The kids had today off today for Martin Luthor King day. I unfortunately did not have that luxury and had to work. Quinn used his day off to work on his last Lego item (an 18 wheeler racing truck). So now all the Lego's have been finished. Figured I would go ahead and put up a picture of Quinn's Lego Batman collection.
Ginger's on the mend, but was still running a mild fever for part of the day. The problem was Catherine had a birthday party to attend today at Chuck E. Cheese, and she really wanted Ginger to be the one to take her. To be fair Quinn wanted Ginger to take her too since that meant if it was just me and him maybe he could watch Star Wars or try and he could try to convince me to play video games with him. But Ginger was still feeling a bit dizzy when it came time to leave, so we ended up compromising. I ended up driving them to the event and Ginger went in with her. This meant Quinn didn't get to hang out with me at home, but he brought his DS so we hung out at a local McDonald's and he played his new Lego Star Wars game on that for most of the time they were at the party.
We waited around for about 20 minutes after the party was suppose to be over and Ginger and Catherine weren't coming out. So we went in after them. Catherine still had tokens to spend, so we divided up the left over tokens between Quinn and Catherine and finally got to leave. Catherine was enamored with this one machine that would basically take a picture of print it out in the form of a pencil sketch. She did this like four times by herself, then convinced Quinn to do it once alone and once again with her. Now we have Quinn asking when we can go back. Too bad it's not a safe place for Catherine to eat, otherwise we probably would go there more often.
Ginger's still sick but is at least mobile today. In order to kill some time I let the kids try and help me out with two new video games I bought. I bought the Incredible Hulk and Iron Man for the Wii. Both were on sale at Target for only $20 apiece, so I thought to myself that's not too bad and I could take the risk on them.
The Incredible Hulk boasts 360 degree completely interactive environments where everything can be destroyed. So when the game first starts you're in a room in a warehouse (I know, a video game that takes place in a warehouse with boxes and crates, très original). I immediately went and tried to destroy a wall, but no dice. This is apparently the most sturdy well built and fortified warehouse on the planet. Now I will admit that once you get through the warehouse area you get to roam Manhattan. Now this is where it actually gets fun. They've actually mapped out most of Manhattan and you can roam it to your hearts content. And if you're a fan of wanton destruction this is a game for you. You can knock down buildings, destroy cars, and cause general chaos. One aspect that makes the game morally questionable to play with the kids around is that the destruction you cause is indiscriminate, which means you can (and do accidentally) harm civilians as easily as you fight the bad guys. Remember how in the old Hulk cartoons whenever Hulk would destroy stuff somehow no one ever got hurt? That's not the case here. In fact the sheer amount of collateral damage you cause is shocking. The only bad game play issues so far that I can knock it for is the camera angle is a bit hard to control at times. Plus there are a ton of different actions to take and so the controls to execute commands at time can be tedious (like to activate a heal is shake the nunchuk, press right on control pad and press B simultaneously). The other minor issue is traveling from one end of the island to the other takes a fair amount of time. There is a way to use the subways, but you have to travel to the subway waypoints first and they don't tell where those waypoints are (maybe that info is in the instructions, but I didn't read those). Overall I'm pretty happy with this game as it's turning out to be a lot of fun.
The Iron Man game on the other hand must be my karma for enjoying the Hulk game. I haven't had the chance to play the game really yet, but Quinn played through the first level. Unlike most games that use the control stick on the nunchuk to move around, Iron Man has a move forward button and you use the Wii pointer remote to turn (I guess for all the money Tony Stark spends on his suit making it be able to go backwards is beyond current technology). It's a horribly awkward interface. And since Quinn isn't that coordinated in using the pointer everything keeps turning constantly. I thought I might get sick just watching him play the first level. Maybe it gets better after that intro level, but based on the game play, I'm not sure (although Hulk did get a lot better after that intro level, so maybe I should stick with Iron Man a bit more before writing it off).
Unfortunately neither game has a multiplayer option which is something I really look for in games these days so I can play with the kids. I've been spoiled by how good the Lego series is at multiplayer I think (still trying to convince Ginger to let me a buy a PS3 so I can get Little Big Planet).
