Back at work this morning; God, I wish I could win the lottery.
Jenny came up with a cool idea for decorating the living room: Paint the wall dark and get a quilt rod and hang our Wedding quilt. I think it would really work. I’m not excited about renting a tall ladder (may I should buy one) and painting up high, but the room is just too stark white as it is and I hate it.
I’ve still got to get to work on the garage - what a disaster. But I think tonight will be laundry night.
Iris is super busy at work… all of her annual reports are due and there’s a TON of pressure to get them done on time. She worked most of Sunday and Sunday night.
-bill
We didn’t make it up to the Avenue of the giants; a 5 hour drive (10 round trip not including sightseeing) just seemed a bit far for a one day trip. Instead, we drove north on CA-1 from Bodega Bay to Jenner and had lunch at Fort Ross. When we got there it was cold, windy and pretty harsh. The Wills ate in the SUV while the rest of us braved the wind and sat on a park bench and ate lunch. Afterwards we walked through the interpretive center and then out into the Fort. Big surprise! It was warm and sunny! See there’s a large wind break that does a hell of a job and we ate lunch on the windy/cold side. After taking off our hats and coats we explored the Russian Fort; we even had the enjoyment of watching some 20-something Russian mobster-wanna-be’s walk around looking tough.
Then, based on the advice of a counter-girl at a gas station, we took a mountain by-pass road which gave us some awesome views on our way back to Hwy 101 and the trip back home to Tracy. After 12 hours out and about we got home and had some Mountain Mike’s Pizza (our plans of making dinner went out the door at that hour).
The Stones left this morning out of SFO. Surprisingly both Will and Lily didn’t freak out. We’re sad to see family go but we needed to get Will and Lily back on routine. We’re going to start being a bit firmer with both the kids - we think we’ve been lenient and lax recently and it’s time they started to shape up (so to speak).
Sunny the dog has been doing good. I accidentally armed the security system yesterday so we were worried that she’d trigger the motion detectors and that we’d have a note from the cops awaiting our return. Luckily, because she’s an old dog, she must have stayed in bed all day until we got home. Good girl.
We’ve got a ton of photos to share of our drive but I’ll need to prep and post them later.
-bill
I’ve posted photos of our Yosemite trip… I’ll blog about it later.
Click HERE for the photo wall.
-bill
ed.
Okay, I’ve got a few minutes now. So let me recap our visit so far:
On Monday, Jenny, Jon, all the kids and I went to our little Micke Grove Zoo. It’s not much but it’s just perfect for Will. Our weather was great. On Tuesday morning we got out of the house by about 10am and with two full cars of happy campers we drove the 3 hours to Yosemite. Our hotel was nice and the closest to the park. It’s busy construction time in and around the park; a number of road closures and delays.
Once in the park we were met with rain and cold and no one was ready having dumped our luggage in the hotel. Brilliant! We did Yosemite Lower Falls and got some good photos. That night we ate at the pizza joint at our hotel.
Wednesday was a great day. The weather couldn’t have been nicer. We did Vernal Falls (though Iris and I petered out just short of the summit. Jenny carried Lily in our kid-carrier while Will stayed with us and played cars in the dirt. We then did lunch (which was hard to do as most of the places are closed as it was still the off-season). We then did a scenic drive to the Wawona Hotel… it was not only a nice drive but we got to see the lodge and then the scenic overview of Yosemite Valley right at sunset. We even had a chance to swing into Bridal Falls. That night we had a nice dinner out and all the kids pretty much passed-out.
Thursday morning we went different ways with us coming home and the Stones spending a day hiking the park. We’re doing a big spaghetti dinner here and it gave us time to do some laundry and get things ready for the rest of our visit.
Saturday we’ll be heading up to the Avenue of the Giants. More pictures to follow.
