Day 19 Weigh in: 215

I ordered a portable DVD player and a seat-back mounting bag this week, for the trip to MB to keep Ryan entertained.   Both were about $120, and it plays DivX/Xvid off of USB and SD Cards.   It conveniently accepts SDHC, so I plan on loading movies on an 8GB card (no toting/breaking my DVD collection - and since it doesn't play BluRay, I'd have to find a DVD of 'Cars' anyway), and that should keep Ryan happy.   I'm pretty surprised about the quality -- it's just a cheap GPX brand device, but I figure I won't be too grumpy when Ryan pours juice in it, vs spending 3x as much on a really nice one (those don't do divx though).   however, it IS pretty nice!   The screen could be higher resolution, but it's by no stretch a BAD picture.

Off Day yesterday -
Woke up yesterday and got new tires on the Camry.   Now it drives smooth, so I just need to get the brakes services so it stops smooth too.

FINALLY got the lawn mowed - front and back.   Still need to wead eat and pull other weeds from around the gardens, but at least the grass isn't 2' tall anymore in some places.   Lack of a mower for over 2 weeks, and 2 weeks of rain are a bad combo.

Katie's getting set to stay alone here while I'm in Sioux Falls this week, so since Amanda and Brian invited her to stay with them for the week, we had to find out how our dogs interacted.   The general plan is that Katie wants to stay here, but if she gets too freaked out, she's going to go there, and take Ryan and Lexi -- the cats will be fine alone for a few days.
So we went over to hang out / dinner with them last night.   Bella, predictably, wanted to be the Alpha dog, and Lexi, predictably, just wanted to chill and play.   Bella asserted her dominance, Lexi cowered and generally was just like "wtf, settle down, ok, I'm going over here now - just stop your bitching".   After a while, they learned to coexist, but really not interact at all -- so, they'll be fine, but maybe not best friends.
We decided that we'd been /generally/ good at our diets for the last 18 days, and decided to have an all-out cheat night.   Taco Mac it was.   Queso, Chips, Wings, Fries, and Sandwiches.   Sat outside since its a) quieter than inside, and b) it was a beautiful day - if a bit windy and cool.

Tags: family, geek, lawn, sbd

Day off yesterday. Went to the doc in the AM about my blood pressure, which is says is showing massive improvement on the small dose BP meds, so he's given me a 6 month Rx for it, and told me to lose weight (again) -- I went the wrong way this month (+3 lbs), so I need to get out of the bad habit of eating out so much.

After that I spent many hours in the yard mowing and fixing some of the loose boards in the fence. The new catcher works excellently on the bermuda in the front, but it has a hard time with the fescue in the back.  I guess it's because it gets so tall that the bottoms of the leaves are still wet unless we haven't had rain in a month?   So - I have to cut the tall part twice, effectively, to get it to bag up all the mulched bits - but that doesn't really add too much time to the project since it's really only really bad in about 25% of the back yard.

I went and got a seed spreader, a whole yard weed treatment, and a whole yard insect control - I'll probably get those out on Saturday, weather willing.   I'm a little worried about killing everything even though the weed killer is rated for bermuda and fescue to be safe, so I'll probably take a paranoid route and just do a small area for a week or so.

I need to get motivated to try to repair the gate that's sagging on its hinges, and still need to figure out how exactly to fix the threshold on my back door that's causing it to stick...

Tags: fix it, health, lawn

No posts for April sofar...   So - this is what I missed, I think.

On April 1st, our car got attacked again -- Katie was pulling out of the pediatrician's office parking lot, and was deceived by someone signaling that they were turning, but was not -- so she got hit in the front left fender.   technically our fault, no big deal, nobody was hurt, everyone was going pretty slow, and we have insurance and stuff.   So, I filed 2 claims with the insurance people on 4/2, and had it sent over to Bradley's to have the work done.  Hopefully I'll get that back soon.   We went and bought a new car seat (same Britax that we already had) and threw out the old one (kind of, it's in a trash box in the garage) since you're not supposed to use an car seat after any kind of accident.  Insurance said they'd buy us anything we wanted as long as it was comperable to the old one, so - we got the same one since we like it a lot.

Amazon finally sent me all my refunds.   I'm so lost in the process, that I'm almost sure they sent me $300 too much back, but - I might just be miscalculating.   Those people were so confused by their convoluted process that I'm surprised I actually GOT the refunds.    They sent me 3 checks (in pounds, naturally) - which my bank evidently doesn't have any CLEAR process how to handle.   They have to mail the check to the corp office, who "verifies the funds with the foreign bank" and then deposits the money.  Process takes 7-14 days.  No big deal.   The checks came weeks apart - check 1 took about 10 days to post, check 2 is outstanding 14 days today and still hasn't posted - I guess I need to call about that, check 3 posted 24 hours after I took it in.   Thinking that was wierd, I called the bank, and the lady just couldn't explain the process to me, so I gave up.  

We finally caught up on Chuck and Life from the DVR, but now NBC's talking about not renewing both of them, which makes us sad.  I think those are our favorite shows on TV right now.   We've started catching up on Heroes, and are still way behind on House...