So I've just learned the kids have Monday and Tuesday off from school. Monday because it's a holiday (Martin Luther King) and Tuesday because of the inauguration. They keep saying how bad traffic and everything is going to be on Tuesday, but I had no idea they were going to close schools. I did like the one report I heard where police officials were telling locals that they should treat it like a hurricane and stock up on food and essentials beforehand (which seems like overkill to me for where we are, although I could see it if you're closer to the actual event).
So Ginger went to bed last night not feeling well and this morning woke up with the full blown flu symptoms. This meant another short day at work for me as I had to take the kids to school, head over later in the morning and take Quinn and one of his classmates to deliver food to the Lamb Center and then head back in the afternoon to pick the kids up after school. So basically today was a pretty short work day.
The pictures above are of a puzzle Ginger bought. I think she hates me. I don't even like puzzles. They're a horrible time sink. And yet if one is out I get sucked into working on it and then can't stop. This one I ended up working on for many more hours than I would care to admit. It has 2000 pieces and is basically a bunch of blobs of color so it was almost impossible to look for a specific pattern. And Springbok has this thing where they have pieces that fit together in, well, I can't think of anyway to say it other than it's non traditional connections so sometimes it's not even remotely obvious what piece shape you're looking for. Ginger got it over the Christmas break because she thought I "needed a challenge". Also because Springbok was having a half off sale and they apparently never put Springbok stuff on sale. Although with the economy the way it is, I suspect many things that never used to go on sale will suddenly be on sale. The annoying thing is when the sale price becomes the real price. And by that I mean there's a retail price, but the item is never on sale at the retail price and always "on sale".
Quinn returned to school today, just in time for his class' first ice skating trip this year. Quinn hasn't really started eating at his old rate yet, but we figured he was probably good enough to return to school, plus he's been looking forward to ice skating for a really long time now. He did end up taking a bit of a spill and hurting his shoulder / wrist, but it occurred because he was trying to jump over lines on the ice, so it's not exactly unexpected that something like that is going to happen with him doing things like that. Since I've already missed a fair amount of work this year, I didn't bother going to see him skating, but sent Ginger as my photographer stand in. Consider how fast he moves on the ice though this is the best picture she got. All the others are blurry or obscured.
Unbelievable how long it took to get this uploaded. YouTube kept erasing the audio tracks because I was using songs apparently that are naughty to use without permission (I had been using a couple of Frank Sinatra songs previously). I mean it's not like I'm making any money from these videos, so I don't quite see the issue. Yes, I realize it's content someone else created, but I'm not reselling it, so they aren't losing money because of me (at least I don't think they are). If no one is allowed to add songs to home movie soundtracks then I can't see how anyone is ever going to have movies that are watchable by anyone other than family.
So after more than eight reworks and probably twice as many uploads I can finally show the video of Catherine's first time ice skating. All video was shot by Ginger (since I was home watching Quinn who was still sick at that point). I take full responsibility for the editing though. It's long. Over five minutes in fact. So if you don't want to see the beginning stuff where I show video of how well she's doing I completely understand. So for those people not interested in that (John, I'm talking to you) just skip to three minutes and four seconds, that's where it starts getting entertaining for everyone else. If you do watch the first part, do take note this was her first time on the ice. I don't think I could have expected her to do much better considering she seemed to somewhat master pushing off and even turning (although there was still quite a lot of flailing arms to maintain balance). And snow pants! I forgot to mention snow pants. I can't emphasize how important it is if you're taking young kids ice skating for the first time (or you think they'll fall down much at all) that you need to have them in snow pants. Otherwise they'll just be miserable.
Ugh, the video looks terrible without looking at the high def version. I suggest going to it on youtube and hitting the high def link. As always, feel free to let me know what you think of the video. And if it suddenly has no audio, someone let me know that too (because it'll probably happen).
Quinn was still sick today, so no school for him. Unfortunately that meant either Ginger or myself needed to stay home with him while the other took Catherine to ice skating. I drew the short straw and got to stay with Quinn while Ginger got to go witness Catherine's first foray out onto the ice. I was more than a bit bummed since I had really wanted to be there to help Catherine if she needed any assistance, and I wanted to be able to see her first time out too. This was her first time ice skating ever so she started out in the beginner's class.
Apparently the fact I wasn't there to help her didn't matter in the slightest since it appears she did just fine without me. In fact, while at home I got the following email from Ginger from the rink:
Our daughter is a rock star on the ice. She moved to the advanced class.
