Rejected!

Rejection is never fun. It's even less fun when it's going to end up costing about $300. And while I wasn't expecting it, the guy rendered a fair assessment. The front tires are pretty badly worn and in a couple places worn through to the tread. And the other item that needs to be fixed is the belt that controls the power steering. Pretty sure I knew about that one and had passed on getting it fixed before when I had the chance. So like I said, it's not like the guy was out to get me, it was a fair ruling. On the positive side, I'll be able to get a sticker for the next month now, and it's only going to cost me $1. And since the inspection sticker is $16 for a year, that means I'm saving a whopping 33 cents! And all it's going to cost me is $300 and a ton of my time. What a bargain!

I Missed Cookies

It's Tuesday, that means Quinn has his ice skating lessons. I stopped by for the end of the lesson this week. He seemed to be doing okay, but he seemed really tired today, which was causing him to have a bit of trouble staying up. He still did pretty good, but if he went down, he would get 'wet' and then complain very loudly about it. The ice seem to have like a very light and thin layer of snow on it. I know it wasn't snow, but it was almost like powdered ice. This would get on his gloves, which then he would complain about them being wet, and it also ended up soaking through his pants around the knees pretty bad from where he would rest on his knee as he was getting back up. Next week I think the plan is to make him wear his snow pants (he hasn't wanted to wear them, but if he's going to complain that much when his pants get wet, he should be wearing the pants where they can't really get wet).


When he was concentrating he was moving at a fairly good clip. And I noticed him and some of the other kids skate around together. So he's getting a lot more control at this point. I don't think he's gliding yet though, except for maybe brief periods where he's trying to regain his balance.


Some of the more experienced skaters tried to show me how to skate backwards (these were the adults, not the kids). I can do it, but only at a snail's pace it (for reference I can go backwards at about 1/4 to 1/3 the speed Quinn can go forwards). They were trying to teach me because I had mentioned that if I could only skate backwards I could probably get some good pictures of Quinn out on the ice. Currently I skate in front of him and twist my torso around to take a picture behind me while still skating forward (I'm basically an accident waiting to happen). And where was Catherine during all this you ask (or maybe you don't ask, doesn't matter, it won't stop me from telling you)? She was playing with some of the other littles that were there and hanging out with Ginger.


I got home late tonight due to a combination of making up time from where I went to watch Quinn skate and simply being completely swamped at work. Since I got home late, I missed a cookie making / decorating session. Which is too bad, because it looks like I might have gotten to sample a couple cookies had I been there.

Ultimately A Little Better The Second Time

So as I mentioned previously, I didn't update my Netflix queue in time and got "Ultimate Avengers II" sent to me. It's actually a slightly better movie than the first one, only because they don't have to spend time introducing all the characters and going through origin stories so there are a couple more action scenes throughout the movie. They do introduce the new ultimate line version of the Black Panther. Iron Man continued his role from the first movie of being the designated punching bag. Seriously, in both movies this guy gets his butt handed to him on multiple occasions. In trying to look at why they did that, especially since he's got his own animated feature that just came out in addition to the live action movie they're doing with Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark, I think it's to show the power of the foe they're facing. Having Iron Man get punched full on by the Hulk shows you how powerful the Hulk is because you can see Iron Man's armor is all beat up after the hit. Whereas if the Hulk were to punch Black Widow or Nick Fury with the same amount of strength you would be picking up pieces of them from three states over. So I think Iron Man gets beat up as a way of letting the viewer realize how grave the threat being faced is, while at the same time offering some protection from the same threat by not having the character on the receiving end of the beating get killed. Check the battle with the Hulk from the first movie to see what I mean. Overall I liked the second entry of Ultimate Avengers better than the first one, but considering how bad the first one was, that's not exactly high praise. I am glad I rented it, if only because on this one they put together a 'gag reel' of clips where they spliced together various clips and had the actors re-dubbed some scenes. All in all those five minutes for me made it worth the price of admission.

Oh yea, you know those "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" commercials? It appears they're redoing them for the UK. For the most part they're following the scripts of the US versions, but they're ever so slightly tweaked. I love those commercials. But I really liked John Hodgman on the Daily Show before he started doing the US commercials. His statistic segments were always hysterical. And from looking at his IMDB page, he's going to be in Coraline, which is an adaptation of a Neil Gaiman book. So I'll be seeing that at some point, because I really like Neil's stuff (MirrorMask was a very well done movie in my opinion).

