I’m going to make a Jason Parx blog post now. Please set aside the next 3 hours of your life.

I’ll go in chronological order over interesting events from the last two weeks. First up is something that I’m very proud of.

Right before the 4th of July a hose on top of the water heater cracked and started spraying water. In my fear I called Mike Diamond plumber. They quoted me $321 to replace the hose, which I later learned was a $10 part and a 20 minute job to fix. Total they wanted over $2000 to replace the entire water heater. Luckily my dad has done that before. The next day we headed out to All-American and bought a new water heater and hoses all for only $462. A few hours later it was installed. That’s a quality savings of over $1500. Boo yah. Not only did we save money, but I got to spend time with my father and learn something from him. Who knew a broken water heater could be such a good thing.

A few days later I had the pleasure of hosting a bachelor party for my brother. It was a pretty mellow affair, but I think everyone had a good time. I was again blessed to spend time with my family and this time be able to do something special for them. The wedding is this Sunday and I’m looking forward to it. This is a picture from our rock-paper-scissors tournament.

This next entry is a frustrating one. The weekend of the bachelor party we purchased a new 2007 Camry.

You’re probably wondering how this could be frustrating. I’ll keep it short and post links for people that want more info, but the main idea is this: The car makes me motion sick. I get car sick very easily as a passenger, and this is due to unexpected accelerating and decellerating. I have never in my life though gotten sick while I was driving, because I can fully anticipate the motion of the car as I press the gas or brake pedals. Unfortunately the Camry has some peculiar behaviors that take away my ability to predict acceleration and decelleration. Unfortunately a 10 minute test drive didn’t make me nauseous, and I would never have thought it could be a problem. If you’d like to read more about these behaviors read here and here. I’ve driven the car 300 miles, and every time I drive it I end up nauseous. Ultimately it looks like we’ll be selling the car and finding something else. We’ll end up losing money, but that’s a better alternative than being motion sick every time I drive it for the next 10-15 years. The next challenge is finding something that doesn’t exhibit these behaviors.

On to more positive experiences, this last weekend we went to Seaworld with Stacie’s Girl Scout troop. The troop is dissolving and this was their last big trip. We got to spend the night in front of the Beluga Whale and Polar Bear exhibits. Super cool. Here’s my best picture from the trip.

And finally my last picture is the least exciting of the five, but it’s not my fault that it came last chronologically. We rented the Rug Doctor from Stater Bros. to clean our downstairs carpet. Every now and then the dog likes to pee on it, and over the last two years it’s built up a few spots. It did a super awesome job too.

That’s about it for now. I will be heading off to Taco Bell pretty soon here to eat with Luna, and I might visit a Honda dealer to test drive a Civic. I hope you’ve enjoyed my Jasso style post. I certainly have.

Yesterday and today I had to attend a training for work, smack in the middle of my summer vacation. Luckily it’s over and I can get back to enjoying my last couple weeks.

I turned off the fancy style buttons because it turned out to be a big pain. It made things slower, only some of the buttons would work, and it was screwing with comment submissions. Thanks to everyone who has registered (pretty much all the regulars). I hope to keep an eye out for fun plugins and additions that can make the website more entertaining. I also want to make a blog section where I can put all the additions I’ve made like official comments, etc, and where I found them.

Since the wife finally registered maybe she’ll start posting replies more often. As for a wife blog, I’m not sure. That might be too dangerous. Speaking of the wife, she’s gone this weekend for a girl scout trip, so I’ll be all alone. I’ve got a ton of pictures I want to scan, so I may hunker down and get that done.

Dodgers lost big today, but it doesn’t matter if a loss is by one run or eleven, it only counts as one. Friday Mr. Penny can turn it back on!

In case you were wondering, to understand this post you need an education level between 6th and 9th grade. That’s according to my Gunning-Fog and Flesch-Kincaid indexes given by my Word Stats plugin.

My wife is gone at Girl Scout Camp. I chose to stay home and keep the puppy company (she’s almost 3 years old, but she will forever be a puppy, weird). As this monumental weekend of aloneness approached, I began to brainstorm different activities I could partake in without the wife. While she loves to do things with me, there are certain things that would be lower on her list, yet high on mine. These are the types of activities I have focused on for today.

