Everybody Dance Now! (The Remix)

So the verification process through google videos is complete. So now I present, the video here that I worked and slaved on that no one else likes! Oh, and as a word of caution, Ginger suggested I post this:

WARNING: READ BEFORE PLAYING

A very small percentage of individuals may experience epileptic seizures when exposed to certain light patterns or flashing lights. Exposure to certain patterns or backgrounds on a computer screen may induce an epileptic seizure in these individuals. Certain conditions may induce previously undetected epileptic symptoms even in persons who have no history of prior seizures or epilepsy.

If you, or anyone in your family, have an epileptic condition, consult your physician prior to playing. If you experience any of the following symptoms while playing the video -- dizziness, altered vision, eye or muscle twitches, loss of awareness, disorientation, any involuntary movement, or convulsions -- IMMEDIATELY discontinue play and consult your physician before resuming play.

Not that we've got that out the way, it's also worth noting that before Google ran it through their mojo machine the video was 23 meg, so I don't know how big or how much bandwidth this googlized version will require. If you're on dialup, you may not want to hit play.



My eyes! The goggles do nothing!

I Came In Dead Last

Today started out nasty with rain and fog, but progressively got better as the day went along. It never got to where it was as nice as yesterday though. I think low 50s was as high as the temperature made it. Catherine had ballet today (as always on Tuesdays). Today was also the last day for us to decide whether we would continue to have Quinn attend the Montessori school next year (if he goes into public schools, he would be starting kindergarten). It was actually a tough choice. Pay for him to continue at the school where he appears to be learning, or stick him into the free public education system to socialize with other kids that will be in his classes from here on out. One the one hand, there are some assimilation issues that attending kindergarten would help him in his adjustment such as getting into the cliques that will be formed later (or I guess the alternative is he may get ostracized from those cliques early on). And there's the free thing, and anyone that knows me will attest, paying for stuff is my kryptonite. On the other hand, he's learning a lot in Montessori school, so we would hate to suddenly interrupt that (don't get me wrong, he's not going to be designing rocket ships in the next year or anything, but he is learning to write his letters, phonetically spell words, and starting on reading). In case you can't tell, we decided to keep him in the Montessori school for another year.

After school the kids came home and made some pictures for Pop Pop for his birthday (Pop Pop, if you read this, try and act surprised when they give them to you). Ginger said they also played some with their lace vehicles. When I got home, Quinn had just woken up and was watching a Little Einstein episode with his Mom. Once that was over and Catherine woke up, we played Candy Land again before dinner (we played it last night too). I was actually getting frustrated with the game last night just because it becomes a hassle to have the game progress. Catherine will take a card, and once you explain the color to her, she takes a long time to move her piece, so Quinn will get impatient and start to move it for her, and this invariably leads a screaming match. Tonight though, Catherine was playing at their new Play Doh table and not playing the game (until halfway through the second game where she took over for Ginger). The first game was just me and Quinn, and he trounced me. And this time he didn't cheat. Last night he would try to get a new card if he didn't get a card he liked. The second game Ginger joined us and Quinn won that one also. I came in dead last, I kept getting the special cards for the places I had already passed. As Quinn pointed out "Daddy, you keep going backwards." I guess it's only fair, since I had won the game last night.

After dinner (low budget meal tonight, cheese sandwiches and canned soups) Ginger suggested we should Catherine the dance video I had made. She didn't like it either. I believe her quote was "It's broken, we need to fix it." Probably because of the flashing. So far no one likes the video. I guess I shouldn't quit my day job to become a video editor just yet. After that we went to see if we could fix Quinn's race track that had come apart. Unfortunately it appears several of the pieces have had the plastic connectors broken, so the pieces don't actually snap together in a couple places. It used to work temperamentally at best due to the connections, but now I fear it may not work at all. Then the kids decided we needed to play Hungry Hungry Hippos. Once again I got trounced. I think 1 time out of 4 games I came in next to last instead of last. My Hippo must have been broken.

Not much to watch on the telly tonight. Ginger watched Gilmore Girls, but with the Prez taking over the airwaves for the State of the Union address, I don't see much worth watching. And no, I didn't watch the address. I can't imagine him saying anything that's going to change my opinion of him or his administration, and I suspect it'll just be more of the same. Although I did see yesterday that the British government (Tony Blair no less) admitted that global warming is indeed something to be concerned about and the threat is greater than originally thought. Hmm, since that's a yahoo news link, I have no idea how long that link will be valid. Even though the British are now onboard, I doubt they're going to be able to change how anything is done here, but at least someone in power is starting to get concerned.

Start Your Engines!

I stayed up way too late working on editing that video last night. But I got it done, and it's up on google's site now waiting to be 'verified'. Barry says he's had a video up for 8 days now that still hasn't made it through the verification process, so it might be a while before anyone else gets to see the video. And at 23 megs, I suspect only those with broadband are going to see it anyway, although Google may have some compression mojo that they implement when they turn it into a flash movie. I screened the movie for Ginger and Quinn. So far no one likes it except me. So basically all that time and I'm not going to get an emmy. Ginger's comments were "It flashes too much." And Quinn's comments were "I can't hear what I'm saying" (I foolishly added a soundtrack and removed the audio component that was with the video that had Catherine screaming "Give it to me" over and over at the top of her lungs). So Quinn liked the unedited version better as far as I could tell. Doesn't matter. I don't need anyone else's validation. I did it for the art.

I heard at dinner that the kids played outside today. It was in the low 60s today, so apparently they rode their bikes over to the park (that was really all I was able to ascertain from the conversation). Catherine tried to tell me something about it being the park near the pool, but I've never been to that one so I had a hard time following what she was saying.

Quinn has created a new game to play inside the house. It's called "Nascar." You pretend to be a car (you have to pick one of numbers from a car) and you run around the dining room table and race. It's a variation of the "Mario Kart" and "Super Monkey Ball" game he plays (both of which also consist of just running around the dining room table). Not sure what's going with the shirt grabbing.



Oh yea, I got these IMs from KennyG (the Dogfather, that just cracks me up) today about Catherine's drawings (the drawings are from the end of the previous post).

[17:18:05] my psychoanalysis of catherine's drawings
[17:18:39] Mom represents more verbal communication to her
[17:18:57] yours holds some interest
[17:19:03] b/c you actually have limbs
[17:19:04] ears
[17:19:09] you listen to her more
[17:19:27] she sees you as calmer
[17:19:44] and more of the "action" parent
[17:20:05] you are not allowed to take my statements without permission

Oops, sorry Ken, didn't see that last line there till I had already posted them.

Wasted Day

I got up with the kids. It was a good morning for me considering they slept until after eight. Once we were up we came downstairs and had some breakfast (Corn Pop cereal for both kids and an omelet for Catherine). We ended up watching a couple of episodes of Little Einsteins. I took some pictures of the kids while they were watching. I really have no idea why Catherine was trying to eat her sock, but she was. And you can tell from the picture of Quinn that even though he slept late, he was still really tired (poor guy has dark circles under his eyes). Ginger wasn't feeling too good today and she slept in pretty late (really late for her), so we ended up skipping church. Once Ginger was up the kids took a bath and we had some lunch. After that both kids watched an episode of Veggie Tales (although they couldn't agree on which one they wanted to watch, so Quinn watched an episode downstairs and Catherine watched one up in our bedroom).

We were pretty unmotivated today. Between the rain earlier in the day and Ginger not feeling too great, we never even left the house. While the kids napped, I worked on editing a video of the kids. I'm still not finished. It's crazy, I've probably spent close to 8 hours on this thing total so far. I had no idea it was so time consuming to do even little things. Apparently putting up a video onto the web is easy. Adding in some special effects and what not is apparently time consuming. It's probably really simple and I'm just not well versed in how to do it yet. I suspect I may actually finish the editing completely tomorrow and then I'll post it once I put it up on google and they approve it. I may need to try and compress it some more, last time I created the movie file as a rough draft it was close to 23 megs (for under 3 minutes of video).

The following pictures were drawn by Catherine when we were at lunch at Red Robin yesterday. I decided I had to share these.


I think Catherine must believe her dad is Ross Perot.

Long Day

Did a lot today, or at least so it seemed. I slept in initially. When I finally got up, the kids were watching an episode of Little Einsteins for the second time.

