The school the kids go to had a field trip today to Cox Farms. The place was way too crowded. And even though my kids can be impatient at times, they got completely shafted by kids that had no concept of waiting for your turn and were butting in front of everyone (with their parents right there not correcting them). Last year when we went, we stayed till almost two or three, which worked out really well since the majority of the people there left around noon. Today though we left at around one since it didn't appear the crowd was dying down at all after lunch. Even with the crowds the kids had a blast, although they were really tired afterwards. I got lots of pictures and videos from the event, but I suspect it'll take a bit of time to sort through all of them (translation: I'll be milking that visit for the next couple of posts).
Even though Quinn isn't allowed to go out trick or treating, this year Ginger conceded to letting him go around and raise money for Unicef. The kids in extended day at Quinn's school were given boxes to raise money for Unicef. So Quinn got to go around to houses and ask for donations. I was really surprised how accommodating people were when he didn't ask for candy and just asked for denotations to help kids that need stuff. We had to work on his delivery some, at first his opening line was "Can you give me some money?" Eventually he got the whole thing down where he would explain how he wasn't asking for candy and was asking for donations to Unicef. There was only one house we went to that didn't donate something. Catherine on the other hand stayed at home, and she was going to hand out candy to the trick or treaters that came by, but only one group came by before she had to go off to bed. For some reason almost all the people that came by our place did so between seven and eight. Which is odd, since when we lived in Arlington the peak time was more between six and seven.
Woo hoo! The Passat apparently had a four year warranty and not a three year warranty like we thought, so the repairs were covered. So Kudos to VW fixing it for free. Jeers to VW for the car needing to be fixed at all. Overall it's hard not to count that one as a win even though driving around in only the one car for those four days was really annoying. The problem (for the one or two of you actually interested) was a short in the coolant temperature sensor.
Since the leaves are changing colors and everything looks nice and colorful, I had this neat idea. I would take a picture of the skyline from the top of the building where I work, and I would see color for as far as the eye could see. Neat plan, but my execution leaves a lot to be desired. Problem one was when I took the picture. It was probably around noonish, so the lighting isn't anywhere near as warm as it could be. Problem two is there are apparently a lot of evergreens in the area, so you don't end up seeing as much color as I thought would be there (either that or the trees just haven't really started changing colors yet). Problem three is that even though you can see a fair distance from the top of the building, after a certain distance everything sort of blurs together in the picture. Problem four should have been obvious before I ever thought up the idea. There area a lot of roads and buildings in the area that simply detract from the picture.
Ahhh, daylights savings time. Or as I like to call it, the time when the kids wake me up even earlier than usual. We noticed this morning that Catherine's nose was running, and it wasn't clear either, so we decided she wouldn't be going to church. So Quinn and I went, but if you'll remember, we only have the one car, and Ginger needed access to it, so she had to drive us to church and then come back and pick us up after it was over. I know that I must sound like the typical spoiled over-indulged American at this point complaining about the inconvenience of only having one car that works. Seriously, just writing this it makes me wonder when I crossed over to being that person. Even so, I'm not sure how people made do with only one car (my guess is it's easier if you live relatively near everything to need the car to access).
After church we picked up some lunch and came home and had a picnic in the front yard. I even broke out the tent. The weather was nice and cooperative for this time of year, so the tent was toasty and warm inside. And before you think we were letting Catherine be outside when she was sick, that runny nose of her's cleared up before they had come to pick us up from church.
When the kids were playing afterwards, Catherine took out one of the exercise rings and held it over her head and told me that she was an angel. I thought that was really cute (and that's what's she doing in that picture since you would probably be wondering had I not explained it).
Then we all went on a nature hike through the woods again, although we didn't venture as deep into the woods as we did last week when Will was up. The kids love walking through the woods, and even have their walking sticks. I'm really not sure where they picked up the idea of using a walking stick since I don't recall ever doing that since I'm usually toting the camera along.
