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Ryan was 2 yesterday; pretty amazing to think that it's only been 2 years, and so much has happened with him. It doesn't seem that long ago that he was 100% dependent on Katie and I for entertainment, food, clothing, etc... But now, at 2, he's completely able to entertain himself - we can leave him alone while we go to cook or take showers or something, and he's ok playing with his toys or watching a movie. He can feed himself pretty much anything, he can make decisions on what he'd prefer to eat, and even get it himself if it's on a low shelf in the pantry (this isn't a good thing). He talks up a storm, but goodness knows what he's talking about a lot of the time, but when he really wants you to know what he's saying, he usually knows the right word to get you on the right track, or at the very least can do the 'I'll take you to it and show you' pull on your hands.... It's been a really amazing last 2 years; and it'll only be more amazing as time goes on... We took Ryan to see Sesame Street Live: Elmo's Green Thumb yesterday at Philips Arena. Parked right at the arena, so we didn't have to walk anywhere, and parking was cheap enough... We had really pretty darn good seats too; as good as the ones that were twice as expensive, I'd say. Though, the way it was setup, I'm not sure there were ANY seats that weren't great in there. We went to the 10:30a show, figuring that traffic would be easier, and since we were having his party on Saturday, we just thought it would be a nice 'on your birthday' treat. He was utterly transfixed the whole time. We were worried that we'd be too far, and Ryan wouldn't be able to see well, and he'd get bored and whine and cry -- not a bit! He kept up with where everyone was at all times, and danced with the music, and made sure to identify all the characters for us. "Big Bird", "Abbie", "Bert", "Elmo"! He'd occationally want to know "Where'd Abbie Go?" or "Where's Big Bird?" - it was such a hoot. Took him to Applebee's for lunch, so he could effectively have ice cream and cookies for lunch, since he didn't want his chicken fingers after all... Got his haircut at Pigtails and Crewcuts again, and they did a great job again. After all that, it was naptime, which turned into "I'm going to play with my new truck in the bed for 2 hours and not actually nap" time... Then we did the rest of his presents, dinner - Pizza - he loves pizza, and cake, which made him uber-hyper, and then played with him new trainset for the rest of the evening while Katie baked, iced, and decorated Ryan's party cake. It's a Giant 3-D Lightning McQueen cake, and Ry's pretty excited about it. Leads us to today - we're hoping that it doesn't pour this afternoon for Ryan's party, if it does - we're in a pavilion, but I still don't want my friends or family soaked getting in and out of there. We didn't invite many people, just a few friends, their kids, and our families - so I think there'll be plenty of room to stay dry. Rant - I know when I was younger that I wasn't very good at RSVPing for everything. But now that I'm older, married, and in-general more responsible, I try harder. Why exactly certain parts of my family cannot manage a simple invitation/rsvp response system, I have no idea. My mom ended up being the one to tell me two nights ago which of my Aunts and Cousins were/weren't coming, because they opted to call HER and tell her, instead of calling me directly. Because my number is on the invitation. Then again, these are the same relatives that never invite us over - they just tell my mom to invite us. Unfortunately, it always ends up like an afterthought (because it's the day of or a day before) that we ever hear about it, so it's just weird to us to show up. To me, it's acceptable to say "bring your kids" when said kids live in the same house. But when your kids are nearly 30, married and have children, invite them your damn self and RSVP directly! End Rant Tags: family, ryan
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Katie, Ryan and I went down to Panama City/Seagrove for the Labor Day weekend to stay with my mom ('Mimi'), sister ('Antie') and her boyfriend, Nick. Got down there pretty late on Friday, since I had to work, but it gave us 2 whole days at the beach. It was really pretty nice, we stayed in a 3bed/3bath condo about 5-10 minutes walk from the beach that was really really nice - everyone pretty much had their own space, though Ryan pretty much needs his own room since he won't sleep in a room with anyone, so he got to sleep in the bunk beds in one room (with his new bedrails), and he seemed to really enjoy that. Mom and Amanda are beach bums, so Katie was in good company and got to do what she really likes when at the beach -- sitting on the beach all day. We went down in the morning on Saturday, stayed until Ryan's naptime, had lunch and then put him down. Ate at Boon Docks for dinner on Saturday. Bonn Docks is a local seafood hole in the wall, that happens to be on the water under the bridge into the PCB area. The food was really excellent, and not too expensive, compared to eating at Red Lobster or something... Sunday we spent the morning at the pool, then went down to the beach for a few hours, and then came back for naptime. Went to Margaritaville for dinner, which we decided we needed to do, since we avoid the crows there like the plague when we go to Myrtle Beach (there's no restaurant