After everyone got dressed, we all went out to eat at Red Robin. Deciding on that was a chore though. Originally we had planned on doing something with Rob and Gretchen today, but we never heard from them. After we called to verify they were indeed going to be busy all day, we changed plans. Quinn wanted popcorn chicken (KFC) for lunch and Catherine wanted pizza (Pizza Hut). So we were going to get takeout, but at some point Quinn changed his mind and decided he wanted "M" fries. I had no idea what those were, but I thought they were waffle fries. Ginger convinced me they were crinkle fries though. Not knowing where to get those, we sort of wandered for a bit and finally decided to go Red Robin. After a tasty lunch I decided to deviate from our plan of going to store to run some errands. It was in the 60s here today, so I figured with it being that nice the kids should be able to get outside and play for a bit. So I drove us up to a park I know about up in Reston behind the Home Depot (it's a long drive, but it was a pretty nice playground). I really wish I had brought my camera, but since it was spur of the moment I was sans cameras. I did get to see Catherine do some pretty impressive jumps between elevated platforms. At least I thought it was impressive stuff for a not quite three year old.

After the kids played for just over an hour at the park, we headed home. First though we stopped at the grocery store (at which we showed Quinn several different types of french fries and found out that "M" fries are actually waffle fries) and then after the grocery store we stopped and did the errands we had planned for earlier. At this point it was pretty obvious the kids were tired, so we came home and had a snack (ok, I had dinner, the kids just had a snack). Ginger made us homemade milkshakes as well. After that the kids went to bed (probably around seven thirty), and Ginger and I watched a ton of TV. We watched Lost (which wasn't even close to one of their better episodes), "My Name is Earl" from the past two weeks, and then I watched the last two weeks of "The Office". I think Ginger watched "What I Like About You" and one of those "Law & Order" shows episode.

I Got Nothing

So I have no idea really what the kids did today. Because they were asleep by the time I came home. Sure, I was a little later than normal (seven thirty), but not that late. Apparently Ginger and Grammy kept the kids out all day and didn't come home till after 5. They also apparently ate lunch out again (I was shocked, anyone want to place bets on whether they eat out for lunch tomorrow also?).

I asked Ginger what they were doing all day and I got this: "They were busy playing policeman save the lady from the dinosaur all day and then we were a train going through the mall". That's a direct quote, no grammar was added to protect the innocent.

I've got bupkis to write about, so you're going to be forced to listen to me prattle on about TV and comics. Let me just say, ahead there be spoilers. So if you care about this stuff, don't read. First off, there was Infinite Crisis that came out this week, in which once again the Flash 'sacrifices' himself to save the universe. It's getting old, the silver age Flash did the same thing in Crisis on Multiple Earths back in the 80s. This time though, it wasn't good enough to just take out one Flash, they took out Flash and Kid Flash. This seems like a mistake to me. The Wally West Flash actually has name recognition now (at least a little) outside of the comic field. Justice League Unlimited (formerly Justice League) is now in it's 5th season with the Wally West Flash as a member. Kids are growing up knowing only this guy as the Flash. Same thing for Kid Flash, he was just recently on Teen Titans. It just doesn't make sense from a name brand recognition stand point if you ask me. And last I heard there was even a Flash movie treatment being passed around, now that comic hero movies are all the rage since Spider-Man broke all those records several years back. And then there is TV's Smallville. This week was the 100th episode, where someone close to Clark bites the big one. The show started out with Clark revealing his big secret to Lana. Finally! They're in college and dating for pete sakes. In the comics Lana knew back in high school. Here's my problem with this show, we all know he ends up with Lois, so why all the angst and buildup with Lana. Anyway, once Lana learns the secret, she goes the way of all those who learn Clark is Superman and ends up getting herself killed. At first I thought this was a novel approach. In the comics which this show is loosely (and I mean really loosely) based off of, Lana is still around, but basically a worthless character since Clark and Lois are married. Killing her off made a lot of sense. But there's a twist, Clark does some mojo and the day reverses and he gets to do things differently. There was a nice joke from one of the characters that's in on the secret, asking how he managed to do that saying "What did you do, fly around the earth and make it rotate backwards?", nice dig there. So the day replays and this time Clark doesn't tell Lana, she doesn't die, but then because 'the universe must be balanced' someone else has to die. And apparently some random guy on the other side of the Earth dying won't cut it, it has to be some other cast member. So it's bye bye Pa Kent, played by John Schneider (or Bo Duke as most of us will remember him). This once again was a deviation from the comics, but not as drastic as one might think. True, in the comics Ma and Pa Kent are still alive, but pre Crisis on Multiple Earths they had died when Clark was young. Personally I think having them alive works better because it gives Clark more of a tangible connection to humanity. Anyway, so they pulled a Dawson's Creek and killed off the Dad. And most people will agree that Dawson's Creek jumped the shark at that point, actually when Dawson's Dad died it jumped all the way out of the water over the shark and onto the beach. Oh, did I mention that Dawson's dad was also the actor that once played the TV version of the Flash. See how this all ties together.

Grammy Arrives

We had some snow flurries this morning. Nothing in the way of actual accumulation though. I kind of figured we would be having flurries soon since as I was driving back from PA last night there was about an hour where it was snowing. In theory, I should have slowed down some, but I was trying to get home by nine so I could see the kids before they fell asleep, so I was stupid and was driving faster than I should have been. I did start driving at more reasonable speeds about halfway home. That's because I left the interstate to get some gas and there was a tractor trailer that had turned over at the interstate entrance (looked like some fluid was leaking from it too, but that didn't stop me from driving past it to get back on the road to try and get home).

Ginger's Mom came up today. So the kids have been vying for her attention. I came home for lunch to see everyone, but they were out at lunch (I had forgotten that when Ginger's Mom is up, they almost always eat out). And I've officially given up on the project of finishing screening the gazebo. Turns out the guys that have been doing things around the house offered to finish it off. I initially told them that at this point it was a matter of pride and I just wanted to finish so I could say I did it, then they lowered their estimate to complete it by $200. For $200 savings I can buy pride.

Barry pointed me to new Video service being offered by Google. I've been experimenting some with that. I'm amazed by how much cool stuff Google is managing to put out. I didn't think they could top themselves after they put out Google Maps. Anyway, I just took the most recent easily accessible movie I had to try it out (it's from my Mom's camera, I think this is from last Saturday). Catherine isn't in the video itself, but I believe you can hear her in the background.



Tennis Video

Everybody Dance Now!

These are dance photos from yesterday. For some reason after dinner last night the kids were in the mood to do some dancing. They both took turns dancing in the hallway. How sad is it that I can barely remember anything else that occurred yesterday? I'm getting old I guess. They say that the first that goes is... Hmmm, what do they say is the first thing to go? I can't remember.

I had to go to PA today, so I got to drive up and back in the same day (that's 7+ hours in the car for people keeping track at home). Not my most productive trip either. I'm fairly certain that everything I learned / did could have been accomplished over a teleconference (maybe I just wanted to look them in the eye). As I got up at 5:45 (AM!) this morning and wandered around the house getting ready looking like the living dead, I decided that people weren't meant to get up that early. It's just ... wrong. On a lot of levels. To make matters even worse as I was driving up there it was foggy most of the trip. And I would see temperature changes of 6 degrees as I would go up and down some of the hills. I must admit though, it was pretty at times. All the trees for a stretch of about 80 miles were completely covered in frost and all icy looking. It's a shame I don't carry a camera at all times. I managed to get back home right around 9, so I was able to check in and say good night to the kids.

After that I had some dinner and then once the kids were asleep (like 15 minutes after I got home) Ginger and I watched some TV (Courting Alex, and Tonight's two episodes of Scrubs, and then Ginger watched Gilmore Girls).

Super Fork

Once everyone was up this morning and had some breakfast, we headed off to church. After church we stopped by Safeway to practically clean them out of the Nouriche drinkable yogurt / smoothie things. Ginger says the kids go through about four of those a day. Then we went to KFC for lunch. That was Quinn's idea (he likes their popcorn chicken). I dropped everyone off so they could get lunch and I ran errands by going to CVS to pick up some prescriptions for Catherine and then I went by Giant to get some Milk. Once I got back to KFC I mooched leftovers off other people's lunches.