When we finally made it back inside it seemed much much later than it really was (and this wasn't helped by the whole daylights savings time). So we played inside for a bit (I zoned out and fell asleep on the couch for a while) and then for dinner I fired up the grill (literally as you now know) and cooked some chicken.
Catherine had a birthday party to attend today of one her classmates. Quinn wasn't invited though (he's in a different class), so I took Quinn bowling while Catherine went to the party to distract him from the fact that she got to go and he didn't. Unfortunately the party was a good ways away and it was only two hours, so Quinn and I were rushing around a lot. We only had time to play two games. As to why we had to rush around, it's because of that engine light on the Passat being on. Ginger didn't want to risk driving it anymore than necessary until it gets fixed, so that meant Quinn and I had to chauffeur Ginger and Catherine to and from the party.
Neither Quinn nor myself did all that well at bowling. I'm going to blame crappy lane conditions for my poor performance. I only scored 177 and 168 while Quinn scored 83 and 72. I mean it had to be the lanes, I completely buried the ball in the pocket a bunch of times and still didn't get the strike I deserved. As for Quinn, I think it was because he started the game using a six pound ball. He was doing a good job of aiming (sometimes, there was the occasional pinball off multiple gutter guard shots also), but the ball was just so light that he wasn't getting the pin action he should have. We switched him to an eight pound ball halfway through the second game and he showed some improvement from that. I had requested they put the gutter guards up for us, and after the first three frames, some guy in the group next to us comes over and tells me that we really don't need the gutter guards for Quinn (I'm unsure if he offered this opinion after watching Quinn bowl a couple of times, or thought just because of his age he shouldn't have them up). Then as if on cue, right after that the next three times Quinn threw he bounced the ball off the gutter guards.
After we picked up Ginger and Catherine after the party, it sounded like Catherine had a lot of fun from hearing her talk about it. They evidently had multiple entertainers (a magician and a clown at the very least). And Catherine also got a goodie bag that she really liked (since in it was a Disney princess book). Ginger took the other camera and took some pictures, but that camera really doesn't do well indoors in bad lighting, so none of the shots even remotely turned out.
Today continues the story of "Why in the world did we buy two Passats?" On the positive side the cars have a lot 'luxury' type features. On the negative side they always seem to have something go wrong. And they're not cheap to repair either. Today Ginger's check engine light came on, so we'll be taking that into the shop on Monday to try and figure out what's causing that. Hopefully it won't cost too much to fix, but basically anytime one these things ends up going to the dealer it seems like it results in a significant amount of work. Last time it was still under warranty, so that helped from the cost perspective (it was still a huge inconvenience though), but I think the warranty has expired on it now. Can't say I'm looking forward to the result of this.
As if we didn't get enough bad news today, we found out that one the kids in Catherine's class is out today with chicken pox, which means Catherine may or may not have been exposed over the past two days when the child was contagious. According to the wiki page, people are "highly contagious by air transmission two days before symptoms appear", which means since the girl is in Catherine's class there's a high probability that Catherine may have been infected, but since it "has a two-week incubation period", it will be while before we know for sure since it takes "10-–21 days after contact with an infected person for someone to develop" the symptoms. At least Catherine won't be contagious (if she's actually been exposed and acquired the virus) for another week or so.
For the following photos, I tried going with black and white, but I'm not sure it works. I don't really think the color version works either though. I feel like there's a decent picture in there somewhere, but I'm just not finding it. Unfortunately if you look closely at the bottom picture, you can see where my CCD has started to acquire lots of pieces of dust (all the more reason I need to buy that all in one lens). Does anyone know of someplace that can clean the CCD without having to send the camera away for a month? I really can't imagine not having my camera for that long. But at the same time the dust bunnies on the CCD are really starting to get annoying. Maybe I can convince Ginger to buy me a newer camera so that I can always have one at home when one gets sent back for cleaning (and no, I'm not serious about that).