I got to watch the video Ginger took once they got home, and I have to say for her very first time on the ice I think she did really well. I still remember Quinn's first time out and how he struggled just to stand up and here she is skating around the rink on her own already. Her and one other girl in the beginner class were moved into the more advanced class.
That's not to say she's flawless. I would say after watching the video she's probably the weakest kid in the advanced class (which considering this was her first time ever ice skating doesn't overly surprise me). And there were still lots of times on the video where I saw her taking spills. I saw lots and lots of arms flailing in order to maintain balance (must to the detriment of those around her sometimes). In general I'm very impressed with how well she did considering this was her first outing. If I had to guess I would think the couple of times she's used her rollerblades probably helped a lot in preparing her for this.
Monday was mostly uneventful. Catherine returned to school and seemed to be fine for the most part (which is good, because her first day ice skating is tomorrow). However, Ginger was unwell for most of the day though to the point where I thought maybe she had gotten what Catherine had, but apparently she just had a horrific migraine that was making her nauseous. This meant I got the play the part of Daddy Taxi and go get the kids after school and then take Catherine to her dance class. And to keep Ginger from having to cook we went out to eat at Ledo Pizza for dinner.
UPDATE: Remember how I said the day was pretty much uneventful? So as I was working really late trying to 1) get my monthly report done (which I wasn't able to finish earlier because I was taxi'ing the kids around) and 2) trying to get to my email at work after they migrated me to a new server. I finally finished working around 2 am. As I was heading upstairs to prepare for bed I noticed Quinn was up and walking around. When I went upstairs to investigate it turned out he was up because he had woken up with a stomach ache and had thrown up (luckily he didn't throw up in the bed and had made it to a trash can, or "The bucket" as the kids refer to it). Quinn was still in pretty good spirits, explaining how it had happened and "reenacting" it for me (thanks Quinn), so we thought maybe it was something from dinner that disagreed with him. This thought pretty much left as Quinn then proceeded to get up and throw up just about every hour afterward until 6 AM (making it so that Ginger and I got very little sleep that night). At this point I have to believe he's acquired whatever it was that Catherine had. I find it hard to believe he got it from Catherine though, since that would imply the incubation period is about four or five days (which seems long to me). More than likely it's something going around the school and he picked it up from someone there (but that still implies either an under a day (if he got it from someone on Monday morning) incubation or a three plus day (if he got it from someone on Friday).
Today marks the day my cousin Will heads back out to California. He was home for three weeks during his winter break, but this is the first (and last) time during his break we got to see him. Everyone came up to wish him on his way and stopped by our place for a couple hours, so we managed to get that family Christmas picture we always try and take somewhat belatedly. I noticed that he must have made it there okay since he's updated his blog with a brief update about his time in Virginia. And I can't help but notice there's no mention of us... :-(
I cooked one of those spiral hams that all you need to do is heat up for lunch, but foolishly only briefly glanced at the directions before I started cooking. Ginger even asked me multiple times if I needed to start it well before lunch when people were showing up, but I had looked at the directions and it said you only needed to heat it 10 to 12 minutes, so I thought I had plenty of time. What I neglected was to keep reading and see that it said 10 to 12 minutes per pound (it was over 8 pounds). We circumvented the issue a bit by pulling it out every so often and pulling off the outer layer. Even so, it seemed like we barely put a dent into it. And as much as I like ham, I have a feeling after I have to eat the rest of this thing I'm going to be sick of it. Anyone up for some ham pudding?
Catherine seemed to be feeling much better today. She's even eating real food again. I think she still looks a bit peaked myself, but maybe that's just me. So far no one else in the house has shown any symptoms, so that's good.
Today was also the day we started taking down Christmas decorations, ornaments and whatnot. Mind you, we didn't finish, and the lights outside are still up, but we're at least on the path to taking stuff down.
I included the above too ornaments because these are the two the kids always think "are disgusting" because you can see Opus' underwear in one and he's putting ice cubes in his shorts in the other.
Catherine seemed to be doing better today. No throwing up or anything. She stayed at home though and watched videos all day (sometimes watching the same one over and over and over again).