After lunch we headed down to Clifton to the Caboose. This was also a chance for Ginger to stop the toy store there and look for some stuff for Catherine's birthday next month. We had Nana with us, and this was the first time she had actually been to the Caboose, so the kids showed her all around it. We stayed a bit longer than I would have liked considering the temperature was back to mid 40s versus the past couple of days which have been oddly warmer than normal temperatures.

Once we got back home, the kids played for a little bit while I messed around trying to actually figure out my camera. I've had the thing for over a year, I think it's about time I start reading up on how to actually use it. After the kids played for a bit, they took their naps. I decided to forgo TV and napped today while the kids napped. Figured I could use the rest. Although I ended up waking up when Quinn got up (I could hear him whispering on the monitor when he woke up). Quinn and Nana went downstairs to play some video games (Mario Kart Double Dash) and I lounged around and watched some more Daily Show Interviews and Colbert Reports. I think I have 6 more to go before I'm completely caught up.

After Catherine got up, we started getting dinner ready. Ginger decided that we would be grilling out tonight. So once I cleaned the grill and fired it up, I cooked steaks and hot dogs. I managed to cook the steaks more than I intended. They ended up being well done (I blame the fact that it's dark outside and I can't actually see what I'm doing). I got in trouble during dinner. One of the rules we have is no toys at the dinner table, so when I took a fork and started whistling the Superman theme song and flying it around peoples plates, that apparently crossed the line and I got my fork taken away. After dinner we put the kids to bed, and I finished watching the Colbert Report I had been watching earlier and Ginger played some Mah Jong on Yahoo games. We eventually watched Desperate Housewives. We both think the quality of the show has declined and we're getting really close to dropping it from the Tivo's season pass. Ginger and my Mom then watched Grey's Anatomy while I did some laundry (and no, I'm not watching Grey's Anatomy yet, although everyone I've talked too that watches it says nothing but good stuff about it).

The Rest of the Story

When we last saw our heroes they had posted asking decorating advice. After sifting through the flood of responses, they went on about the rest of their day. Today was another really nice day (temperature in the 60s again). So the kids got to play some outside riding their tricycles. Quinn and I played some 'tennis' (I throw the ball to him, and he uses my old raquetball racket to hit it back to me). I actually snapped a bunch of pictures of the kids outside, but later realized I had my camera on manual and that I had the shutter speed set really long for when I was taking some indoor shots, so everything came out whitewashed and blurry. My Mom is up this weekend and she had her camera, so maybe I can get some of her shots. Ginger and I let my Mom watch the kids outside and we took that as an opportunity to be able to put up some styrofoam insulation in the downstairs storage room (I had promised I would help put it up the next time my Mom was up and we had some time available).

Ginger and I have been tossing this idea about getting a new TV around a lot more recently. I think she's got a 50 inch plasma in mind. Keeping with the TV theme, today while the kids napped, I worked on catching up on some TV. I managed to watch Smallville from the past two weeks. And got halfway through Stargate Atlantis. As I was watching TV, I noticed it getting dark outside and I managed to snap this pick out back as the sun was setting. I think it would have looked better if I could have taken it from even higher above the trees.



Since my Mom is up and can watch the kids, Ginger and I went out for dinner. I found it amusing that with the weather the way it is, the radio was playing ads for snow blowers (what the heck were they thinking). Ginger wanted to try and eat at Arties, but they had a 40+ minute wait, so I vetoed that and we went to a chinese restaurant that we used to get take out from that we both liked. Strangely enough, we both liked the food dining in even better than the stuff we normally get when we have their take out. When we got back, we watched a couple Daily Shows and Ginger actually stuck around while I finished watching Atlantis and for the beginning of Battlestar Galactica (at one point she looked up from her book and asked if we had switched shows), but then she couldn't take the boredom (for her) anymore and went to bed. I finished off that episode of Battlestar Galactica and then a couple of Teen Titan episodes. I think I only have a couple more shows from last week and 2 weeks worth of Daily Show interviews and Colbert Reports, and then I'll be completely caught up (at the rate I'm going, I don't think I'm going make it).

Wanted: Interior Design Advice

Ginger has picked out some pictures she wants to buy and hang over our fireplace. I'm still on the fence about them. I'm just not convinced the colors will fit in with what's already in the room. I tried my hand at photoshopping images of the pictures onto the mantle and then had Ginger arrange them the way she wanted, but I don't think it looks all that realistic. Maybe I should call Barry and get his help since he's the photoshop king. If people have opinions about the colors, feel free to comment (my thinking is if enough people don't like it, I can save some money). And I'm not asking people to say they don't like it if they do, just comment if you don't (or add comments if you do like it, I don't want to seem biased here).

I Wish Stamping Only Cost 39 Cents

Today was unseasonably warm (I'm sure it has nothing to do with global warming). So Ginger took the kids on a walk again. The kids found more 'clues'. Still don't know what the ultimate end to this mystery is. But this time they recorded their clues by taking pictures. There were a lot of pictures of clues, but they all appear to be related to flaws in cement. They raced the mailman and won (they ran past him as he had to stop to deliver letters) on their way to the basketball court, where they played some more pretend basketball.

The wall in the cubby downstairs had been painted it appears. So some progress on the state of the repairs in the house is occurring. I learned today at work that I'll probably be heading up to PA again next week, but this time hopefully for only a day. And today was Ben's last day at work, so I signed his card with "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!"

Ginger went to one of her stamping event things tonight. Think of it as poker night for the girls where they get to spend money on stuff as well as chit chat and make cards. I got home around 6 the kids were just finishing up dinner and then Ginger left at around 6:30. The kids didn't nap today, so they went to bed a little early (around 7:30, we watched "Little Einsteins" before they went to bed). I had invited Ben over tonight, and had originally planned on inviting Rob and his kids over too (since I knew Gretchen was going to the stamping thing also), but once I remembered that the kids hadn't napped, I didn't feel I could invite them over since I knew Quinn and Catherine were going to be going to be early. Ben was doing a ton of last minute before you leave work forever things, so he didn't leave work till a little after 7:30 (I found this amusing since earlier in the day around 11 he had said he was going to cut out early around 3 or 4). We ordered pizza for Ben, and I had some leftovers. We watched "The Last Samurai." I thought it was okay, seemed a little hokey in some places though and was pretty slow in some places also (and it was a longer movie at two and a half hours, so seeming slow and being long never go together well). Ginger got home around 12 I got to see the cards she made tonight (they look nice).

It's a Clue!

Today was Ben's going away lunch at work. His last day is actually tomorrow, but they had his lunch today (there's some IT lunch thing at work tomorrow that they didn't want to force people to choose between the two). Unfortunately Ben's going away lunch conflicted with Clara's birthday lunch. I figure I'll still see Ben in the future even though he isn't working with us anymore, so I opted to go to Clara's luncheon. And I hear Ben had a massive number of people attend, close to 30 or something, so I would have been lost in the crowd anyway. Although Ben's lunch was at Olive Garden, so I missed out on my chance for 4 bowls of soup and a take home dinner. I almost managed to miss Clara's lunch by having an impromptu meeting in my office that ran till almost 12. Clara's lunch was fun, except for people kept talking about Lost, so I kept hearing bits and pieces of spoilers.

We had the handy dudes out once again working on the deck. And apparently the consensus is that we don't have to rip out the drywall in the laundry room to replace the insulation because the prevailing theory is something about it not being that wet or because the insulation is fiberglass it's not a big deal that it got wet. I didn't understand, but if someone's turning down money to do the job, then maybe it really doesn't need to be done (or the time and effort would be more than they would get, but I'm hoping it's not that).

The weather was nice today, so Ginger took the kids on a walk around the neighborhood today. From what I hear they spent a lot of time on the trip 'looking for clues'. Apparently they've read some of the "Nate the Great" books now so while they were out whenever they see a footprint or a piece of concrete that's broken off they decide that's a clue. A clue to what, we don't know, but a clue none the less. Quinn tells me that they walked all the way to the pool. And that the pool was mostly empty, but had yucky stuff in the bottom. Oh and apparently they played basketball. I have no idea if they were on a real basketball court or not (I do know they didn't actually have a ball, so I assume this was all pretend), but I hear Catherine made a basket.

