Workers came by our house today to replace all the gutters. They climbed on the roof and made a lot of racket pulling all the old ones off. In the meantime a guy that stayed at the truck was making brand-new gutters with a gutter machine! At first sight I thought another guy was pushing the new gutter out of the truck, but upon closer inspection the gutter was much longer than the truck. They were being generated by a gutter machine! These machines can make seamless gutters on the fly from a large roll of aluminum and they are the state-of-the-art machinery for every gutter professional. I suppose that they can make gutters this way as long as they want, or at least as long as there is aluminum available in the truck. Here’s a video I found on YouTube of one of these machines in action. This is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen!

The last few months we’ve had to make do with the standard broadcast television stations. Using the built-in antenna in our Vizio TV we’ve been able to get about 15 channels including CBS, NBC and ABC for free. I’ve been really impressed by the quaility of these free HD channels. I am blown away by the details when we watch our favorite shows like Lost and 30 Rock. Now that we’re moving into another house we’ve decided to sign up for Comcast high speed internet and try out their cable TV as well. Costs for this is going to be around $80 per month of which $40 is for the digital starter TV package. It’s one of their smallest packages with only about a hundred channels. We have seriously thought of not getting cable TV and only watch our free broadcast channels and our favorite shows online. We’ll give this a try and cancel the TV package if we’re not watching it enough. More »

Today our Wingscapes Birdcam captured a Common Redpoll snacking on nyger seed among the usual American Goldfinches. This is the 15th bird to be snapped by the birdcam. These birds are usually sparse in Northern Illinois but this area is seeing a finch invasion this winter. How cool is that?

This just in: Academy Award winner Kevin Costner, who played in baseball movies Field of Dreams and Bull Durham, is part of a baseball team ownership group that has selected Zion IL, right here in Lake County, as the site for a new Northern League baseball team!

The minor league team, which is still to be named, will begin playing in May 2010. Construction on a new stadium will start this summer. The new team will play in the Northern League. There will be an upcoming Name the Team Contest, where fans will be involved in submitting name entries, with lucky winners chosen among the entries.

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Woodstock Willie, Chicagoland’s most famous weather prognosticator, saw his shadow today in Woodstock and predicted six more weeks of winter. 🙁 The ceremony on Woodstock Square took place this morning shortly after 7am, after several days of events including a tour of the filming sites. Willie emerged from his tree stump (after we saw his handler put him in 15 minutes earlier, and the groundhog almost escaped!) and gave the bad news to Woodstock Mayor ­Brian Sager.

Mayor Brian Sager finds out if Willie saw his shadow

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(continued from part 1) So we were waiting outside the Opera House for the tour of the filming sites in Woodstock and at 1:25pm we were still the only ones there. A police officer of the WPD confirmed that we were in the right place for the tour, but where was everybody? Then all of a sudden people poured out of the Opera House, where they had been for a Chili Cookoff, as they do in Punxutawney. There were about 50 people in the tour, which was led by Bob Hutchins, the location manager of Groundhog Day. He gave us a great insight in the filming of the movie and all the different filming locations in Woodstock. First off he explained how they chose the town of Woodstock.

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Today we went to Woodstock for Groundhog Days. Since the movie Groundhog Day with Bill Murray was filmed in Woodstock, the town has been celebrating the days leading up to the February 2nd holiday with events inspired by the movie. We participated in an awesome walking tour of the filming sites with Bob Hutchins, who was location manager for the movie, and at 10:00 this morning we saw a free show of the movie Groundhog Day at Woodstock Theater.

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Today we signed the lease on our new place in Round Lake Beach. Round Lake Beach is a village in the north of Lake County IL with a population (in 2007) of 27,959 people. There are a lot of lakes around, so that part of the name makes sense, but I’m not sure yet what the ‘beach’ is all about. It sounds like a sunny place in Florida, but believe me it is very cold there right now. We found a nice new-ish house with a garage, 3 bedrooms and a large yard. We’re going to be pretty busy the next couple of weeks moving our stuff, buying more stuff and decorating our new home with all of the stuff.

Did you know that Tutankhamum wore flip-flops? This picture is from the Tutankhamun collection in the back of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, which we visited in 2003. And check out those solid-gold toe protectors. Those don’t really compare to the Gold Toe socks at Kohl’s. All this fancy footwear was recovered by archeologist Howard Carter in 1922 when he uncovered the tomb of the famous young pharaoh. The flip flop is probably the world’s oldest shoe. From pharaohs in ancient Egypt to celebrities in Hollywood, everyone seems to love them.

Yesterday I received in the mail our I-Pass transponder for the Illinois Tollway. The I-Pass is a little electronic box that we’ll attach to the windshield of our car. It allows you to drive through toll booths on toll roads without stopping, and you only pay half of the normall toll. If normally you have to pay $0.80 when you pass a toll then with the I-Pass it’ll only take $0.40 off your pre-paid account. Pretty good deal, and the transponder is basically free. You pay a $10 deposit for the device and have to charge it with $40 to start off. What could possibly go wrong?

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