Quinn's doing much better now. He stayed home from school again today. He still has a cough that seems to flare up every now and then, but as far as a fever goes it seems like he's past that. So far no one else is showing symptoms (knock on wood).
There's a rumor out that Barack Obama might put in an appearance at San Diego Comic Con. I can't imagine that will actually happen though since the crowds there are already enormous and the extra security that would be required for Barack to show up would be insane. But the fact that it might not happen didn't stop people from finding this photo and posting it.
Next week is suppose to be the debut of the new animated Spider-Man show. It's suppose to be on the CW and there's talk they'll be showing two episodes back to back. I plan on at least giving it a look to see how they do with it. And if it's kid friendly enough I might try and let Quinn watch it.
And to round out the media super hero stuff, it looks like TV Guide is going to have an issue with a bunch of DC's heroes that have had TV shows on the cover. he blurb about it can be found here. I don't know how, but they actually managed to make the Adam West Batman look non campy.
I've spotted a new trend. Apparently on a yearly basis my car is going to be rejected when I go to get it inspected. This time it was for the back brakes which were evidently "pretty worn". Last year I thought I got a fair assessment, this year I'm not so sure. And did the cost of inspections go up? Looking at my blog post from last year the inspection cost was $16, this year it cost $26. Is the cost no longer regulated by the state and everyone can charge willy nilly? Or did the overall cost really go up 62.5%? That seems like a hefty increase.
So news on the sickness front is evidently Quinn threw up in the middle of the night, but he had his bucket with him and neither Ginger nor I even knew he had thrown up until the morning. Kudos to him for not even needing us. It should come as no to anyone that he stayed home today recovering. From what I heard he camped out on the sofa and watched a lot of TV and didn't have any other incidents during the day. Last night I had gone to the library to pick up some books Ginger had reserved and while I was there I looked through the DVDs they have available for kids and found "The Best of the Electric Company". I have fond memories of that show from when I was younger so I figured I would rent it so the kids could watch it (and last night I had also assumed that Quinn would be home today and might need something new to watch, and if it could be even slightly educational, all the better). I'm not sure Quinn (or Catherine since she got to watch some of it later in the day when she got home) liked it as much as I did as a kid. I remember Electric Company being what you wanted to watch once you were too old for Sesame Street. And it had entertaining recurring characters like The Adventures of Letterman, the hipster Morgan Freeman as Easy Reader, a mime version of Spider-Man and let's not forget Bill Cosby (although when I made a joke about "eating the puddin' pops" all I got were blank stares from everyone).
Quinn ended up coming home from school midday the same time as Catherine. And a quick doctor visit later in the day confirmed that he has the flu. Ginger said he was so tired at dinner he kept lying his head down on the table, but he also stubbornly refused to nap or go to bed. And he was coughing pretty consistently when he finally did go to bed. We gave him some Delsym, and I know the reports say cough medicine might as well be a placebo, but that stuff seems to work. Well, it somewhat works. It hasn't taken away his cough entirely, but it has greatly reduced the amount of coughing he has been doing. But I suppose that could be a by-product of him being asleep also. I remember back in December when I had a cough that combined with Advil was the only thing that kept me from constantly coughing. So I think it works, but who knows.
Quinn has picked up a bit of a cough from somewhere. I suppose with all the flu type illnesses running around a cough isn't so bad though. To balance out picking something up though, he decided to lose something as well and now has lost another of his baby teeth. It fell out at school just before he came home from what I heard. Since the kids were already in bed by the time I got home I was lucky that Ginger had taken some pictures of him at dinner.
Told you I had more ice shots that weren't as good.
I think this is the last respectable ice shot from a couple of weeks ago. Mind you, I have a couple more, and I feel confident they'll make it onto the blog eventually, but the quality of the shots will decline a bit after this (I suppose one could easily argue that the decline has already started).
I spent today removing that last tree trunk. The roots on this one were significantly more entrenched than the other one though. I didn't end up working up quite as much of a sweat as yesterday, but it was still strenuous. In addition to that I had the kids "helping" me. Which as anyone with kids knows means that the whole effort took a longer than expected. I can't remember how many times I had to tell the kids not to run while holding the saw, the clippers or the some other tool that could cause dismemberment if they fell on it and impaled themselves. Once the kids gave up helping and went inside I made pretty good progress. Now I just have to figure out what I'm going to do with all the debris from the trees.
