Deck the Halls

It's that time of year. The holidays... I have my parents coming to town tonight. It will be really weird to have them here for Christmas. Usually there is a lot of family around and multiple locations to spend time at. This year it is all at my place and it is just our family. It will be nice to have no worries about scheduling and stuff like that.

My dad and I will be working on our unfinished basement. We are focusing on our bathroom/laundry room. It will be so nice to have the whole thing finished. When it's all said and done we'll have a family room and a fish room for all my aquaculture and coral fragging and breeding and stuff.

This week has been pretty crazy at work. We are going to be moving across the street on the 29th of December. I didn't have as much warning as I would have liked but that's just the way things go. It will be soooooo nice when we are all moved. My work life should end up much less stressful. I'm glad to be taking a couple of days off. I guess that's how IT works.

Doh!! I forgot that I still need to wrap some presents...

Welcome to the Holidays

Everyone is probably posting about their Thanksgiving Holiday. I'll jump on the band wagon. Ours was fairly uneventful. We have family in town from Utah and the Tri-cities. For me Thanksgiving is just the jumping off point for Christmas.

For some reason Christmas this year couldn't come soon enough. I'm not sure what it is about the holiday. It is probably the memories from past Christmases. I think Christmas was always a joy and now that I have my own children, to see them get excited about Christmas really gets me thinking.

It's all good. Now I don't have to hold back with watching Christmas movies and listening to Christmas music. Dish Network added the holiday music to our music channels so that will probably be on from now until the 25th.

Happy Holidays

The little drummer boy

My 4 year old son, Stuart, has been a drummer pretty much since birth. He has always loved music. When he was 2 we would ask him how a song went and he would drum out the rhythm for us. We got him a little toy drum set from Wal-mart which he enjoyed completely. Now he is just too big to play it. He always liked to play his Uncle Adam's real drum set and was upset when he couldn't for whatever reason.

We finally decided to get him some lessons. His teacher is so impressed. He says he plays better than some of his 7 year olds. He's probably just saying that so we will continue the lessons. I think he's doing extremely well.

It was very difficult for him to practice on a toy drumset so we broke down and got him a junior set from the music store. Needless to say, he is in absolute heaven. He would play that thing nonstop if we let him. He also requires us to be in the room so that he has an audience. It is a difficult thing to ask you child to stop practicing his instrument.

This weekend there is a drum show at the mall. He was asked to bring his set and enter a drawing and stuff. There are tons of drums all throughout the mall. He has been running up and down the mall with his sticks, looking for the one he want most. Right now I think that he really wants a green one. I'm sure things will change as he gets older. Hopefully he'll look more at functionality and quality than the color.

Anyway, he's our little drummer boy...

New software, new leaf?

Wow, you'd think I'd be better at keeping up on this thing. I decided that my other software was too hard to use. Sometimes it isn't best to do it yourself. I had that software installed on my personal server but it was lame. So I transfered everything over to this one and I already like it better. We'll see if I can do better.

Anyway it's getting cold and wet. Hopefully the mountains will fill with snow soon and we can get to some snowboarding. The last time I went last season, I learned a ton. Unfortunately it was like the second to last run so I didn't get a whole lot of time to use what I had learned. I am anxious to see if it is still working for me. That's not for a few more months though.

I've been working hard on our fish club site and I think it is about where we want it so I can slow down. It has made me pretty busy. Plus I just took my Zend PHP certification exam (I passed) and so the last couple of weeks I've been busy with that as well.

End of Line

Saturday Fun

So I'm back from out little trip. We actually came back on Tuesday. It's been crazy since we got back. We had a board meeting for the fish club that went awesome. We got tons accomplished. At work we had a hard drive fail while we were making some major network changes so Friday was crazy. It took Kevin and I most of the day to get that all working again. Then today Kami had a Chorale retreat for the first half of the day. It was all good. We had a lot of fun. Then after that I went to Moscow with Jeff (a guy in our club) and talked to the fish store people about the club and stuff.

Anyway its good to be home. Now I am working on getting my 55 gallon tank ready. I need to get some work done on the stand to get the 55 gallon sump to fit. I'll be taking it to work to have someone help me with it.

I think my copepods and new phytoplanktons are doing well. I'm going to setup another tank so that we can do some clean up of some nuisance hitchhikers on our rock.

I guess that's enough for now...

Good Times

Yesterday we visited the Puyallup fair. Quite the experience. It is the Western Washington Fair. Last weekend we went to the Palouse Empire fair in Colfax. Much different. We spend about 4 hours at the fair and that wasn't enough to see everything. I could have spent more time in the commercial barn with all of the demonstrations. They were quite entertaining. There were way too many people. I think it would have been better without the kids too. After the fair we went to see my cousin's new wife and new house. He is doing quite well. He's a real character. I also got some ideas from my dad for the stand for my 55 that I'll be putting in place of my 75 at work. I have a steel stand that I need to cover with wood to make it match my hood. I think it is going to turn out well. I'll be building it tomorrow morning. Today should be a lazy sunday. Church for my parents isn't until 2:00.

Vacation

WooHoo, I'm on vacation. It's been a while since I've had a chance to get away from work. At least for more than a couple of days and farther away than my house. I'm still connected though so if you read my last entry...no withdrawls. Anyhoo, we are in Olympia for the next few days visiting my parents. We are also going to visit the Puyallup fair. I haven't been there in probably 10+ years. It feels pretty nice to not have to go to work. I'll have to check my e-mail and see if anything need my attention. Some people at Decagon don't understand that Kevin, the other IT guy, actually knows how to do stuff. I don't know what I need to do to get them to go to him. Maybe I should go on vacation or something.

No I will not fix your computer

Some days I don't know why I went in to computers. I spend all day and then come home and am on a computer pretty much the entire evening. Even now, I can't leave the freaking computer alone. Kami's away at Chorale and I had the kids. Once they were in bed, on the computer racing video games. I got fed up with not winning and came upstair. What do I do? Pick up the Notebook and start hitting the fish site. I think it is actually an addiction. I wonder how long I could go without checking my e-mail or checking my forums. I bet I couldn't go 2 days. This weekend we'll be going to Olympia to see the fair. I won't be able to make it with out checking everything. All I can say is it is a good thing my parents have DSL and wireless so I'll be able to connect the notebook. Don't get me started on fixing other peoples computers. This kinda turned into a rant. I do love my job. I just wish I wasn't so dependent on these stupid machines.

Here we go...

So, I decided that I want to have a blog. I don't know if it is out of a feeling that I need to be doing what everyone else is doing or what. Next thing will be doing a podcast or something like that. I keep telling myself that no one wants to read what I have to say but I keep saying that about a journal too. Anyway, most of this will probably be about fish since that is pretty much all I think about lately. As the president of the local fish club, I feel like I have no choice. It's not a bad thing...