After church we went and bought Quinn a skateboard today. We did it for a couple reasons. One was I really don't feel like I'm getting my money out of my current health care plan and I figure this will help with that. The real reason though is the night before he really stepped up and ate a whole plate full of pasta. Now this was something new for him, and he did it without complaining or anything. Now I did bribe him by saying he could get a skateboard or Rollerblades if he ate the whole plate full, so that obviously influenced his decision some. Still he did fantastic so I figure he earned it.
Just so Catherine doesn't feel left out the plan is to get her a pair of Rollerblades, but nowhere we went had ones she wanted in her size so we'll be going out again for those or we'll end up ordering her a pair online.
Once we had purchased the skateboard Ginger had to leave to go attend some meeting related to the school. Because of that she ended up being gone for several hours and I made Quinn wait to use the board till she got back since I figured she would want to see his first ride on it. I think the wait just about drove him completely mad. After two and half hours he decided to suit up in his helmet, knee and elbow pads and wrist guards and just hung out at the door until Ginger got home.
The skateboard is part of a starter kit from Toys 'R Us and it's pretty much crap. I tried it a couple times and it just doesn't move very fast at all (I suppose it's possible the board is calibrated for a lower weight and my higher weight is causing too much friction). The good news is since it is pretty slow I guess it is pretty much perfect for Quinn at this point since he's just starting out and can use the fact that it's slow to get a handle on what he's suppose to be doing. He only had one case where he actually fell down, and that was just before we were ready to head inside. Overall I have to admit I was really impressed he did as well as he did first for this being his time. I mean he was able to do some in place turning and he even tried jumping while riding a couple times. After we filmed the video (see below) he even got some cones out and was able to navigate around them. Like I said, I was impressed. If he shows a lot of improvement I might have to consider getting him real board at some point. How sad is it going to be that he's going to be so much better at this than I ever was when I was growing up.
Since the board moves so slow, the video is pretty long. So family members and anyone else that cares can watch the one above. I don't expect John to watch the whole thing, so I made the following one for him and anyone else that just wants the highlights. So think before you click, long movie above, short movie below. Enjoy.
How many times? How many time am I going to change the settings on the camera and then forget to set them back. Seriously, I want to know. A couple nights ago when taking pictures of old pictures I changed the EV value to -2 to try and reduce the amount of flash reflection that was showing up. Apparently I never reset it, so all the pictures I took today were at -2 EV, so they're all overly dark. A lot of the shots are going to look a tad odd due to me bumping up the contrast enough to get a picture that's even remotely viewable. One of the whole reason I wanted the D200 was because it has Custom Menu banks that save your settings, but it merely changes whatever you have the current bank set to, and you have to be working in a bank. And you can't write protect the banks (which just seems like a dumb decision on their part to me).
Anyway, on with today's pictures. Quinn went out and flew his hovercraft some more this morning. It also broke again, so after this latest flight I had to glue it back together again. It's just soft styrofoam so it break when it falls sometimes, and Quinn manages to get it pretty high before it falls (which means more breakage).
Since this is the last weekend prior to Labor Day we decided to hit the pool for what might be our last visit of the year. And this was my first visit to our pool all year. I can't believe the whole summer has come and gone and I've only made it to the pool with the kids once.
And you can tell they're near the end of the pool season (I believe it closes for good after Labor Day) because they've gotten really slack about cleaning it. There was a nasty layer of gnats over the top of the water in the shallow section. And I'm not talking about just one or two here or there. I was amazed how many there were. Ginger thinks they must have had the pool lights on at night and didn't skim the water this morning.
Despite how well Catherine is doing swimming (and I will add she's doing really well I think) I wasn't able to convince Ginger to let her go off the diving board solo.
After watching some of the Olympics Quinn has suddenly decided he wants to learn to dive. The problem is he seems highly resistant to actually entering the water head first. So this makes diving problematic at best.
He's got a semi nice form when he jumps a ways out, but since he won't go in head first he ends up landing flat on the water doing a massive belly flop.
After about four or five dives like this he decided he needed to sit out for a bit because "his stomach was hurting." And I was thinking to myself I bet it is.
I tried having him more or less fall off the board straight into the water just to get a feel for "how" to dive. But that still wasn't working. Eventually I held him up in the air by holding onto his feet and dropped him into the water. That sort of showed him what he was suppose to do, although he still never really went in correctly except for a couple times he came close with dives that ended up looking like the shot above. So it'll be another year before he gets to practice anymore.