What a non snow day event. The weather forecast was all full of sound and fury, but in the end we got nothing. School's closed simply on the basis of the forecast and a little ice this morning. Now don't get me wrong, we got some ice, but not that much. In fact it was nowhere near as much as the ice storm last week. Based on the reports I had been expecting something like what Curt got up north. I did hear about some traffic issues this morning, but it didn't sound like anything that warranted closing schools and the roads seemed fine later in the morning. Maybe we'll get some more precipitation and get some more ice tomorrow. I can only hope I suppose. Although, since there wasn't that much ice today it came as a bit of a surprise that when I came home I noticed there had been enough ice to drop a couple of our trees. I suspect the ice from last week probably weakened these quite a bit. Can't say I'm looking forward to having to clean this up. Ginger's already suggested hiring someone to do it. Meanwhile I wonder if I can just move it to the curb and call it yard waste.
I initially spent part of the morning at home and had planned on working from home. But I wasn't able to get any work done with the kids constantly fighting so I eventually decided to just go to work for a couple of hours. I didn't spend long there and basically called it an early day so overall the day ended up being less than productive.
We've got a winter storm warning in effect from 10 tonight until 10 tomorrow night. At this point with all the doom and gloom in the forecasts I have to wonder if anyone is going to be able to even leave their house tomorrow. Of course they also called for like an inch of snow yesterday and we got nothing from that. But this time they're saying it's real! I still haven't even finished posting the ice pictures I have from the last Tuesday when we got an ice storm and now we're already scheduled for another one. I blame that stupid groundhog. If he hadn't seen his shadow on Feb 2nd we would already be well on our way to Spring. On the positive side if the kids don't have school maybe I'll take some of the day off myself.
Catherine had her five year doctor visit yesterday. She seems to be fine, but the doctor was a bit worried that he doesn't think she is gettng enough milk or meat. Now we're going to have to try and get more egg, meat and milk into her. And in case that doesn't work she now gets to take vitamins that have extra iron. Although I seem to remember hearing that vitamins in the supplements don't absorb into the blood stream as well as ones extracted from food do. Not sure if there's any truth to that or not.
Yet another photo of the ice from last week above. The kids had today off from school. So Catherine got to play with all of her new toys. One of the toys she got was some Barbie-ish talking Hannah Montana doll. None of us knew anything about Hannah Montana other than I think it's a show on the Disney channel and there was some movie about it that just came out. So far that qualifies as the most annoying gift with the singing and yelling the doll does. Not sure it ranks anywhere near the annoying level of the Barbie phone from last year that would "call" every 10 minutes between 10 AM and 6 PM. Now that was really annoying. I did come home from work for lunch since the kids were home. Too bad they disappeared downstairs to play almost as soon as I got here. From the brief time I did see them it seemed like they were playing with the Catherine's new spirograph. I heard later that Ginger tried to get Quinn to try a chicken hot dog for lunch. From the reports I heard that didn't go too well. In Quinn's defense I had one of them for dinner and they're not that good, at least not reheated anyway.
I recently watched season one of Extras. It stars and is written by Ricky Gervais, the creator of the The Office, and I have to say it is quite funny. Like The Office there's no laugh track or studio audience, and most of the humor comes from really awkward situations, but it's definitely worth a watch. I haven't seen the BBC version of The Office, but now I may have try and watch that at some point. The only bad thing about the series (and I hesitate to say this is bad more than annoying) is that the episodes are only a half hour long and they don't put more than three on a DVD. I'm fairly certain that the whole season of six episodes could have fit onto one DVD instead of needing two separate DVD (thus requiring me to burn two Netflix rentals instead of one). Season two is most assuredly going to be entering my Netflix queue in the near future even though it will also take two rentals for size episodes. If you're thinking of purchasing it a bundle of the complete series (season 1, season 2 and the series finale) just went on sale.
Today was Catherine's big birthday party with all of her friends. It was at Gymini and it certainly looked like all the kids had a lot of fun. Catherine enjoyed it because she was allowed to be first at everything. Plus she got to hang out with her favorite teacher "Mr Eric". Sadly even though I had powered up all the cameras, made room on all the memory cards, I forgot to change the batteries in the flash unit, so that wasn't working as well as I would have liked (it was taking way too long to recharge and sometimes simply wouldn't fire). Looks like I need to think about getting a lens for low light situations. I took lots of pictures, but not many turned out. I picked some of the better ones below, but even then the pickings were slim.
Parachute games are always a hit with the kids.
There was a huge trampoline area with ropes the kids could climb.
There was also a huge spongy pit area the kids could jump in and swing on a rope out over.
An obstacle course that included some time on the uneven bars and mini rope swing.
Then some the celebration with the cake.
