Headed to South Texas/ Simple Machines

So,  I'm at the tail end of our Sunday night ritual of late.  We join up with Matt and Nicole for dinner and then Mad Men and a cocktail (or two).  Lately, we've also added Boardwalk Empire to that formula, and it makes for a pretty good evening, I think.

Tomorrow I drive down to Brownsville in the afternoon, and then I'm talking to folks at UT Brownsville - Texas Southmost College on Wednesday.  On Wednesday I'm in Corpus Christi, and then I'll be home that evening.  Its some driving, but I've got two audio books from my book bucket list that I'm going to try to get through.

At any rate, between the game on Saturday, errands and the employment of a pulley AND going ahead and decorating for Halloween today (because, man, was the weather nice...), I don't have much in the way of an update.

Kudos to Jason and Jamie (and neighbor Chris) for helping us get the chairs onto the upstairs balcony. 

Last weekend, after thinking we might do this for about two years, we purchased some adirondack chairs on end-of-season closeout.  We have a second story balcony on the front of the house.

This is actually an old picture, but that's the front of our house.

For me, the upstairs balcony was a big selling point for the house.  Fall and Spring in Austin can be very, very nice (and parts of winter), and we've never had any good seating up there since we moved in (which was just about four years ago, when this picture was taken).

Anyhow, we got the chairs home, but when I carried them through the house, it turned out the chairs wouldn't actually fit through a standard-sized interior door.  So, back through the house they came.  We considered some different options, and in the end I called my father-in-law, who usually has some pretty good ideas about how to do this sort of thing. 

I'm not saying DocDik endorsed my plan to install an eyehook and hang a pulley from the hook, but he did add the crucial factor of "have someone stand downstairs and pull the chair away from the house with another rope" that kept me from just slamming the chair into the house.

Sure, the whole operation seemed a bit iffy, but there's a reason people employ pulleys in this day and age, and I can report "Operation Chair Lift" was a success.  Plus, now we got a pulley.

I'll be back soon enough.  No idea if I'll find time to check in with you guys.

Hope the weather is as beautiful there as its turning here.