I want to eat at bad enough to wait 2-3 hours to eat at), but the wait was only quoted at an hour on Sunday, so we waited it out by giving Jimmy some money in the gift shop. The food was actually really good, and not too expensive, which I was surprised about. Evidently before the playing of 'Margaritaville' or at the end of 'Jamaica Mistaka' , not sure which - they fire cannons, and have a pirate and his wenches (on stilts) come out to lead the diners in the singing of Margaritaville. Fun, sure. The cannons combined with really tall people scared the crap out of Ryan, and he required sitting in my lap for the duration of dinner. To make things better (before they got worse, then better again) the tall pirate-man came over making balloon animals. He talked to Ryan and made him a monkey. During dinner, the monkey spontaneously popped - which sent tears of distress/surprise ringing out across the restaurant, fortunately Pirate man came running back to make a new orange puppy dog for Ryan. He carried that puppy around ALL NIGHT, "Orange paa-paa". Even wanted to sleep with it... After dinner it started to storm, which killed our chances for a night walk on the beach, but we still had a good time; we just went home so Ryan could play with Mimi. We all had an awesome weekend, Ryan really enjoyed having all the attention from Antie Amanda, Nick ('Nyuck') and his Mimi. Though -- we didn't consider the commute home... It took ~7 hour to get down there, which is normal... But it took over 11 hours to get home! Evidently, since checkout time is 11am everywhere, and tehre are really only 2 ways out of PCB, and neither of them are 11 lanes of expressway, traffic was retarded. It took us about 2 hours to get the 17 miles out of PCB out to Defuniak Springs and the highway. Then we got to hit bumper to bumper in every damn town we hit on the way home. We bailed from the expressway in Newnan and took backroads back to our house, and got home a little after 11 last night. Mom and Amanda left a couple of hours later, and got home around the same time as us. So the key is either to leave BEFORE 9am, or after 2pm, or you'll be in crazy retarded traffic... Tags: family, ryan, vacation
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Last Thursday bright and early we took Ryan over to spend the day with my Dad, who hasn't really ever had the opportunity to have Ryan on his own for a lot of quality one-on-one time. We loaded his car seat up into his car for the day, and off we went to go do adult things without The Boy. Dad took Ryan to the Yellow River Game Ranch, to visit/pet some animals, and then had lunch, went to the park, and just generally had a great time. Ryan slept like a log Thursday night. Katie and I decided that we were going to go car shopping. We finally paid off the Camry a week or so ago, and have decided that we need to replace the aging Escort that has no a/c. After looking at lots of vehicles at CarMax, I finally had an idea of what I wanted. Decided I really wanted something with a 6cyl engine, and that would be reliable for my goal to keep the car of at least 8 years. Meaning it needed to be pretty, fun, and reasonably practical, and reasonably fuel efficient. It really came down to either an 04-06 Maxima, or an 06-07 Honda Accord Coupe. After a little more shopping around, I was still really tosssed on Maxima vs Accord, when we found the perfect car. After test driving an 06 Accord EXL V6-6 speed, I was hooked. Managed to get them to a price I was happy with, and spent the rest of the damn day doing paperwork. The mileage was a little higher but the 6-6 is somewhat rare (at time of buying there were 43 EXL 6-6's nationwide on Autotrader, vs 260 EXL Auto's), so I took it as I found it, in a really pretty Silver, with Black Leather interior. Goodness, it's so much FUN to drive! I haven't taken any pix of my own yet, but here's a few that I saved from the dealer listing (Can't really see the black pinstripe in these photos, but I had that taken off):  ( Couple more photos, and a few details behind here... )And yes, we DID have an adult dinner out, had some fun hanging out. Went to visit my mom after dinner, show her the car, and then picked Ryan up around 8 or so. Right before we left Uncle Steve's house, Ryan fell and hit his face on the edge of their coffee table, and has a nice bruise on the bridge of his nose and under one eye now, but nothing else. Poor baby! Tags: family, ryan
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Dad's in town this week for a visit with family and a Santa class. Had dinner with him, Amanda, Nick, Uncle Steve, Aunt Jane and Grandmother -- Ryan's just about got "granddad" and "G.G" (Great Grandmother), but not quite. Dad's coming to our house this afternoon to visit and have dinner again; and then we'll be letting dad take him out all day on Thursday for some one-on-one time.  Had CoolRay come check my a/c at the house and clean it/recharge it, since we've noticed that our electricity usage is quite a lot higher than last year at this time. He found it to be dirty, and about a pound low on freon, probably because of a cap that was missing somewhere. Fixed all that, recharged it, and now we'll see how energy usage goes. I just have no idea what else we have added to the house to use so much extra energy this year... My new/reallocated UPS estimates that I have 209 minutes of battery-time for my AP, Router/Firewall, 2 small servers, my RAID server, Cable Modem, main switch and Phone ATA. So, in theory, we can surf the web via WiFi with the power out longer than our laptop batteries will last :) Tags: family, fix it, geek
