Talking to people

I talked to Scott recently. He seems to be doing good. (I think he was bored, though.)

I talked to Jonathan, the state of South Dakota still won't let him practice law. (I think he's a little bored.)

I talked to Rob, he thinks he can beat me at Age of Empires, but has a cold and sleep is more important to him right now.

Russ gave me a subscription to "The Family Handyman". Thanks Russ.

Digital Streaming TV

We were playin with Digital Streaming TV yesterday at work. It seems to work ok, but there are only about 4 useful channels set up right now, and there really isn't anything on during the daytime. We ended up spending most of the time playing with the VideoLAN media player settings more than anything else.

More later, when it sounds more interesting.

Stray

Some stray dog stopped by our house tonight. I had a tag for a microchip, I called the number, but the chip was still registered to a shelter or vet place somewhere around here, not a real person.

I tried to convince the dog to go home, by pointing to the street and saying "Go home", but that didn't work. The dog either didn't speak English, or didn't know how to sit. (I figure it's still not full grown, really.) I went inside, the dog continued to scratch at the door, we were talking about it, and the dog seems to have wandered off somewhere else.

I washed my hands, but my eyes are killing me now. I don't know how I got so allergic to dogs. It's not like I haven't had them around before, but I guess Max had a different type hair or something. Or maybe it's something like adult onset of allergies.

Kate has started talking about getting a pet again. (As in "if we clean the whole house, can we get a pet?") I don't think it's going to happen. (Both cleaning the whole house and getting a pet.)

Feed Reader

A few months back, I was using akregator as a feed reader. It worked well for a few weeks, then went bonkers and started hanging on bootup.

Several weeks ago, I installed the NewsFox Firefox extension. It worked pretty good, but for some reason, it doesn't like the new blogger feeds. This was ok at first, since I was the only person I knew on the new version, but people are starting to migrate, and it's getting annoying. I waited for an update to the extension, and the update made fancy little icons for each feed being read, but didn't fix the problem with Blogger.

I downloaded Liferea to my machine, and loaded all the feeds. This seemed to work (except for Amy's blog, it would not authenticate me in.), and I thought I was in business. Then I closed the app, configured a panel shortcut, and tried to start the thing up. The app starts, and dies. I ran it from the command line, and get:

A stale lockfile has been found, and was deleted.
Segmentation fault

Looks like it's actually a seg fault without a core file, so my liferea experience will add up to about 20 minutes total. A record so far.

I downloaded blam, didn't have all the dependancies installed, it's too late at night to hunt them down. I may go after it another day.

Downloaded RSSOwl. This ran out of the download, but has the same basic problem with the new Blogger that NewFox had. new record, 45 seconds.

I guess I'm back to doing things the old fashioned way, asking Tara if anyone has updated their blog. (Just kidding, it's the other way around.

Distracted by the food

We (when I say we, I mean the wives of the Stake Presidency, really) did a dinner for the Bishops and their wives between sessions of conference today. My Bishop asked me how we were doing while we were at the table with the food. I could tell that he was pretty distracted by all the food, I said "Good." Then I said "OK." Then I said "Well, we're sort of fine." Then I said "Actually not so great." Then I said "We've got some problems."

At that point, the Bishop said "I'm sorry, what did you say." My response was "Nothing."

I thought it was pretty funny, anyway.

Home Visits

This weekend is Stake Conference. At the end of the Priesthood Leadership session, the Stake President was talking, and he mentioned that this year, he wanted to make 100 visits to members' homes. I think this was a test to see if I was paying attention.

Anyway, after I said "100 visits, huh?" His response was "Yeah, I kind of sprung that on you guys without us talking about it. I guess you have a lot of work to do."

Later, I went up to our old Stake President, shook his hand, he had a big smile and greeted me, I said "Can you come in to see the President on Tuesday?" The smile immediately disappeared. I certainly have an influence on people sometimes...

Game Time

Age of Empires

Me and Dave (1) vs. 4 hard computers (0)
Me and Dave (1) vs. 2 Expert computers (0)

Dave's comment at the end of the second game was "It was kind of funny, 2 hard computers was harder than 4 hard computers." I guess I forgot to tell him that I increased the difficulty level...

Game Time

Age of Empires

Drew - 1
Me - 0

We had 2 comps also, and each player had a comp to get rid of first. I don't even think it was a challenge for Drew...

Sometimes it pays to go back

Yesterday I was working on some machines in the Bookstore. There are 3 of them all in the same rack. I was trying to move a tape drive from one machine to another.

