72 hour kits

My 72 hour kit plan is to refresh the things every conference time. Each of the girls has a large purse like thing, except we don't have one for Lily right now. The kits need to get refreshed so larger diapers can be put in, bigger clothes, that sort of thing.

I forgot all about them last night when we were at the store. I actually didn't even think about it until Priesthood session when he was talking about prepardness. I guess I'll have to work on them early this week.

The girls like it because they can eat the stuff we take out. (There are plenty of treats, that sort of thing.)

The Dave Bates school of Toilet paper usage (Sponsered by Charmin)

One of more of our children (we suspect Emma primarily) uses their weight in toilet paper each trip to the bathroom. They also tend to leave it in there, not being brave enough to flush themselves to see what happens. This evening I found a toilet bowl full of wet toilet paper. I don't think there was any standing water left, just wet paper. It took a plunger and several flushes to dispose of it. I'm sure the Water Authority loves that kind of thing.

I say Dave Bates because when he was first our roommate, he used to use LOTS of paper. We suspected he would roll the toilet paper around his hand until he made a glove out of it each time. Maybe that's what Emma's been trying to do. For Dave, we got out a roll of toilet paper just for him, and marked every 20th square for him. He seemed to get the point. I doubt that would work in Emma's case...

Mud Maggots

They've been working on a new building just outside our office window. There are also several fairly large construction projects going on around campus these days. There have been plenty of cement pump trucks around, which for the last 5 years, make me think of one thing when I see them.

5 years ago, they were building us a new Data Center. Having to deal with students still needing to get to class and building between existing buildings, the construction guys didn't have a lot to work with. There was a fence put up right to the edge of the giant hole they dug, and when cement trucks came, they had to pump it fairly far, because the building is underground and was quite large. They would bring the really big pump trucks in.

One day, I was in Karl's office talking to him. Karl's office then had a window that looked out onto where the pump truck sat. I was talking to Karl, and the pump truck fell over on it's side and bounced across the sidewalk next to it. There was a student walking and was 6 feet shy of getting killed. Karl saw the look on my face before he heard the crashing noise.
I ran out to the thing, and grabbed the kid that nearly got hit. He was just standing there shocked. I asked him if anyone was under the thing, he didn't respond until I started shaking him a little. (No one was under the truck.) Then the pump truck operator jumped up out of the cab and started running. Other people were running our way. Diesel fuel was spilling everywhere. Within just a few minutes, everything was chaos.

We ended up having a HAZMAT team show up, to clean the diesel up, they started cutting up the pump, and all kinds of stuff. After things got crowded, we went up on the roof of the North side of the Talmage building to watch. (No crowd there...)
It turns out that the pump truck had only put it's 2 right stabilization booms out, the other side had none out because of the fence near the sidewalk where people were walking, the pump operator had been swinging his rig over to the right to clean out the pump. He got too far over and the weight pulled the thing down.

I'll never think of anything else when I see a cement pumper truck. It's the biggest thing I have ever seen tip over and bounce before or since.

Age of Empires: The Warchiefs

So, after last week's downtime to go on a date with my wife, I'm back to the "Thursday Night Fights". Rob showed up to play, but it turned out that he had installed the latest patch to the game, and we had a version mismatch, so he went away to do something else while we played. I installed the patch after we got done playing, it seems to work ok. Everyone involved needs to update their game before we play next week... Dad couldn't find Dave, for some reason, and it ended up being Dad, Drew, and Me.

We played 3v3 against Hard computers and won. Then Drew had to take care of his baby, and Dad and I played 3v4 hard computers and won. We got done just after midnight Eastern time.

Lydia the Tattooed lady

She's been at it again.

Tara took these pictures before She cleaned Emma off.
Luckily, it was a washable marker this time.
My favorite is the all brown foot.

I asked Emma if she had been drawing on herself again, Emma response: "Yeah, except Mom didn't see what I drew on my tummy." I tried to get her to show me, but she ran off. It turned out so be some sort of Sasquatch looking dude.
She also must have gotten Hamlet, which we just watched (not with her), confused with Macbeth...