Once again when I got home Quinn was up, but Catherine was still asleep. Quinn talked me into playing some foozball, but he quit after a couple of points when I wouldn't just let him. We're really starting to have a problem with Quinn feeling he always needs to win. Right before dinner he had a minor meltdown because we wouldn't let him push Catherine out of the way in the bathroom so he could be the first one to finish washing his hands. As of right now, it's not too bad, because Catherine doesn't seem to care as much as he does about winning (must be a boy thing), but once she starts caring too, I can tell there's going to be trouble.

Once the kiddies were asleep Ginger and I watched "CSI" and "Without a Trace". After that Ginger headed to bed and I watched "Lost".

Ask Not For Whom The Gas Passes

Yesterday was odd. It started out with me getting to work for our rescheduled conference call. I had thought this call was going to be with the folks in PA to discuss the interface we'll be implementing. Turns out it's a conference call with another company about how they want to implement screens that talk to our stuff through the new open interface we're creating (which I might add, one of our tasks is also to create screens for this). Nice heads up. I don't mind being in on these calls, I would just like a little heads up sometimes as to who I'm talking to and what the nature of the relationship between the callers is before going in.

Anyway, after that debacle I decided to come home for lunch (this combined with the fact I had brought in no food for lunch made it a no brainer). When I got home, Quinn was playing with his Connect Four game and Catherine was running around completely naked. Not pantless which is more or less normal these days with her potty training, since she'll often come out of the bathroom pantless (her new nickname in those instances is "Barebutt Catherine", although she will put her pants back on with prompting). I'm hoping we can break that habit losing her pants before she's a teenager. Anyway, the reason she was completely naked was she had returned from ballet class and needed to use the restroom, and had to take off the entire outfit in order to do that. Luckily Ginger was close behind with a change of clothes.

While I was home Quinn wanted to start putting together his new magnet sets that he had gotten when my Dad was up. These were things like a magnet set to build an airplane (or rocket as Quinn refers to as), a helicopter and a general set that could make a star. I wasn't able to finish putting it together before I left to go back to work, but I got all the parts that needed to be screwed together done. Once I left, Ginger took over helping put them together. The plane was put together once I got home, but Quinn had been 'flying' it around the house like it was a toy airplane and had squeezed it so that it basically lost it's shape. So I got to take it all apart and put it together again. Fun. Once I had it together and Catherine's star together, they were both flying them around the house, until they ran into each other and again squished their creations. Ginger I believe was multitasking between five different things at this point such as dinner, helping put the items back together and other stuff (I have no idea what those other things were, but she's made a point of mentioning several times how impressive she was and that I should relay that here, so there).

Work for the past couple of days has been meeting with people trying to figure out how we'll implement all we have to do with the limited budget that we suddenly have. My budget started out as 4 man years over 9 months, and has shrunk to 1.5 man years over the next 6 months. Time to 'work smarter' I guess. Today at work was a bit annoying actually. I got an email from the PA folks that they wanted me to do a phone interview at 1 PM. So I said sure, no problem. And they told me that they would call me when they were ready for me to talk to the guy. Ginger called just before one and wanted to know if I was going to come home, and I told her about the call and I would try and get home after the phone interview. So two thirty rolls around and still no call from PA. I called HR in PA to find out what was going on, and low and behold, the interview is actually on Friday. She was sure she had mentioned that in the email, and I told her, "No, I think I would have noticed that." Once she reread the email she sent, she started apologizing a lot. At that point it was too late to go home though. Luckily there was some meeting down the hall that had ordered food for lunch and there was some lunch meat platter leftovers in the kitchen area, so I snagged a bit of that.

Oh, and there was a fairly large shake up / reorg that occurred at work today also. I had known there was one in the works, but it turned out to be a lot bigger than I had anticipated. I think I won't know all the ripple effects of it until Friday.

Only Quinn was up when I got home tonight. So Quinn and I goofed around for a bit as I carried him through the house. It was all fun and games till he let one rip while he was up there on my shoulders. Catherine woke up just as we were having dinner. I made the mistake of trying to go up and get her by myself and I got a lot of "Nooooo, I want Mommy. Go away!" She is so cranky when she first gets up. I have no idea where she gets that. Can't be me. Luckily Quinn came up and I had Quinn ask her to come downstairs and she was 'sugar and spice' with him and followed him downstairs as pretty as you please.

Ginger's still having her headaches. I think today is like day 6 in a row. Partly because of that we haven't been able to watch / knock off much in the way of TV. Just "Scrubs", "Gilmore Girls" (Ginger), "Boondocks" (me) and some partial "Daily Shows" (me again). Doubt we'll get to "Lost" tonight.

The Cinderella Complex Revisited

No school for the kiddies today. When I got up Quinn was playing Connect Four and Catherine was playing with her Cinderella stuff.

I got to work late, and realized I had forgotten to approve my peeps timesheets. Oops. I also apparently missed a 10 AM conference call that they called to tell me about around 9:15 AM. Nice heads up there. Anyway, today was all about telling various people about the program I'm working on as I'm trying to bring the people that will be doing the actual work up to speed. You would think that after going over this stuff like 5 times with different people I would have it down to some kind of science, but such is not the case. Each time I feel like I'm winging it and spewing out information stream of consciousness style. Oh, and I got the new schedules for the program and my budget has been seriously cut. Nothing like being able to see the looming disaster ahead of you.
Ginger took the kids out on errands today. They grabbed lunch from Wendy's and came by my office to have lunch with me. The kids did their normal whiteboard drawing routine plus some created some pulleys with the window shades cords.

I got home around 7, and everyone was already up (no big surprise there), and Ginger was cooking dinner. So I played with the kids for a bit while dinner was cooking. I saw that Catherine the Destroyer had already managed to break the plastic pieces of the new Cinderella stuff that allowed the two dolls to dance across the floor. To be fair, maybe it was Quinn. All I know is that recently it seems that the lifetime of any toy in house is in serious jeopardy in the presence of the twin engines of destruction that are Quinn and Catherine. The Angelina plastic doll house furniture that she got for Christmas has already fallen prey to the inadvertent Godzillas. I tried to repair the plastic Cinderella stuff using that PVC glue, but it wouldn't actually hold. I found that a little odd, but strangely after smelling the glue for a while, I found I didn't care as much (that stuff is pretty strong). Going to try again tomorrow maybe.

Dinner was some Greek chicken dish with olive oil in it that made it taste a bit lemony. There was also Ginger's famous and extremely delicious carrot souffle. The dinner came with the option of having feta cheese on it. Ginger asked me beforehand if I wanted the cheese on mine, and I said no because I didn't really know anything about that cheese (I should have went with the whole "Sorry dear, the migraine diet doesn't allow that kind of cheese, although since she knows about the migraine diet that could have seriously backfired on me). Later when we were putting the kids to bed, I came downstairs to fill their juice cups, and I could have sworn that a cat had pooped somewhere in the kitchen based on the smell. I eventually tracked it down to the cheese. Ginger claims it doesn't smell like that, but to me it smelled like some form of poop and in my mind, something that smells like poop probably doesn't taste good.

From here on we're entering semi rant mode, so be warned. This whole Cinderella thing used to worry me. I mean, after all, I'm a modern educated male (as much as some might argue differently), I supposedly know the trappings of how it's actually a story telling women that they need to be taken care of instead of being independent. I mean it's all there in that Cinderella Complexbook, right? I bought into all that and it bothered the crap out me that Catherine liked the stuff so much (not that there was a thing that I could do about it mind you). Anyway, I was thinking about it this morning in the shower (isn't that where all the really great ideas come from), and it occurs to me there are other interpretations one can make and it may not be as gender biased as I let myself first believe / be convinced. Here's the deal, Cinderella works her butt off for little to no reward, holding onto hope that the work will be it's own reward. She puts in hard hours, and does a ton of thankless jobs. Not only that, but she's getting paid crap. One could almost see this as a parallel to working in today's market place really. So then what happens, she gets to go to the ball, and there is noticed by the Prince. Now I realize at this point in the story, none of the work she's done necessarily facilitates or influences the affections of the Prince, but I'm ignoring that fact because it doesn't help prove my point. The Prince then searches her out (ok, it's actually the Prince's dad who makes one of his toadies search her out, but go with me here) and marries her. At this point she leaves her old life behind is well taken care of for the rest of her days (or so we're led to believe at the end, for all we know they fight, she divorces him and takes half of everything and moves to the Caribbean wherein she cavorts with locals, but that's not where I'm going with this). Anyway, back to my analogy, the Prince basically comes in and acquires her. Almost like a large corporation might acquire some small company wherein the employees who own stock or are otherwise invested in the small corporation benefit immensely and become rich and never have to work again. When looked at from that point of view, Cinderella actually represents the American Dream at it's finest and everyone can be Cinderella. Cinderella can be seen as an allegory of the employee working at the small company, who is hoping to get acquired / bought out so that they can retire to a life of leisure. At least looking at it this way makes me feel better about Catherine liking it so much (and makes me wonder where the heck I left my glass slipper).