What the heck is wrong with Google lately. Have they finally gotten so big they're having problems scaling now? Blogger is in a perpetual state of maintenance (or just plain broke) these days. And now the main Google home page seems to be having issues occasionally also.
A while back when I mentioned that Marvel was going to be doing a set of stamps through the US Post Office much like DC released a set of stamps (that didn't include J'onn J'onzz). Well the preview for the sheet is available now (see over on the right). I already went into my thoughts on the individual character choices, so I don't intend to revisit that, but the images they used are new material. They did more or less the same thing they did with the DC ones, where they have the individuals up top, then issues down below. But man did they do some funky stuff with the issue correlation. Seems like The Spider-Man issue shown below happens to be the issue where he attempts to join the Fantastic Four, so they're on the cover also. The Hulk cover shown is back from the earliest days when he was grey and not the iconic green that most people recognize (I will say some of the best Hulk stories I've read came from the period where Peter David was writing the title and had him return to the grey Hulk). Spider-Woman doesn't even get a cover from her own series, just her first appearance (which was in Marvel Spotlight). The wackiest ones though are Elektra and Wolverine. Elektra's cover is actually not an issue of Elektra, but a Daredevil cover, they apparently just took Daredevil's name off the cover and slapped Elektra's up there instead (and they took off the annoying ad for the Huffy bicycle that was on top of the issue also, but I can't fault them for doing that). Wolverine's cover is an X-Men cover, which makes sense considering that's where he 'broke out' as a popular character (he didn't appear in X-Men first though, his first appearance was actually Canada turning him loose on the Hulk). The thing that's weird though is they choose an issue of X-Men where not only is Wolverine not on the cover, but at that point he wasn't even on the team (they're showing X-Men number one, which is a couple decades before Wolverine joins). Even with all those anomalies, I'll still try and pick up a sheet of these at some point when they come out in 2007.
And finally, got one more picture from the creek in the woods out back. Not real thrilled with this one since it seems cluttered or something. Maybe the colors are too drab or something.
How annoying, I go to make my post for the night and blogger blows a gasket or something and is completely inaccessible. I swear, if this service wasn't free, and I wasn't already entrenched, I would seriously think about considering the possibility of maybe entertaining the idea of switching to something else. And I'm not kidding!
From the comic entertainment world (which I just know everyone loves to hear about) there's some news about Moon Knight. Yea, I know, at this point 95% of you are going Moon Who? Think of him as Marvel's answer to Batman, but with a multiple personality disorder (oh, just think of the hilarity that can ensue). It seems as if they're planning on developing Moon Knight into a television series. I'll go ahead and make a couple of predictions. This show will be so bad that it will never make it onto the air. Or if it does, it'll be cancelled faster than Birds of Prey. At least Birds of Prey had scantily clad hot chicks fighting in it to make up for the poor writing and acting (not that, you know, I ever watched it or anything).
Got another outdoor nature shot. The well is starting to run dry here as I'm getting to the pictures that just barely make the threshold of being post worthy.
Finally, here's that video I was talking about a couple of nights ago of how I have to light the grill. KennyG, wait, I mean "Fire Marshal Bill", mentioned that I can just buy a new igniter. I'm not sure that's what the problem is though. When I do push in the igniter, I hear it making a constant clicking noise, but the grill just never lights up.
John is in town working on a proposal, so he came by tonight and paid us a visit. Hopefully we didn't bore him too much. Once the kids are in bed things aren't that exciting around here. Although he did seem somewhat impressed that we have 46 entries in our TiVo season pass list.
And it just wouldn't be an entry without yet another photo my adventure with the kids out back this past weekend when Will was up. I kind of like this one just for the variety of colors in it. Although there's probably too much green there near the bottom for it be a really good shot.
And finally, here's that video that I was talking about yesterday of Catherine. She makes this noise by blowing air through her mouth and vibrating her cheeks. It's the weirdest thing. I've tried to do it and I can't. Be warned, near the front of the video she briefly opens up her mouth with food in it, but you really can't see much. She started making this noise not too long ago by imitating a cat purring. Since then she's incorporated it into everything, but as of right now she does it a lot when she's upset or mad (which is bad, because then I start laughing). The video itself is just over a minute in length.