And a rousing game of Duck Duck Goose to end the festivities. After that we went out to dinner with Barry and his clan at Pomodoro (we had tried Red Robin initially but the wait for a table for a group that big was simply too long to even consider with it already being a bit late). Once we got home Catherine managed to convince us that she should be allowed to open up all her loot from the party, but we told her she wouldn't be able to play with any of it until tomorrow. She got lots of books, Barbies and other girly things so she'll have some fun tomorrow playing with that since it's a holiday and the kids aren't in school.
So as has been mentioned in previous posts, Quinn's been in Richmond for the past couple of days. Because of that I had to go pick up him up for the party since, so I met Ginger's parents at about the halfway point and we went straight to the party that had already started (I think we may have been about 20 minutes late or so getting there). I know Quinn likes spending time with his grandparents, because he almost started crying when he had to say goodbye. Of course, that doesn't do much for my self esteem since it can be interpreted that he's crying because he has to go with me. But, even though he was sad and started to tear up he didn't actually cry, and later he told me that he almost did, but that he didn't because "Big boys don't cry in front of other people." I was wondering where he had picked up that line and Ginger explained that it might have been from the "Farmer Boy" book the kids are listening to on CD. That's a book in the Little House series and focuses on a boy named Almanzo. And in the book it states stuff like "He did not cry. He would have cried if he had not been almost ten years old." So I'm guessing that's where that came from.
With the end of the writer's strike the CW announced when we might see some new episodes of scripted shows, and Reaper is on the list! It's slated for return on April 22 with five new episodes (hmmm, one week after taxes are due, I wonder if there's a connection there). I'm really hoping this is good news and bodes well for a season two pickup. But let's be realistic, I like the show so it'll probably get canned. I did notice that NBC also announced when we might see some new shows this season from them, but Journeyman wasn't on the list there (start playing taps now for that show, it's done).
Yet another ice photo for your enjoyment. Don't worry, there won't be too many more of these. At least not a lot of them, I have to run out at some point, right?
TiVo has managed to drag Ginger over to the dark side. She stated the other night that like me, she couldn't recommend a TiVo to anyone anymore. Why you ask? We got our "new" TiVo the other night and set it up. The next day when Ginger was playing around with it while the kids were at school she noticed that it shows a gray screen when changing channels. And sometimes it will just not display a channel and there are a couple of channels that both the old Series 3 TiVo and the television can see but the new TiVo refuses to acknowledge even exists. Turns out the new TiVo isn't so much new as it is new to us. That's because it's a refurbished model. And apparently it's in way worse shape than the one we already had (in our opinion). On Thursday night it started just spontaneously rebooting. No rhyme or reason, just every so often it would reboot. And it was as if it was running at half speed. Remember back in the day when computers had that Turbo button you could press to speed it up? It's sort of like that, but in reverse. It just operates slower than normal and can take multiple seconds to respond to a command. That is if it responds at all since the user interface has a nasty habit of simply locking up at various times. So Ginger called up TiVo and this time she got one of the "special" tech support people (even though she called her "take me to the more advance tech guys" support number). The guy she was talking to kept insisting that TiVo simply had the wrong channel lineup, even though Ginger's knows that's not the case. So at this point it certainly seems like we'll be sending this replacement one back and trying our luck with the next one they send. Ginger's becoming more and more willing to consider my fallback plan of simply keeping the old one with one cable card that doesn't work. I mean it's really only an issue if we want to record two encrypted HD channels simultaneously, because even the broken cable card slot still displays all the local over the air HD channels just fine.
Tonight at dinner Catherine pointed out how quiet it is without Quinn here. She mentioned that no one has been yelling or fighting or anything. Then as if a lightbulb went off in her head she wanted to know if she could get her chip for the day. What's a chip you ask? Well the kids can earn poker chips for various things throughout the day which they can later turn in for a reward, it's a lot like the smile system that Barry's kids use to get stuff, but we require way more chips (each chip represents 25 cents and the toys they can get around between $8 and $20). Anyway, Catherine's rationale for wanting a chip was, as she pointed out, that she hadn't gotten into a fight or hit Quinn all day. We explained that Quinn's been in Richmond and she responded with "Yea, but I didn't hit him." It's this kind of reasoning that has me thinking she may end up being a lawyer someday. It is a creative way to think about the issue, I'll give her that.
There's a rumor out that Barack Obama might put in an appearance at San Diego Comic Con. I can't imagine that will actually happen though since the crowds there are already enormous and the extra security that would be required for Barack to show up would be insane. But the fact that it might not happen didn't stop people from finding this photo and posting it.