Tonight was also the series finale of Atlantis. It was a fun show. Never taking itself too seriously and still managing to turn in stories that were better than average. The only bad thing was it felt like the ending / cancellation caught the team by surprise and they've been scrambling to tie up all the loose plot threads in a hurry. The final episode felt rushed and they tried to squeeze in face time for too many people. It also had a lot of tidbits that have become trademarks of the show. Like John goes on a suicide mission that doesn't result in him dying. Or Ronon is super skilled at fighting unless the plot requires him to get taken out in one hit. And my favorite one, people make decisions to save the lives of small group of people at the potential detriment of millions of others. So basically normal sci-fi fare. At the end though everything was wrapped up and a nice little bow was put on it. It's too bad the show is gone as there simply aren't enough good sci-fi shows on the air anymore. I am looking forward to Dollhouse.
Catherine woke up this morning still throwing up, so no school for her. The good news is that for the rest of the day Catherine didn't throw up. Since Ginger couldn't leave Catherine I got to play taxi and take Quinn to school, pick him up and take him to his dance class after school.
Since I have nothing else worth mentioning (for the moment, none of the rest of the family has taken ill), I'll throw in this mini review of the movie Birds Of America. So let's say you're making a movie and you cast Matthew Perry, who is basically known as Chandler, the funny one, from Friends. Then you include Lauren Graham from Gilmore Girls. Sounds like you have the making a decent comedy on your hands, right? Then for some reason you decide who needs comedy and instead you decide do this movie. I think the movie is trying to be a dark serious film with a comedic undertone. That's what I think it was trying for. I'm not sure what it actually is (bad comes to mind though). It feels like an unfunny version of The Royal Tenenbaums on about a 1/4 of the budget (and for the record I didn't think The Royal Tenenbaums was a funny movie).
To give you feel for how bad it is Ginger made this comment about an hour into the film "I think I would rather be watching that X-Files movie again."
To which I replied, "Really? I'm not sure it's that bad."
And she replied "Yep, X-Files was better than this."
It's a shame too, because if nothing else the underlying theme explored by the movie could have been decent I believe if they had the proper script. But they just seemed to have a lot of subplots that never really seemed to come together.
Tonight was not a fun night. Catherine went to bed complaining that her stomach hurt. Then around 10 PM while Ginger and I were watching season 2 of MI-5 we hear the call "MOMMMMMIE!!!" After heading up stairs we saw Catherine had thrown up. A lot. More than I thought was capable of being in a child so small. Ginger cleaned up Catherine and switched sheets while I had to take care of the old sheets. Ugh. I almost threw up myself cleaning stuff up. Luckily she had managed to miss most of her stuff animals. And later she told us "I feel better now." Good to know.
Unfortunately that wasn't the end of it. Catherine ended up throwing up several more times through the night. Once she was able to use the bucket, but the other time she didn't and ended up going through another set of sheets and she managed to tag her stuff animals (Hello Kitty, say hello to Mr Washing Machine).
Today was Catherine's turn at 20 questions on the way to work. She stumped me good.
JamesF: Is it alive?
Catherine: No.
JamesF: Is it taller than me?
Catherine: No.
JamesF: Is it taller than Dobie?
Catherine: No.
JamesF: Hmmm, so it's smaller than Dobie. Do we pass it on the way to school?
Catherine: No.
I will interject that I apparently made a tragic mistake at this point in assuming the size. Also, the reason I ask about passing it on the way to school is Catherine has a habit of picking something she sees, so I sometimes try and take advantage of that.
JamesF: Is it in our neighborhood?
Catherine: No.
JamesF: Have you ever seen it?
Catherine: No?
JamesF: Have I ever seen it?
Catherine: No.
JamesF: Wow. Ok. Hmmm. Is it something you use?
Catherine: No.
JamesF: Is it in the United States?
Catherine: No.
JamesF: Is it on the Earth?
Catherine: No.
JamesF: Is it something in outer space?
Catherine: No.
JamesF: Ok, not on the Earth, not something in outer space, is it in the Earth?
Catherine: Ummm, I think so.
JamesF: Ok, so we have something smaller than Dobie, that we've never seen, that isn't used, that is inside the Earth.
Quinn: I know what it is. It's Lava.
Catherine: It's not Lava.
JamesF: I want to say a rock or something, but that doesn't seem right, especially since you might have seen those.