Quick rewind to Saturday night: Jenny mentioned getting in around 9pm, but we weren’t sure if that meant landing at SFO at 9 or getting to the house at 9. So at about 8:30 I checked NWA online and saw that there was a 7:30 arriving flight and an 11:30 arriving flight (which departed MSP at 9)… so I figured that they would get here in the next few minutes or at 1:30am. They arrived at 9. (Whew) We stayed up for a while and chatted before falling asleep at about 1am
We spent Easter Sunday eating chocolate, eggs and later meat and wine. We found a very nice cool wine store, Vino 100, it’s an interesting concept for a franchise wine store in that they aren’t all wine snobby. They carry 100 wines for under $30. The store is organized simply by sweet to dry. The owner of our local shop is very knowledgeable, super friendly and easy going. I walked in, told him I didn’t know jack about wine nor did I drink but told him three bottles that Iris liked. He pulled two brands off the shelf and has since recommended about 5 others that Iris has liked. Last night we even impressed Jon with mutt wine that was good.
Today, well I’m not sure what to do with the Stones. Iris is working so I think I need to get the 7 of us out of the house; but to where?
-bill
Lily just has a slight cough as does Will but he still has to take drops for pink eye. Iris and I are doing better with just congestion and a bit of a cough as well.
Yesterday I mowed and edged - stepped in 1 dog poop (note to self, don’t get a dog). Today I cleaned the living room and vacuumed. Later we need to touch up the bathroom and hang a shower curtain.
I found Dale’s sauce for my lamp chops, yah! I also picked up two new seasonings from Stubbs.
Played around with the new camera a bit. In order to keep the size as small as possible, Sony did things like: battery is charged via an external adapter (doesn’t charge in the camera like our old one); USB doesn’t provide power so that when you upload photos, be sure to turn the camera off when done.
Iris and Will are going to Target to get a couple of stools for our kitchen counter, Pledge, pillows and propane. When they get back we are going to color Easter eggs.
We’re looking forward to having company over. I told Will that tomorrow night he could stay up late and have popcorn and watch the Dinosaur show (Walking with Dinosaurs is on Discovery HD). He’s so excited but I don’t know of which part… staying up, eating popcorn, or watching Dinosaurs.
-bill
Iris has an ear infection in both ears, I’ve got it in the left. Iris awoke this morning with the signs of conjunctivitis. Will’s on the rebound and just has a cough but for the past three nights he’s peed in his bed. What is going on with that? Lily is doing okay, just a little runny nose and cough.
I’ve got to get easter baskets and candy tonight on my way home from work and pick up our new digital camera at BestBuy - our store in Tracy didn’t have any in stock.
-bill
UPDATE
So I took a half day today. Went to BestBuy and got our new camera… cost us near Zero because of the gift cards but I did get a little carrying case and 4gb of memory for it that way we don’t have to carry around memory sticks like we did for the old camera. I also swung by the Volvo dealership; it seems they made a 35 mile typo in the mileage on the old wagon and DMV rejected their paperwork. I asked for a free oil change for the hassle of having to drive over to help them with their mistake… the guy laughed. Oh well, worth the try. I priced out a roof rail kit for the S40. We have a bike rake and a luggage box but the new car doesn’t have factory installed rails. We’re going group camping in May and I’d like to use the box to carry all the stuff; no sense in wasting it. The rails run about $180 so that’s not too bad, just hope I don’t have to also buy a rail conversion kit to mount our existing items to the new rails.
My stomach is making the most god-awful sounds imaginable. The Doctor said that my ear infection could be the cause of my stomach woes. And then add to that the amoxicilian could also be to blame. Joy.
But back to the new camera. It’s very small, has tons of features and did I mention small? There are no buttons (all touch screen) and no big lens (hence no motor or anything else). At 10mega-pixel it’s double our old camera, half the cost and about 1/8th the size. The old one was nice because we had different lenses and filters for it. But lugging around a camera big was a pain in the butt. It’s bad enough carrying kids snacks, diapers, drinks and everything else for the kids; carrying around a camera was just too much of a hassle. So tonight, after the battery is charged, I’ll snap a few photos and upload them.
So like I said, I’m home right now. I’ve got two laptops to configure for work. I have to rip Windows Vista Business off one and install Windows XP and then try to configure the other one for dual-boot so that I can run Vista and XP at the same time. God, that would be sweet.