You know how with kids they'll play with a toy for a while, then get bored with it. You can put it away when they stop playing with and then months or years later they'll find it suddenly it's the best toy ever again. We just had that happen tonight with the Hovercraft. I don't think they had played with this for about two years now, and yet tonight that's all they wanted to do. The video runs a bit long, and it's no Brick Olympics, so I can't see John making it all the way through this one (and fair warning, it's a bit boring in the middle, so non family may want to just skim it).
A while back (all the way back in May according to Netflix) I watched I Am Legend. This is a movie based off the ground breaking book I Am Legend by Richard Matheson which was key in developing the modern vampire /zombie genre genre as well as exploring the notion of worldwide apocalypse due to a disease. I say the book is groundbreaking because of the influence it had on pop culture and future storytelling, not because I've actually read it. This isn't the first time this book has been adapted to film. It's had a couple other incarnations as "The Last Man On Earth" and "Omega Man". This latest movie is probably the closest adaptation to the original (at least in concept in the initial stages), after a while it diverges onto it's own path that deviates greatly from that of the book.
In this movie Will Smith plays Robert Neville during a worldwide virus outbreak. A cure for cancer somehow mutates into a lethal airborne virus and starts infecting everyone, and the infected show signs of what we typically associated with vampirism (intolerance to light, attracted to blood, etc). The disease killed 90% of those it infected and 9.8% devolved into primal incarnations with heightened physical abilities and apparent diminished mental capacity. Neville happens to be one of the .2% that has a natural immunity and is the last uninfected person still alive in Manhattan (the uninfected have been hunted and killed by the infected humans or one would assume have possibly committed suicide). Neville is something of a scientist and has been researching the disease hoping to find a cure. His only companion is a dog. Dogs are apparently immune to the airborne virus, but can become infected when exposed to the virus through physical contact. The first part of the movie deals with Neville's daily routine, and examines what the pressures of extreme isolation would do to a person. For me this was some of the most interesting parts of the movie. Neville's backstory is told through a series of flashbacks as we learn how he ended up where he is.
Sadly I think most of this movie (excluding some of the end) is told through the previews for the film. Since the first part of the film simply follows him around and seems to be a study in isolation. And there are only so many shots you can pull to create a trailer, and most of the good ones are in the preview. The ending of the movie deviates greatly from that of the book wherein we learn the reason for Neville's Legend status. I've heard there's an alternate ending to the movie that's at least closer to the original book, but I haven't seen that since it wasn't on the disc I got through Netflix.
I didn't particularly like the visual representation of the infected humans since it seemed a bit too unreal to me (as did their heightened physical abilities). I also had to wonder how the infected survive, since they seem to be meat eaters and don't seem to be eating one another. Basically don't try to make too much sense of the story. So sit back and toss out all your rational logic reasoning while watching the movie and you should be able to enjoy it as action popcorn theater. If you're looking for an action film, it's okay (that's about the best endorsement for the film I can muster).
For a while there I was beginning to think Ginger might never return home. She was suppose to come back on Sunday, but a for various reason (including a potential storm and not wanting to fight traffic) she decided to wait to leave until Monday. But then on Monday a fierce migraine prevented her from doing coming back. And then today they were all packed up and ready to go and the car battery was dead.
Luckily they were able to pay an arm and a leg and have a new battery delivered and installed and were able to return home. And her brother JJ came back with has to spend some time here as well. I have to admit, it was really nice getting to see Ginger and the kids again. Even though they drive me crazy sometimes (the kids more so than Ginger) I certainly do miss them when they're not around.
For no good reason whatsoever tonight I will be posting some old pictures of Cheryl that I found after looking into a couple old photo albums.
I will say I don't know what I was using to take these pictures with back then, but someone needs to take whatever camera it was out behind the barn and put it out of it's misery. I suspect it was a big honking point and shoot Nikon camera that used FILM! One of these days I'm going to have to see about getting my existing negative scanner working and actually scanning in all my old negatives. Because taking pictures of pictures just doesn't cut it.
Judge Cheryl bringing the hammer down on some poor inebriated soul in a Tweety costume.
So Ginger and kids decided to stay in Richmond for another day and come home on Monday. Since they didn't come home Sunday that means that whole thing about me not having any free time sort of went out of the window. At this point I'm bored out of my mind. What in the world did I use to do before getting married and having kids? Anyway, here's the latest Brick adventure. I screwed up in a couple places, but I didn't feel like going back and fixing it. These things still take way more time that I would think to put together (not even counting the time it takes to film it). Sadly I still wait until too late to start working on these things.
The one thing I find amusing about the Olympics is here we have a group of the world's finest athletes coming together to test the limits of their physical endurance and abilities. And what do I end up doing? Sitting on my butt watching TV more often than ever before as I follow the games. Something's wrong with this picture. On the other hand, if there's ever an Olympic sport for TV watching, I'm going to be a contender.
