were really neat.
The rest of the pictures are from a place called Mine Kill State park. Apparently over here "kill" is another word for creek or stream. This was the first place I went this morning, about 9:30, and there wasn't a single other person in the park that I could see. It was really quiet and peaceful compared to the Vromans Nose hike I did later in the day.

This is one of about 20 deer I saw today moving through the park. This one and 5 or 6 others weref walking about 20 feet off the trail in the same direction that the trail was moving. At one point the trail got really thick and wooded, adn there were signs everywhere saying to keep out except for the purpose of bowhunting, and I got scared and turned around. I mean, who wants to get shot by a bow on a freaking nature hike? Not me. Luckily, there were plenty of other trails around that I could go on that didn't have signs, so I felt relatively safe.


This is Mine Kill Falls. The turnoff for this is about 1/4 mile down the road from the park entrance, so this is the first place I stopped at. I went back around noon to walk down to the lower part of the falls and sit and have a snack bu there were way too many people there, so I didn't stop.






These last two are of a covered bridge that was built in the mid-1800's, I think. In case you can't read the sign says "$5.00 finr to ride or drive this bridge faster than a walk". It was pretty cool.

Some fun pictures

Hi everyone. Colleen's grandparents were last week and these are some pictures from the weekend. It was Uncle Don's birthday party on Saturday, so we all went to over to Aunt Sue's house for dinner. I worked on Sunday morning for some friends and so these first few photos are from Colleen hanging out at Joan's house on Sunday morning.


Joan and the kids have been keeping some caterpillars in a little thing in the house and a couple of them hatched on Sunday.This is Vera, Joans daughter.
Here's Joan and Don. I guess they were looking at a butterfly on the roof. But it almost looks like they're looking beyond, into space or something. That's the barn at their house behind them. It used to be the biggest barn in Schoharie County, which is saying a lot because they're are a lot of big barns around.


Here's Colleen's grandmother Nana and I looking at something. I think we were talking about trees.
If you look closely in this picture you can see Natalie and Lane waving back at me.
This is the view from Aunt Sues house.
Here we all having dinner at Sues house. It was and supposedly hats were required but not everyone followed the rule.
This is Aunt Sue, Lane, and Sue's dog Georgette.

Pumpkin Race

Hi everyone. We haven't been up to much the past couple weeks, so there really hasn't been anything exciting to post until now. On Sunday we drove up to Cooperstown where each year they have a big pumpkin festival. On Saturday they weighed the pumpkins and handed our ribbons and such, then on Sunday they carve all these massively huge pumpkins and hollow them out and race them on the lake. They use kayak paddle and people actually get in the pumpkins. I took some photos of the race but they didn't turn out so well, then I remembered that we can take video on our camera, so I recorded some of the race, and that's below. It was pretty sweet.







Then last night, Monday, we went over to a friends house to watch a presentation by this woman Elie, who spent 6 months on a research vessel in the Arctic in the middle of winter. Frozen in the ice and drifting where ever the ice wanted to drift. It was pretty interesting. We were her test audience, as she'll be giving the presentation in New York City, Paris, and Oslo, Norway in the coming months. I'm not sure what she does, she's not a scientist, but she travels alot all over the place. Anyways, that's what we've been up to.

Hi everyone.

So last weekend we finished the showtime house project. It's a $22 million, too many rooms to count four story with an elevator amazing house. Unfortunately, no pictures yet, bu you can go to: http://www.sho.com/site/showtimehouse/home.do and check it out. They have some videos and stuff of some of the rooms, so it's pretty interesting. The opening party was on Tuesday, Colleen and I stayed here and babysat our bosses daughter for the night while they were down in NYC at the opening party. One of our bosses, Tiffany, does some work for this company called The Brelli, which makes bio-degradable umbrellas, and the head of that company went with them and brought her good friend Jamie Lee Curtis along for fun. Our bosses said that everyone was trying to kiss her butt at the party but she wasn't really paying attention from what we heard. Anyways, they had fun, and we had fun playing with their daughter. On labor day we went for a little walk and here are some pictured from it. Other than that, we're not up to much. Getting excited for our concert on Wednesday night, which I hope will be alot of fun. Bye for now.

Tired of driving

Hi everyone! Sorry it's been a while, but we've been super busy at work the past couple weeks so we haven't had a chance to do very many exciting things.

Last Friday my boss and I went to Boston to deliver a 600lb piece of coal at a clients house. Boston is only about 4 hours away, so it was a pretty nice day trip. Unfortunately, didn't get to see much of the city, the house we went to was sort of on the outskirts of Boston.

Then on Monday, we had to drive to Purchase, NY, to the university their to pick up a piece of coal and a couple chairs that our boss had in a furniture show. We had to drop our boss of at the train station so he could make a meeting he had in NYC, then Colleen and I had to drive to the university to pick everything up then drive back home.

