Last week, Becky and I got to go on a hot air balloon ride from Woodinville. It was amazing. We really lucked out with great weather that day; it had been raining a couple of days prior, and most of the days since have been at least cloudy and cool.

Here are some of my favorite images from the flight. The yellow balloon was ours; the one with vertical stripes was the other half of the group we flew with.

Many of you have heard at least something about the struggle we’ve had getting our master bathroom remodeled. I won’t recount the whole saga here, but suffice it to say it’s been stressful. It is now, at last, done. (Well, 99.9% done — there are a couple of small things to finish up). I wouldn’t say I’d do it all over again, but it is definitely a huge improvement. Continue reading to see the before and after photos.

When we bought the house, the master bathroom was really bad.

Pink! The walls were pink, the ceiling was pink, the tile was pink, the blinds were pink, the shelves were pink. At least the toilet wasn’t pink! The floor was carpeted too. Who puts carpet in a bathroom???

Here is the layout of the bathroom as it was when we got it.

Before we moved in, we painted the walls white to tone down the pinkness. But we didn’t really have the time, energy or money to re-do the whole thing. So the pink tile, gross carpet and small shower stall remained. Late last year we finally decided to do something about it. Without really knowing anything about remodeling, I drew this layout.

That plan actually turned out to be pretty similar to the final result. The pocket door had to change out for a normal door because there were pipes and heating ducts in the way in the wall. The positioning of the tub is a little different, the heating vent went in a different spot and the shower door is in a different place. But other than that, the first design worked fairly well. Here’s what it ended up looking like.

It’s way better than the old bathroom. It’s not a huge room, and the new design wastes a lot less space. The heated floors are awesome. And I love the rain shower. Still, was it worth all the time and stress? Hard call…

I’ve yet to receive a paycheck…

Chris Barnes put together a tool that surfaces this data in real time. Good stuff. I actually have an interface that does the same thing, but I decided not to release it to the public (partially because I was too lazy to get it polished enough to not be embarrassed by it, and partially because I didn’t want Apple to get annoyed and shut off the data feed).

Here are some updated charts. (Previous graphs and trivia are here.)

The trick is that it seems to be showing current availability, even though the page is worded to make it sound like it’s showing the next day’s availability. So after the Apple Store has closed for the day, the only way that page is going to show phones as available is if they had some left over at the end of the day. If they’re getting more the next morning (as many stores have been), it won’t be reflected on that page. Of course, the page also doesn’t tell us how many phones are in stock — if it’s only one, you’re not going to have much luck getting it.

Anyway, I started collecting the data that the availability checker page shows a couple of days ago. If you can look beyond my embarrassingly bad Excel charting skills, these may be interesting (yes, I should be using Google Charts, but I wasn’t feeling patient enough to figure out how to make it do what I want, and gnuplot gives me a headache every time I use it). You’ll notice that stock goes down over the course of the day (i.e. stores run out of stock), then it spikes back up again in the morning.

Charts updated July 18 at 9:15PM PDT, the rest of this post reflects data as of the evening of July 17.

A few other interesting tidbits:

• Since I started collecting data, only one store has never shown as having any iPhones in stock: Lehigh Valley in Whitehall, PA.
• Many other stores have been mostly out of phones since I’ve been watching. The ten most neglected stores (besides Lehigh Valley) are, in order: Natick Collection (Natick, MA), Leawood (Leawood, KS), Bridge Street (Huntsville, AL), Deer Park (Deer Park, IL), Los Gatos (Los Gatos, CA), MacArthur Center (Norfolk, VA), South Hills Village (Pittsburgh, PA), Willowbrook Mall (Houston, TX), Bayshore (Glendale, WI) and West Towne (Madison, WI).
• No stores have been fully stocked with all three models all the time, but a few have come close. SoHo has been out of Black 16 since 7 PM PDT today, but has otherwise always had everything. Fifth Avenue was out of Black 16 for about 4 hours early this morning, but has been fully stocked the rest of the time. The rest of the top 10 best bets (in order) are: Lincoln Road (Miami Beach, FL), Stonestown (San Francisco, CA), North Michigan Avenue (Chicago), Manhattan Village (Manhattan Beach, CA), Century City (Los Angeles, CA), Lenox Square (Atlanta, GA), Oakridge (San Jose, CA) and UTC (San Diego, CA). Of course, these are just the “best bets” with respect to how often they have phones — line length (and comfort) is a whole different story…

If I have time, I’ll run these queries again next week when I have more data. Of course, this should all be taken with a grain of salt, since it’s only as accurate as the data Apple publishes on their availability web page. But it’s better than nothing.