Catherine has started making a weird noise lately. She does it a lot, but particularly when she's mad. She blows air through her mouth and somehow manages to only vibrate her cheeks when she does it, so it sounds a bit like something flapping. It's really hard to describe it with just words. I have a video of it, but Google Video's instant upload isn't so instant at the moment (with as many problems as Google Video has on a regular basis, it's really no wonder they bought YouTube). In fact the other night I tried uploading a video of me trying to manually light our gas grill, and that video didn't upload either (the igniter on the grill is broken, so you manually have to ignite the gas, fun stuff).
Eventually those videos will be available, but until then, I have another shot from out back that I can post.
My cousin Will came up today to hang out with us for a bit. So for fun we took the kids and wandered around through the woods behind the house for a while (to the kids it was a grand adventure). I took a trash bag out with us and tried to clean up some of the trash that's back there along the creek (it's purely for selfish reasons, that way I don't have some of my pictures ruined because there's a piece of trash in it). I also took a few pictures of everyone while we were out there.
After that we all headed out to Ledo's Pizza for lunch. And after that it was off to the Northern VA Model Railroaders openhouse in Vienna. Their schedule we picked up last month listed today as a day they were open and since the kids really enjoyed this the last time (okay, mostly Quinn), we decided to go again. I think the place where the exhibit is used to be this place, but I'm not one hundred percent positive about that. We met up with Rob and Gretchen and Tyler who were already there (shh, don't tell Catherine, but Autumn wasn't there because she got to attend a Disney Princess on Ice show).
After a while Karen showed up with Amanda, so we had even more kids. While the whole picture out the window up on top of the caboose was pretty cool, Catherine did manage to give me a fright on more than one or two occasions as she leaned a bit further out the window than I would have liked.
You'll just have to take my word that we eventually went to the model train exhibit since I only took a couple pictures there (and to be honest, since I'm fairly heavy on pictures for today already, there's no real reason to show pictures of the trains). Quinn was in there for a really long time. Amanda and Catherine got bored after a bit and Ginger went off with them while Will and I stayed behind as Quinn continued to be fascinated. It was actually nice in that it gave me some time to catch up with Will about stuff he's doing. We closed the place down at five and then started making our way home. We eventually got home after a stop by a toy store and the comic book store (the comic book store trip was for Will, you believe that, right?).
I did one of those father son bonding things today and picked up Quinn from school and took him to Chic-fil-A for some food. Since they use peanut oil Quinn almost never gets to go and he loves their french fries. The reason we went is because earlier in the week when I got home late one night, the kids were already upstairs and getting in bed. There were some french fries left downstairs on the table so I grabbed some and ate them as I went upstairs to say good night to the kids. Quinn immediately asked what I was eating and then got really upset because those were his leftover fries and he thought he was going to eat them the next day (he hasn't quite figured out the whole fast food isn't even that good fresh, much less a day later). I promised him a trip to Chic-fil-A to make it up to him and that calmed him down.
So I think we may have gone from just about to the point where the foliage is almost ready for good for picture taking to just missed the opportunity in just a day. Between the rain last night knocking off a bunch of leaves and the high winds of today, we went from having almost no leaves on the ground to having the ground covered with leaves. This is our backyard now. Good thing I don't intend on raking this, otherwise my weekend would already be shot.
While I was out taking some pics I also learned that the 50mm Nikon lens I used to use with my old Nikon N70 doesn't work that great with the D70. I'm guessing I need to have a lens that has that D or ED rating for the camera to take full advantage of it.