In the rack are 3 machines, 3 DVD ROM drives, 1 Tape Drive, with 3 black cables and 1 white cable, all of which I did not label properly when I put the machines in.

I move the white cable for the tape drive from the one machine to the other yesterday, and then spend 2 hours trying to get it to talk. It was kind of frustrating. The bookstore closes at night, it's not like I could stay there all night to work on it.

This morning, after looking at it from home a little, I decided to go back to the bookstore so I give the server a proper cursing out. It turns out that the white cable was not connected to the tape drives, it was connected to one of the DVD drives. I had hooked 2 DVDs to the same server and didn't notice. Shortly after, everything was recabled so that the white cable went to the Tape Drive, and the 3 Black cables went to the 3 DVD drives. The tape drive works perfectly now, but I still haven't got labels on anything...

Flash to the Past

***New feature - where I talk about something had happened to me once***

At the end of my Freshman year of High School, the band teacher moved me from clarinet to Baritone Saxophone. This didn't really have anything in particular to do with my proficency at clarinet, or my rigorous practice schedule. (read: non-existant) I think possibly the biggest factor was that I was big enough to handle the thing.

Anyway, I carried that thing back and forth the school all the time. I guess this was in the hope that I might practice. Early on in my sophmore year, I was walking down the hall with the case, 2 Senior Football players, about a foot taller than me, and twice my size, were coming the other way. The case was kind of big and awkward, and they tried to dodge to get out of the way of it, and they both fell in a heap. (They were in kind of a hurry.) I laughed at them, it was kind of funny, but this seemed to be the wrong thing to do, because I found myself being chased.

After running for my life, I ran out the front door of the school, down the front path to a semi circular drive, and hid behind a car. Luckily, I got behind the car before they came out, they looked around, didn't see me anywhere, and I avoided getting the crap beat out of me. I considered it a positive experience at the time.

Later in the school year, I found myself throwing shotput and discus with these 2 guys on the track team. They seemed to not remember the encounter, and I never brought it up...

Mary pulled all the books out of her bookcases today. (She was reorganizing) Kate got a invitation to a birthday party at school. Putting 2 and 2 together, I figured it was the perfect time to require the cleaning of the room.

By the time I home from work, they were banished to the room until they finished picking up the books. (It was like a 10 minute job.) They tried to call our bluff, but it didn't work.

Eventually I made the 2 of them sack lunches. When I took them in to them, it felt a little like I was the Warden sliding the food into the cell.

I guess it worked, they eventually picked the books up, but it was like 8:30pm by then. I hope Kate's not too broken up when I tell her she still needs to clean her room to be able to go to the party...

Game Time

Age of Empires III: The Warchiefs

(Detecting a theme here?)

Me, Dad, Drew, Dave - 1
4 computers - hard setting - 0

The computers killed all my villagers 3 different times (as in build up village, get villagers killed, build new villagers, etc them killed, etc), but eventually everyone knocked them back. Then we got out our No Clue Sticks. It was all over after that. I actually destroyed one computer players city from the inside out, which was kind of fun.

Tax Time

The IRS is not accepting electronic submissions until Feb 3rd if you are claiming the Sales Tax Deduction, Tuition and Payments deduction, or Educators purchases and Fees deduction. Their story is that they have to make changes since President Bush signed the law Dec 20th extending these deductions.

Why is it taking so long? The code was there last year, the deduction was just extended, not really changed. Did some DBA somewhere drop a table? (It must have been a DBA's fault, right?

Just a warning for those anxious to get their taxes in, but are claiming one of these deductions. (Tara.) We bought a car this year, and are claiming the sales tax deduction (since it was a major purchase.)

They are back to not wanting my blood

Today is the Stake blood drive. I just went over there, and there was absolutely no waiting to get in. Unfortunately, they don't want to talk to me. I've had a cold. They said you can't give blood if you have any symptoms of the cold left. So I left.

Thinking about it now, I should have stopped at the treat table on my way out...

Game Time Invite

Age of Empires III - The Warchiefs

Thursday nights - 9pm Eastern time (7pm Mountain)

On our little hamachi network. Email me if you need the details.

Why the Hamachi network? It seems to be lots faster than the Microsoft Site. And it definitely does not have the load issues the Microsoft site has from time to time. Basically, the Hamachi client gives us our own little VPN lan to use the "Play LAN Game" feature of the game, as if we were all in the same living room. (Or office at work, but I'm sure that doesn't happen in anyone's office that I know...)