Christmas Isn't Over Yet

I got up with the kids this morning (Ginger prodded me telling me Catherine was up). I found her pantless in her room from where she had woken up, gone into the bathroom, removed her diaper and used the bathroom, but didn't really feel like putting pants back on and had returned to her room. After procuring some pants, we headed downstairs and I fixed her an omelet, orange juice, and "Chicken Little" cereal (which is really Rice Crispies, but when we bought it the first time they were doing a tie in with the Chicken Little movie, so from then on it's been "Chicken Little" cereal). Quinn got up a bit later and didn't want to eat anything at all, but rather just wanted to play. Catherine claimed she wanted pancakes too, but once I made them she was too busy playing with Quinn to come eat any. After Ginger got up we all started getting ready for church. I heard that while I was getting ready, Quinn ate all the pancakes that I had made and didn't let Catherine have any of them. I later saw on Quinn's camera that he had taken multiple pictures of the pancakes before eating them.

Nothing special happened at church, except that while we were there Ginger realized that she didn't have the epipen with her (see yesterday's post where I took it when I was watching the kids at the mall without her, what I forgot to do was return it to it's correct place within her purse). So I had to drive back home and get it. I managed to get back halfway through the sermon.

After church we came home and had a quick lunch. Cheese sandwiches for Catherine and Ginger made by your's truly. I also made a quesadilla that Catherine and I shared, and for just myself I made a tuna fish sandwich. Ginger made Quinn some soy nut butter crackers.

Just about the time lunch was finishing up, we got visitors. My Dad, his wife Martha and my grandmother MaeBelle. They brought up a ton of Christmas gifts for the kids and us. Quinn had a blast showing everyone around the house and explaining all the various things. Quinn and my Dad played 'soccer' upstairs in the hall, and later I think they built roads and played cars. Catherine got two gifts that she immediately fell in love with, a Cinderella castle (with a Cinderella and Prince Charming doll) and a home ballet set with a bar and floor mat and video. Quinn's favorite gift appears to be a Connect Four game. Although he's still learning the basics of the game (such as for him the game doesn't end when someone gets four in a row, and he doesn't care if you get four in a row as long as he gets four in a row at some point also). I tried to snap some picks of the kids with Great Grandma Fitzgerald and the rest of the folks. I've decided it's difficult to get a good shot with both kids in the picture and multiple other individuals. One kid / one adult and you might eventually get a decent shot. Any more, and it's a crap shoot. These are some of the better shots.







After everyone left, the kids went and took their nap. Maybe it was just me, but it felt like they napped for a pretty good while. When Quinn got up, he immediately wanted to play Connect Four some more. I went and checked on Cinderella and Price Charming, and it turns out they were in a somewhat compromising position. Not sure what the prince is thinking since he's still fully clothed. And what's up with those sparkly pants? Once Catherine woke up, Ginger suggested I go pick up dinner from KFC (she's had a headache for the last 5 days, so her fixing dinner was out, and I had used all my mojo at lunch). I took Quinn with me and we accomplished our mission and brought home the food. The kids stayed up a lot later than I thought they should (it was around nine thirty when they started making their way upstairs to get ready for bed), but then Ginger reminded me that tomorrow is a holiday for a lot of people, so no school for the little guys.

Visiting Mordor's Restroom of Doom

I'm getting old. I'm finding out that more and more I really need sleep. I remember the old days of staying up all hours of the night, getting 5 to 6 hours of sleep and being ready to go the next day. These days, when I get under 6 or 7 hours, I'm practically the walking dead. I stayed up waaaay too late last night watching TV. But for whatever reason the Tivo didn't record Atlantis until midnight and didn't get Battlestar Galactica until one (and I couldn't not watch them). And I managed to knock off "The Office" from earlier in the week (I actually thought this week's episode was better than normal). Anyway, because of that and trying to watch some Colbert Report and Daily Show interviews, I didn't get to bed till almost 3 and I ended up getting up at 9.

The guys were here repairing the drywall in the laundry room and finished powerwashing the deck this morning. The deck looks a lot better than it did before, and the railing looks almost newish (the deck floor looks better, but you can still tell it's worn). I'm a bit concerned about the laundry room drywall. I think they just patched it up. I was under the impression they were going to take some of it out and check to make sure that the insulation hadn't gotten wet / moldy. Guess I'll have to ask Ginger about checking if they're planning on doing that.

Ginger and I both had haircuts scheduled for today. So we drove into the mall with the kids in tow. Ginger's appointment was for 12. We got there around 11:40ish. I went and inhaled some lunch and Ginger got lunch for the kids. She went off to get her haircut and I watched the kids while they ate. She forgot to leave the epipen though, so I had to go get that from her. Then at around 12:15 Quinn announces he has to go poop and as if on cue, Catherine announces she has to go pee. Great. I've got bags, 4 drinks, and the bag of food. I can't carry everything and control the kids so I went and dropped off some of the lunch stuff with Ginger. Then took the kids to the restroom. Let me just say, mall restrooms are disgusting. Holy crap. There were four stalls in the restroom, and three were occupied. Ok, no problem, there's one we can use. Quinn at this point has decided he doesn't have to poop and just has to pee. So he's outside the stall at a urinal and Catherine is pulling her pants down trying to get up on a completely disgusting toilet seat. I try and clean that off, but that means I have to use the toilet paper. Thinnest...paper...evar! This stuff is thinner than 1 layer of a tissue. I hope the money the mall is saving buying this stuff pays off sometime. And to make matters worse, what's on the back of the toilet seat? Some pr0n flyers or something with let's just say some very explicit pictures. I'm not making this up. At this point I'm wonder what the f*** are people doing in here. I finally get the seat cleaned off and put down like 5 layers of toilet paper. By this time Quinn has started wandering off so I have to drag his butt into the stall to keep him from leaving. Then after Catherine is finished and I'm trying to pull her pants back up her and Quinn start playing some peek-a-boo game between my legs. Once we're finally out of the stall and I'm trying to get the kid's hands washed, Quinn decides he really wants one of product being sold vending machine style from the restroom (two guesses what that was, first one doesn't count). I seriously do not know how Ginger does this crap on a regular basis. My respect for her ability to manage this crap has grown immensely. Although, I *have* to believe that the Women's restrooms are in better condition than this one was (and I suspect don't have pr0n just lying around either and they probably don't have prophylactics for sale).

Once the trip to restroom of doom was complete, we went back into the mall area. Here we found what I thought was one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time. It was this device called Reactrix. Now I know what it is, so I'm not saying it's something it's not. It's a big interactive ad. That's obvious. But the way it works is pretty cool. And I don't think the kids even really knew it was an ad. Here's what it is, there's a projector on the ceiling that's projecting the 'screen' onto the floor. On the floor is (what I believe is) a light sensitive screen. There's a wireless device on the projector that I believe is getting input from the screen on the floor. By moving their body parts across the screen this creates a shadow on the pad on the floor, which sends that info back up to the computer in the ceiling and acts as input. So what you get is kids being able to 'kick' digital balls around on the ground, or chase fish, or fight space ships or squash spiders. The spider mode was pretty cool, since there are 2 types of digital spiders, the bigger ones which can be squished by 'stepping' on them and a pack of small spiders that home in on one of the points of input (usually some unsuspecting child which runs away from the pack of spiders coming for him / her which is usually accompanied by said child screaming). This thing kept all the kids I saw there entertained (mine included). There were a couple of 'ads' interspersed with the games also. Some work better than others (the one ad that simply had the product and a rainbow overlaid that could be moved was probably the least impressive one). So we hung out there at the Reactrix until Ginger was finished getting her hair cut (I included a picture of Ginger I took later with her new haircut, I've noticed lately my posts are getting more wordy and less with the pictures), then I handed the kids off to Ginger so I could get my haircut. And I hear that even though they apparently went and bought some stuff, eventually they ended up back at the Reactrix.