Weather Report

Tonight it's raining. Not the "shock and awe" type storm of yesterday, but a nice light steady rain. The kind that makes you switch your wipers from the interval setting to the low setting. It reminds me most of High School football rain, the kind that doesn't soak you all at once, but eventually gets to you, one way or another. It's the kind that's cold enough to make you really wish you could go to the concession stand for some hot chocolate... Luckily I had enough sense to take my umbrella with me, which makes a world of difference... (I was too stupid in High School to use an umbrella...)

There was about 2 inches of snow on the ground this morning, we ended up not walking to school. By afternoon, the snow was gone, except for the very smallest amounts here and there in shady spots. After Kate got home from school, we were trying to get the girls in the car. Emma was running around the yard laughing about how it snowed in the springtime on the flowers. Ruth had found a little tiny patch of melting snow, and appeared to be trying to figure out what plan she could concoct for it's use. She was shuttled away from the snow before she acted on anything she was thinking about...

Locked out

Tara, don't read this until tomorrow. (She's had a bad day. For one thing, Emma had gotten water all over our bedroom. They also had a wild time at the library.)

Tara came by at 3:45 to see if I was ready to go. I had been trying to get something fixed up to be ready for priority registration in a couple of days. Tara decided to go up to her parent's house.

I got a ride home, but realized that Tara had my house keys. We have a spare key, but it's been residing in the kitchen for a number of months.

All the doors were locked, but luckily, since it's been so nice lately, one window was unlocked. I was able to get in. (The security issue with the window has been fixed, so if you were reading this and planning to come rob us, you're out of luck. Every time we end up having to break in the house, the security is much tighter around here for some time.)

As an added bonus, I couldn't find any sign of water in our bedroom.

Rocky Mountain Weather

We walked to school/work for the second straight day today. When we left the house, it was really nice outside. (I thought, "It's really nice out here. I thought it was supposed to rain today.") The further West I walked, the less nice it got outside.

By lunchtime, huge dark clouds were rolling in. Things got nastier and nastier looking until it finally let loose. We got lightning, thunder, hail, rain, wind, and just general nasty weather.

Yesterday, the high was 66 degrees. I mowed the lawn. (It really needed it.) Tomorrow, the high is supposed to be 40 (with rain). By Saturday, we will be back to the mid 60's again (and perfect again).

In other news, I planted peas a couple of weeks ago. They seem to be pretty happy right now.

What time is it?

Someone asked for help today with a performance problem. I found their script doing 5000 "gettimeofday" requests a second. 5000! Per second! They were asking 50 times for each time it really even mattered in any way shape or form. They seem to be unable to issue a 'wait' request, this was their way of doing it.

I told them to not do that anymore.

Library "project"

The Project management people decided to try to go forward with a project for the library at the end of last year that wasn't really 'open'. (This means we (engineering) were too busy to work on the thing.) They tried to get me to come to their meetings, but I refused, not having the time to work on a project that wasn't really a project.

What the library needed was the ability to replicate their production catalog DB to their stage environment, quicker than restoring from backup tapes. I agreed to work on the problem on a 'best effort' basis. At the beginning of the year, I had the problem 90% figured out, but school started, we got busy, and real projects (and things like DST) got in the way. I only got back to looking at it today.

I have the problem working, but it might be a while before I get it implemented. OR I might do it tomorrow. Hard to say.

Kong Kone

I ended up with the girls in the middle of the afternoon, and decided to take them for soft serve at the local grocery store. I ordered 4 small cones (Lily was asleep, and I don't think Tara would have appreciated it...), and a Kong Kone. The girls filling the cones seemed to have a hard time making them small. I asked her after each one to make the next smaller. Ruth was beside herself waiting for hers.

Then she did the Kong Kone. This is normally a pretty big cone, but this time I think she wanted to make up for the ice cream she didn't give the girls. She got a large insulated cup, and filled it as high as possible, based on the laws of physics and our current altitude. The thing was something like 18 inches tall. I couldn't finish the whole thing. (And that has to tell you something, as you should very well know.)

Need a lot of ice cream? I recommend the Kong Kone at Macey's.

Breakfast for dinner

Breakfast for dinner is for some reason the girls' most favorite thing to eat. It doesn't matter what it is, it must be just the idea of it. (It's the rebel in them.) Normally, we get a "I don't want that" or "I want cereal" from Emma the moment she sees her food. Not today. I'm not sure she ate much of it, but at least she said she liked it...