Dollar Night

The basketball team picks one game a year to offer $1 tickets for the upper bowl. I think this is basically so they can fill the place up (22K people) for the really big games.

Last year, I went and picked up $25 in tickets. The way I figured it was for us to go, it would have been lots more anyway, so I bought a bunch of tickets to invite people. We worked our way through our locally placed familes, and still had something like 15 tickets, so we invited some families in our ward here that had bunches of kids. (As in "Come to the basketball game, my treat.") It was pretty fun.

This Saturday is the $1 ticket night for this year. Unfortunately, this Saturday is also Stake Conference. For about 3 1/2 minutes this morning, I thought about picking up another 20 tickets. It starts at the same time as Stake Priesthood meeting, and Tara doesn't really want to take all the girls by herself.

Next year.

Too much birthday

This is what happens when you give a boy more birthday than he bargained for...

New dresses

As promised, here are some pictures of the girls in their new dresses. And yes, Ruth did get her sweater, I forgot to mention it, and she has not yet worn it... The girls seem to like both the sweaters and the dresses..

2007 Goal Update

#1 - Move up on the HP ITRC forums. I am currently at 1795 points, slot 160. This is up 23 points from last time, but I have not really moved any slots. (There are some big spaces between slots ahead of me, it doesn't appear to be well ordered.)

#2 - Lose Weight. I am down to 230 pounds (5 total for the month). I think this is largely due to the fact that I have been starving my inner child.

#3 - Mission Journal. This weekend I was sick, and ended up staying home from church. (Mostly to sleep.) At about 2pm, both phones rang, and the doorbell rang, which woke up Ruth, so I got up. After feed Ruth, I started in on the thing. I ended up getting through about 6 weeks of my mission (about 6 pages.), which is not a lot, but it's something. (It wasn't our door, the people across the street and down a few houses have the same doorbell as us, sometimes when people ring their door, it rings our bell, which was the case today. Also, sometimes when people ring our bell, nothing happens. It's kind of weird.)

#6 - Read 24 books. I have finished 2 books for the year so far.

Game Time

Age of Empires: The Warchiefs

Free for all -

Me - 1
Drew - 0
Dad - 0
Dave - 0

Dave kept attacking me, and I kept killing all the dudes he sent, and it looks like Drew attacked Dad right about the time, went over to take Dave's town center out.

Drew eventually couldn't keep up with my economy, after he revolted, and I detroyed a large number of his gatlin guns. He conceeded after I sent a blockade to prevent his using cards anymore...

Book Report

Faith Rewarded
Thomas S. Monson

This book is a collection of all of President Monson's journal entries related to (East) Germany. It tells an interesting story, and President Monson didn't add any other prose to the book, let the journal entries speak for themselves.

It talks about all his interactions with the Saints in East Germany. Early on, he promised them that if they stayed faithful, they would have all the blessings of the gospel any members of the church would have anywhere else in the world.

Eventually, this included a temple in East Germany, patriarical blessings, and missionaries to and from, to name a few of them.

It was an interesting book.

I have a new desktop image for my laptop. It's called "Linux Bad Boys". I kind of like it. So far, no one has tried to mess with me.

Unexpected packages

We have gotten a couple of unexpected packages in the mail the past few days. Both of the had clothing for the girls. One was from Amy, one was from Grandma Oaks.

I was not around when the one from Amy was opened, so I'm not exactly sure what came out of it, but I read a review from several of the girls, who liked the clothes. This also means that I really don't know when to take a picture of those clothes.

The box from Grandma was on the doorstep when I got home form work this afternoon. The girls were very impressed with the dresses she sent. I believe the terms used were "fancy" and "pretty". Tara asked Mary at bedtime what her favorite part of the day was, her response was "Getting my fancy dress from Grandma." We had to put the dresses up so that they would not wear them before Sunday, but we will take a picture then and post it here...

Game Time

Age of Empires: The Warchiefs

Me - 1
Drew - 0
Dave - 0

Not that there was time for us to play another - the game lasted about 3 hours. Drew took Dave out at about 1.5 hours, but it might have partly (or more) been the fact that Dave is in a time zone 2 hours ahead of us and needed to go to bed.

There were a couple of times that I thought Drew had me for sure, but persistance (my word for stubbornness), and the fact that he kept attacking my forts, and not knocking down my factories paid off.

It helped that I attacked Drew with Gatlin guns until he committed to making lots of culverins, then I switched back to infantry and calvery.