We went to NYC yesterday(Saturday) for work to start a project. The TV channel Showtime is doing this thing where they find a house and then bring in some interior designers to design a room in the house according to a specific Showtime show. The shows for this one are Dexter, Weeds, Californication, The L Word, The Tudors, and I think a couple others but I'm not sure what they are. Even though our boss isn't an interior designer, the owner of the house wanted us involved, so we're doing a red rug made out of felt, going up 3 flights of stairs, and a couple other things that kind of tie in to a couple of other designer's rooms. We packed up the truck Saturday morning, drove down, hung out for a couple hours, went to dinner and had some drinks, then went to bed. We got up this morning and went to the house, only to discover that the stairs, and most of the other areas where we needed to work weren't even close to being finished yet. So we left. And drove home. We'll go back this Friday and do everything. It kinda sucked, but we had REALLY good Indian food for dinner, so it was worth it.

So we'll be back Friday for a couple days, then the following Tuesday, the 9th, we have to go back down to NYC to babysit our bosses daughter so they can go to the opening night at the Showtime house. Unless we can talk them into leaving her here with us at their house, but we'll see. Then Colleen and I are going a concert in NYC on the 17th. We going to see The Mars Volta, I don't know how many of you have heard of them, I think they kick arse but I think most people who read this won't like them. Anyways, so that's been our fun the past few weeks. OH yea, Colleen also got our new work website up and running, www.jimzivicdesign.com She did a majority of the photos, and did the layout and a bunch of other stuff that made me glad I was in the welding shop most of the time since I had no idea what was going on. So that's our life. The weather has turned around from lots of rain a couple weeks ago to being about 80 and sunny for the next week or so, which is nice. Sorry no pictures this time, hopefully I'll do something soon. Take care all.

Fun Hiking Day

Hi everyone. We went a nice hike today, on a pretty steep trail, but it was a lot of fun. About 6 miles total. Here's some photos, and a picture of our new car.

Well here it is

Hi there. I guess I'm part of the bandwagon now, too. I was going to call it Curtis Family New York, but, since Colleen's last name isn't Curtis and technically, we don't have a family, I thought it just wouldn't work. Then I was going to have the address be "bensandjeremysblogssuck.blogspot.com", but then I thought the joke would get old after a while, and no one likes and old joke. "There once was a man from Nantucket...."

Anyways, we got a new car on Wednesday, a 2008 Scion Xd. In case some of you didn't know Toyota bought our Tacoma back from us for $12,997.50. I could just say $13,000 but I'm miffed that we missed out on that $2.50. It took them a month and a half to get our check to us, and in the meantime they gave us a 2008 Toyota Highlander Hybrid to drive. It can seat 8 people, with leather seats and wood trim. It was cool that they gave us something so nice to drive, but it was a pain the butt keeping that clean after working out in the welding shop most days. But, it's all over now. I'll post a picture of it tomorrow. It's too dark right now and it's raining to take a picture of it. The pictures I do have to post are the final pictures from the loft project that we finished last week.



Here I am getting pieces of the floor set in. It took 28 pieces of 1"x3" hollow steel tubing to make the floor. We had to set each piece in and then attach it to the frame with a screw to the little piece of tubing that's under my left arm if you can see it. The only problem was that each piece needed to be 12' long, and we can only fit things up to 11' in the freight elevator at the building, and only 9' into our work truck, so we had to cut each piece. So that made 56 pieces just for the floor, plus we had the stairs, railing, and a couple of other pieces of steel, plus all of our tools and ladders that we had to carry up. We took the freight elevator to the roof and then had to carry everything up two more flights of stais to get to the people's apartment. It was pretty cool though.


This is just a funny picture that Colleen took.


Here I am doing something. I think I was marking the floor where the support beams were so we knew where to put the screws.



Here's me and our boss Jim, making sure we cut the top part of the railing before we attached. Thankfully, we did. The entire structure is steel, and we glued leather to the flat parts of the railing.


Here's the (almost) finished floor and the inside part of the railing. We'll be making a felt rug to go on most of the floor, and the woman wants us to build her a desk that will go along the railing on the left side of the photo.

These are the stais. It's actually more of a ladder, they're pretty steep, but we had to work with the space we were given. The thing on each stair is a piece of suede with rubber glued to it and then the whole thing is glued to each stair. We had to build the stairs a the studio up here, since we wouldn't have had the time or the equipment down in NYc to do it there. We originally made it as one whole unit, but then decided that since it weighed close to 500lbs or more that we should cut it in half and then bolt the two pieces together when we got there. he only thing that sucked was that we had to bolt them together and then lift them up to attach to the frame, but it was still better than carrying the whole thing up.


And here is the finished product.

So I hope you all like my first post. I'll try and remember to take a picture of our car tomorrow, plus hopefully we'll be launching our new work website which Colleen designed and built almost all on her own. And she took almost all of the photos for it, and it turned out really nice, so maybe I'll remember to send you the web address for that so you can look at it and see what she's been up to the last 3 months.