-bill
So now I’ve got an ear infection. What the hell? Grown men don’t get ear infections… do they? So I’ve got a 10:30 appointment; Iris just left for hers (sinus congestion and ear infection too). I swear, the past week has been a disaster.
-bill
Our nanny is out sick so Iris and I split the day; I went to work at about noon while she worked all morning. She’s taking the kids out to get Will some new pants. The bean pole keeps growing out of his pants and while we seem to be swimming in clothes for Lily, Will’s a different story.
Will wanted to go to the zoo this morning but with everyone still a bit under the weather I voted against that idea. Will’s response? “Daddy? You said that we can’t go to the zoo… that reminds of something. We can go to the park!” Recently he’s been doing a lot, “I think that reminds me of something.”
Sunny the dog is crashing at our house for the next two weeks. At 10 years old the Lab/Retriever mix is a very mellow and patient dog. Will says, “I love Sunny and she loves me bunches.” Lily just likes to walk behind her and giggle non-stop.
Jenny, Jon and the kids are coming this Saturday. I’ve still got to scrub my baseboards,re-finish the hardwood floors, polish the flashing on the roof and clean the inside of our mailbox, but I hoping that she won’t call mom and complain about the condition of the house. Luckily our fridge is built-in so there won’t be any dust/grime for her to white-glove inspect. 
I have a limited cooking repertoire but I do try to perfect it so this year for Easter we’re going with lamb chops, apple sausage, potato pancakes, peas and applesauce for dinner. I’m trying hard not to meal plan the whole week but I figure I ought to at least know what to cook for Easter. One other night we’ll have spaghetti and meatballs and italian sausage. The kids love it and we have an awesome set of dishes for it. On Monday night we’re letting ‘Bell and Big Will babysit our sleeping kids and the four adults are going to Livermore to play Bocce Ball. I had a good time last week and thought that Jenny and Jon would like a night out as well. Hence, I’m not going to try to reproduce one of the dishes that the place in Livermore makes: Boar Sausage and roasted potato & rosemary pizza. Yum!
I cooked pancakes on my new range-top griddle and it worked great. This morning I made eggs in our new pan. Newer is better. Period.
-bill
So Will probably has pink eye as well. I think that if I came down with chicken pox then we’d be all set.
Anway…. we got some nice curtains and rod for Iris’ office, they look good. We also used some tax refund money to buy all new pots and pans. We picked up a 10pc Calphalon One set at a very, very good price. We had such a mix-match set of pots and pens some of them warped most of them really damaged thanks to abuse and misuse.
Yesterday Mike and I move a couple hundred pounds of rock out of his front yard; he’s re-landscaping and the rock was the biggest obstacle. Hopefully he’ll ask for help when it comes to tackling the overgrown bush as well… it looks like a hell of a job to rip it out of the grown.
Iris’ friend Carol is coming over today with Sunny so of course we’ve been cleaning; that’s the Agnes in me… I can’t stand a messy house when company comes over.
I’ve got almost $400 in BestBuy gift cards (Christmas and awards at work) and Iris and I finally decided that we were going to replace our digital camera. Our current camera is nice but it’s big; you can’t throw it in your purse. So we’re going to get the new Sony 10megapixel that just came out. It’s so small!
-bill
So I didn’t get home until 11pm last night; my vendor was hard pressed to get everything working and we had a lot of trouble integrating their product into our environment. There were a few issues that were problematic mainly due to our unique variables and requirements and a few problems due mainly to the way our servers are configured which resulted in some stupid, stupid errors that cost us time. We paid the vendor about 3k to have this guy come out and now I wish we had paid for 3 days instead of 2. But he couldn’t stay over the weekend and no one could get approval for him to stay anyway. Hopefully we can fix the last of the bugs via e-mail.
In regards to the kids, we took Will to the doctor’s office yesterday; he’s thrown up once a day for three straight days… it was really odd and we needed some reassurance that we right in thinking that it was just excess mucus getting into his stomach and making him sick. We were right. Lily is doing much better too… those drugs did the trick. But of course Iris is now feeling ill.