After that we came home, stopping at a couple of grocery stores along the way to pick up some more Nouriche and Orange Juice. Once we got home the kids took a little nap.

When the kids got up from their nap it was snowing. Today's been weird weatherwise. It started around 50 degrees this morning, and as the day went on it just kept getting colder and colder (and windier and windier also). The snow only lasted about half an hour. Just long enough to get the ground wet and put some ice down. The wind has been incredible. We lost one of the bird feeders off the deck (well, not lost, I know where it is, but it blew off the deck).

After dinner (pizza from Papa John's) it was time for cleaning up the house. We're expecting visitors tomorrow and we had to clean up (which really means Ginger did most of the work). We also took down some more of the Christmas decorations that were still up (bye bye Belly Buttons, the Belly Buttons are the little snow guys in the picture with Ginger).

Something Smells

I think something died in my office downstairs. It could just be me that smells, but it's been smelling really bad for the past couple of days. I think a mouse or something may have decided to give up the ghost in my closet (which is the where the water pipes enter the house).

Catherine has just started realizing what it means to go to school. She no longer likes it as much. This week has been pretty tough on her. And apparently she's had a few crying fits while at school. She's pretty used to getting her way about whatever she wants and now she's having to deal with the fact that she has to be at school whether she wants to or not. She even claimed she wanted to stay home with me instead of going to school (so you know she really doesn't want to go). Part of this I blame on Quinn. For the past couple of days when he's woken up, he hasn't really wanted to get up and get ready for school, but rather wants to just play. So he's been saying he doesn't want to go to school and that he doesn't like school (although once he's there, he seems just fine). The problem is Catherine has been hearing him say this, and to some extent, I think she's picked up on the idea that if Quinn doesn't want to go, she probably doesn't want to go either. Hopefully this will all die down in another week or so, but who knows.

Today the guys came by to start doing the various jobs we have around the house that need doing. They powerwashed the deck and found the source of the water coming into the house in the basement. Some backstory: in the basement over summer when we had a particularly long rainstorm, I noticed the carpet in the cubby area where we have the downstairs TV (which is under one of the fireplaces upstairs, hence the cubby) seemed wet. At first I blamed the cats, but soon realized that it could only be the cats if they had drank about a gallon of water (plus it didn't smell). So we had the guys here doing the drywall work in the laundry room take a look. After punching some holes in the drywall and not locating any problem, they tore up the carpet. Turns out the cement under the carpet has a crack going across it (more than likely from where the house is continuing to settle). So the water was coming in from there, and probably only during really bad rains. So they're going to use some polysomething or other and patch that up. Of course it looks that carpet is going to need to be replaced, but Ginger's been bugging me that we need to replace all the carpet downstairs anyway.

During lunch today I went to try and help KenC pick up his new TV. The plan was to go to Home Depot, rent a truck, then over to Costco and purchase the 50 inch plasma TV he wanted and take it to his place. The plan fell apart when he asked about renting the truck at Home Depot and guy said "Ok, what are you purchasing." Apparently they only rent trucks to people that buy stuff. Who knew. So he'll be getting the TV later at some point. The only good thing out of all this is now Ginger thinks having a new TV might not be so bad (our old Sony 60 inch projection has definitely seen better days, the guns are really misaligned). Who knows, maybe that could be our combined birthday present in March that we give each other. It's not like it wouldn't get used, we do watch a fair amount of TV. Although last night I learned that Ginger apparently doesn't care for "Lost" all that much. After we had watched "Four Kings" and "My Name is Earl", she voted for "Without a Trace" instead of "Lost" claiming she really doesn't like the show that much and watches it mainly because of me. Turns out "Without a Trace" was a repeat though, so we watched "Lost" (woo!). I really liked what we learned about Echo's backstory and the 'monster'. Spoiler ahead! While it was nice to actually see the monster onscreen and verified, we had already seen it before in the pilot last year (watch above and to the right of the turbine in the image). I remember arguing with KennyG about that scene almost a year ago (he was positive it had been photoshopped).

Got to decode / port some Visual Basic code today at work. Well, truth be told, I had an interface document that told me what the data was suppose to look like, but the actual format of how many bytes each element represented wasn't accurately represented, so I sort of cheated and used the Visual Basic code that had been provided to determine how the data stream was structure. Because I got so involved in that though, I got home a little late (after 7). Catherine was still asleep from her nap, but Quinn was up. So I got to have dinner with Quinn and Ginger (dinner was nuggets and garlic bread for Quinn, some leftover pasta for Ginger, and a tuna fish sandwich for me). After dinner we went upstairs and played some with Quinn's Thomas the Tank Engine train tracks that he had set up in the sitting room next to our bedroom. Bets are being taken for whether Ginger ends up tripping over it during the night.

Feels like Monday

Since today is the first day I've gone to work down here in VA, it feels like it's a Monday. Today started off pretty crappy. I woke up with a massive headache. Felt like a sinus headache since my nose was somewhat clogged (although I'm not showing any symptoms of being sick). Maybe like the kids I'm actually somewhat allergic to the cats and being reintroduced to them sent my system for a shock. Anyway between that and not feeling too well, the day didn't start off too great. When I got to work I enlisted some help and started looking into potential interprocess communication techniques for an embedded single board computer running linux. Since I don't need timing down to the microsecond level, we decided that simply running separate processes and communicating via pipes or sockets would probably be sufficient.

I came home to see the kids for lunch since Ginger had called and said Catherine had requested my presence. That was apparently a momentary whim since when I got home Catherine was playing her handheld V.Smile game. Quinn was busy watching her play, so neither could break themselves away to come say hello. Can you feel the love? I had leftovers and soup for lunch then headed back to work. Was stuck in a meeting for a couple of hours where I managed to get rid of one of the software components I was in charge of (I've only been technically managing it lately and had done very little real work in it recently, so it made sense to hand it off to someone else).

Afterwards I gave Ben a ride to Craven Tire to pick up his car. I forgot to ask him if they found a ton of things wrong with his car also. As a side note, Ben has turned in his resignation at work as of last week. Kind of a bummer. You hate to lose the good ones.

Quinn had literally just woken up when I got home (he hadn't even made it downstairs yet, just been up long enough to use the restroom). He had a pretty bad case of bed head, but I didn't think to get a picture of it which is a shame. Ginger had a migraine, so I watched Quinn while she went upstairs to rest for a bit. Once Catherine got up we had dinner. I heated up some chicken nuggets for Quinn. Catherine had some yogurt. And I made some pancakes for them also. Ginger had some leftover pizza. I had some leftover tuna that was in fridge (at least I think it was tuna). I have no idea when it was put in there, but I'm hoping Nana left it there over the weekend, otherwise I'm probably going to be hurting pretty bad tomorrow since Ginger didn't recognize it either. Catherine posed for me showing off her new shoes. I assume these are toy type shoes. They look like flats, but the height makes walking a bit difficult for her. She seems to like wearing them and likes showing them off.

Quinn and Ginger both seem to be showing some signs of catching some form of cold. I suspect it's just a matter of time before Catherine and I end up with whatever this is.

Got a *lot* of TV to catch up on from the past couple of nights, and it looks like there is some from tonight we have to watch also. Had to wait for Catherine to actually get to sleep before we could start watching. She used to be really easy to put to bed, just drop her in her bed and leave and you were done. Lately though she's been not going to sleep, getting up and wandering around the house (which if she sees you, she runs back into her room and slams the door as if you won't know it was her). Not sure what to do about that. Hopefully it's just a phase. Ginger managed to watch "Gilmore Girls". Then we teamed up to watch "How I Met Your Mother," "Two and a Half Men," and both of this week's "Scrubs." Didn't manage to get to Lost yet. We didn't bother taping the Lost that came on at eight. I'm hoping it was another retelling of everything so far. If anyone watched it, did it have anything new? We have the later one Tivo'ed so we'll probably get to that tomorrow night.