I missed the "Iron Chef" episode where they dragged out the 2 live pigs...

At Christmastime, we had 2 different people give us very large spiral hams. These were cut up, put in ziplock bags, and put in the big freezer out back. I haven't been very motivated to cook the ham since that time, and we still have a lot of it. I really can't think of too many ways to cook the ham. (Ok just 3: boiled with beans; fried ham and fried eggs; and broiled in the oven)
Tonight we had boiled with beans. It wasn't bad. I wouldn't eat it every night, but it wasn't bad. It would have been a whole lot better if we had coleslaw with it, but Tara was gone, and I didn't have any cabbage.

Anyone have any good recipes involving ham? I really haven't done much looking around, but we need to start working our way through it.

Restaurant Review

Doc's Pizza Buffet

Also know as Adam's once favorite place in town to eat. We haven't been in this place in a long time mostly because of my body's longstanding rejection of greasy pizza. (The vote was 5 to 1 with one absention.)

Tonight was karioke night at the pizza buffet, which the girls liked. I had a couple of plates of spagetti and garlic bread.

Ruth decided that she wanted my drink, which she really liked. (Dr. Pepper) She kept getting more. I tried to switch her drink and put a little root beer in one time, but she didn't like that at all. She really likes Dr. Pepper, Tara got her to start asking for "Pepper in the bottle", I'm not sure how long that will go on for. (Once, Tara had a 44 oz drink from a gas station on the kitchen table. I caught Ruth walking around the house drinking from it...)

There is now a battle raging in my gut. Just thought I'd share.

Tattoo Artist

Hopefully Emma doesn't grow up to be some mad scientist, she'd always be trying out her new potions on herself. Currently, she's practising her body art.

Her specialty is belly button art. Here you can see her latest piece, which appears to be some sort of Frenchman.

She's also been trying her hand at tribal tattoo artwork.

Book Report & "The play is the thing..."

Hamlet
William Shakespeare

Tonight we had tickets to see Hamlet up on campus. It had been something like 15 years since I had read Hamlet, so I decided to read it again to be ready for the play. It turns out that I understand it lots better than when I read it as a teenager. Maybe is was the fact that I wasn't being forced into it, maybe I just have a bigger vocabulary now. I don't know. After we got home from the play, I gave Tom the book to read, but I think he was just humoring me.

The play was good. They kept things moving, they would have one scene going on one part of the stage, and another sitting queued up on another. They also jumped around in the play just a tiny bit to break up some of the really long scenes.

Both the book and the play were in black and white. The guide for the play said they put everything in blacks and whites, and people wore red if they were hurting Hamlet in some way.

The play and the book both ended the same, everyone died.

After the play, we saw the Frandsens. One of the boys was saying something like "He made a good 'Omlet. He's a good egg. I want some more 'Omlet."

Oops

I broke the home page today. We had scheduled a move. There were a number of things that fell apart. The main problem was that They rolled out a redesigned home page a month ago, and added a "This week on campus" feature to it. To get this working, they were making a DB connection to a machine out on campus somewhere. They convienently didn't tell us about the connection, (it breaks our architectural model.) so we weren't really worried about it. The data fromt he connection is cached locally, and periodically updated, so after I moved and tested the first server, everything was working. When I cut production over and moved the 2nd server, everything fell apart, and we couldn't figure out why. It was down for about 2 hours.

I tried to keep the OPS folks updated, but gave up after 30 minutes, since we didn't have anytthing useful to say, and they kept asking the same questions over and over.

The main problem with this is that today was Philly beef steak and Buffalo chicken nugget day at the Morris center. I was planning on going. Tara was kind of planning to go. Everyone in the office was planning to go. The outage occured over lunchtime. We missed lunch. Philly Steak and Buffalo chicken nuggets only happens every 4 weeks, so we have to wait until April 19th...

Reinforcing stereotypes

Yesterday I stopped at a gas station near the airport. I went in to get a drink. The guy at the counter was named Sandheap, and was listening to ethnic music. (You guess the culture.) He seemed to be pushing the candy from the bin at the front of the counter.

I got up to the counter, and since he had been push the candy, grabbed a Snickers. His response was "Candy. 3 for a dollar. Candy. 3 for a dollar! Candy! 3 for a dollar!!" I looked down, and the sign said 3 for a dollar, 59 cents each. I dropped the candy back in the bin, Sandheap's response was "No candy?"