Last night Iris had the kids in the big tub (on the weekends we sometime fill up our deep tub and let them play in it). Iris hit the button for the jets just out of curiosity and BAM, they worked. Scared the crap out of her. I can’t explain it at all. Damnedest thing, eh? So today I’ve got to get some vinegar and flush the system out; I can’t imagine the last time they were cleaned. I may pick up a commercial jacuzzi system cleaner at Home Depot.
Speaking of chores, here’s the revised list for the weekend:
- Find a nice curtain and rod to install on Iris’ office to separate it from the bedroom
- Find 2 or 3 bar stools for the kitchen counter
- Spray weed killer along our driveway, sidewalk, and path in the back yard
- Buy sandpaper so that I can sand down the dividers I put in the silverware drawer.
- Buy more wood to make more dividers for our tea/coffee drawer
While I still like my idea of using stone veneer, I don’t want to spend the money right now and frankly I don’t feel like painting. So I think we’ll just take down the curtains, hang some art and see how that looks. We need to do something in that living room; it’s so sterile and disorganized. I think the curtains clash and maybe the cheap blinds that are used on the upper windows are ugly too… maybe I take them down too. God, why does everything require a ladder?
-bill
It’s been a while since I posted a good Global Warming story and after the destruction of my previous website I don’t have any archives of the items I post in the past. So this morning I decided to poke around and find something really juicy:
An article published in the Mar 14, 2008 Washington Times is quite good… let’s take a look, shall we? (emphasis mine)
- “More than 20 years ago, climate scientists began to raise alarms over the possibility global temperatures were rising due to human activities, such as deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels. To better understand this potential threat, the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 to provide a “comprehensive, objective, scientific, technical and socioeconomic assessment of human-caused climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation. IPCC reports have predicted average world temperatures will increase dramatically, leading to the spread of tropical diseases, severe drought, the rapid melting of the world’s glaciers and ice caps, and rising sea levels. However, several assessments of the IPCC’s work have shown the techniques and methods used to derive its climate predictions are fundamentally flawed. “
- “A panel of statisticians chaired by Edward J. Wegman, of George Mason University, found significant problems with the methods of statistical analysis used by the researchers and with the IPCC’s peer review process“
- “the community of specialists in ancient climates from which the peer reviewers were drawn was small and many of them had ties to the original authors“
- “The IPCC published its Fourth Assessment Report in 2007 predicting global warming will lead to widespread catastrophe if not mitigated, yet failed to provide the most basic requirement for effective climate policy: accurate temperature statistics“
- “…the IPCC clearly violated 60 of the 127 principles relevant in assessing the IPCC predictions. Indeed, it could only be clearly established that the IPCC followed 17 of the more than 127 forecasting principles critical to making sound predictions. “
- “Politics shapes the IPCC from beginning to end. Legislators, policymakers and/or diplomatic appointees select (or approve) the scientists — at least the lead scientists — who make up the IPCC. In addition, the summary and the final draft of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report was written in collaboration with political appointees and subject to their approval. “
Now for a little editorial from me:
The United States has the longest running, contiguous form of government in the world.
Do you understand what that means exactly? For over 230 years our form of government has worked without failure. No other major country on the planet can claim that right today. Simply look at the history of Europe. From monarchies to totalitarian and socialist regimes, Europe has been a political nightmare for hundreds of year; they just can’t get it right. So basically, in my opinion, Europeans don’t trust their government; they don’t believe that their politicians will have any longevity. Governments fail. They come and go.
But the EU? Hell, that’s got to work, right? So Europeans believe in global government more than local governments. They put all their eggs in theses all-powerful bodies like the UN and the EU. And that my friends is why Europeans so fully believe in Global Warming… because the UN and EU tell them it’s true. Because their own, now emasculated useless governments have no choice but to fall in step with EU policy tells them GW is real. Because their socialist media tells them its real.
