Wow, it's been a month since I last wrote. Well, things have not progressed as fast as they once did. After all the frantic work we put into the house prior to moving in we decided to stop killing ourselves and to enjoy life a little bit again.

We decided to treat ourselves and took a weekend off from house work. We decided that working on the house every night during the week was not very relaxing, so we don't do that anymore.

I feel much more relaxed and we have gone back to doing the things we love. We cook on the grill in the backyard, we take walks around the neighborhood, and we actually watch TV! Not just TV but we broke down and got a satellite dish for the NFL package.

What an ordeal that was, idiot 1 and trainee show up from DirecTV and decide the only place they can put the dish and have it get good reception is in the corner of the lot even though the corner of the roof by the driveway has a clear shot of the Southern sky, above the tree line. They try to find a temporary place to put the dish until they come back out and do it permanently so they install the dish on the huge tree in the front yard. Yes, you read that right. The dish was drilled into the tree in the front yard.

We laughed at how ridiculous the thing looked but the tree somewhat hid the fact we have a dish screwed to it.

Our reception was pretty mediocre. If you farted near the dish we would loose the signal. If you have been reading this you know we like to do it ourselves so we decided to see what we could do about this crappy signal. Rob went out to the tree and moved the dish about while I yelled out how strong the signal is. After a while I started to feel like one of those 'callers' at an auction: "I got a 50, 50, 50 now a 65 we are at 65%, 20 we are at 20, 20, 29 WAIT there's a 70! Don't move. What did you do? Rats, we're at 20,20,20."

We couldn't get the reception any better and actually made it worse. We would up having to call customer service which was the best thing we ever did. After a lengthy conversation with them, we found out the correct coordinates for the dish to face and with the help of a compass we headed out to the front yard to do something about the satellite dish on our majestic tree. 226 degrees is the magic number for us.

We paced around the house and realized that the best spot for the dish is not on the tree, it's by the driveway ... EXACTLY WHERE I TOLD THE DISH GUYS I WANTED THE DAMN THING IN THE FIRST PLACE! We took a 2x4, left over from the bathroom remodeling, and hammered it into the ground and c-clamed it onto the chain link fence. Then we screwed the satellite dish into the 2x4. After some simple adjustments we get incredible reception. Before we moved the dish we were at 50% most of the time, now we are consistently at 90-100%; and we have a lovely new piece of modern art in the front of our house. We call it 'Edgewater Style' sometimes we refer to the 2x4/Satellite dish art as 'Sylvan Shores' but all in all, we are pleased with how clear every Dallas and Raider game comes in with very little interruption. If only the Raiders could complete a pass....