That was fun. We definitely need to set a regular time, and get Amy to go out and get the game... Anyone else out there want in on it? Dad? Darren? James? (I don't think Adam has the time right now, and Tom needs to upgrade to a newer computer to be able to play.)

Restaurant Review

The Creamery

I know we've been there before, and I reviewed it here, but we went again. This time, we got 5 kids meals instead of 6. (Ruth never eats much.) The kids meal includes a cheeseburger, fires, a drink, and an ice cream cone, all for $2.79. It really is a good deal.

The food was good, the girls seem to have enjoyed it.

Several nights ago, Ruth and Emma pulled all their clothing out of their dressers. After bringing Kate home from school, I told the girls if they got all the clothes put away by 5, we would go. (Bribery at work.) They finished at about 5:30, but they finished, so we went. I think $15 to not have to put away all those clothes isn't all that bad a deal...

Was that rude?

I just emailed out the following to someone:

"Some people should stop sticking their noses into everything, eventually all they will be able to smell is the nasty stuff."

We'll have to see how that goes over...

Fun at work

Over the weekend, the Bookstore lost their A/C unit and burned their servers to a crisp. I got called in on Monday, one of the machines had it's 2 mirrored drives with it's OS on them none functional. I was able to get one of the disks to start working after getting them cooled off.

Since that left one failed disk, I worked from the bookstore today. I was doing pretty good, I got HP to get a drive down to us, got the mirror synced back up, and basically had them completely back and stable by 1pm. (Where it looked very bad on Monday at the same time.) We talked about, and decided to patch the server while it was down. I had patched their stage, no problem, but after patching this box, it didn't boot up again. The box had a special piece of HW installed I think the patching problem was related. (It's complicated, and I don't want to really get into it right now.)

Basically, I rescued their machine, got it all back up, then completely toasted it. Since the bookstore locks up at 6pm, I took their disks to work on them on my machines in the Data Center. I took a 4 hour break for Stake Interviews.

Now, 14 hours after toasting the machine, I think I have it back to where it was. It took a great effort of skill and a little luck, but this is the last time I am going to say it, I don't want to curse myself for later when I go to try to plug the disk into the machine with the special piece of hardware... (And people tell me I should be a little humble, at least.)

No more posts until something non-work related occurs. I'm hoping that's soon.

Game Time

Age of Empires III: The Warchiefs

Me - 1
Dave - 0

We also played several rounds against the computers.

Running our little personal VPN, we were able to play the LAN game, and had no performance degradation that I could tell. LOTS better than Microsoft's site. (Even 2000 miles apart.)

Bribery

I have recently resorted to outright bribery. I'm not ashamed of it, and make no effort to hide it.

Tomorrow, when the girls get up, they can have Pop Tarts for breakfast. I bribed them into going to sleep. A couple of nights ago Emma earned a comic book by going to bed and going to sleep. If Emma hits 14 days in a row potty training, she gets all kinds of stuff. (I'll likely settle for even 5 days...)

I have one of those big bags of little bags of chips. I hope that will help bedrooms get clean.

I once paid Tara $10 to change a dirty diaper.

It's a good thing I'm not in politics or a Union...

Book Report

Brainiac
Ken Jennings

Quick: What type font was Ken Jenning's book "Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs" set in?

I really enjoyed this book. For one thing, a lot of the things Ken said in it reminded me of those fun-loving-20-hour-but-still-not-getting-all-that-much-schooling-in college days...

I really liked how the book slowly went through his Jeopardy! experience, but only gave you a little in each chapter, taking right turns all the time into other trivia related tangents.

If I knew back then what I know now about College Bowl, I can think of one thing I would have done different. Earl used to occassionally spend a lot of time trying to think up good questions to put in packets for upcoming tourneys. A couple of times, I came along (his office was in the Talmage building, where the computer room was, not that we couldn't have talked about it at home, living next door to each other...) he was writing questions, and I got sucked in. Earl always seemed to have to spend more time trying to rewrite my questions to properly fit the format then he did trying to get his own questions done, I think. You'd think I would pick up on the thing from sitting in the "intramural" College Bowl Earl and Ken used to try to keep going in the Maeser building back in the day, but I'm kind of slow. And I had an itchy trigger finger back then, and always buzzed in early trying to get the answer quickly, which now I know is how a lot of people did it, all thanks to Ken's little book here.

Besides laughing at old times, this book was facinating from the story it tells, and not just what it's like to be on Jeopardy!. I can't imagine what it would be like to be in a town that shuts down for 2 days a year to do a local radio trivia contest, much less finding people who would actually indulge me in creating a team.