Last night I went over to Chris Luna’s new pad and hung out. We watched Ferris Bueller, random SNL dvds, and played Karaoke Revolution (cool game!). I ate Little Ceasar’s pizza and KFC chicken, mmmm.

Today I have decided to embark on a Lord of the Rings Extended Edition Marathon. The running time of all three extended editions is 11 hours and 22 minutes (not including disc changes). My original idea was to watch all 3 films including extras, but that might be a little long. It is now 11 am, and if I start soon, that has me finishing about 11:00 pm tonight, not including bathroom breaks and eating. There are easily 2 hours of extras per film, so those might have to wait. Here is a rough schedule of my day:

11:30 am – 3:00 pm : Fellowship of the Ring
3:00 pm – 7:00 pm : Two Towers
7:00 pm – 11:00 pm : Return of the King

UCLA plays Memphis at 4:05 pm, so I may switch to that for the duration of that game. I watched the game on Thursday against Gonzaga, and it was amazing. While I didn’t attend UCLA, I did look into going there in High School…so it’s behind CSULA and CSULB for schools I actually care about.

If you want to watch a LOTR film or watch UCLA in HD, you know where I’ll be.

This is the first night I will spend alone at our place without my precious wife since we’ve been married. I went off to Palm Springs for a night a couple months ago, but this is the first time she has gone to do something while I stay home. She’s off to an all-nighter for Girl Scouts. The big question of course is not will I miss her, but what am I going to do with the next 20 hours of loneliness?

I could take up field hockey.
I could watch the entire season of Firefly.
I could play 10 games of MVP Baseball ’05.
I could lesson plan. (HA!)
I could finish buying presents on Amazon.
I could make posts about what I could be doing.

Or I could clean the house, be overcome by the smell of ammonia as I mop the kitchen, and take a break and come post on here.

Big Bear was a lot of fun. Stacie, myself, Andrew, and Sarah all went up with some crazy girl scout leaders for a fun weekend. We didn’t do a whole lot, mainly slept, read, played catch, and ate. Stacie and I bought baseball gloves before we left and practiced our catch, it was fun. I think going to the outdoors can really boost your sanity and remind you what an awesome planet we live on.

Today I started new teacher training that lasts all week. It’s a cool opportunity to gear up for the new school year and meet some of the other new teachers I’ll be teaching with. A lot of it are concepts I learned in my credential program, but they are very good refresher courses.

After new teacher training Andrew helped me move even more stuff to our place, specifically a china cabinet from my mom’s house and a bed from Stacie’s mom’s house. Whoa, that’s a lot of apostrephes. The china cabinet belonged to my Grandma, and it looks pretty nice in our dining room. It should be a great place to put some nicer dishes, and we can use all the cabinet space we can get. I had also ordered a door from Lowes, but they’re retarded and got it wrong for a 2ND time! I got my money back and decided I’ll look elsewhere.

Stacie started college school today, I start next week, and in a couple weeks we both start school work. This will probably be a long semester since we’re both taking classes, but I look forward to the challenges ahead. Oh, so I had a cool idea. What do you think about me buying a cool domain name like www.mathparty.org and putting a blog like this on it with the daily homework? Wouldn’t that be cool? My students could come check their homework for the day, and I could post test and quiz reminders, that kind of stuff. I think it would be fun.

Stacie and I are pleased to report that our family has grown by one. Yes, the dog has come to live with us.

It’s sort of a bittersweet change because she had to leave my parent’s house. I really wish there were two of her so we could both have her. I’m sure they will grieve the loss, but I see a new dog in their future, and we can’t wait to help them look.

We’ve watched 7 episodes of LOST now and might squeeze one or two more in tonight. Stacie has also started playing Animal Crossing, so we might start playing that together. I mowed and edged the lawn today, that was fun. Stacie’s girl scout friends are coming over right now with a new bread board, so now we can cut stuff. Although we don’t have any knives yet, haha.

Now we’re going to try and cook dinner. Cross your fingers.

Yay for me. I’m off to St. Dominic Savio for Girl Scout Sunday. The girls sing, carry in the flag I think, and help with the service. Afterwards we’re going to Soup Plantation, so it should be fun. My body really wanted to sleep in though, but I’m awake. Guess I’ll have to do that another time.