Grammy left today and headed back to Richmond. So that made tonight worse for me since Ginger needed to attend a lecture up at the school tonight. Normally that wouldn't be a big deal at all, but I completely forgot about it and ended up stopping by several stores on the way home and ended up making her run a little late. Trying to get both kids to go to sleep after she left was an experience. Catherine kept crying out for "Mommy" to come put her blanket on (and would kick it off if I tried to put it on). I kept explaining that Mommy wasn't here and she was just going to have to live with it just being me. Quinn would have gone to sleep fine, but every time Catherine would call out he would call me in to ask what Catherine had wanted. I think it took like 45 minutes or more before they went to sleep finally. And with Ginger gone, I can't go down to my cave to play on the computer since I can't hear the kids from down there. So I had to watch a DVD upstairs. And I couldn't even watch TV since most of the shows I have to watch I watch with Ginger. Although now that Grammy has gone home Ginger and I can try and catch up on stuff we missed from this past week (since with Grammy up the TV always seemed to be on that Dancing with the Stars show).
For now for something completely different. I found these videos on the web. They're ads for Sony Bravia (which I think is some LCD flatscreen), but don't let the fact it's an ad stop you from watching. These are simply fantastic. The sheer time and effort that had to go into making these is insane. Both ads require the latest version of Quicktime (version 7 or something I believe), and if you watch the high resolution versions, it's potentially a non trivial download. There's one ad with paint and one ad with balls (and what's the deal with the clown in the paint ad?). I can only imagine how long it took to clean up after shooting these (although cleaning all that paint off the buildings and landscape had to be the worst).
And finally, just for Curt since he asked for it yesterday's comments, I present the infamous Tweety drinking picture from "JamesF: The College Years".
Ok, I'm not really Batman (although Quinn was Batman once a long time ago), so I guess I should explain. I'm hoping most people remember the first Tim Burton Batman film. Man, it's hard to believe that was that long ago. I remember that film being the first big screen superhero movie that I thought of as being well done. I felt they 'got it' when it came to translating the character onto the silver screen. I fully believe it set the tone for later films that I feel eventually surpassed it such as X-Men, Spider-Man and even Batman Begins. Anyway, that's not where I was intending to go with that. If you'll remember Michael Keaton in costume during that film, he couldn't turn his head. When he turned he wound up having to turn his entire body. That was me this morning. I woke up with a pinched nerve. I get these every so often and they're really painful. I usually get them after slack off and get negligent in doing the stretches Barry taught me. So this morning, I couldn't turn my head and I was angling my entire body whenever I moved around. Driving in this condition is a pain since it makes it very difficult to look over your shoulder behind you (I get around it by trying to not switch lanes unless absolutely necessary).
Shifting gears (or going from an odd to an end as Scott claims I'm wont to do), since Grammy is up, we now have access to her camera. That means I have access to the pictures they took from where Catherine went to the ballet when she was in Richmond. After the show she got to go backstage and get her picture taken with a bunch of the ballerinas.
And just because I seem to be doing a lot of blog shout outs in this post, I'll point people to John's page where he has some nice pictures from Seattle up.
For most people I'm guessing tax day was a while ago back in April. Not us though, we got an extension, then waited until the very last minute to turn them in (today was the last day). Why did we do that? I really don't know, it's not like we owed money since we got a refund. But I can bet that wouldn't have stopped them from fining us had we not gotten them post marked by today. There was one good thing about all this. Since Ginger had to go to the post office, she bought me some of those superhero stamps while she was there. Woo!
In other news Grammy came up today and will be here through the week. The kids are pretty excited about it from what I can tell. It worked out well since I ended up staying late at work tonight and just barely got home in time to tell the kids goodnight as they were getting into bed.
And for today's pictures I have some shots from out back again. On Sunday I took a walkabout through the woods behind our house and tried to capture some of the leaves as they're changing colors. To be honest, I didn't get much in the way of foliage pictures simply because only a handful of trees have actually changed color to the point where they really stood out, and the ones that have the most drastic color changes aren't really picture accessible (usually they're surrounded by other trees that haven't changed color yet). But I was able to get some pictures of the creek that I think turned out pretty good. It was actually tough finding a clean area to take the photos. That's because even though this creek is a ways into the wood, it was pretty polluted (at least compared to the wooded area surrounding it). I was simply amazed by the sheer amount of garbage that I saw as I was walking along the creek. Plastic grocery bags seemed to be the worst offender and were all along the creek in various places. Makes me feel like I should go out and try and clean it up at some point.