I thought it was funny.

Hey, Quasimoto, where have you been?

So, I've been kind of busy lately. The places I've been: Work, Church, and Home. (Quite possibly in that order...)

We have this project at work that's eating up the bulk of my time. We have a deadline of April 30th, I hope it's done by then, but I'm really not holding my breath too much right now, it looks like we are running behind in a couple of areas. (The areas I have direct control over will be ready, at least.)

Every semester for priority registration (student with more credit hours get to register first, the University's way of trying to get them out of here), they base the day you can register on the number of credit hours you have. This is done on the fives: 125 hours, 115, 105, 95, etc. This is not an even distribution all the way through the process. Last time, we had one day where 4500 new people could register, the next day, only 250. This doesn't do nice things to the web servers. I've been reporting this for a number of semesters, including performance graphs to show that we are not handling the load we get on those heavy days, so far, no one on the business process end of things appears to be listening. I looked a couple of days ago, and priority registration is again on the 5's. I haven't really wanted to go look and see the distribution yet, I'm hoping that if I ignore it the whole problem will go away. In about a week I will be setting up my charts to be ready for another round of reports on how they can better spread the load. Hopefully by the time the girls are in school, they will have a more even distribution set up. (It's a goal...)

About a week and a half ago, I was talked to one of the guys on our team. He had been my student, we hired him on a 1 year temp position. He was telling me about this company in San Antonio that kept calling him get him to come down to interview for a job. He had interviewed while he was still a student employee, but he didn't take the job then. I told him he should go talk to them, now that he had more full time experience, (and an HPUX certification that I made him go take the exam for over Christmastime) and it was possible that they would offer him better money than the last time. His comment was that he might take a Friday off sometime and go down there. The first part of last week, he had a really bad on-call. The end of last week, he went down and talk ed to the company. He accepted their job offer this morning. They had made him an offer he couldn't refuse. There are mixed feelings about it in my office, I think at least one person was made at me... The way I figure it, is that he had to do something in the next 6 months, either here or elsewhere, or he was out of a job anyway. I don't think it's a bad thing that he's going out into the workforce, we'll have to work more, possibly, but it's good for him. Of course, in 6 months he could be laid off, and cursing me out, but that's ok too...

Non First Time Visitors know that I used a bad penny as part of my NCAA Basketball bracket. (First time visitors keep reading.)

On Friday/Saturday, I worked on the retaining wall for my garden. I put in 5 feet of foundation and 2nd layer stone. My landscaping shovel is falling apart. I am also out of stone. I forgot to look at the stone place as I drove past it today. There is hope of my finishing it this year.

I reinstalled my laptop on day last week. (Ok, so just an hour) I have spent a few minutes here and there tweaking the thing. (I went from SuSE 10.1 to Fedora Core 6) Last night I installed games. This morning I set up my email. (Now you know where the priorities are...) FC6 seems pretty nice, and it eliminates the worst problem I had with SuSE 10.1, which was Evolution crashing when I deleted email out of my exchange account. (SuSE 10.2 might have also had that fix, but for now I'm sticking with FC6.)

I gotta go.

I'll take that...

Lily has started trying to grab her bottle when we feed here, once in a while. I don't know if it's just that she wants to make sure she gets to drink as much as she wants before we take it away, or she wants her hands at the ready of one of her sisters gets too close, or what, but there you have it.

She has also started moving around while she's asleep, or when she wakes up, or something. She's been turned sideways in the pack and play a few times, and she gets herself scrunched up into a corner of the cradle. I set up the bigger crib for her today so that she's got plenty of room to swim around in there.

Bad penny

OK, so the coin flip bracket I set up didn't fare well. Currently, I only have 4 teams left - UNLV (who knew?), Southern Illinois, USC, and Georgetown. Of those, the coin flip has only Southern Illinois going to the Elite Eight. The coin flip bracket is all but dead, the first to bow out.

Enough of that.

Visiting the Math Lab

We went to visit the Math Lab today. (It pi day - 3.14) They were having a little luncheon. It's been nearly 5 years since we moved out of our old Data Center, and they moved in. I went to check some of the stamps I did back in the day that listed my tenure in the room, there are still there.