Crossed Max Payne off my list of movies -- it was pretty much the steaming pile of poo that I expected.

Amanda and Brian announced their pregnancy right before easter, so we're really excited about that.   They're figuring that the baby'll be due in December.   We went out to dinner with them and their families on Saturday night after Easter service (we usually go to the off-peak services around Christmas and Easter since we get so many visitors on Easter Sunday AM service, it gets crowded) - they announced it to their families then, Brian's mom was bawling, it was sweet.   She's had a Willow Creek figurine in her trunk (Pregnany Mommy) for "a long time, waiting for this day" that she was finally able to proudly present to them.   We'd known already for a couple of days, so Katie was semi-prepared to get some candid pictures of their moms getting the news -- it was pretty cool to be a part of that with them.

Then Easter - we had our Moms and my sister over for lunch.   Katie cooked Ham and veggies and devilled eggs and lots of yummy stuff.   This year was pretty fun, Ryan's old enough to understand his easter basket - he got a new firetruck (woo, woo, woo) with lights and sirens - but Ryan really likes making his own noises - a snuggly lamb, Gymboree bubbles (the best bubbles in the world), some new cars and lots of candy.  After lunch, we took Ryan out in the back yard for his first easter egg hunt.   He had a ball!  He did get a little hung up with wanting to OPEN the eggs and eat the candy, rather than finding more, but with a little encouragement, he rounded them all up.  

James and I took a long lunch (just 2 hours) last week and went to see Fast and Furious.   It was about as good as expected, since our expectations weren't high.   I put in on the rung with Tokyo Drift, which I wasn't a big fan of - but I liked the first 2 a lot.  

Went to Jump 4 Joey's on Friday since I was off.   That place is a lot of fun!   It's basically a warehouse that they've converted to a play yard for kids with 7 or 8 big bouncy houses/slides and stuff.   Ryan has a ball in them, and parents are allowed to go with their kids in them (I'm sure crowdedness becomes a factor at some point) but since it was a Friday at 11am, we pretty much had the run of the place.  My abs still hurt.

Saturday we helped Brian paint his upsairs and downstairs hallways and the 2-story staircase hallway.   Manuvering a tall ladder in a staircase to paint way up high...  not fun.    But, over the course of the day we DID end up having fun, though we were exhausted by the end, but I think it turned out pretty nice.   We met up with a couple of other friend of theirs afterwards for dinner and mini-golf at Monster Mini Golf over off Barrett.   It's indoor mini-golf, completely black light lit.   The theme is monsters, of course.  Mostly silly looking ones, but there were a couple that really freaked Ryan out -- notably the one that looked like a normal guy, until it reached up and peeled its face off...   That creeped me out a little too, but Ryan got really clingy after that.   They had good music playing - and Ryan was rocking out with it.   He REALLY likes Aerosmith "Walk this way"...   Too funny.    Arielle and Evan went off to do their own thing after that, but we found out later that night that they got engaged - so that was exciting.

It needs to stop raining on my days off so I can actually cut the lawn, it's starting to get rediculous.   I also want to do some kind of weed treatment - but not really sure what to do yet, trying to get motivated to do research, but I'm just not THAT interested in my lawn - even though I should be.  The Ants invading my kitchen also reminded me that I need to get out the DemonWP and do my spring insect treatment.   That stuff works wonders for a long time, it makes me forget to do it in the spring...

We got a new thermostat that I installed last night - one of those semi fancy $30 5-1-1 programable jobbies, only because I couldn't really justify buying the $100 touchscreen one with the remote, even though it was hotness.   So, we replaced our old manual mercury filled one, and now we need to paint.

Books - I finished the New Testament, which was really exciting to go through.  I wasn't going though studying, just reading the words and the stories.   The Gospels are really interesting to read back-to back, comparing how the authors told many of the same stories, but from different perspectives.   Acts is fantastic, it starts slow, but the story is amazing.  After that it goes into Paul's letters to the Romans, Corinthians, Collosians, etc - and Paul kinda drones a bit.   Those books make for good study material.   Katie wants to read Revalation with me, so I skipped that for now.   Started the Old Testament now.   It's really amazing the stuff that I /thought/ I understood, but really just never heard.   Genesis is so much more than JUST the Creation - it accounts for thousands of man-years and lots of stories.   Exodus is more of the same.  At some point, not sure if it's Exodus or Leviticus, God describes in great detail building the Ark of the Covenant, its coverings, the tabernacle, and lots of other stuff.   That kinda drones unless you happen to be skething what they're describing - that could be an intersting place to go back and study a little, or at least look at more research.  Leviticus is pretty dry -- it's laws.   A lot of them.   Hundreds of them.   Not Covenant Law style like on the tablets - but they're laws about clean/unclean animals, sacrificial offerings, how offerings are made, what offerings to make in what cases, different kinds of offerings, how to make oneself "clean" after handling something "unclean", etc.   So, I'm currently in the first chapters of Numbers...   Numbers - is, well, numbers - sofar.   It's an account of a census that Moses took in the land, just how many people are in the tribes.   It's brutal to wade through this part... 

Tags: books, fix it, lawn, movies, ryan, the list, work