Saw this posted over on Marvel.com accompanying this article, I seriously hope this is some kind of sick joke. Realistically though since the Spider-Man 3 movie is coming out next year, this costume change can only be temporary since I know the movie will have the traditional duds.

I'm Back

I'm back and I'm tired.

Got up at 5 AM on Monday to get ready for my trip to PA. Might now have been so bad had I gotten to sleep before 12:30 the night before. Anyway, after the three and half hour car ride we got to sit around and once again go over schedules for eight hours. Fun stuff.

We checked into the hotel at around 6:30 PM on Monday and I napped for half an hour before we all went out to dinner at Titlow's Tavern & Grille (and no, it's not a strip joint or a brothel or anything). Pretty good food. I love their Seafood Chowder.

I crashed pretty quick after we got back to the hotel. From the report I got from Ginger the weather in Northern VA was really nice and warm on Monday. Ginger said Catherine did really well at school. When she went to pick the kids up both of them were playing together on the playground. They came over to Ginger holding hands so they seem to be getting along with each other while at school. With the weather so nice they got to play some outside once they got home.

Today we left the hotel at 8:15 AM. Since we were waiting on more people coming up from VA today, we went over some more schedule stuff before they got there (which I believe they got there around 10). I also got to pick the brain of one of the program architects so I now have a fairly good idea of what he was thinking when he wrote the statement of work. Nothing I've seen so far sounds overly hard, there's just a lot to do. Probably could use another software engineer in PA for the job (they only have 2 at the facility up there currently). The hard part of this job is going to be coordinating the work being done in VA and PA simultaneously.

We left PA around 4:30 or so. I had to courier some documents back to our facility in VA, so we had to stop by work and drop those off. Managed to get home just after 8. The kids were already dressed for bed and getting their books read to them. So I got to help tuck them in. I'm looking forward to spending some more time with the kids tomorrow. Didn't get to see a lot of Ginger yet since both kids have been calling for her constantly, but I've already learned she has a migraine. And she's apparently cleaned my office at home while I was gone. So everything is...different. I'm still adjusting to it. And it turns out I have tile flooring in my office, who knew.

Christmas is Over (Almost)

The trees are down, the real one is now out at the curb and the fake one is in a box downstairs. The pine needles have been vacuumed. There are still a couple of decorations around the house, but for the most part it's all gone. It's almost as Christmas never happened. Except for the giant race track that's taking up 75% of the sitting room (or whatever the name of the room with the piano is). And the influx of new books. And the new toys. But aside from all that, you would never know it was Christmas a few short weeks ago. Actually, the giant inflatable Snowman in the front yard and the lights on the bushes might give it away. Not sure why I didn't get to those today, but my money is on laziness. Guess I'll be taking those down later this week.

Both kids went to bed later than we would have liked, so they're probably going to be little terrors tomorrow when they have to get ready to head back to school. This week will be the first week of Catherine staying for the full half-day. We'll see how that goes.

Free is Good

I didn't get anything for free today, but a friend reminded me how much I like that saying, so up it goes. My Mom (Nana) is up this weekend, so that means I get to sleep in on Saturday. After a minor "Quinn is calling out for you" wake-up setback at 7:45, I managed to work through that and get back to sleep around 8:30 or so and persevered until 10 or 10:30. I don't remember the exact time.

Ginger got up with Catherine around the 8:15 timeframe I believe. I'm not sure what the kids were doing before I got up, but I suspect it involved the television, simply because I don't recall hearing them (and they can be noisy little buggers when they're playing). Anyway, eventually I was up and about and Ginger and the kids were removing ornaments from one of the Christmas trees.

Ginger had scheduled a handy-dude to come by the house to give us an estimate on replacing the dry wall (and no, I don't plan on doing it myself, I think my track record so far pretty much proves that I shouldn't). In addition to the dry wall we're going to have them refinish the deck, and check out the wall in the basement. Who needs savings when you own a house anyway.

Quinn had a monster soy nut butter sandwhich for lunch. I mean the bread on this thing was huge. What shocked / surprised me though was that he actually ate half of it. With it being that big, I figured he would be lucky to get through maybe one fourth of it. But he kept at it and ate half. Ginger had this bright idea that for lunch I could go outside and freeze my butt off and grill hamburgers and hot dogs. For some reason (I'm going with I must not have been fully awake yet and didn't realize what was going on) I agreed to do it. She must have sensed my trepidation with doing it, because when I went out she locked me outside in the cold with no coat (after which I was wide awake). She "claims" it was an accident and didn't know I had gone out, but I know the truth. Hmmm, now that I think about it, I think I need to go outside and put the grill back under cover.

There'a lot of backstory for this next part, so bear with me (or skip to the next paragraph if you start reading and find yourself bored to tears). A couple years ago we gave my Mom a digital camera. Nothing really fancy, and it's only a couple megapixels. Oh, and one time when she was up here she had left it out on top of her car all night when it downpoured rain. But she really likes it (surprisingly it still worked after it was all dried out, I have to admit, I was shocked) and uses it all the time. So when my Mom was up for Thanksgiving she actually was one of those people that went out shopping on the Friday after Thanksgiving. She went to Radio Shack and bought a digital camera for like $50. What she didn't know at that time was that we had already bought her a new digital camera. So I hinted that she probably shouldn't open it, because it probably wasn't all that great. Now for the other part of the stort, for Christmas we also gave Quinn a Oregon Scientific 1.3 megapixel camera. We did this because he really loves to take pictures, and we figured it was pretty cheap. Let me just say the camera we bought for him is a complete and utter piece of crap (in my opinion of course). I would not recommend this camera to anyone, ever, under any circumstances (unless Oregon decideds they want to pay a ton of cash for an endorement deal, then I'll be a complete sellout, but lacking endorsement deals the camera is terrible). It takes horrible pictures (not because the resolution is bad, but there's color banding issues in the pictures about 80% of the time). Words fail me at how bad this thing is. So today I asked my Mom if she had returned the camera she got for $50 yet and she hadn't. So we took that and gave it to Quinn today after lunch and he loves it. Now don't get me wrong. It's not a great camera (it takes about 15 seconds to write a picture you take to memory). But it's got an LCD (which the Oregon one didn't), it can do movies (which the Organ one couldn't), it's 3 mega pixels (the Oregon was only 1.3) and it works (you can see where this is going). Anyway, he likes it a lot. He even took this picture of me with it (I just wish I looked better, I especially like the starting of the double chin I have going on there). The only problem now is we don't have a memory stick for it yet so he maxes it out pretty fast (takes a picture of the door knob to the basement, a picture of the stairs, his feet on the stairs, the wall going downstairs, the top of the stairs as seen from the bottom, it's like watching a "Where did Quinn Go" cam that only updates every 10 seconds).

After lunch while Quinn and Nana played downstairs Ginger, Catherine and I took down the decorations from the other tree and then I took down lights from both trees. Not too long after that the kids went to take their naps. I managed to watch Battlestar Galactica while Quinn was napping. I started watching Atlantis but only got partway through it before Quinn got up. I won't comment on either show in case people haven't had a chance to watch them yet. After Quinn got up, he played with Play-Doh for a while, then moved on to play with other stuff downstairs. So that when Catherine eventually woke up and saw the Play-Doh, she played with that for a bit herself. She made this huge multicolored snowman. It just kills me when the kids play and mix up the colors of the Play-Doh, but I'm trying to get past that.

Since my Mom is up, Ginger and I went out for dinner, although we didn't actually leave for dinner till close to 10 since Catherine hadn't been up that long and needed to adjust to the idea of us leaving. Once we got back, I finished watching Atlantis and then came down to post this. Tomorrow is Ginger's first official day handling the toddlers class at church. She's looking forward to it.

Worthless Update

Catherine continues to do pretty well with going to school. She brought home some of the stuff she's worked on throughout the week today. Apparently it included a portrait of Quinn that she drew. I think she really nailed it.

I've been really tired today, so I've been in a crappy mood. Ginger took the kids out to drive around the neighborhood and look at Christmas lights since it's probably the last time those will be out. I guess I need to be prepared to take our lights down over the weekend. Dinner tonight consisted of leftovers. After putting the kids to bed, we watched "Without A Trace" from last night and I also watched "The Office" from last night. Slow news day here, so not a lot to report. On the positive side, I didn't have to deal with Cingular at all today.