Sorrel asked the old department head if he was ready for me to start my graduate work yet. He kind of didn't say anything, I responded by saying that I wasn't quite over my undergraduate work yet, or lack thereof. He kind of laughed, and said he didn't remember the past, which I thought was a very diplomatic answer...

5 years ago, we did a little horse trading. I had one class left to graduate, but was busy, and got a "D". We traded my getting us out of the Data Center for him counting the D as good enough for credit. I think they got a pretty good deal out of it, but I'm not ready to go back to school, and I'm not sure I would do Math at this point.

Sunday evening fun

Yesterday, Emma brought a picture home from her Sunbeam class. She hadn't finished coloring, and wanted to color it later. Sometime in the evening, Mary (who must have been bored at the time) colored all over the thing. Her results:
When Emma found the edited paper, she was not happy by any means. I thought I might be able to find a blank one on the internet, but had no luck. I ended up scanning in the picture, and using "paint" to clear out all the coloring and scribbling. I think I did a pretty good job:
Emma sat with me and watched me clear the thing out. I think she was impressed, hopefully it doesn't end up being a regular thing. I really hadn't planned to spend 3 hours uncoloring, but there you have it.

March Madness (OK, borderline insanity)

On Sundays, I have the girls pick numbers, from 1 to 4, for bathtime. I usually mix up the order so that it keeps them on their toes about who goes in what order. On Sunday, I tossed #1 & #4 in together, and #2 & #3 in together, tourney style...

Today I filled in a bracket for the annual work contest. (The prize, bragging rights for a full year.) After filling in the bracket, I started thinking about the bracket. Then I decided to line up 6 brackets, like the cards you'd see in front of a little old lady in a Bingo hall. (I don't think I know any bingo playing old ladies, right? Tara tells me I missed a Sunday School lesson recently where they talked about trying to not give offense to people. When referring to myself, I sometimes say "The patient is rejecting the transplant"...)

Anyway, after the work bracket, I created a "Coin Flip" bracket. It had several 16 seeds going to the Elite Eight. I guess that is what happens when you flip coins.

The 3rd bracket involved something I called "Seed difference less than 8, take the underdog." Meaning 5 vs 12, take the 12; and 8 vs 9, take the 9. It turns out that there were 16 upsets in the 1st round, then all the higher seeded teams won after that. The final 4 was the 4 number one teams. Not all that interesting of a bracket, really.

For the 4th bracket, I created a bracket that had BYU, Maryland, UCLA, and North Carolina all make the final four. (The winner? BYU over Maryland. Sorry Darren.)

While thinking about the 5th bracket, I decided that the coin flip really didn't do much for giving the higher seeded teams any advantange. I decided to do another randomization, with a bit of a weight to it. I created a table of 32 random numbers 1 to 16. If the seeding was separated by 7, like the 5-12 seed game, I used the 7, with 11 to 5 odds. If the random number was 8, the higher seeded team was picked. If the number was 13 (above 11), the underdog was picked. By this time, as you can see, I had too much time on my hands.

(Sorry about the blank space here. I'm not sure what I did to end up with it.)

15 - 15 to 1	7 - 11 to 5
14 - 15 to 1	6 - 10 to 6
13 - 14 to 2	5 - 10 to 6
12 - 14 to 2	4 - 9 to 7
11 - 13 to 3	3 - 9 to 7
10 - 13 to 3	2 - 8 to 8
9 - 12 to 4	1 - 8 to 8
8 - 12 to 4

I think the "Random #" bracket turned out fairly interesting, and I would have used it had it not gotten 15th seeded North Texas into the Elite 8... (Click on the bracket to see it closer.)

Having created 5 brackets, I needed just one more to fill out my Bingo slate. I decided to combine the brackets into one. (2.5 with non-forced picks by me, 2 in different types of random picks, it could happen, right?) For this 6th bracket, I took the team picked most often in that slot from the other 5 brackets, and used them. If it was a tie, I took the higher seed. (Several slots ended up with just one available vote, several were tied at one.) I think the results were pretty good, and posted it on the work pool as having been done by the girls. I will let you know if they win.

Updated pictures

We took some pictures of the girls to refresh the pictures on our wall in the back room. (Mary's didn't turn out well, she was kind of tired and didn't have the patience for it.)