I am sure that if I were single at this point, with nothing to do, after reading the book, I would quickly become addicted to playing NTN Buzztime at whatever restaurant I could find it at. Is that why Tom likes to go to Wild Wings so much when he's back at home? Am I never invited because he doesn't want me showing him up? (The nearest one to our house is 24 miles away...) The best plane ride I was ever on was an overnighter on Song. Tara was with me, we had a baby (Ruth? Emma?) with us, the baby was passed out on my lap while I played the little trivia game on their display all night long. After landing, I wondered if the person in front of me appreciated my poking their headrest all night.

Anyway, back to the book. It's well written and facinating. It struck a chord with the not-so-much-in-the-closet trivia fan in me. (As you can plainly tell by the fact that I have stayed up past 2am to finish it.) Maybe I will organize another neighborhood Trivial Pursuit tournament...

Game Time

Settlers of Catan

Me - 2
Tara - 0

At least Tara knows that I don't throw games to let her win.

In other news, Dave bought AoE III The Warchiefs, and we might try to get set up tomorrow to play.

I got Zoo Tycoon 2 Marine Mania today. It's pretty interesting.

Congratulations to Lily, who has joined a winning team

{Editors note: This is just rating. Don't let it discourage you from having kids or from visiting us. I'm sure your kids behave themselves at home, and our kids behave themselves when visitors are here, or when they are visiting others...}

It appears the Children are winning against the Parents. A few minor indications that this is the way things are leaning:

Kate has been late to school every day. Today it was because she ate her breakfast too slow, yesterday, she took too long tying her shoes, etc.

Emma has short hair. (Mary's major contribution of the week)

Emma's currently potty training streak: 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 . Tara just found her with toilet paper in her pull up, I can only assume she was trying to keep the Musical notes on the front from going away without actually having to head for the bathroom.

Ruth is the Grand Master of them all. We could devote weeks worth of little articles about Ruth. Ruth was the cause of the Great Lysol Night of 2007. Ruth has decided it's okay to get into the kitchen, push the chair over, and start playing with the knives.

Lily hasn't been corrupted by them yet, maybe be can impose a non-intervention edict.

On top of that add: Little girls who refuse to close the bathroom; One who always tries to get in the bath, clothed or not; Rooms that are only clean for hours (or less); They will not (I repeat, will not) go to bed at night unless threatened in one way or another; and the list goes on.

Whoever said that 4, 5, or 6 kids was just as easy as 2 or 3 was either pulling peoples' legs or completely unable to distingush fantasy from reality anymore.

One consolation is that someday we will get to win back all the points we are losing here with the embarassment factor. Anyone who thinks I won't have a good time embarassing these girls when they are teenagers doesn't know me very well...

My favorite blond joke

We've been getting emails at work the last few days about the manditory sexual harrassment training we need to attend. This has lead to a number of blond jokes, for some reason. Today I told my absolute favorite (and really the only one I can ever remember) that cracked everyone up.

"Two blonds were building a house. The first blond noticed the second pulling nails out of her bags, looking at it, and either using it or throwing it over her shoulder. Thinking this strange, the first asked the second what she was doing. The second said some of the nails she pulled out were backwards, and she couldn't use them. The first said 'Don't get rid of those, they are for the other side of the house.' "

2007 Goal Update

Well, here are a couple of things to consider:

#1 - Move up on the HP ITRC forums. I am currently at 1772 points, slot 160. (2 people past me this week...) This is up 31 points and 2 slots.

#2 - Lose Weight. I am down to 231 pounds (4 down) through no appearant fault of my own.

#3 - Mission Journal. I thought I would have time last Sunday, I am not sure what happened.

#6 - Read 24 books. I am in the middle of 3 of them now. (See upper right hand corner of the blog for details.

Baseball Hall of Fame

Missy is getting married August 4. Tony Gwinn and Cal Ripken, Jr are being inducted into the Hall of Fame July 29. I think maybe August 1 or 2 would be a great time to take a trip over to Cooperstown. Anyone interested? We could get up at 5am, drive over to be there when they open, walk around the place for 8 hours, drive back, and be home at 9pm.

Anyone?

Ramblings on the activities of the day

Yesterday was the first day of school. This means I spent yesterday and today in the Data Center staring at the webservers. Yesterday I was mostly bored, which is not necessarily a bad thing... Today however, I was not so lucky. Sometime last night, one of the webservers decided it had enough and was no longer cooperating with us. The operations staff tried convincing it through repeated reboots, with no success. I spent the better part of the morning looking at the thing, things would take about 3 or 4 times longer to normal to start, not give any errors, then refuse to do anything. It was a little maddening. I finally decided that I would give it one last reboot, and if it didn't cooperate, I was going to reinstall the server. It rebooted and started working normally. Sometimes you just have to know the proper threat to get what you want...