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Katie and her mom went to see a movie on Saturday and do some shopping, while I hung out at home with The Boy. I worked on getting my laptop up and running OSX (project x86), but never got it to completely install, and after several hours I gave up. Might have worked better with a newer laptop maybe, I'm not sure if I had the right drivers or patches, and information on the project is pretty sketchy, due to all the different computer configurations there are out there... I installed my newly acquired 3000VA UPS and Battery Pack that I got from a decommissioning at the office. It was about 2 years old, and the batteries should be good for 3-5 years, so it's perfectly overkill for holding up my fileserver, and all my network gear that I keep down in the basement. I hope I never have to move it again, the combined weight of the 2 parts is ~200lbs. Ryan's decided that he's comfortable getting himself out of bed now. He knows that he can get in and out on his own, that's not new, but he's always just sat in bed and waited for one of us to go get him out. This weekend, when i heard him stirring I just called out to him from our bedroom -- he hopped out of bed, came out of his room, closed the door behind him - and came to see us. Same after his nap on Sunday. So, he's currently still waiting to be /invited/ out, but more than happy to come out on his own. It's hard for me to believe he's not even two, and already really acts just like a normal person, doing so many of the things big people do... On Sunday, we noticed after church that Ryan wasn't saying "GiGi" when referring to his friend Angie -- he actually had "Angie" down. They walked out of church hand in hand, between Rachel and myself. We didn't get a picture, but it was really cute. My Mom and sister came over in the afternoon to visit. Ryan belted out another surprise calling Amanda "Auntie" (very clearly) - so she was super excited about that. "Grammy" doesn't seem to agree with him, so we're working on "MiMi" which is working better. We went out to dinner, and they left around 9:30. So we watched Coraline after they left. That's a pretty freaking weird movie, but we really liked it. It was a little creepy to watch right before bed, but we survived the night. Tags: family, geek, ryan
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Formatted my work laptop to Windows 7 Pro on Friday, right after the RTM Build was released to corporate users. While I'm a die-hard Vista fan - not sure why everyone was convinced it was problematic, I ran it for 2 years, and I think it only crashed on me twice... While sure, when it first came out there was limited driver support, and some software incompatibility, those are somewhat expected - but bearing with it for a few months, it got really usable, and incorporated a lot of nice features... 7 has a lot of hype, and people are saying that it's "what Vista should have been" - and in general, I wonder how many of those people really gave it a fair shake, and a little time to attain some vendor support... I don't know that it'd be realistic to let a "fully developed" OS sit on a shelf away from the masses for 6-12 months while all the vendors updated their software/drivers to support the new architecture, but if they release it and not everyone's software works out the gate - the OS becomes a "flop". None of the people/peers that I know that really /use/ Vista - I'm not talking used for a week think it's anything short of excellent, if not a little heavy. After my first weekend with 7 - I'm impressed, but it's not SO much better than Vista that I'm rushing out to buy my own copies to replace my Vista licenses at home... We'll see how it progresses. Tags: geek
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It's been a month since I wrote in my LJ last, I think -- need to get better about that... I don't think I'll try to recap a whole month, but might allude to things if I think about it. 5 Years... This past Saturday was our 5th anniversary - how the time flies. It's really pretty hard to believe it's only been 5 years; we've done so much (but there's still so much to do together!). Ryan's nearly two... It's all just so crazy... Can't even think of how to put it all in words, it makes my head spin... Katie and I went out for dinner at Elevation Chophouse in Kennesaw (at McCollum airport) - which was actually pretty darn good. It's right on the runway,so you can watch the planes come and go. Unfortunately it was a bit rainy on Saturday night, so there wasn't too much activity. Not /super/ fantastic, especially for the price, but we had a $25 coupon from restaurants.com which made the price pretty tolerable. Katie had one of their steaks, which she said was very good, but not quite as good as her favorite from Longhorn. I had their wood-grilled porkchop, which was very tasty -- I'm not sure that I've ever had a wood-grilled pork chop, so I can't really compare it to anything. Scallion hummace appetizer was very good, scallions were kinda spicy after a while. Extremely yummy Cheesecake and a Root Beer Float for dessert. Generally, pretty impressed with the service and the food, could have been a little easier on the onions, I think the