3/31/2012

Today was Mindy's birthday. I hope she enjoys being 25. My birthday present mainly involved taking as many of the kids out of the house for as long as possible. Mother Nature was as uncooperative as possible - it was 45 and raining. I took Scott and Parker to Ollies (which is an amazing mixture of nice stuff mixed in with a large quantity of crap and all in a building where they are clearly not concerned about the setting selling the merchandise, but relying wholly on the merchandise selling itself.) After that we went to the local Ducati/Triumph/BMW motorcycle dealership. I drooled like Homer Simpson over a donut and left a bit sad. I miss the bike. I wish western PA was a place I could get a bike as a year-round commuter vehicle. Alas, it is not. Then we went to Home Depot, Rite-Aid, Weis and finally came back home.

Cole had spent the entire time making artwork for Mindy. He is quite creative and loves to do artsy stuff when he is not doing things such as wrestling, playing in the dirt, building a beaver dam with his brother (yes, he and Parker - according to Parker - built a beaver dam yesterday). The boys spent much of the afternoon destroying the house room by room.

Have I mentioned that we're excited to move to a real home, one with a basement and a yard? Even a garage for them to go ride their bikes in when the weather is lousy will be an improvement. We're excited to plant a garden, work in the yard, and not have the neighbor kids looking in our windows while we're eating dinner or practicing their skateboard tricks at 8:30pm right below Scott's window.

We don't know what home we will be in yet - we won't for another month or so - but we're excited.

I think we're going to tell everyone that our ancestors were a founding family.

Weekend update

On Friday afternoon I picked up Dad at the Wal-Mart parking lot/Megabus stop. We then drove to Cleveland that night. Western PA is quite hilly and made for some slow going. We spent the night with Lee & Wendy in Cleveland, loaded up the trailer in the morning with a bunch of lumber and a table saw which Mindy had pulled across the country when we moved to PA, and then drove to Philadelphia. It rained almost the entire way. But the trailer tires didn't blow out and we made decent time. After unloading the stuff into Tom & Kathryn's new (to them) big house, I headed home. I pulled into our parking lot at midnight. It was good to get home.

The boys (and I think Mindy) were happy to see me on Sunday morning.

The boys say some funny things. I don't remember any of them right now, but I do remember that Scott fell off the chair this morning. It amazes me how resilient they are, especially at his age. So he got the massive black eye 2 weeks ago, it is still healing. Then he fell down a half flight of stairs on Saturday and scraped up the same eye, then he also falls off the chairs, trips when he is walking, and otherwise turfs it in some way or another many times a day - and he gets up for more.

He also dances a lot which is pretty cute. I'll try to get some video of it.

What Is Fair?...and this post is now recorded on a government server

I saw this the today and thought it was well-put.

What Is Fair? - Reason Magazine

 ___________________________________

So while one party tells us that all will be fair as long the government can take a sufficiently large amount of other's income and earnings, the other gives us the horror show DHS and builds a giant spy center to record 20 terabytes of data a second, of U.S. citizen phone, email, fax and whatever other electronic communication is taking place. It'll make you feel warm and fuzzy, or at least inclined to protect your privacy by relying on cash as much as possible and talking via tin cans and a string.

This one is a link to wired magazine about the "Utah Data Center"
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1

Fairies wear boots

With the change of Facebook to the timeline, I've about had it with Zuckerberg and co., so I'm going to start this up again. In conjunction with a dropbox folder where I will upload pictures, you will get to hear our goings on.

The last post was in November 2010. Since then we've had a child, and among other things, he's learned to walk. Mindy spent much of last summer in Utah. I spent the summer in Hagerstown, MD with JLG and two 22 year old roommates.

I finish the program in about 6 weeks and we are moving to Butler county PA. We may even live in Butler, PA.

Cole & Parker now empty the dishwasher each morning. They put the utensils away and stack everything else on the counter. This morning they stacked a cup that had flipped over in the dishwasher water and all. Mindy learned this the hard way when the water ran down her arm.

And in other exciting news, spring has arrived. The grass is green, the trees have buds and some of them are even blossoming. I saw a few in full bloom on campus today. They were beautiful.

Irma the groundhog is pregnant again. After a long winter hiatus she is back scrounging around her home for leaves and stuff. Yesterday Mindy scared off a year-old cat who was headed down into her hole. She didn't want the boys to witness the murder of a cat by a groundhog.

Oh, and Fairies wear boots...it is a Black Sabbath song.

A quick report

So, since September 29 we've done a lot.

Mindy has grown a lot in the belly region. He's due in 5 weeks, but we're likely to see him in the next week or two.

The first mod ended and we went to NY for a few days. We had a great time. Driving the tank in NYC was not a lot of fun, nor was finding a place to park it. On the bright side, we got 19.5 mpg and met a really nice old lady at the farm where we picked up a motorcycle older that 90% of my classmates to haul into Queens for the boyfriend of a dear high school friend. While we were in NY the weather was great so we were able to do a lot of fun things outside. We went to Governors Island and rented bikes (for free on Fridays, so we didn't really rent them, but borrowing seems to imply that there is a personal relationship involved, which there was not). I was afraid they would take one look at Mindy and tell her there was no way they would let her ride a bike with a child seat on the back, but they didn't and the four of us had a wonderful time exploring the island. While we were waiting for the ferry to go back to Manhattan I got a call from JLG (you can look them up at jlg.com) and they offered me an internship for next summer. I have since accepted and am looking forward to spending next summer there. Tom and Kathryn came up on Saturday and all of us walked up to the new parks along the river between Atlantic Ave and the Brooklyn Bridge. Mom and Dad were very patient with the level of insanity and the volume we brought to the house and we had a great time with them. Abbey didn't handle it as well. She is probably still happy we're not there.