About five more minutes go by as Quinn and I discuss possibilities and discard them. Finally we get to school and neither of us have come up with an answer.
Catherine: Do you give up?
JamesF: Yes, I give up. I have no clue what it is.
Ah, the kids are back in school after the winter break. There's a momentary peace in the house now. Too bad I'm back at work also and can't enjoy it myself.
So I got a new toy for Christmas. A webcam. Nothing fancy or even all that good (as you'll see). I also bought one for various family members thinking we could do video chats. We'll see how that goes (I know what my prediction is). So I gave it a test run, and it at least somewhat works even if the capture mode is bit delayed.
Another stay at home day. I must admit I'm liking this whole not extended working thing a lot more than I thought I would. Nana is still up, and in addition Ken and Amanda came over. So while the kids were off playing together the grownups were playing Sequence. Well, Amanda and Catherine were playing together mostly, Quinn was on his own a lot and ended up building more of his Batman Lego items.
But then eventually it was time for Ken and Amanda to leave, and suddenly the stalling began. They couldn't possible leave until they gave us a dance performance.
Catherine and Amanda (and Quinn to an extent) would go "offstage" and change costumes between impromptu dance numbers.
At some point Quinn apparently decided to go for the flashdance look. Not sure he's going to be able to pull that off.
Dance off! I've got a lot of video of this, but I can't decide whether to subject people to it or not.
Nothing really to report over the past couple of days. Nana has been up, but I have no pictures of that and don't have access at the moment to her photos, so this shot (that I had already posted elsewhere) will have to do. I will say this picture looks drastically different on my CRT monitors and the laptop's monitor than it does on Ginger's LCD monitor. On her monitor it looks overly saturated or something. I'm guessing we haven't tweaked her setting appropriately or something. I could believe that since the picture of the kids that was in this year's batch of cards looked pretty dark when we got the actual photos, but when Ginger ordered them the picture on her looked fine. Which maybe means her brightness is up too high? I don't know, anyone else have a guess?
Happy New Year. No one except me stayed up to watch the ball drop (Ginger made it to about 10). And really I didn't either (I was downstairs playing World of Goo on the Wii). I got it using Wii points I got for Christmas. It's very entertaining and a bit addicting. The only bad thing about it is it's kind of short. There's probably a good five or six hours of gameplay, unless you really want to try and obtain the obsessive compulsive disorder records (I didn't even bother). Anyway, I did TiVo the ball drop so the kids and Ginger could see it the next day (and apparently I could also see it if I missed by playing video games too long).
A couple of comments. I think I mentioned this last year. Now I know Dick Clark is a living legend. He's the man. No doubt about it. But it's time to have someone else step in and do the countdown. At one point he was off by several seconds during the countdown (this could be because of that dastardly extra leap second that got added in). Watching Dick now is a bit of a downer because you end up feeling really sorry for the guy. And I have to believe the network isn't trying to bring the party down (I suspect since they have the name brand of Dick Clark's Rockin' New Year's Eve they don't know how to continue without him at this point). So instead I switched over to NBC where I got to watch Carson Daly phoning it in on that network. I got the impression the cold played a factor in how enthused he was since they had him standing outside the entire time.
So about that extra leap second, I didn't see the clock go to 23:59:60, so did they adjust for it before the countdown? And how exactly does this work for computers. They all measure time as time since Jan 1 1970. Doesn't this extra second throw everything off? Or is this extra second already accounted for in all the software and this was a planned extra leap second (for some reason I thought the one added this year wasn't on the schedule of every 20 years excluding centuries).
It was a tad on the windy side today. To the point where I briefly thought we were going to picked up and dropped in Oz. We did see some brief snow flurries when the wind was blowing really hard in the morning, but nothing after that. And while we were eating breakfast we heard what sounded like something hitting the house. I thought maybe some of the kids playground equipment had been blown into a the side of the house, but that wasn't it. It wasn't until later when I was staring out the front window that I noticed something was in the bush in front of the house. Turns out the wind blew so hard it pulled the chimney protector clear out of the mortar.