Here are the winning photos.

Slickdeals.net

One of our Bishopric one Tuesday night told me about the site slickdeals.net. I have been watching things there for about a month. Occasionally, they have something I'm interested in. Usually stuff has a mail in rebate attached to it, sometimes they are just listing good deals.

We ran out of copy paper today, Tara was going to go to Costco to look at the cost for a case tomorrow. It turned out taht slickdeals had a really good deal for paper listed today.

I just got 10 reams of paper for $16, after tax. It was $58 dollars, but they took $43 dollars off in the promos they are running. It comes with free shipping, and they listed Tuesday as the delivery date. Not bad. (I am not expecting it until Wednesday, if they are using USPS...) I had posted the link for you here under the "shared items" section to the right.

New shoes

I have been wearing a pair of dress shoes for about 6 months that hurt my feet. They really hurt my feet, on Mondays, I always have a huge bruise on my ankle from the day before.

I had a better pair, these were older than that pair, but the shoes eventually fell apart (literally). It's hard for me to fine a pair of shoes, and I dislike shopping for them so much, that I have put it off until today. (I came home Wednesday night and let Tara know that I was never wearing the other pair again. She didn't want me wearing sneakers to church, so we went today...)

I have to get size 11W or 11.5 M. That's for my left foot. (Since I shattered my ankle.) My right foot is more a 10.5 W or 11M, but there really aren't any places that will let you buy 2 different sizes of shoes. I need to find someone with the same problem but on the other foot, we could go shopping together...

My other problem, is that most shoes either will not go on that left foot, or rub against the ankle and scars funny. Usually it takes quite a bit of time and effort to find a pair of shoes that is comfortable. Today it wasn't all that bad. I found an acceptable pair in the second store I visited.

As an added bonus, the shoes are advertised as being waterproof. I really do not like to have wet socks... Hopefully that doesn't mean my feet will sweat in the shoes.

Restaurant Review

We went to Wendy's for lunch today. They had (For a limited time only!) a new sandwich called the "4 alarm fire spicy chicken sandwich." How could I resist?

Well, the employees seem to have been rather hurried, my sandwich seemed to have more sauce than I think they intended. That's ok, because it tasted good. I would call it maybe a 3 alarm sandwich, not a 4 alarm, but maybe I'll go back and ask for another, but with more jalepenos...

If they have it where you are, go try it, it's pretty good.

Goal Update

It's been a month since I posted an update on things, so here they are. All catagories are listed, in case you have forgotten:

#1 - Move up on the ITRC forums. I now have 3889 points, 42 points in the month of February. I am now at slot 156, which means I haven't gained any traction in the past month. This is mostly due to the fact that I have a big project at work I'm doing. It has to be done by April 30 to avoid a big fine for the University, and at this point, we are kind of behind schedule. I haven't been paying all that much attention to the forums...

#2 - Get down to somewhere in the 200-210 pound weight. 229 today. only down 6 pounds for the year, but that means I am still on target to get done by the end of the year.

#3 - Finish my mission journal. I had that one Sunday morning when I worked on it, that has about summed it up for the year. Not good.

#4 - Finish the garden retaining wall. Ruth has been climbing the wall to walk on the raised garden. Hopefully she stops walking on it when there are plants growing there. (I am planting peas in the next 2 days. (Yes, it's that warm.)

#5 - Build another wooden chair. I have some other things to work on here at the house before I can think about this.

#6 - Read 24 books. I'm still only at 3 books for the year, which means I am falling behind, unless I start counting comic books...

Game Time

Age of Empires

3 v 3 - Team 2 (Me, Dave, and Rob) defeated Team 1 (Drew, Dad, and Brian)

Then Dave and I attempted to play against 2 expert computers, but the computers seem to have had a grudge against us. (I must owe them money.) We lost 2 games, Dave decided he was tired, and I lost my internet connection for 30 minutes.

We saw a few momentary relapses of our network latency, but nothing like last weeks problems...

Google Picassa

Google is supposedly uploading pictures you post to blogger in a Picassa account. They say they have all the pictures there that have been posted since December. I just logged into it, and only have 1 picture there. Maybe they don't like the pictures I post.

I'm not sure, but my guess is that this picture will show up...

