JAMES MULLETT

Decorating for the Holidays

This is the first year since we’ve moved away from our Valley Trails house that we’ve had the opportunity to fully decorate the house. Abriana helped Cynthia decorate the Christmas tree this year. Abriana had the honors of placing the star (a ceramic gingerbread cookie snowflake) on the tree this year. Unfortunately, it was far to heavy for the tree, so it drooped over. I ended up replacing it with a lighter silver plastic star.

Home theatre installation

I finally got around to replacing our 5 ton 32″ television with a new 52″ Sony Bravia LCD television. I ended up getting a Yamaha 7.1 Surround Sound receiver, Sony Blue Ray player, Yamaha iPOD docking station, IR Repeater system, In-ceiling speakers, Yamaha subwoofer, external speaker volume control, and external speakers to go with it. It turns out I had to throw in a 2.1 channel 200 watt amplifier from AudioSource in order to get my external speakers to work on zone 2 of the receiver. Here is a picture of the back of the new TV along w/all the boxes for the new components. The dinosaur TV is in the back.

I was going to do all of the installation myself, but it looked like it was going to be too daunting of a task. I found a guy advertising on Craigslist that he would install/mount the television for $250. That was a great price, so I figured I’d give him a chance, although I was a bit skeptical. After all, contractors in San Antonio are extremely dishonest, lazy, incompetent, and unreliable… throw in the fact that I found him on Craigslist and we have all the ingredient’s for a disaster.

To make a long story short, Jeff (The guy advertising on Craigslist) did an exceptional job, was always on time, did everything he promised he’d do, was not satisfied until everything was perfect, and kept the work site clean. I would highly recommend him to anyone.

We had some big challenges to overcome. Mainly, the in-ceiling speaker wires were hidden behind drywall and were not found were we expected to find them. I ended up cutting 7 holes in the ceiling in order to find where the builder had buried the wires. Trying to find these wires probably burned an entire day, but Jeff remained extremely patient. You can see the holes I made in the ceiling in the picture below:

Another big challenge, was that the builder did not terminate any of the component cables, so Jeff had to terminate them before he could install the wall plates for the patch cables. Here’s a picture of the wall plates; however, it was not complete yet at this stage.

We also had some electrical challenges that Jeff helped me resolve — hence the two circles above the 4 gang electrical outlet.

Here’s the wall with the mount bracket before the television was hung.

After the television was hung and after I installed the wall shelfs.

I plugged the holes I made using the slugs from the drill bit. I will have my friend patch this up when he paints the house. When he’s done, you’ll never be able to tell there were holes in the ceiling.

I ordered this audio/video cabinet online and assembled it when it arrived. I was up until 2am assembling it.

I ordered the IR repeater kit online as well. This is a project I completed myself a couple weeks after the television was hung. Now we can point all 5 of our remote controls to the center of the TV to control all the components.

Project complete! I think it will look a lot better once we get some color on the walls (probably should have done that first).

Polar Express 2008

We visited our time-share this November up near Tyler Texas. We only stayed the weekend, but had a pretty good time. There is an in-door water park inside the resort (not really designed for small children). The highlight of our trip was the Polar Express. Inspired by the movie, many railways all over the United States host a similar train ride. The train picks us up in a small town about an hour south of Tyler, then takes us to the North Pole. We each received our golden train ticket, you can see the conductor taking the ticket from Abriana in order to punch a “B” into it (I’m assuming it stands for “Believe”). Throughout the train ride, there is music, dancing, and hot cocoa. Once we reached the North Pole, we had picked up Santa Claus for the journey back, he handed out single jingle-bells to each of the children.