Routine Sunday

Very uneventful day for us. Aside from going to church, a quick trip to Wegman's and eating lunch at Ledo's Pizza we didn't do much. We did start discussing whether Quinn should start getting an allowance for doing some chores around the house. Quinn is very much in favor of this idea and has already started picking out things he plans to buy. Apparently he's regressing in his toy choices because everything he was talking about buying was Thomas the Train related stuff. I'm still not convinced he realizes he would have to actually do some chores to get the money though.

The snow's just about all gone.

Grammy And Pop Pop Stop By

Grammy and Pop Pop came up for a short visit today. The real reason for their visit was to take back the sewing machine of their's we were borrowing (they needed it for something). In reality I suspect the ulterior motive was really to drive for 4+ hours just so they could go out to lunch for 3 hours. That's right, they came up just to pick up one item, and then went out to Artie's for lunch.


Before they arrived the kids made some cards for Pop Pop since it'll be his birthday soon. They used Ginger's stamping / scrapbooking stuff. They really got into it. When everyone went to lunch I bailed since I don't really like the food at Artie's and lunch there always turns into a marathon session lasting hours upon hours. I hear Quinn was an eating machine though and ate a ton of food (no new foods mind you, just a lot of stuff he normally eats).


And they wouldn't be grandparents unless the kids got some stuff when they came up.


Catherine just loves playing in the snow. And since it's so cold and the front of our house gets almost no sun, we still have some in front of the house. Here she's kicking snow onto the driveway. The only problem with that is she's wearing Mary Janes. I'm assuming the snow will eventually melt, and if we have a couple more days like today where it's almost 60 degrees, I suspect it won't be long before it's completely melted.


This was Quinn before he left pretending to drive and talk to some NASCAR drivers on the cell phone. Someone needs to tell him it's not safe to talk on your cell while driving.


And who is that handsome devil in the reflection in the glasses?

Random Bits

Arrrrgh! After ranting about how crappy that Ultimate Avengers video was I forgot to update my Netflix queue once I returned it and now they're sending me Ultimate Avengers 2. Cue me screaming "Nooooooooo" while camera pans up and around in Kirk screaming Khan mode.

So I saw in the entertainment news today (as it pertains to comic books) that Katie Holmes is going to pass on appearing in the next Batman film (The Dark Knight). Now I have to assume the next Batman movie has a production budget comparable to the first one (around 150 Million). So instead, she's going to appear with Queen Latifah in "Mad Money" (whose total budget is like 12 million). That seems like it would have been a no-brainer decision. Is she nuts? I mean I know everyone thinks Tom is crazy, but who knew crazy was contagious.

I got home too late to really see the kids tonight. Catherine was already in bed asleep and Quinn was reading books with Ginger before hopping into bed himself. Good thing the weekend is coming up. Maybe I can take some pictures (because I never do that). And speaking of pictures, here's a couple more from earlier in the week.

TV Stuff And Pictures

There was more Martiany Manhunter goodness on Smallville tonight. And this may be spoilery for Heroes if you didn't watch on Monday, so stop reading if you didn't (or just scroll down and look at the pictures). Seriously, stop reading. Why are you still reading if you didn't watch it yet? So my observation is this, on Monday Sylar was still in his cell and drugged up, but didn't he break through the glass on the previous episode? I figured from that (since Eden had turned off the power nullifier) that he had escaped. What gives? How is he still a captive? Did I miss something?


Will it ever stop? Even more pictures from last weekend.


I'm probably the only one that will find this one interesting, but it was snowflakes caught in a single spider web strand. This strand went off the porch to the trees. I have no idea how it managed to stay there through the wind and snow, but it did, and even caught a snowflake or two on it.


Quinn took this one of me. It was Monday night, so I was still in recovery mode, and as everyone knows, you can't shave when you're not feeling well.

Ultimate Letdown

I'm almost better I think. Today I didn't need to take any Claritin and I managed to last until three in the afternoon before I started feeling worn out and tired. I still have a nagging cough which I suspect I'll have for a week or more (for some reason when I get sick, the cough sticks around long after I'm over the actual virus). Quinn also seems much improved and basically back to his old self.

Catherine's really been interested in trying to read lately, and has even started using the movable alphabet at school to write out some words. At this rate we're thinking she may actually start reading before Quinn does. That's not to say I think Quinn's incapable of mastering the art of reading, far from it, but rather it doesn't come easily to him so he doesn't put as much effort into it as he does tasks that he's good at (like math for example). It's also getting down to the wire where we have to decide whether we're going to have him attend public school next year. Ginger called the school to talk to them about their programs and didn't like the answers she got (she also admits that she was talking to a person that had been there for less than six weeks, so this person might not have been the best one to be promoting the school).

