Monday, December 04, 2006

Great Home for Sale in Talus / Issaquah, WA 98027

Here are some pictrures of the home we are selling in the Talus neighborhood of Issaquah, WA.
For more information on this house, please send mail to: samiller@pobox.com


Click on any picture for a larger view.



The House on a Beautiful Fall Day:

The Main Living area:


The Front Entry:


The Main Living area and Kitchen:


The Backyard on a Summer Day:


A cold Winter Morning dawns over Tiger Mountain summit (viewed from a Bedroom):

A snowy day in Issaquah:

Friday, December 01, 2006

Cone-y Island

See the funniest thing to hit the Internet since Dancing Hamsters!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8bOzijedBU

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

A cold and snowy day in Seattle

Seattle got it's once a year snow this week; a chance for us New England expatriots to remember what winter is like for the old folks at home :) I realized today that six inches of snow in Seattle is the equivalent of the Blizzard of 78 in Boston... businesses were closed and people abandoned their cars on the side of the road.

The day dawned cold and frosty. For those of you keeping score, this picture of the sunrise was taken at 8:56 AM when the sun was just coming up.




Sue dusted off the snow shovel and gave it a go. This picture of Sue was taken at 1PM and the sun was approaching the horizon... we get sunset around 3pm. This is exaggerated by the mountains around us, but it is still a pretty short day.

The one saving grace of the cold weather is that it made the sky clear out and we had some nice sunshine.









Saturday, November 11, 2006

What 10,000 cubic feet of water per second looks like

This week we went up to Snoqualamie Falls to see how it looked after the flooding rains from last week. It was an amazing torrent of water (which isn't done justicew by my cell phone camera :)

Thursday, November 09, 2006

My Life in the Junk Shops

So, we've been spending a lot of time in Junk Shops this week; Sue is looking for a couple of small things to use when we "stage" the house to sell. These shops are also known as "antique" shops...

I'm coming to the realization that my childhood is now officially classified as "antique". Every shop we'd wander into, I'd find myself saying... "hey, we used to have one of those in our house....". Two notable cases stopped me in my tracks....

Number 1) The Fisher Price Barn, complete with all animals and a "mooooo" sound when you opened the door:




Number 2) the exact same table and chairs that we have painted with our names (well, my name anyway...:)





















Monday, November 06, 2006

The best historical perspective on Terrorism

Last month I read this article in the NY Times describin the parallels between events that occurred in ancient Rome and our curent times. Way back then, pirates attacked and burned the city of Ostia. The leadership at the time used it as an excuse to implement broad "emergency" powers and ultimately chase the senate out of Rome.

http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F30E16FA3C540C738FDDA00894DE404482

Sunday, June 11, 2006

What the Northwest does on a sunny summer weekend....

Today we had our first sunny day since I can't remember when.... On Saturday Sue and I heard what sounded like an amazing drag race happening down the hill. It went on all day and I finally realized what it was... Hydroplane racing at Lake Sammammish. On Sunday we went down to check it out. Here are some pictures (click on any picture to get a larger view)

OK.. I have a soft spot for the car shows... this was one of the cooler old cars, a Dodge Super Bee

The Hydroplane Pits:



I have to admit that the best thing we saw all day was a juvenile Blad Eagle who was cruising the water front and occasionally dipping into the water for his lunch...



Lifting the boats out onto the water when they raced



There were a lot of family teams



Here I am in front of one of the old boats










Monday, May 22, 2006

Sue's New Ride



We picked up a new Camry yesterday to replace the old grey mare (i.e. Avalon) .

Friday, May 19, 2006

The Rocket Bike

A long weekend in the Bay Area gave us a chance to get together with Dan. Besides some great meals (including breakfast at La Note and Jimmy Beans, our two favorite place in Berkeley to have breakfast) we got to see Dan's latest creation, the fixed gear bike he built from scratch this winter.

You can click on any of these pictures and get a larger view


Dan, Jake and Julia after their bike ride to the playground:



This is the crank and bottom bracket that Dan and I got at Recycled Cycles in Seattle when he was up for Christmas



The Completed Bike:



Not sure why Eric inserted the Boy Scout walking stick....





Sunday, April 16, 2006

Easter In Taipei

Rachel turned the locals on to Peeps:

Saturday, April 15, 2006

The Skagit Tulip Farms



We took a ride up north to an area that is famous for it's flower farms. Here are a couple of pictures. It sure would have been nicer if the fr*ckin rain would have let up..... (click on the picture to see a larger image)

One project finished....



We've been working for a while now to get some cabinets added to a space in our house (call it our Living Room...). Today the last bits were finally completed and we've been been moving stuff in. Here are some pictures. Some of you might notice that this looks an awful lot like a bar... well, it's not... it's just storage for all our, um, liquor and glasses...

Saturday, March 11, 2006


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Building a Home Theater PC (pt1)

This note shows my latest project, building a Home Theater PC. This device will sit with the stereo, in the living room. I am going to rip all of my CD music to this box and use it as a jukebox. We'll also use it to play Internet Radio and for ripping and playing DVD movies. I will be putting all of my pictures on this PC. The PC has a 64 Bit AMD 3800 processor, 3 WD 250 Gig drives configured in a RAID5 configuration (that assures that a loss of any single disk will not result in any lost data.
















The case looks like a Stereo device (click on a picture to enlarge it)















This is the motherboard. The AMD processor is snapped into it's socket in the center of this picture














Here is the Motherboard in place with some of the connections in place. Because so much is packed into a small case, cooling is a big deal. there is an 80MM fam up in the front and 2 60MM fans in the back.

Girl Scout Cookie Time!

Today we went to a Volunteer Fair at the Town Building in Issaquah. Sue met the quintesential Girl Scout (pictured center with about a zillion badges on her vest) and bought our annual cookie allotment. Mmmmm, Samoas :)

Sunday, March 05, 2006

The Car Ferry







Sue and I took a road trip around the end of Puget Sound yesterday, with a return trip via the Car Ferry. The boat took us from Bremerton into downtown Seattle. Ferries are a pretty common way of getting around this area. For our ride, we just pulled into the pier, paid our $10 and waited to drive onto the boat. The ride was about an hour long and wound in and out through the sound. Sue hung out in the car. It was a beautiful day with great views of Mount Rainier and the city of Seattle:

Friday, March 03, 2006

A wonderful day in our neighborhood

Today was a nice sunny day in Washington. I thought it would be nice to start to record some of the daily life to help our far away family stay in touch with things around here.

This weekend, I'm going to get a few things done. My prediction:
- Get a few mile hike in
- Ride my Bike
- Get to the Gym
- Drive a bucket of balls
- order parts for a media center pc to build
- Write a letter in french to my nephew/pen pal Aiden
- Look into New York travel

Let's see how many of these things get done :)

Sunday, February 26, 2006