chef put onions in just about everything. After Dinner, we went over to the AMC to see The Proposal; which we thought was pretty funny, and it was a good date movie. Sandra Bullock I can generally do without, but Ryan Reynolds never fails to entertain me. Sunday we went and got massages (courtesy of Katie's mom's Christmas Gifts to us) - it was my first time ever, and I can see why people go back over and over... Too rich for my blood though. Katie's mom got Ryan a Power Wheels car for a good deal from the kids sale this week; He's pretty excited about it, but definitely intimidated by how fast it goes :) -- we figured he'd be that way, but went ahead and let him have it, to get him used to the idea. I have a 10pm-8am work maintenance at the colo downtown tonight, and I'm not looking forward to it. We're overhauling the way everything's connected, and adding some new VM hardware, and removing some now defunct hardware that has been converted to VM. I should be napping, but can't. Tags: date night, events
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Got my google voice invites the other day, and got one setup, which is a pretty slick service. There's nice integration for the Blackberry with it too, so it makes it easier to use. But then, someone pointed out to me that gizmo5.com has setup service sorta like Skype, but it has a portal for GV integration that allows free calling through the gizmo5 service! Even better yet - you can get an ATA phone appliance (converts SIP (voip) to analog phone signals), so you can use a plain old phone with it. I went out on eBay, bought an old Sunrocket ATA for $20, and got it setup and rocking tonight - it works MUCH better than my Magic Jack. Gizmo5 allows unlimited amounts of incoming calling to your ATA device for free, and they appear to only be concerned with outgoing calling for making money. You can make outgoing calls for free, but they're limited to 3 minutes - if you buy a bucket of minutes, you just use those like a prepaid card at $ .02 per minute, but the bucket doesn't expire, you just buy as needed, unlike my cell phone... So now, my google voice number will ring my house, cell and/or office. I have no idea who might want to reach me this badly, but I'm always happy to play with new toys. And - now we have a free land line at home so we can call katie's mom when she's babysitting, since she sometimes forgets to turn on or have her cell phone charged. Tags: geek
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I just sold my old Eclipse that's been in the garage for years. I thought it died in back in '05, so it's just been sitting for nearly four years, and despite the many people that have told me that I should spend some time investigating it - I ignored it.
Finally, I posted it on Craigslist, and after nearly a month of getting dumb offers, and people that didn't actually show up to see it - I finally got someone to come out tonight. He looked at it for about 30 minutes, then He told me the budget he was on (including repairs), which was pretty much what I was asking for the car in total (given that it didn't work, and I thought the engine was shot), so we negotiated a price that seemed fair to me. Not really what I wanted, but better than all the other offers that I'd had.
So, negotiations aside, he got busy with a few tools, some voodoo, and a rubber-chicken-with-a-pulley-in-the-middle. After shaking said chicken, he did the unthinkable. He started the car. It started, and ran. Then it died. He determined that he also needed a new battery, so off he went to the local Autozone, got a battery, came back, tinkered some more - and about 2 hours into the whole thing, he drove it away with his wife and kids following... He asked me several times at different points in the revival if I wanted to renig on our deal -- not so bluntly, but I could tell that he was seriously worried that after I saw that it WAS a working car, that I was going to bump the price. He didn't want me to feel sore about him or the deal, and was generally a really cool guy. I'm not one to welch on a deal like that, so I stuck to it. I halfway hoped that he would find something wrong that he didn't want to fix, and that I'd get another chance to get more money for it - but decided that I'd deal with that if it happened, but I was comitted for now.
He's a cop for a local police department, with 3 small kids and a wife. He'd had to close his family business a while ago, and then decided to change career paths to be a cop, and his wife was a stay at home mom, studying to be an EMT. They'd had to sell their minivan in order to make ends meet, and they replaced it with a $900 special from Craigslist that he's fixed up - it was actually quite a nice car... Not new, and not luxiurious, but it was in good shape, had AC, and fit 3 kids. So, in order to stay away from car payments, he's been looking for another car to replace his old gas guzzling chevy, but was on a serious budget. He said his dad always taught him that he needed to know how to work on his own cars, and he was putting that to use now more than ever fixing up a couple of cash cars.
I know it could have just been a super elaborate story, but really - after talking with him, and seeing how excited his kids got when he got the car running - they all wanted rides and stuff - I really think he was legit. He told me I could ride through his precinct parking lot and see it if I wanted to...