I watched "Ultimate Avengers" tonight on DVD. I had high hopes for this. After having my socks permanently knocked off week after week by Justice League Unlimited I thought for sure Marvel would bring their A-Game to this outing. Sadly, that's not the case. The story itself is an adaptation of the first volume (twelve issues) of the Ultimates comics books. That has some positives and negatives right from the get-go. The Ultimates is a great read since it's a complete reimagining of the Avengers team. The story got high praise when it first came out, but the fact of the matter is this was a complete reinvention of the characters. The heroes, if you could really call them that, are basically a bunch egotistical self absorbed schmucks with serious character flaws. Now a lot of that gets tossed in the video since, after all, this is being marketed to kids. Therefore it behooves them to have heroes that act like heroes. The problem is that enough of the bad qualities make it into the video that it makes the video feel like it's searching for it's identity. In the video they're not the completely arrogant individuals from the comic, but neither are they the larger than life / over the top moral compasses you normally expect from a super-hero story. Now you may be asking yourself "Self? How did they managed to get twelve issues worth of stories in a seventy minute video?" The answer, unfortunately, is "Not very well." Squeezing in a modern day reinvention of all the heroes, character introductions, internal team strife and the actual overall alien invasion plot and a resolution into only 70 minutes is going to be a tough sell no matter what. The video seems to realize it's all too much and basically ends up just having Captain America be the focal point of the story. The animation is passable at best and nothing to get overly excited about. They try to render what I would call scenic shots, but then screw it up by getting the perspective wrong as they zoom in or out. Overall, my recommendation is to skip this video (I plan on skipping the second one). If you're really interested in the idea of reimagining these characters for the modern day coupled with some fantastic art, check out the trade paperback collection of the first six issues of the comic it was based off of and simply skip this video (and for the record, I'm not sure I would suggest that book for kids, it has some fairly adult themes in it). If you want pure animated superhero goodness on video, then grab a DVD of some Justice League Unlimited episodes instead of this.

Finally, I've got a couple more shots of the snow to share.

Ice Skating: Week 3

Quinn seems to be mostly recovered from whatever he had. I still have a semi persistent cough and my nose won't stop running. At least it didn't until I bought some Claritin D, which I didn't really know about having to get from behind the pharmacy counter until Barry told me about it. If only I had visited the website first, I could have gotten an ecoupon and saved $4. That stuff for the most part dried my sinuses right up. The only problem is the "non-drowsy" claim. Now I'm probably still somewhat run down just because I'm sick, but once I took the stuff I felt completely exhausted.




Quinn had another ice skating lesson today. I had to miss his lesson time since I was at work making up for yesterday's lost time. Luckily Ginger had the camera with her and got some pics. From the report I heard he fell down a bit more and had more trouble getting up today than he did last week. Like me, this is probably because he's still not completely recovered yet. Ginger did say a couple of the times after he fell down he would start making snow angels on the ice. And at one point he was doing good enough to try and race some other kids, so he's doing fine I think. He did have another pretty bad fall where he cracked the back of his head which still hurt him even with the bike helmet. Let me tell you what, we're getting our money's worth out of that bike helmet. Meanwhile Catherine just hung out and played her handheld VSmile video game (at least I think that's the VSmile).


After skating everyone went home and the rest of the day was fairly uneventful I think, except we had some visitors in the backyard, so more deer were making their way through the woods. Pics are once again by Ginger.




And finally I can't have Ginger hogging all the picture glory, so here's a couple I took back during the snow.

Snow / Sick Day

Schools were two hours late today. Since Catherine only goes to school from nine to noon, a two hour delay means there's really no point in her going. And Quinn is still somewhat under the weather, so he wasn't going to go either (although he seems to be doing a lot better, not coughing near as much and we're down to just a runny nose). I, on the other hand, still ended up feeling like crap and didn't go into work. And later we found out Catherine's ballet class for today was also canceled, so no one really left the house all day.

Since no one had to go to school and I (as mentioned previously) felt like crap, I slept in some. Once I got up, I wasn't feeling a lot better, but I saw Ginger and Catherine were on their way outside to scrape the driveway.