With Ginger and the kids gone, it's been pretty boring here. I've ended up staying up way later at night that I should (thanks to a combination of the Olympics, catching up on TV and the occasional video game). Last night was worse than normal and I didn't end up getting to bed until around 3:30 AM (those old school Mega Man games are tougher than they look). So one can imagine I was a tad disoriented when I was woken up at around 4:30 AM to an intermittent high pitched beeping noise. I stumbled half asleep and tracked the noise into the vicinity of the upstairs hallway. Sounded like it was the smoke detector. But it wasn't going off, it was just beeping every so often at regular intervals. I figured since it's one of the models that has power going to it the battery must have died. So I yanked out the battery and went to get a new 9 volt to replace it. No such luck. There were no extra 9 volt batteries. So then I decide to raid one of Quinn's toys and "borrow" a 9 volt from there since the controller on remote control items usually uses a 9 volt battery. And Quinn and I are going to have to have a talk because all of his remote controls controllers were "on" and thus the batteries in those had been drained and were dead.
Lacking a battery I tried disconnecting the power to the unit. That was mistake since apparently all the smoke detectors are on the same power line and disrupting it to one of them causes them all to go off. So I finally yanked out the wiring connection to the unit, but left the wires themselves connected to the power. That seemed to do the trick and it stopped beeping. So I went back to bed and no sooner had my head hit the pillow than I heard a high pitched beep. No way! I walk back into the hallway and sure enough, there's a beep. But it's not coming from the disconnected smoke detector. Believe it or not it took me a while to figure out where it was coming from (you have to get multiple bearing on where the noise is so you can perform a direction finding triangulation). And since it was only beeping maybe once every 30 seconds it took some time. Eventually I found it. The carbon monoxide detector which is plugged into an outlet in the hall. And it's battery was dead (now I'm thinking the smoke detector's battery wasn't dead, but it started beeping once I took out the battery to try and replace it). So I used the old smoke detector battery which apparently was still good in the carbon monoxide detector (I suppose in retrospect it would have been simpler and probably safer to put back the smoke detector and simply unplug the carbon monoxide detector). Eventually an hour after the whole ordeal started I was back in bed. I will say part of that time wasn't dealing with the problem since at one point I decided to log into work and check the progress of an overnight test we had running.
And if you couldn't tell, the photo is another leftover from our beach vacation. I'm quickly running out of unused pictures though.
Ginger and Grammy took the kids to Williamsburg today. From the looks of the pictures it was entertaining. Makes me wish I could be there with them, but noooo, I'm stuck back here at home stuck in the daily grind of going to work.
The hats were apparently very popular today.
I should have told Ginger to look for a pair of Nike Air.
This was from what Ginger called the "Fife and Drum Program: Musket Portion".
According to Ginger "When you like what they do you say Hazah." I wonder if she meant "Huzzah".
For 75 years this apparently served as the Governor's palace in Virginia.
The kids evidently were referring to this as the "Foot Jail".
Like the shadow Quinn makes in this one with his hat. It looks like he has a triangle for a head.
When Ginger was telling me about the picture above she was saying how it reminded her of when we did that. The conversation went something like this:
Ginger: It's just like when we took our pictures in one of those.
JamesF: When was that.
Ginger: <disdain>On our honeymoon</disdain>.
JamesF: Oh. Right. Then. Really? We did? I don't remember this.
Ginger: Yes. We took pictures. You should use those pictures and this one in your blog post.
JamesF: Ummm, okay.
So I went searching, and lo and behold she was right. I didn't really doubt her, I just apparently don't remember stuff that well anymore. Luckily I have all these pictures to look back on "help" my memory.
Once I saw the picture I did remember this. I think it was in St George Bermuda. It was in the middle of a town square. Which seemed a bit odd since the whole town square was filled with touristy type shops. I will say the photo album only had this shot of me, I didn't see any of Ginger locked up.
Oh yea, and in theory I should be doing something with Brick since everyone's in Richmond, but honestly I'm not sure I'll have time to get to that. And against all odds for two days in the row the heat pump has continued to function. Maybe we've turned the corner on that one.
Ginger and the kids have taken off for Richmond. They're down there for one last visit before school starts in a couple weeks. That and there's the small matter of Grammy's birthday this weekend. And meanwhile here at home the house is nice and cool with the heat pump finally working after the repair guys were out once again yesterday.