Katie was sad, she cried a little. I was a little sad - knowing what I know now, I could have driven that car longer - I can't remember if I would have wanted to or not though. But, I held to my word, and I believe that someone will greatly benefit from from my old Eclipse. It really was a good car for me, and I really hope that it's a good car for him.
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It's about 7 weeks since we started SBD, and it's been about 3 weeks since we've full-on fallen off the wagon - but we intend to get back on after 4th of July weekend. Good news:I'm still at about 220lbs, which means I'm still down 9 from when I started, and means I haven't actually gained any weight back since the MB Vacation... So hopefully I'll be in good position to start back. We're headed up to Dad's for the weekend, my aunt, uncle, sister and some of our cousins will be there to celebrate the weekend, and will be back at the end of the weekend. We returned the portable DVD player we bought prior to the MB trip because it choked badly on DVD's after about 2 hours of running, so we got a new one tonight. It's an RCA, so maybe it'll work better, but it doesn't play DIVX, so I'm having to get DVD copies of the movies we have on BluRay. Sims3 is addicting, if I haven't already said that... Oh yea - and I recant my Gripe about Seagate's RMA cost. it's actually 'free' to ship my HD back to them and have them replace it at a snail pace shipping (so >2 weeks with shipping both ways) - cost to me ~$10 for shipping to them. OR, you can pay the $15, ship to them first, and they'll 2-day ship it back - Cost ~$25 and it'll take about a week to get it back. OR you can pay them $20, and they'll ADVANCE ship a replacement via 2-day, AND send a prepaid return label - Cost $20 and I get the replacement in 2 days. It's kind of a no brainer. I got my advanced RMA today, and it only took about 4 hours for the array to rebuild into OK status. I'm pretty astounded, I figured it'd take a day to repair. Tags: geek, sbd, vacation
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Jeez, June seems to have been a bad month for celebrities: RIP... June 28 - Billy Mays June 25 - Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson (Guess Farrah's family is pretty ticked...) June 23 - Ed McMahon June 3 - David Carradine There are a couple of other notables, but I think those were the really high profile ones... We finally went and got my grill on Saturday, and then it decided it was going to rain. And then didn't. But we'd already gotten it all packed away for a storm... We also decided that we needed a patio set (We've only been in our house four years next month) - so we started looking around for something inexpensive - or preferably cheap, even. There was a /really/ cheap ($100) set of 4 chairs and a table at walmart, but it was sold out. Just as well - the chairs were only rated for 200lbs - which excluded me, so it probably wouldn't have ended up pretty. We found a really nice set at -- Kroger -- last night. Who'd have figured. Kroger's got all their outdoor furniture for 40% off right now, so we found a pretty neat set of swively chairs with a metal table for four - that didn't have one of those glass tops that makes me worry... It's got ceramic tiles inserted into the top which are replacable with any standard tiles if they break or whatever, and apart from the chairs' semi-old lady pattern, the whole set without an umbrella was only about 200 bucks. The umbrella stand was only an additional $15, so we got that too. Now we need an umbrella... So, once we have the table built - we'll officially have a full deck set. Katie and Ryan have been mildly sick this weekend, so we just took it easy (aside from carrying around grils and patio furniture) so that they could rest. Tags: family, news
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The boy had a rough night last night - we night he might be coming down sick, he was all sniffly. I rescued a turtle in the road this morning a few houses down from mine out in the middle of the street. Funny how he started moving fast when I started walking up. I took him a good distance off the road, and set him down in some tall grass. Hopefully he stays out of the road! The Sims 3 is really addicting. I was late to work this morning because I stopped to play for a few minutes, that turned into an hour this morning. Seagate sucks, they charge $15 for non-advanced RMA of their hard drives (+20 for advance) -- so, 5 year warranty, but I have to pay to use it. I had one 750 in my raid5 array die, so I really have no choice but to RMA it. I put my old Eclipse on Craigslist - anyone want to buy a non-running 94 eclipse? I've gotten a couple of scammy looking e-ails offering to send me a certified check for it. After a while I decided it can't hurt to say "go for it, send me money" - and see if I get any. I guess I'll sort out how to sell by mail IF i get a check, and IF it's not a counterfeit. Ryan made me a neat picture holder and a really cute/sweet Father's Day card in a workshop at Gymboree and Katie's getting me new grill - I just haven't decided which one yet. Watched a couple of movies this week: Gran Torino last night -- Clint Eastwood will be Dirty Harry until he dies. I thought it was really good, I liked it a lot. Australia -- Really long, but we liked it a lot. A little sad, a little boring at times, but it was really good over all. Tags: geek, movies, ryan
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