I decided that didn't seem right, no matter how sick I am, so I quickly suited up and headed out to help. The snow had turned to light rain over the night, which with the really low temperatures had quickly formed a very thin sheet of ice over everything. The driveway was really easy to clean since the ice was only on top of the snow, and not on the driveway itself. The problem arose when I finished and came back inside. That tiny bit of effort had completely wiped me out. I came back inside and showered and rested a little bit, then decided to work from home for the rest of the day since I had some of the stuff I'm working on here (and realistically if I'm this bad, it would probably be better not to infect everyone else at work anyway).








And during that time when I was working, I discovered something. I simply cannot telecommute. It's not that I don't want to, because believe me, I would love to. But when I'm here and trying to work, the kids (who are also here) don't seem to get the fact that I'm working and are constantly interrupting me and trying to get me to do stuff (the worst was Quinn using GTalk and IM'ing and calling me from upstairs). I finally was able to make some real progress when they took a nap, but after that it was back to the same problems. Although later in the evening Quinn was distracted by some new NASCARs he got in the mail from where we did one of those mail-in offers from Kelloggs, so from then on I was left to my own devices and got a lot done.

Unfortunately with me being under the weather, we never got to go sledding (which would have been a blast on the ice I think). So no pictures or anything of that, but here's a couple more photos I took from yesterday. I personally like the pine tree one, but still think it's missing something.




Around the midnight hour, did anyone that uses Google's homepage to track blog rss feeds suddenly notice anything different? Like posting dates and rockers. The dates are nice, but I'm not sure what the rocker is suppose to do. Updated: Ok, it appears the rockers can expand to show some of the post text, but only some of blogs have this feature (more don't than do it seems). I don't see the rhyme or reason yet of what makes a blog qualify for text within the rocker.

First Real Snow Day

Missed church this morning due to Quinn and myself being sick. I tried sleeping most of the morning, to which Ginger commented that it's only a sore throat, and why do I need to sleep for a sore throat? Man, I really wish I had a good comeback for that one.


And for once the forecast proved accurate, it snowed today. I'm not sure how much we got total, but it was late enough before it actually stopped that we didn't get the kids outside (not that Quinn could have gone anyway with him being under the weather). Both kids really want to go out and help shovel the driveway. Meanwhile I'm thinking to myself "Help?", heck, I'll pay you if you do the whole thing without me.


I'm hoping the snow sticks around for a day or more so that we can actually have the kids go and out and play in it. It sure looks like it would be fun. Maybe we'll try sledding again provided the snow sticks around and I can get some video of that. I've learned my lesson though, if I do a sledding video again I would definitely shorten the length.

Short Update Due To Impending Sickness

I had the kids all day today since Ginger was attending an all day scrapbooking session. We met Rob and his kids for lunch since Gretchen was attending the scrapbooking event also. After that we all came back to our place for some playtime.

Quinn's had a runny nose most of the day, and the later it gets the worse he's getting. He has a full blown cough going now that's actually preventing him from being able to sleep since it keeps waking him up. Although he had me stay in there with him while he tried to go to sleep, so I doubt I'm going to be able to avoid getting this one. Right now Ginger has him and is attempting to rock him to sleep. Looks to be a long long night in the making at this rate. I personally have had a sore throat since this morning that also has been getting worse as the day continues (I'm downing Halls as if they were Pez at the moment). Needless to say none of this bodes well for the future.

All this and we're suppose to get snow tomorrow. Which is really going to stink if we do since Quinn and Catherine have been looking forward to it snowing for about a month now, and based on how Quinn looks now he is going to have to miss out of being able to go out and play in it (since there's no way I can justify letting him do that if he's as sick tomorrow as he is now).

The Wait Is Over

Now that the new drive is up and installed I transferred over ~60 Gig of video data and deleted it from the old drive, so I have space again (for a while anyway). Making this video took a lot longer than I would have liked. What should have been about an hour of editing ended up being around 3 instead. This is due to Movie Maker being a steamy pile of poo when it comes to dealing with huge amounts of data. Now admittedly since I converted mov files to avi files the resulting uncompressed video files were absolutely huge, and that got doubled when I messed with the reverse video also (when all was said and done the program was probably dealing with two to three gig of data between all the various clips). There's gotta be buffer overruns or something occurring in the program. The video played correctly in preview mode, but when you went to save it, the effect applied to a segment would be applied to all subsequent segments also. And sometimes it would just stop saving the movie at about a third of the way through. I ended up having to break the video up and saving three mini movies which I then imported and combined into the whole. This has the unfortunate effect of applying some compression to the video twice, so it's a lot fuzzier than it should be. Anyway, enough about that. The video is pretty long clocking in at roughly three and a half minutes. It's in three sections. The first part shows Quinn during the lesson portion as the class is learning how to keep their balance (by practicing mini jumps). The second section is free skate time where Quinn was doing really well at going back and forth across the rink. The last section is where he started getting cocky and tried to race some of the other kids (with somewhat predictable results). As you'll be able to see he showed a lot of improvement from last week, to the point where he's able to get up after a fall quite easily now.