Cole has started going to preschool on Thursdays and Fridays. The bus picks him up at 7:10 and drops him off at 1. He loves school and his primary teacher says he is getting much better in class. We hope some of it has to do with him getting accustomed to the structure and holding still. I volunteered at his school one morning and had fun seeing him there. In his class is the neighbor's girl and two girls from the ward who also live in the complex. Parker was sad the first day when he woke up to find that Cole was gone. Now he really enjoys the alone time with Mindy and the chance to play as he pleases without having Cole tell him what to do.


About a week ago I finally got some clocks and artwork on the walls here. It makes a huge difference.

Also a few weeks ago I was out with Cole in the parking lot while he rode his big wheel. I distracted him at the wrong time and he drove into the trailer hitch of the truck. Off we went to the urgent care where the Indian doctor struggled to understand what a trailer hitch was and Cole left with two stictches just above his left eyebrow. Now both boys have scars above their left eyebrow - about 10 weeks apart.

Cole was healing up well until school the next week when the bus headed down a dirt road for the first time and the guy hit a pothole or something and Cole and the other kids on that side of the bus all banged their heads against the window. It wouldn't have been a problem except that Cole hit the cut and it came partially open. It has since healed up and I took the stitches out myself. Its no different than cutting the strings that hold a chicken together. I recommend everyone remove their own stitches. I also decided that an activity we need to do each time we move to a new place is a dry run to the Urgent Care to speed things up when one of the boys needs stitches.

It is now a couple of days later and I am out of school until after Thanksgiving. We spent a couple of hours at the hospital on Tuesday night. Mindy got another shot of horse tranquilizer to stop the contractions. She's taking it really easy until Sunday because if he decides to make his entrance into the world before then we'll be driving to Danville (80 miles east of here) to the NICU. After that, he'll be born here in State College.

We get a glimpse of winter every few weeks when the overnight lows drop to the low 20's. One of those morning Parker went out on the patio in his PJ's and, while standing in a cloud of his own breath, told me that it was warm outside because the sun was up. Poor child, he's thinks like a desert dweller. He'll figure out this winter that a beautiful clear sunny morning in the winter is usually the coldest.

That is about all. I'm headed to India for two weeks at the end of February for school. It should be a great experience. Mindy is glad her mom will be coming for that time.

Time flies

Just as I hit the post button, I noticed that blogger claims my last post was Sept. 1. While I do not doubt this, it nonetheless surprised me. We have had a wild month. Starting the day after Labor Day, Mindy and the boys and the critters and Dad, and a sister-in-law drove across the country. During that same week, the schoolwork really started to take off. Then we spent the weekend moving in and things have only gotten wilder. I think I got 6 hours of sleep one night last week - it felt so nice, but I woke up before my alarm simply out of habit and the fear of having missed my ride to school. The days all blur together. I'm thankful for Outlook and a phone that has my calendar on it - this way I know where to be.

Yesterday morning a classmate turned to me and said "You look like hell". I couldn't argue with it. I certainly felt it. Last night I did okay and got 5-1/2. I manage to get home for dinner one or two nights a week. There are classes, team meetings, association meetings, employer information sessions, job interviews, job fairs, meetings with career placement people, meetings to present assignments and then just the time reading and writing.

It is great to be together again as a family. I think Mindy was happy to see me, I know the boys were. They wanted to wrestle with me at 1am when they saw me. Mindy has done a great job of adjusting and clearing the house of boxes and making it look civilized, pretty much without any help from me. Each day a bit more is done...and each day the basketball she ate grows a bit.

It is now the end of the first set of classes. I've spent so much time in team meetings. No meeting tonight though! But there is accounting homework, an 8-minute speech (not reading a transcript), and a team paper. Final presentations and exams are next week. Then there is a week spent doing career development stuff and we start the race again.

Added to the picture

So the other afternoon on the bus home from school - home being a relative word, since it is the Christensen's home that has been my home for the past month - Adam told me their almost-4 year-old had drawn a family picture that day. It had five people in it. When asked to explain, she said, mom, dad, me, brother, and bro. Butler. So I'm in as far as she's concerned. I'm apparently getting close to being awarded an honorary uncle degree.

Classes race on. I've had quizzes the last two days, and the first round of assignments are due next week. For the most part, I'm enjoying it. Thankfully I have two classes that are case-based to offset the extremely thrilling statistics and accounting courses.

Next week is the big week. We'll be together as a family. It will probably require a bit of adjustment by all of us, but I think we're all ready for that.

I'm headed to NY for the weekend. I'm excited to see Brooklyn again.

This is kind of a rambling post.... my brain is fried and I've got another hour before the last meetings of the day begin.