For breakfast I had 4 doughnuts and 1/2 a roast beef sandwich. I think this happens to be a great breakfast, personally. So far, no one has disputed that fact, but until now, only 6 other people knew.

I took Lily into the doctor, she has gained 9 ounces in the past week. I think the main reason for this is the steak puree IV drip we have been giving her.

I finished the final hour of the Nova series on String Theory tonight. It turns out that someone came along that could do the Math, and was able to move things right along. I knew it.

No one told me they were not dishwasher safe

I used all the flour in my little jar today making Scandinavian Rye bread. (It sounds like the Scandinavian part means it has caraway in it...)

I made the bread because I had roast beef in the crock pot, and didn't have the time or patience to make Kimmellweck rolls. Dinner was very, very good. Tom would feel very left out if he ever read the posts on this blog. The roast was just perfectly tender, the horseradish (on mine anyway) had a nice kick to it, and I cooked the corn in the juice from the crockpot. I would eat more right now if I wasn't full...

Anyway, having used up all the flour in the containers, I figured it was a good opportunity to get them washed. This is the result:
I don't think they will be used for flour anymore. Could this be considered dishwasher art? Maybe I should try to donate them to the Museum of Art...

...and we shall never speak of it again...

Lots of Lysol
An entire roll of paper towels
A load of Laundry on 'hot'
and a child that was forced into the shower to get cleaned up.

That's all I care to say.

Game Time

Apples to Apples Junior

Tara - 1
Kate - 0
Mary - 1
Emma - 1

I was the judge for all 3 games. The game gets kind of interesting when half the people playing can not read...

New Haircut

Emma's comment so far has been that her haircut is just like mine... She seems to like it, she at the very least loves not having to have her hair done anymore.

Switching rooms = cleaning rooms

After I got up this morning, I started swapping Kate and Ruth in the bedrooms. How could 2 rooms get so messy? I figured that I should put the new bed onto a clean spot.

Luckily, I had Mary at home, everyone else went out for the day. (Emma needed a haircut.) I got the big bucket, and made Mary play the "empty the bucket" game for 3 hours. I'm not sure how much she enjoyed it...

Anyway, Emma and Ruth are in the same room now, let the fun begin!

"Those who forget History..." - AKA - The great scissors ban of 2007

Mary cut her hair 3 days ago. She also cut the hair from some of her stuffed animal dogs. Tara had a talk with her about it, it appears that the talk did not stick very well. Tonight, Tara asked what was wrong with Emma's hair. It appeared to much much shorter in the back, and not so even. Emma took me to the spot where the hair was, and told me that Mary cut it. The first picture appears to include a mixture of stuffed animal, Mary, and Emma hair.

As you can see, Mary cut not a lot, but signifigant lengths of her own hair. I can't verify this was from today, it could be the results of her trying to give herself some bangs.
This 3rd picture is a large pile of Emma's hair. It looks like Mary got all the hair in the back, and trimmed the ponytail down. Now that the story is out, Emma appears to be quite upset about it. We have not yet resolved on a punishment for Mary, but I have gathered all the scissors I can find, and they are not getting them back. Mary had $9 from previous months' allowance, I'm taking Emma to the store tonight to spend it. Mary will also be paying fo Emma's haircut. Mary will also be missing her cousin's basketball game tomorrow morning.

It's a little frustrating, since it was only 3 days ago that Mary was talked to about this. I don't understand. I did punch a wall, which I think was also a mistake...

The bedroom shuffle

I was talking to Jess at work today about how the girls have a good old time every night. He talked about how they ended up moving their girls who were going to school into the same room, the younger ones into another. Their thoughts were that the ones who were headed to school in the morning ended up getting up together, and would go to bed a little earlier...

This is an interesting idea. Emma and Kate are together right now, Ruth and Mary in the other room. Emma is a night owl, and will not stay in her bed at night. Even now, at midnight, she's up. Ruth is an early bird, she gets up at the crack of dawn and starts bothering Mary. If we were to put Mary and Kate together, and Ruth and Emma, would the older girls get more sleep? Would Emma and Ruth start to balance each other out, going to bed earlier (Emma), and sleeping in a little(Ruth)? Could we stick Emma and Ruth in the smaller room, and end up with less stuff for them to make messes with? Would it even work?