For the record, Bellevue did have some 8GB models in stock, and an apparently minuscule number of white 16GBs, but no black 16GBs. I would have taken a white one, but I was told that there’s no way I’d get one given the number of people already in line. The line was estimated to be 3-4 hours (roughly half an hour before they opened).

So, no iPhone for me today. Maybe later this week, if I get lucky. I’m not holding my breath, though.

Update: I posted some more information about iPhone stock.

See me? I promise, that’s really me! This is from CMT Insider’s coverage of the Miranda Lambert fan club party.

If you want my autograph, email me, and I’ll see what we can work out…

We started the trip out with a visit to the Grand Ole Opry. We didn’t even go to the hotel first — straight from airport to Opry. That’s the way to start a vacation! It was a great lineup including Montgomery Gentry, Luke Bryan, Whispering Bill Anderson and Carrie Underwood. We were way up in the balcony because we delayed too long on buying tickets, but it was still incredible.

Sorry about the poor quality of the videos in this post — they were all taken with our little point and shoot Canon digicam, which isn’t a very good video camera.

The next day, we headed out to Greer Stadium for the City of Hope Celebrity Softball Challenge to watch some country stars and pro football players try to play softball. It was hot and there wasn’t much shade, but it was still a blast.

After the softball game, I got sick of lugging the SLR and lenses around in 95+ degree heat, so most of the rest of the pics were taken with the digicam. Sorry! The next day is when the festival really got under way. But first, we met up with Michael and Kari from Mad Dancer Media for lunch. After that, we got to go to the taping of the CMA Close Up show at the Ryman Auditorium, which will be on GAC next month. They interviewed Gretchen Wilson, Randy Travis and Taylor Swift. They were all very entertaining and nice. Taylor was, of course, the biggest reason we went, and she didn’t disappoint a bit.

The nightly concerts kicked off that night with a whole slew of awesome performances including Montgomery Gentry, Kellie Pickler, Luke Bryan, Jewel, Taylor Swift, and Sugarland. They were all incredible, seriously.

Over the next few nights, we were blown away by a whole bunch of other amazing acts including Miranda Lambert, Lady Antebellum, Faith Hill, Keith Urban, Rascal Flatts, Carrie Underwood, Little Big Town, Rodney Atkins, Trace Adkins, Randy Travis, Sara Evans, and Dwight Yoakam. Alan Jackson was a big highlight for me.

Friday was a very fun day. First, we went to the Miranda Lambert fan club (Ran Fans) party. Not only did we see a great acoustic set by Miranda and get to meet her and get a photo, but we got to meet her dog Delilah! Then we met up with Russell for the first time and he took us over to a listening party for Faith Hill’s upcoming Christmas album. It sounds awesome — if you’re into Christmas music, you’ll definitely want to pick it up when it comes out. At the party, we got to meet Sandra (oh, and Faith too ).

On Saturday, we got to meet Taylor. She was very sweet, especially considering how long she’d been there (and how many more hours she had ahead of her).

We also got to check out (and hold) the famous guitar from the Our Song video.

Sunday night after the nightly show, we headed over to meet up with Russell and Sandra at the Lady Antebellum fan club party. We both already loved Lady A, but they truly blew us away with their performance at the party. WOW!!! After they played, we got to meet them and get a picture.

Monday was an awesome day. Russell picked us up and showed us all around the Nashville area. We got to see so much cool stuff, I can’t even list it all. But one highlight for me was eating lunch at the Loveless Cafe. I usually don’t even like biscuits, but I’ve been craving those Loveless biscuits ever since we left!

We also got to see the WSM tower, which was really neat.

That evening, Russell and Sandra took us to dinner at a great local place. The two of them really went out of their way to make our trip special, and we can’t thank them enough for it!

All in all, it was one of the best trips we’ve had in a long time. If you’re into country music at all, I definitely recommend trying to go to CMA Fest at least once. It’s hot, there are a lot of people, but it’s an experience that can’t be replicated anywhere else.

See? Cool!

See? Hot!

See? Even hotter!

I know I’m a major geek, but it’s very fun to be able to instantly tell the temperature of anything in the house. I can tell how cold different areas of the fridge are. I can tell how hot different parts of the oven or grill are. I can see how hot the gear in the entertainment center is getting. Nifty! Apparently this is really supposed to be some sort of automotive tool, but I doubt I’ll actually ever use it for that kind of thing.

Since I’m in the process of seeing how hot different things are, I’ll do this last one. Just for you, Jennifer