This seems like I should just copy last week's entry. Except this weekend it was Karen and Amanda that came over instead of Ken and Amanda. And Catherine was here instead of being in Richmond. And we didn't go bowling, but played here at the house all day. But aside from those things, it was just like last weekend. Karen and Amanda came over today because their place is getting painted again (the walls this time, last week I believe it was the ceiling). The kids all had a lot of fun playing through the day and Ken did come by eventually and joined us around dinner time (he had been at work most of the day).
I didn't get any pictures of the kids that I feel are really good, but it wasn't from lack of trying. I'll go ahead and post the best of the lot (which will just emphasize how bad some of the other shots must have been). I tried a bunch of close up shots, and none of them really seemed to come out. Not sure if it was the lighting of the fact that I was using the Sigma lens on the camera, but I'll go ahead and blame the lens even though the fault probably was with the photographer. I really need to just bite the bullet and buy the new lens I want. I did notice in the close up shots I took of Quinn that he's starting to show signs of having a lot of moles show up on his skin. I know that's a trait he's gotten from me. Of all the things he could have inherited from me, I was hoping that wasn't going to be one of them. I mean between Ginger and myself, the eyesight of both kids are probably going to be crap, but I was really hoping Quinn wouldn't get the mole thing.
Tomorrow is probably going to be rough, since Quinn didn't actually nap and wasn't in bed and asleep until well after nine tonight. Combine that with how hard he played today and he's more than likely going to be edge most of the day tomorrow. And even though it was very girly, I really liked the outfit Catherine had on today. She looked really cute. It's a shame I didn't have the memory card in the camera when she was showing off her tap dancing and ballet moves (and of course, once I got the card she didn't want to do it anymore).
Ugh, what a crappy crappy day. Too bad I can't actually talk about it. Guess you got lucky and don't have to listen to me rant about it.
So once work was over, when I got home there was a police helicopter circling over our neighborhood. Then a fire truck showed up just down the street. I walked over and further down the street there were about 6 fire trucks and several ambulances. The street was completely blocked and cars couldn't get by. I didn't go check it out though, so now I'm just left wondering what the heck happened. No kid pictures today, so here's some more stuff from the backyard.
I went out and bought an el-cheapo graphics card today since my old one burnt to a crisp. I got a GeForce FX 5200. It was around $80 and seems to do most of what I want it to do. There's even a $20 rebate I can send in, but I refuse to subtract the rebate from the price until I have the rebate in my hand. I've had too many rebates never show up to think the cost is really $20 less at this point. I haven't tried putting the card through it's paces by exercising it with intense games or anything, but I did try it with the old Diablo2 DirectX stuff and it seemed to be fine. To be honest, I haven't been playing as many computer games recently as I had in the past, so maybe I don't need all that horsepower anymore. I mean really, beside web browsing, blogging, Sudoku and photo manipulation, I rarely use the computer for much anymore. I still plan on buying a better performing video card in the near future, but it had been so long since I bought one, evidently all the hardware had completely changed. Nowadays card are all using this PCI-Express interface, which my motherboard doesn't have (so that tells you how old my motherboard is). I like how every 3 to 4 years they just completely change the connectors on the boards so that there's no possible way to upgrade without upgrading everything. Nice racket they have there.
And speaking of photo manipulation. If you want to see yet another version of the Quinn / Lantern / NASCAR picture that Buddy made, click this link. And in the interest of equal time, here's a photo of Green Lantern Catherine who looks like she's ready to kick some alien butt. This should prove once and for all that I'm terrible at this digital photo manipulation stuff.