Clearly the idea has some merits. Maybe we will try it and see...

A hat for me

After Christmas, I couldn't find any of my Winter hats. My head was cold. I made myself a hat, in CSU green and white. The hat is just a little too big, I made the same hat for Tara (Same number of rows, that kind of thing) but hers is about 2 inches shorter. I guess the thread here is just a little more stretchy. It is a warm hat, I have to walk to work on Monday, I suppose I got it done just in time...

Emma - Her version of being half asleep

I'm not sure where we got this girl, if anyone can tell me, I'm listening...

Slow Churned Ice Cream

The Dreyer's/Edy's people have come out with a line of slow churned Ice Cream. They say it's 1/2 the fat, 1/3 the calories, but all the same ingredients. I don't get it. It tastes the same. The only thing I can figure is that the ingredients list skim milk as the only kind of milk or a mixture of skim and regular milk. I guess if you have skim milk and mix it for a very long time, you get the same kind of ice cream.

I found out tonight they have a flavor of this stuff that's called "Take the Cake". It's yellow cake flavored, with sprinkles and frosting already mixed in. I think I'm going to have to try that stuff out if I can find it. I could take a 1/2 gallon of it, get it soft, spread it into a cake pan, and use it as the birthday cake for one of the girls' birthdays. I just have to figure out which one of the girls would appreciate it more. We told Kate she could have a birthday party for her friends when she turns 8, maybe ice cream that looks like a cake would have a high embarrassment factor...

So what's the point?

I don't understand the purpose of Caffeine Free Diet Pepsi. We have had a can of this in our refrigerator for some time now. Tara and I just can't bring ourselves to drink it. For Tara, it's a matter of not liking the taste of the "non-sugar" stuff they stick in the drink. For me, it goes much deeper. First of all, drinks should have sugar in them. (Not for all people, I know this. Someday it likely won't be the case for me either...) Now, if I'm drinking soda, and it doesn't have sugar in it, it better have some other little pick me up in it. (That's where the caffeine comes in.) The carbination does funny things with my stomach anyway, so if I'm going to drink it, I don't want to be tired and have gas coming back up after drinking, it's not a good combination. I just don't understand the appeal of a Caffeine Free Diet drink...

2007 Goals

Well, it's time for a new set of goals, so here they are. There are too many of them that are similar to last year, unfortunately. I will not be doing weekly updates, that was too much last year, I think. I will make "regular" updates instead...

#1 - Move up on the ITRC forums. Last year I wanted to get to slot 100, and really didn't get a lot of traction there. (Ended up where I started, really.) Let's say I want to get up to slot 140 this year, and see how it goes. That slot is at 4185 points, I have 3741 points. I am in slot 162.

#2 - Get down to somewhere in the 200-210 pound weight. Another 'oldie but a goodie.' I am at 235 right now, so there is some work to do there.

#3 - Finish my mission journal. This really needs to get done.

#4 - Finish the garden retaining wall. It's a nice wall, at least the 1.2 that's finished. I want to make a compost pile over on the other end, but I need to finish the wall first. The stones are heavy, I can't get them all at once, and will have to do it some at a time...

#5 - Build another wooden chair. I want to make a matching chair for the front porch, but I first need to update the blueprints to get rid of the errors in it. This will likely happen in the Summer.

#6 - Read 24 books. Last year, I read 20.

It's kind of scaled back from last year, but I think that is okay.

2006 Goal Update

Last January, I identified some goals for the year. I had been trying to do weekly updates, but I really burned out completely on it around the middle of the year. Here they are:

#1 - Move back into the top 100 posters on the HP ITRC forums. I wanted to shoot for around 1500 points for the year to accomplish that. I ended up with somewhere around 500 points for the year. (I didn't make any posts for a number of months, I got very busy at work) Here is how I did:

