The Blarg

Niall made a post about plastic bottles, and inside that article it talked about Sigg Bottles. They’re basically an aluminum water bottle, sort of like a thermos, except they look really cool. I figure what the heck, I take a new plastic bottle to work every day, and at $3.50 a flat of water, if buying a $25 sweet bottle will help me not use plastic bottles and save money, then it’s worth it. And I’m thinking the aluminum will help keep the water cooler a lot longer, and this way when other people at work also buy Stater Bros water I won’t have to put an N on the lid. So hopefully I refill it everyday and take it to work, look cool in the process, save money after 6 months, and help the environment. Here’s the one I ordered:

I’d also like to advertise a new online money sending site called Revolution Money Exchange. It’s like Paypal, but a better deal. My brother put it on his site, but I’m trying to steal his thunder and get you to sign up and refer me. You get $25 just for signing up, so get on it!

I’ve been told that people check this website solely to see pictures of some baby. So for all those people, here you go.

Stacie’s good friend Shannon came to visit from Georgia!

Have I mentioned that an infant can be tiring business?

Stacie and Lydia went to work to show off the babies to all the other teachers. Apparently Luke did not appreciate this.

Every now and then we get a shot of him smiling. They’re really infrequent right now, so whenever we see one it’s like we’ve struck gold. Note to self, never take cute smiling son for granted.

Here are four generations all lined up. Having a great grandpa around is very special.

There aren’t very many pictures of me, so here’s one. Yay me.

And I had to put this one up, because dude Paul, you’re a natural.

I feel like I should get a Flickr account or something, but I know you’d all be too lazy to go look at them. And this way I can add some commentary. Look for videos sometime this century. Only two months of work left. Woot!

Edit: I went ahead and threw all three songs on The Blarg radio over to the right. Now you don’t even have to leave this page to listen to the music! Oh WoW!

Some music I like a lot. Stuck in my head mucho.

Anarbor – I’ll Stay to the West

Parade the Day – American Dream

Over It – Caught Up In A Rundown

The Blarg’s hosting service crashed sometime last night and was down about 12 hours. The hosting service went to a backup from the 21st, so my last post was lost.

The htpc is back up and running with the replacement hard drive. It’s getting a super clean reinstall of Windows and I just installed Norton Ghost to make a nice backup in case this ever happens again. I’ve gone to great lengths to set things up, so once I have a backup of the whole thing, I won’t have to go through all the hassle of setup (which really wasn’t that bad a second time around). I bought a neat little cooler that attaches to the bottom of the hard drive and helps to pull some hot air off of it. In my case the hard drive is sort of isolated and no air passes over it, so this is a really easy and quiet way to circulate the air. I’ve even seen a five degree drop in my video card temps.

I started to play Final Fantasy 7 from the original playstation the other night. I remember when Andrew and I got that game back in the 90’s. I think he beat it, but I never did, so I figure why not throw it in and see what I can do. It’s an easy game to play when the baby is lying on your chest. I know the game takes a long time to beat, and I’ve got plenty of other things to do, so we’ll see how long my interest lasts.

Baby is doing well. He’s sleeping longer chunks at night, and already he’s able to spend a lot of that time alone in his bassinet. Hopefully sometime in the next couple months we’ll get him moved to his own crib and a good nighttime routine will be established. Our friend Shannon who lives in Georgia was out here on vacation and stopped by today to see Luke. It’s amazing to see the little changes he’s going through already. You can tell his eyes are working better because he looks around. Stacie walked by him in his chair today and his eyes about rolled out of their sockets as he watched her go by. He does a little bit of smiling, but not a ton yet. I can’t wait until I can tickle him or give him a raspberry and he squeals in delight. Right now when I do it he just looks at me like “what the heck is that!”

The Dodgers beat the D’backs. Woot woot!

Tonight Stacie and I went out on a date for the first time since Luke was born. We called up a set of grandparents, requested their services, and off we went! Woodranch BBQ in Cerritos is one of our favorite places for good meat, so we headed out there. It was fun being able to go out just the two of us. We both remarked about how life didn’t feel that different, like it still didn’t feel real that we have a child. Life is certainly different than it was before Luke, but it’s not 100% different, it’s only partly different. I’d say a baby is more like an upgrade to your current life.

I started putting baby videos on the computer today, so hopefully by tomorrow I’ll have some posted.

For whatever reason we have Monday off, so hallelujah for that.

The hard drive in my HTPC died tonight. It was during the Dodger game, and I’m sure the death of the hard drive and the Dodger loss were related. For all the geeks, it froze, I rebooted, and could never get into windows again. Chkdsk kept freezing (a good 12 times) trying to startup, and even gave me an “unknown error has occured.” Tried to repair vista, but when it tried it said it can’t (because of a bad disk). I took the drive out and put it in my external usb drive on the upstairs computer, and even that is terrible. It showed me the contents of the HTPC drive for a minute, but then I started to get all kinds of errors trying to access it. Not sure why it went down, but I think it could be because of heat, so I’ll take a few steps to deal with that. It could be a completely random thing too, so who knows. Luckily it’s still under warranty, so the new one should be here soon. Only sucky part is I have to set it back up. I never got around to making a norton ghost image of it for precisely this situation. Oh well.

Baby is crying. I go.

Today our little guy turned one month old! It’s hard to believe it’s been that long. I’ve got a full 60 minute tape for the last 3 weeks, so his youth should be well documented. Once I get to editing that I’ll be sure to post links. For now though, here is his monthday picture!

Dodgers: They put up another high score tonight, so I expect a week or so of doughnuts. Andruw Jones did have two hits…in the SAME game, so that’s a positive. Four games in a row on TV this weekend/Monday.

Book: Took me about 3 weeks (since baby came home) to finish the most recent chapter I was on. I started a new one last night and made good progress, so I’m hoping things speed up. Sometimes the words just shoot off the finger tips and you know exactly how the scene should unfold, but other times it could go a bunch of different ways. Most of the time you just have to plunk away at it, and in the process you usually figure out where it’s supposed to go. I’ll wait until I have more exciting news to say more.

Videogames: I’m currently batting about .325 at AA Jacksonville in the Dodgers minor league organization. I’m a shortstop trying to rise up the ranks, and it’s a stacked position for the club, but I’m giving it my best shot. I’m riding a 9 game hitting streak right now, so hopefully the higher ups notice me.

What a lame title.

Involuntary or not, this looks like a smile to me!

I’ve been scolded for not posting pictures of Grandfathers yet, so here they are!

Now for some Aunts and Uncles. I love how Luke is looking at Paul like he’s crazy.

To accomodate the new flash I had to buy a new camera bag. I bought it from a company called Crumpler. Their website is super crazy. I got the “4 million dollar home,” and it fits my d50 and sb-400 flash just perfectly. Everything is snug, there’s room for batteries/accessories, and it’s fairly small. If I had a second lense or something longer than the standard kit it would be too small.