Category Archives: News

Things, Goings On, and Stuff I write

Hurtling Towards Two

Abigail is going to be two in about 4 days, and today’s mostly over. The little girl that I love so much is surely amazing. In only two years she’ll be four and in seven times that number she’ll be sixteen (and proving my amazing math skills in ten times that number she’ll be twenty-two). What is so fun right now is that she’s getting pretty well potty trained (though tonight I got to handle a "secret stinker," or a potty done in private that was later revealed to us as an accident), she’s got a pretty good vocabulary, and in a couple weeks she’ll start the dance classes Jessica has her signed up for. Shortly after that she’ll start gymnastics and begin her Olympic training. When she’s fourteen (and looking about six or seven) she’ll appear in her first Olympics, if she’s lucky she’ll make it into one more at eighteen, and if God works miracles she could be in a third Olympics at the ripe old age of 22.

Of course at twenty-two she’ll have steel posts in her legs, a robotic elbow, more stitches than Betsy Ross’ sewing projects and a very narrow set of carreer choices. Of course that’s just conjecture, but I was totally right when I guessed that she would be born before the thirty-first of December 2002.

Evening at the Zoo

Last night we went to the Denver Zoo with the Kaes for what was billed to us as "A Picnic at the Zoo." The Denver Zoological Society apparently put it together and invited us, paying members, to pay a little more and see the animals in the evening. Yeah. Um, the animals were all on vacation, taking an evening rest before the night-time hunting began or were wearing cement camouflage. We enjoyed the time eating with the Kaes and walking with them around the zoo – the carousel was a blast – but the animal watching was pretty dull. We saw a seals, camels, flamingos, Giraffes through glass, zebras, buffallos, flamingos and lots of peafowls (peacocks to those who are gender indifferent) but no lions, tigers or bears. Oh, my.

The fun with the Kaes made up for the lack of critters, but I was sorely disappointed not to see the animals in full swing. Maybe the overcast weather put them in a foul mood and so the zoo keepers put them to rest for the evening early. Anyway, in the end we enjoyed a great time of fellowship.

After the zoo we had to go to my parents house because my Mom’s Windows ME machine (ME stands for Microsoft’s Empire) stopped displaying icons after I tried to show them Linux the night before. Doh! Turns out the Active Desktop (renamed to Inactive Desktop) was the problem. Once we turned that off the icons showed up and the (insert some derogetory word) E-Machine started showing the icons. *

In short the animals were missing and the icons were missing – but we made due.

* I should note that one of the funniest things Bryce Edwards ever said to me was that Active Desktop should have been named, “Horrible waste of system memory and machine killer.”

WordPress Rocks

As Matt recently posted, WordPress can handle comment spam. I currently have moderation turned on, mostly because I don’t get a lot of comments and I’m in front of my computer all the time. What I really like is the fact that I just got an email showing me the markup of the comment. That comment message had several links in it, including one to do a whois look-up on the IP address, one to accept and another to delete the comment. All from one email. I’m going to install one of the nifty comment plug-ins from the WordPress wiki shortly which should help reduce the already low amount of administration I do. We now return to our normal blog posts.

The Secret to Potty Training

We discovered the secret to potty training for Abigail: Sponge Bob. No, not on Television, not in sticker form (methods that sounded like they’d be effective) – we have Sponge Bob and Patrick on the toilet. Literally. We got a Sponge Bob Squarepants toilet seat and now Abby thinks it’s fun and cool to go to the potty. Moral of the story? Television is from the devil 🙂 If she’d never seen Sponge Bob (my fault) she’d have been just as bored as before with the old potty seet.

Olympics

I’m pleased with the Olympics this year because even though the commentary is just as bad as it was in the political arena, it’s much more palletable. The athletes are doing great over all as well. Abby or course adds a whole new flavor to the Olympics because each event is summed up to one action. Tonight during the men’s high bar event it was, “Swing, swing.” The swimmers are told to, “swim, swim.” And of course the Women’s Beach Volleyball athletes are told to “Put some clothes on!” – but that’s me saying that 🙂

Of course NBC is doing everything they can to make it hard to know when certain events are being aired. Witness the schedule. 

8:00 PM OLYMPIC SUMMER GAMES 2004 Primetime

helps so much.

Rutabaga

Last night we went to our friends, the Kaes, house and had a blast. We (as in not me, but my wife and Krystal) made lots of Mexican food and then ate it (which is good) and it was quite tasty especially since not one thing on the table had wheat in it! Yummy.

However, I must say that I prefer our toilet paper over theirs. And Craig, since I know you read this… thank you for having toilet paper since while climbing Mt. Bierstadt I thought, “I hope I don’t have to go potty.” We have the nice soft Cottonelle toilet paper which we enjoy as much as one can enjoy a piece of semi-abrasive material on ones skin. I don’t know why I had to write about this other than it was a distinct thought I remember from last night. You see my allergies were bad. The ragweed plant, which I think is misnamed, is polinating right now, which means the air is filled with little tiny bits of nasty stuff designed to wipe me out [and thus we’ve come full circle with the wiping].

We played a game called, “Hear Me Out!” which could be fun, and had some funny moments, but the problem was that we kept landing on one of two mini-games that made it too much of the same thing. However, at one point in time Krystal compared herself to a white tiger and Craig proudly proclaimed, “I love vegetables because without them I couldn’t say Rutabaga with a straight face.” He then followed it by talking about how legumes make you gaseous. We all were busting up (including Brian, who was hanging out with us) outrageously at that point and so we ended that round and called it quits lest we have to play the ‘brainstorm’ mini-game again.

Oh, and for the record, Jon Doyle and I leading some of the music Sunday morning went quite well and the congregation seemed to like it. Or, at the very least no one ran out screaming 🙂

Test Your Web Projects in Konqueror

I’m using SuSe Linux and it rocks. But it is not installed on my Desktop. Nope, it is on a CD-ROM where it boots from when you start up the PC. Of course you could install it as a dual boot OS on your PC, but that’s your choice. Cool things included in the installation are spell-check built into the text areas of Konqueror, the ability to use the TAB key to actually put tabs in the text area and the fact that the User Interface is clean, fast and looks nicer than Windows XP. I’m very pleased with the performance of the OS and will probably install it here on my desktop soon.

Download this useful version of Linux at http://www.suse.com/us/private/download/ftp/live_eval_int.html

The Hike

The climb up the mountain (I can’t remember the name of it for anything) was awesome. It kicked my behind-side but it was a good experience. If you come to Colorado (assuming you don’t live here) I’ll take you up there to see it even if you don’t hike it. I’ll have pictures up soon. The air up there is… thin. or what feels like make-believe. It is like God let Mr. Rogers design the air because it was really hard to breath as I was ascending. However, the ascention was slowly but surely achieved and we had a great view of all sorts of mountains and hills. You will see in the pictures that they don’t do justice to the real thing.

The hike averaged 1,000 feet of climb every mile (so 3 miles = 3,000 feet up) as we started around 11,004 feet. Cool stuff, but completely exhausting. I’ll report more when I wake up from the tiredness.