Ginger and I watched Feast Of Love the other night. I'm not sure exactly what genre you would put this movie. Probably a romantic drama I suppose. It's not exactly easily labeled. It's an interesting movie that has Morgan Freeman as the movie's narrator and has insight to be able to see things others miss, and yet we find out that like all of us when the dealing with his own issues he's as blind to these things as the rest of us. The movie has lots of plot threads weaving in and out of one another with a fairly large cast. Overall I liked the movie a lot more than I expecting. Ginger claims that's because of the number of scenes with actresses in various states of undress, but I contend that while those scenes didn't negatively impact my opinion, they weren't what made me like the movie either.
And finally now I can regain some of my free time. I've finished Zelda. I know, you're thinking, but you already finished that game a long time ago. And I did finish Zelda: Twilight Princess. However, I just finished The Legend of Zelda: The Windwalker. It was the Zelda game for the Gamecube, so it's a bit older. Back in the day when it actually came out I had started playing it on the gamecube, but about halfway through the game (or what I thought was halfway through, in reality I was probably only about a 1/4 or less of the way through) my memory cartridge containing my save game got corrupted. At the time I didn't feel like redoing everything so the game languished, but while we were on vacation at the beach I went ahead and started playing it again.
The graphics leave a bit to be desired in this day and age, but I do like the fact that the Wii is backward compatible with Gamecube games, so I can play all my old Gamecube games on the Wii (which makes me wonder why I still have the Gamecube at all).
You spend a lot of time with the "Windwalker" conducting music. It's how you can the way the wind blows. You also spend an inordinate amount of time sailing. The game takes place on an ocean world that exists within a 7x7 grid where each grid has an island in it. Sailing from place to place gets tedious at times (luckily later in the game you can short cut to a couple of prepicked places). I didn't find anything in the game overly hard, and there were only a couple of areas where you really had to think to get past. The "bosses" were very easy to beat (especially the ones I had beat previously) and only the last boss fight was challenging (partly because it goes on for so long). As with most Zelda games in addition to the main plot there are a plethora of side quests you can embark on. Overall the game is an entertaining timesink if nothing else.
And it's a really good thing that I finished too, because I wasn't going to be playing it tonight. You see the kids are sleeping in the basement in the room where the Wii is tonight, so that means no game playing on the Wii for me. Why are they down there you ask? Would you believe the heat pump is on the fritz so the upstairs is hotter than normal. I personally don't think it's that hot, but it's also almost seven hours after the kids go bed, and it was a tad warmer upstairs then. Yep, so we had the repair guys out again today, and this time it's the compressor outside the house. And they just replaced that three years ago (it broke the first summer we were in this house). They didn't have the parts to replace it today, so they'll be coming out tomorrow to finish the job. At this point I'm considering renting out the guest room to them since they've been out here so much recently. This is putting a major crimp in our plans since I believe Ginger was planning on leaving for Richmond tomorrow, but now she's going to have to be here while they're replacing the compressor.
And on top of all that Catherine had her allergy test today. Sadly she's still allergic to peanuts. I feel bad for her since in order to do they test they prick a spot on her back until it bleeds and then introduce the allergen to examine what the response will be. This means she ended up with about 21 pricks on her back throughout the entire test. There's a long list of things she's allergic to including peanut, almond, cashew, hazelnut, sesame seed, crab, lobster, cats and dust mites. Ginger said the peanut reaction was by far the worst though. We had already been avoiding nuts in general, and it appears now that was a good decision and one we'll have to continue doing.
Once again a Sunday comes and goes and we accomplish almost nothing. Lunch turned into one of those marathon sessions and didn't finish until close to three thirty. And considering the kids still needed to clean some downstairs that didn't leave a lot of time in the rest of the day for any other activities. And tomorrow is the big day in which Catherine is going to get retested for allergies. The hope is that Catherine isn't allergic to peanuts them anymore. Wikipedia claims 25% of kids outgrow it, but I don't know how accurate that number is since Ginger's often quoted that number as being as low as 5% to me in the past). In addition to getting retested for peanuts (and other nuts) I believe she'll also be tested for seafood, so maybe our eating out choices will grow after tomorrow. Hears hoping for really good results. I can't tell how happy it would make me not to have to worry about the peanut allergy anymore since that severely limits where we can eat out.
All the pictures here are from the past month of so with my handheld Nikon. I've noticed that even though I'm not overly fond of my handheld Nikon that it does take some really good macro shots. Much better than I can take with my regular camera since I don't have a dedicated macro lens. I particularly liked how the flower shot above turned out (the color and black and white version). The rest of the shots that follow are standard (or even substandard) fair in my mind.
Random musings of JamesF. More than likely stuff in the blog will be about what's going on with the kids (Quinn and Catherine). Let's face it, they're a lot more interesting than I am, but that's not to say it won't contain other updates pertinent to what's going on here in the household.