Stats Date	Rank	Points	Last Post	Bunny	Diff	Rspnss	PtAvg
2006-12-27	164	3699	2006-12-16	180		541	5.13
2006-12-20	164	3699	2006-12-16	180	+4	541	5.13
2006-12-13	-1 164	3695	2006-12-01	180		538	5.15
2006-12-06	163	3695	2006-12-01	180	+13	538	5.15
2006-11-29	163	3682	2006-11-27	179	+10	537	5.14
2006-11-22	163	3672	2006-10-30	178		535	5.15
2006-11-15	-2 163	3672	2006-10-30	178		535	5.15
2006-11-08	-1 161	3672	2006-10-30	178		535	5.15
2006-11-01	160	3672	2006-10-30	178	+2	535	5.15
2006-10-25	-2 160	3670	2006-10-06	178		533	5.16
2006-10-18	-1 158	3670	2006-10-06	178		533	5.16
2006-10-11	157	3670	2006-10-06	178	+9	533	5.16
2006-10-04	-1 157	3661	2006-09-27	177	+3	533	5.16
2006-09-27	156	3658	2006-09-12	177		533	5.15
2006-09-20	156	3658	2006-09-12	177		533	5.15
2006-09-13	156	3658	2006-09-12	177	+11	533	5.15
2006-09-06	-1 156	3647	2006-08-23	177		529	5.17
2006-08-30	+1 155	3647	2006-08-23	177	+8	529	5.17
2006-08-23	-1 156	3639	2006-08-16	176	+6	528	5.17
2006-08-09	-1 155	3633	2006-05-10	176		527	5.17
2006-08-02	154	3633	2006-05-10	176		527	5.17
2006-07-26	-2 154	3633	2006-05-10	176		527	5.17
2006-07-19	-6 152	3633	2006-05-10	176		527	5.17
2006-07-12	+4 146	3633	2006-05-10	176		527	5.17
2006-07-05	150	3633	2006-05-10	176		527	5.17
2006-06-28	150	3633	2006-05-10	176		527	5.17
2006-06-21	150	3633	2006-05-10	176		527	5.17
2006-06-14	150	3633	2006-05-10	176	+15	527	5.17
2006-06-07	150	3618	2006-04-29	176		527	5.15
2006-05-31	150	3618	2006-04-29	176		527	5.15
2006-05-24	150	3618	2006-04-29	176		527	5.15
2006-05-17	-1 150	3618	2006-04-29	176		527	5.15
2006-05-10	-1 149	3618	2006-04-29	176		527	5.15
2006-05-03	+1 148	3618	2006-04-29	176	+27	527	5.15
2006-04-26	149	3591	2006-03-22	175		523	5.14
2006-04-20	149	3591	2006-03-22	175		523	5.14
2006-04-19	149	3591	2006-03-22	175		523	5.14
2006-04-12	149	3591	2006-03-22	175	+8	523	5.14
2006-04-05	-1 149	3583	2006-03-22	174		524	5.13
2006-03-29	+2 148	3583	2006-03-22	174	+19	524	5.13
2006-03-22	150	3564	2006-03-14	173		525	5.11
2006-03-15	-1 150	3564	2006-03-14	173	+3	525	5.11
2006-03-08	149	3561	2006-03-06	173	+41	522	5.12
2006-03-01	149	3520	2006-02-23	171	+3	517	5.12
2006-02-22	149	3517	2006-02-14	171		514	5.13
2006-02-15	+3 149	3517	2006-02-14	171	+39	514	5.13
2006-02-08	+3 152	3478	2006-02-03	169	+51	510	5.12
2006-02-01	+1 155	3427	2006-01-31	166	+60	509	5.08
2006-01-25	156	3367	2006-01-20	160	+20	504	5.07
2006-01-18	+5 156	3347	2006-01-17	158	+99	504	5.06
2006-01-11	+1 161	3248	2006-01-10	151	+26	501	4.98
2006-01-04	162	3222	2006-01-01	150	+5	496	4.99

It turns out that 1500 points would not have even done it, anyway. I would have needed 2000 points. Didn't happen this year.

#2 - Finish my mission journal. I really did not get a whole lot done after about the middle of February. Our church starts at 1pm in 2007, so I have hopes that I can start working on this again. It's now been 10 1/2 years since I came home.

#3 - Finish the garden retaining wall. I didn't work on this at all. I think I need to go once a month to the place and pick up one or two dozen stones to get going at all on this in the spring.

#4 - Make 6 wooden chairs for outside the house. Making 1 seemed to be harder than it should have been. It didn't help that the blueprints were poorly written. At this point, I would need 7, not 6...

#5 - Get down to somewhere in the 200-210 pound weight. This didn't happen, and in the past few weeks, I have added about 5 pounds.

#6 - Start using the gazelle again. I didn't do this regularly, but until this Fall, when Kate and Mary were going 2 different places in the morning, I was getting quite a bit of walking in...

#7 - Take some vacation trips. See some people. Relax. This year, I visited the following places: Buffalo, NY; Nauvoo, IL; Houston, TX; Phoenix, AZ. I saw a number of people, and did some relaxing.