I'm not sure what value Picassa is to me, I don't really think I have a need for an online photo directory. What I need is to clean up my hard drive of some of the pictures I currently have on it. The thing is nearly full...

New Playset

Tara has grown tired of our $100 Kmart swingset. (More to the point, she has grown tired of hearing 4 girls fight over 2 swings...) She is considering the Costco Playset, that Emma wants to save up her money to pay for.

The thing would certainly give more choices for play. Ruth would spend all day every day climbing the ladder and sliding down the slide. (Is this a good thing or a bad thing? It's 6 feet off the ground where the top of the slide is...)

Some assembly is required. The thing includes shipping charges. It seems like it would fit well in the yard, and it would also mean that sometime this year or next, I would have to dig up the yard around it putting in some sort of base like wood chips, to provide a softer landing spot for heads. It would mean I would have to rethink my backyard watering plan. It would mean the new default statement would be "Go outside and play."

Tara has to really decide if she wants to get it. (I mean she has to decide if she really wants to get it.) It's $1200, so it's not like it's a drop in the bucket, but then again, it's not like it's the same price as a new car. We hear that the trip to Buffalo in the late summer may be now optional, and getting this might replace a trip out East this year. (And it would mean the subtrip to Cooperstown is out.)

We think Ruth might still be a little small for the thing, meaning someone would have to be out there watching her when she is playing on it, but at the same time, those other children who refuse to take naps in the afternoon can be playing out on it for the 3 hours of the day that Ruth is sleeping.

Any opinions? In the color picture, if you look very carefully, the little kid on the tire swing looks worried. If we do get it, do we make the girls pony up some money for it? Kate, Mary, and Emma all have $150 in savings, Ruth has $60. I wouldn't really want to stop giving them allowances for a while, the allowance really is only there so that they can have some experience playing tithing....

Sleep Update

The other night, I was concerned that I would not be able to use the newly purchased memory foam yet. When I went to look at midnight, the thing had expanded all the way, except on the very top and the very bottom. Since I figured I wouldn't be laying there anyway, I put the mattress on the bed.

Tuesday morning I woke up feeling pretty good. My sore back no longer hurt. I felt well rested.

Wednesday morning, the same thing happened.

This morning, I was a little tired, but I didn't get to bed at a decent hour on Tuesday or Wednesday night, but I still feel pretty good. I think the memory foam was a good deal, especially if it keeps up like this. It could be a life changing experience, like buying a house, getting a garbage disposal, or getting a dishwasher.

The memory foam seems to retain heat better. We got really hot Monday night, Tara turned the heat in the house down. We need to put a different bedspread on the bed...

Construction glue is not a toy

Back in the day, Rob and I were both working for Rob's brother-in-law, Kevin. We were framing houses. (This was before Rob fell down from a 2nd floor to a first floor and broke his arm...)

One day that summer, we were putting down a floor. I don't remember how things escalated (I think it started with an accidental swipe with the glue gun.), really, but at some point, I ended up getting (not on accident) construction glue all over Rob's legs. (Rob has (or had) kind of hairy legs, by the way.) Shortly after, I was not paying attention, and Rob got the glue in the back of my shorts and let loose on it. Having a large glob of construction cement is not a good feeling, by the way.

Well, it felt quite funny, and we decided that we needed to get cleaned up before things solidified. (Especially for me, I didn't want to be wearing the same pair of shorts for the next month...) We drove home and headed for the bathrooms. (Luckily Jamestown 21 had 2 bathrooms) It was a little easier for me to get cleaned up, while I had a larger dose, there was less hair involved. Rob sat in the bath for a very long time. I think I was peeling construction glue off of various parts of myself for about a week...

Game Time

Age of Empires

Rob and Brian - 1
Me and Drew - 0

The 4 of us - 1
4 Expert comps - 0

We wanted to play an 8 player game with the folks in Buffalo, but for some reason, their connection through Hamachi kept dropping as we started the game. We tried playing with it for a while, then finally gave up. They all dropped at once, and the other 4 of us, scattered among the 4 winds, played just fine without it. I suspect either Hamachi either had problems with all 8 connections at once, or there was some sort of Networking issue at the house in Buffalo.

Anyway, I still need to get in some more game time with Adam, if he's interested, in the next 24 hours...