I had to go back a ways to find a picture of the house where you can make it out, but the above is a shot from a while back, and below we have the shot from today. I've volunteered to try and climb up and reattach it, but Ginger seems to think if I do that she'll get to collect on my life insurance earlier than she plans so she told me I won't be going up to replace it. After looking at it I don't think it's ever been replaced. The thing looks old as all get out and it's rusted through and through. Even though it's incredibly rusty though it didn't break off, the screws are still there, so it really was the wind that just ripped it out of the mortar.
Later in the day we had Ken and Amanda come over for a playdate, but I had no luck getting the kids to pose for a decent picture.
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.
The Incredible Hulk boasts 360 degree completely interactive environments where everything can be destroyed. So when the game first starts you're in a room in a warehouse (I know, a video game that takes place in a warehouse with boxes and crates, très original). I immediately went and tried to destroy a wall, but no dice. This is apparently the most sturdy well built and fortified warehouse on the planet. Now I will admit that once you get through the warehouse area you get to roam Manhattan. Now this is where it actually gets fun. They've actually mapped out most of Manhattan and you can roam it to your hearts content. And if you're a fan of wanton destruction this is a game for you. You can knock down buildings, destroy cars, and cause general chaos. One aspect that makes the game morally questionable to play with the kids around is that the destruction you cause is indiscriminate, which means you can (and do accidentally) harm civilians as easily as you fight the bad guys. Remember how in the old Hulk cartoons whenever Hulk would destroy stuff somehow no one ever got hurt? That's not the case here. In fact the sheer amount of collateral damage you cause is shocking. The only bad game play issues so far that I can knock it for is the camera angle is a bit hard to control at times. Plus there are a ton of different actions to take and so the controls to execute commands at time can be tedious (like to activate a heal is shake the nunchuk, press right on control pad and press B simultaneously). The other minor issue is traveling from one end of the island to the other takes a fair amount of time. There is a way to use the subways, but you have to travel to the subway waypoints first and they don't tell where those waypoints are (maybe that info is in the instructions, but I didn't read those). Overall I'm pretty happy with this game as it's turning out to be a lot of fun. 
The Iron Man game on the other hand must be my karma for enjoying the Hulk game. I haven't had the chance to play the game really yet, but Quinn played through the first level. Unlike most games that use the control stick on the nunchuk to move around, Iron Man has a move forward button and you use the Wii pointer remote to turn (I guess for all the money Tony Stark spends on his suit making it be able to go backwards is beyond current technology). It's a horribly awkward interface. And since Quinn isn't that coordinated in using the pointer everything keeps turning constantly. I thought I might get sick just watching him play the first level. Maybe it gets better after that intro level, but based on the game play, I'm not sure (although Hulk did get a lot better after that intro level, so maybe I should stick with Iron Man a bit more before writing it off).
Tonight was also the series finale of Atlantis. It was a fun show. Never taking itself too seriously and still managing to turn in stories that were better than average. The only bad thing was it felt like the ending / cancellation caught the team by surprise and they've been scrambling to tie up all the loose plot threads in a hurry. The final episode felt rushed and they tried to squeeze in face time for too many people. It also had a lot of tidbits that have become trademarks of the show. Like John goes on a suicide mission that doesn't result in him dying. Or Ronon is super skilled at fighting unless the plot requires him to get taken out in one hit. And my favorite one, people make decisions to save the lives of small group of people at the potential detriment of millions of others. So basically normal sci-fi fare. At the end though everything was wrapped up and a nice little bow was put on it. It's too bad the show is gone as there simply aren't enough good sci-fi shows on the air anymore. I am looking forward to Dollhouse.
Since I have nothing else worth mentioning (for the moment, none of the rest of the family has taken ill), I'll throw in this mini review of the movie Birds Of America. So let's say you're making a movie and you cast Matthew Perry, who is basically known as Chandler, the funny one, from Friends. Then you include Lauren Graham from Gilmore Girls. Sounds like you have the making a decent comedy on your hands, right? Then for some reason you decide who needs comedy and instead you decide do this movie. I think the movie is trying to be a dark serious film with a comedic undertone. That's what I think it was trying for. I'm not sure what it actually is (bad comes to mind though). It feels like an unfunny version of The Royal Tenenbaums on about a 1/4 of the budget (and for the record I didn't think The Royal Tenenbaums was a funny movie). 
Later in the day we had Ken and Amanda come over for a playdate, but I had no luck getting the kids to pose for a decent picture.