Pseudo Justice League

Still no ice skating movie. Spent tonight getting the new drive up and running, which took a lot longer than it should have since I didn't know how to do that in XP and spent a couple reboots wondering why it wasn't showing up under "My Computer". Once it was visible I hade to wait forever for it to actually format the drive. I spent that time upstairs watching Scrubs with Ginger and then watching Smallville after Ginger went to bed. Tonight's episode was "Justice", a play on the formation of a "Justice League" having Clark team up with a bunch of hero characters (Green Arrow, Flash, Cyborg and Aquaman) that have been introduced at different times over the years on the show. Still not sure why Aquaman made the team. Thank goodness the warehouse they had to infiltrate was on a pier, otherwise he would have been even more extraneous.

The show did have some really good one liners though. Aquaman's "It's always fish jokes." Clark getting tagged with the code name "Boy Scout". And my personal favorite of the night was after Flash is captured by Lex. Flash states he wants a lawyer, to which Lex replies "And I want a ponytail, disappointment abounds." Good stuff. Some stuff was pretty predictable, such as the gratuitous 'each individual using their power during the infiltration' shots and the mandatory slow motion group scene as stuff blows up in the background. Overall I thought the producers did a fairly decent job of not having the show come across as campy, but at the same time didn't try to take itself too seriously. As a whole though it was a lot better than I was expecting it to be.

I tried getting some pictures of the kids tonight. They didn't really seem to want to cooperate, although Quinn did better than Catherine. These days Catherine seems to be in full blown defiant mode where she just doesn't do what you tell her to, so having her sit for pictures for an extended period is pretty tough. I assume she's so defiant because this is her stage where she's trying to figure out what her boundaries are. I'm hoping she figures them out soon and we can quickly get past this current stage.




And this shot I just kind of liked, although I think the lighting could have been better.

No Space Left On Device

I had this grand plan of making a video of Quinn's ice skating escapades from Tuesday. I was going to show how much better he did this week. I had a bunch of ideas what I wanted to do, and then when I went to the implementation stage I realized that Movie Maker doesn't let you reverse video. You can mirror the video, but not play pieces in reverse. So I spent some time learning how to do that. It can be done via third party tools, but you have to save your video uncompressed. Which can turn a two minute video that's maybe 26 MB into a 350 MB file. And I just don't have the space left on my hard drive at this point to do it (I'm down to around one Gig free, and I'm wary of getting too close to the actual threshold). That would be 180+ Gig filled now. So I ran JDiskReport to get an understanding of where all my space had gone (I will add that JDiskReport is a sweet freeware tool that's written in Java). Anyway, apparently it's almost all pictures and video.


And while "Program Files appears to be significant, it's because my old Canon PowerShot used to store it's images there so that accounts for about half of the space there (the other half is actually Half Life 2, which for some reason is under Program Files instead of games). I guess it is officially time to get another disk up and running in my machine and transferring some stuff off this one.

Since I didn't take any shots of the kids today, here's a sunset shot from my office I took yesterday.

Ice Skating : Week 2

Since it's Tuesday that means today was the day Quinn's class goes ice skating. I'll say this, he showed a huge improvement over last week. That's not to say he still didn't fall down occasionally, but when he did fall, he was able to get back up. Also he didn't fall anywhere near as much as he did last week, and he got to the point where he's able to skate across the rink without falling. The couple of times he did fall was when he would pay too much attention to other things going on in the rink, or when he was simply trying to go too fast (there were times where he was moving at what I would consider a slow run / jogging speed).




I think the lessons they give at the beginning are really helping. The teacher had them skate around a circle in the ice to practice turning. And they also did some stand in place and jump exercises to practice balance.


Even though I was out on the ice last week, when I first went out this week it was as if I hadn't been out in ages and I felt like I had to relearn everything all over again. Eventually I started feeling comfortable and even took my camera and the video camera out on the ice to get some shots and film. Looking back, taking the D70 out with the new lens probably isn't the smartest thing to do.


And based on the pictures I pulled off the camera, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Ginger let the kids play outside for a bit once they got home from ice skating.