Sports Night

Had my all day meeting today. Boy, that was fun. I didn't get a full report on what Ginger and the kids did today. I do know that Catherine was apparently washing stuff at some point in class. And I know she didn't play with the golden beads, although she likes to make you think she did before telling you that she didn't.

Everyone woke up from their naps shortly after I got home from work. Then I played some Ping Pong with Quinn. Now this probably isn't what you normally think of as Ping Pong. The game goes like this. Quinn takes the ball, crushes it so that it ends up flying somewhere across the room, and I go get it. Then I come back, hit it to him over the net, but because the table isn't true cork board, the ball doesn't really bounce. So it sorts of falls off the table, then he picks it up, and crushes it across the room. You would think this game would get old after a while, but nope, he just keeps on playing.

Dinner tonight was tacos. After that came cake and cookies for desert. Unfortunately Quinn didn't get to have a cookie since he didn't finish eating his dinner. It's been a while since I've heard Quinn give us his cookie eating philosophy catch phrase. In the past he would pass out the cookies saying "Mommy gets a cookie. Daddy gets a cookie. Catherine gets a cookie. And I get a cookie. Everybody gets a cookie." I even made "Everybody gets a cookie" my hero's battle cry in City of Heroes once. After dinner we got the kids ready for bed. And then Quinn and I played what's becoming our nightly game of Football (played using a spongy Baseball) for about 10 minutes. Quinn sort of makes up the rules, but the game always seems to end with him scoring a touchdown somehow (even if I manage to tackle him)

Once the kids went to bed we watched the new comedy "Four Kings" and then "CSI". "Four Kings" was actually better than I was expecting it to be, but I went in with really low expectations though. So it's marginal, although I think we're willing to give it another couple of episodes. Took me a while before I could place one of the actors as the dude that had been one of the stars in canceled sitcom "Committed" (actually, I never remembered the name of the show, just the description, Ginger looked up the name on IMDB). After that we went downstairs and finished hanging the curtain rod above the door in the basement. Then that we watched "My Name Is Earl" which we have to tape downstairs now because the Tivo upstairs records "CSI". There's a lot of TV that we have to watch on Thursday. We didn't even get to "Without a Trace", "The Office" and I only got to watch the news into part of "The Daily Show".

Tomorrow is the resumption of Battlestar Galactica. I'm still waiting to see if my prediction of Gaeta being a Cylon pans out since I think he was the trigger that caused Boomer to shoot Adama.

Hump Day

Quinn came and work me up this morning. He wanted me to give him his bath because, and I kid you not, he said he didn't want his Mom to see him naked. I think it was a stall tactic personally, but it got me up. After I gave him his bath and got him dried off and dressed, I sent him downstairs and then I showered and dressed myself. By the time I got downstairs it was time for the kids to leave for school. Apparently since I got downstairs late I missed the fact that Catherine was showing some anxiety this morning about going to school. So when she ignored me when I called her five times to come get in the car I yelled at her and she had this huge meltdown. Ginger then told me that while I was upstairs Catherine had been saying she didn't want to go to school and wanted to stay at home with me (please, pass the salt so I can pour it in this open wound). She eventually calmed down a bit and everyone got in the car and took off. Catherine was feeling a little better as they were leaving (I think) since she played the hands on the window game with me as they were leaving. I 'pushed' the car up the driveway and out into the culdesac and they took off.

I had to conduct a phone interview today. I've decided I'm not really a big fan of over the phone interviews since I think they end up lacking something. It's harder to accurately judge some things over the phone. After that I went home for lunch to see the kids. Catherine was over whatever mood she had been in earlier by the time I got home, although Ginger said when she picked her up from school she threw three consecutive fits in the seven minutes it took to drive to the store (if it was me, I would have thought that was probably just one long fit with some downtime for catching her breath in there, but Ginger was there, so I trust her interpretation). Ginger also said she was in a much better mood once she had eaten something. Maybe she's like me, I can be a bit of a grouch (understatement?) if I'm overly hungry and / or tired. When I got to the house for lunch though, both kids were bouncing all over the furniture sporting their new ski goggles they got for Christmas.

Work was interesting as things keep getting busier and busier it seems. I got a reminder at around five today for a meeting tomorrow morning from nine to four that I had never gotten the original invite for, so that required some last minute calendar clearing. Still scheduled to head up to PA for two days next week, although since there are three of us going now, apparently I'm not driving (something about not being able to get the third person in the car with the car seat and various junk in the back seat).

Got home at just before seven. The Diana Krall and Enya CDs we ordered from Amazon showed up (thank you Border's Books). Played some air hockey with Quinn. He's getting a lot better about not using his hands. Of course, he's also gotten a lot worse about actually changing your score if you get goal, so strangely he keeps winning (although the games are last longer). Dinner was pasta, carrot souffle and some toast with some weird toppings on it that Quinn had evidently helped fixed. The topping were red, so I was utterly amazed when Quinn actually ate an entire piece of the bread. Didn't see that one coming. After dinner I played a bit of "Super Monkey Ball" with the kids in the dining room (which ends up being just us running around the table till they get so dizzy they start wiping out). Not much on TV tonight worth watching, although I did watch an old episode of Boondocks that I missed. I think Ginger watch Law & Order. I say think since when I went upstairs earlier she was actually reading a book, possibly her new one from Amazon, while the TV was on.

Catherine Goes To School

I got "the call" from Craven this morning about the car. It had passed inspection, but just barely. And of course, they had their recommended list of things to fix. The front tires were just barely passing spec, the alignment was off, and the power steering fluid needed replacing. I figured probably should get that done since I'm probably going to be heading up to PA more often (I've already got a trip booked for next Monday and Tuesday) and the snow seems to be more prevalent there (plus if the alignment is out, those long trips are just going to kill the tires). The power steering fluid is supposed to be replaced at 40k and the car is at 39k, so I felt that was at least justifiable. I later found out that the power steering fluid is proprietary and you can only get it from the dealer, so I'm sure that cost me some extra for them to go procure that. All in all this dead battery is costing me a fair chunk of change.

Catherine's first official day of school was today. She got all prepped and ready with her "packpack" (that's what she calls her backpack) and later she insisted on wearing her "hoodie". Mom rattle off some photos while I was video taping before we left. Since I had no car, I went with the kids to school, plus this way I could video tape Catherine's first day. Quinn was also very excited about Catherine going to his school and had agreed to take her to her class, but instead of taking her to her class, he ended up taking her into the bathroom. Which worked out well since she had to go. And then Quinn decided he had to go too. So we stopped filming for a bit. After that Quinn escorted Catherine down the hall to her class and dropped her off (before he left though he decided to tell Catherine's teacher about the race track he got for Christmas). Catherine gave both me and Ginger a hug then ran off into her class. No crying, no apparent separation anxiety or anything. Ginger then went and dropped me off at work. Now even though it was Catherine's first day, it was Tuesday, so she had Ballet today. This means she was only in school for about an hour before Ginger picked her up for class. Since I had taken the video camera for filming Catherine at school, Ginger used it to film her some at Ballet also. I didn't get a report from anyone as to what happened after that, but I assume they went back and picked up Quinn and went home for lunch.

My car was finally finished around 5:30, and I had to scramble to bum a ride since Craven closes at 6. I co-opted KennyG into giving me a ride. Almost didn't get the car since we got there at 6:15, the lights were off and they were getting ready to lock up, but I got the car. Came home and Ginger and Catherine were just getting up, this was probably around 6:45 or so. Quinn actually napped longer than Catherine today, which is really unusual. We had Chili for dinner, the kids went to bed around 9:30 (they stayed up a little late since they had napped for so long).

After the kids were finally asleep we got to watch Scrubs. I've missed that show. I'm a little disappointed that "My Name is Earl" and "The Office" have gotten the Thursday 9PM to 10PM death slot up against CSI though. I mean really, what are the NBC executives thinking there? Putting a freshman comedy that doesn't even have a full year under it's belt up against the number one show on TV? I can't decide if they're just stupid or if they don't want the show to succeed.