Americans on the other hand generally have faith in but are still weary of their government. We’ve been around long enough and we did it right the first time. We take pride in our democracy and we don’t trust global governments because they historically fail. And because our government hasn’t embraced global climate change neither has our general population. And thank God for that.
-bill
Iris took Lily to the doctor’s yesterday. Lily’s eyes were so swollen she could hardly see. It appears that she has both an ear infection and a harsh and sudden form of pink eye. They were glad we brought her in because of how fast it was moving through her system she was at risk for getting damage to the soft tissues around her eye. Will is still a bit under the weather and for some reason he threw up last night. We’re not sure what’s going on there but we’ve got him on a BRAT diet and see what happens tonight. Poor kids.
I’m spending all day today and tomorrow with a software vendor that’s installing some new Anti-Virus for me at work. It’s a pretty big job and high-impact (and exposure) so hopefully everything goes smoothly.
Sunny the dog is coming over Sunday. Hopefully that too goes smoothly.
-bill
Now Will and Lily both have colds; oh the joy.
Our ADT alarm system has a fault which triggered the alarm the other night so I had to call and have them come out today to fix it.
I think I’ve come up with a decorating solution for our formal living room. It’s a tough room because of the vaulted ceilings that carry on up the stair case. We can’t just paint the walls and call it done, and any art would have to be pretty large because of the heights involved. So I decided to go with a stone veneer wall. Do stone on one wall, paint 2 other walls a caramel color and the last, small wall a chocolate brown. I think three big black and white photos will help break up the stone and really make the whole room pop. Of course that means that I’m going to have to recover the recliners; which Iris knew already. See I have a good color/pattern sense and I had a hard time picking out the fabric for our wing-back recliners. I wasn’t feeling leather so I went with a deep red and gold trim. Those colors won’t go so I’ll have to see how much to redo the chairs in leather. Joy.
-bill
p.s. Here’s a great story on how the BBC is airing Hamas propaganda by showing the demolition of a terrorist’s house by the IDF… of course the IDF didn’t tear it down and the house is still there but hey… who needs facts, right?
Through Iris’ new friends, I was invited to go play Bocci with some other guys. These were pretty normal folks and I had a good time. It’s always a little awkward meeting new people without a commonality to help spark conversations but I look forward already to doing it again.
My new video card didn’t help with the playing of 1080p on my media PC. Looks like my problem is my limited RAM (2GB)… I need 4gb but the PC doesn’t have the space. Bummer. Plus, the new card was really loud so I probably wouldn’t have kept it even if it did work. Oh well. I can still watch standard def movies and dvds and all of our music. Was just hoping to get the 1080p high-def working before Jenny got here so that I could impress her with Blade Runner.
I have to go back to the Mississippi tomorrow but luckily she’s tied up in Richmond so it’s just an hour drive there, an hour of work, and short drive back to work.
I’ve got to borrow or by a ladder to work on the pump for our bathtub jets. The access point is on the exterior of the house about 12 feet up the wall… what a stupid location, it’s not even at the head of the tub! I was able to reach the GFI and reset it and the fuse at the breaker but that didn’t help. I’ve got to figure out a way of testing the outlet and the pump seperately so it looks like I’ll be playing with an extension cord this weekend.
-bill
San Francisco banned retailers from using plastic bags; thankfully the hard choice between paper and plastic was solved by the democratic process. Of course the drive to ban plastic bags had nothing to do with scientific fact. Instead, it was about hysteria and misinformed politicians doing the wrong thing because it felt good.
From this article on the Times Online, “The widely stated accusation that the bags kill 100,000 animals and a million seabirds every year are false, experts have told The Times.” “Lord Taverne, the chairman of Sense about Science, said: “The Government is irresponsible to jump on a bandwagon that has no base in scientific evidence. This is one of many examples where you get bad science leading to bad decisions which are counter-productive. Attacking plastic bags makes people feel good but it doesn’t achieve anything.” (emphasis mine)
Once again more proof that the general public and thus the government is full of idiots that are easily manipulated out of fear by the PLM (Politicians, Lawyers & Media) which use fear to make money and take control of your life through laws.
-bill
