Paint Ball

I got to get out and play some paintball this week. We had a grudge match against the 950th. This time they did two things that really made it tough for us. First, they took three of our good players and gave us three crappy players in their place, second... they focused on getting my friend John and I out first.


Well, we ended up getting beat pretty bad... but it was still better than going to work!


Honestly, the whole time I'm playing I'm thinking about how cool it is going to be when I can play with Hayden and Seri! Honestly, that's my motivation to stay in shape... and by stay in shape I mean... not eating as much BBQ when I go out. Baby steps man... I can't rush a thing like fitness!

And then the stove broke...

Ok, hard drive replaced. Dogwood is back up. I got rid of the vundo virus that found it's way onto the laptop... and then I decided to 'fix' the stove.

There was this part on the door that I couldn't get clean, so I tried to take off the handle. Note to self, the designers of appliances must have some type of competition as to how few screws they can use to hold something together. If you take out just two little screws from the stove... the whole door comes apart! Yeah, good times.

I'm actually used to military equipment where there's 18 screws to each 1 ft by 2 ft panel. Oh well, I got it fixed... it only took me an hour or so. That's about all for now. Both Hayden and Seri are sick so I was up till 4 am and then got up at 0730 to start the ribs. Yes, they are that important. Anyway, it's cleaing day so it's back to laundry mountain, or the dreaded kitchen of incredible stench! I might even find out what's in that to-go box in the fridge... it keeps making eye contact whenever I go to get the ketchup. It's freaking me out man!

So... my hard drives dead

Yep, it happens to all of us. The cool thing about this one is that it's just a bad sector, so it's a slow death. In times of my youth, I would try to keep this drive alive by "not writing on that sector." Now, thanks to countless hours scraping a B out of my Computer Architecture course (and what I should have picked up in my A+ cert back in '01) is that doing that is pretty much impossible. I was thinking of trying to partition the drive and 'catching' the bad sector in one of the partitions, thus isolating it. I might just do that for fun and see how long it lasts but... I don't want the safety of all my witty de-motivational pictures and unpopular music to rest in the clutches of a damaged drive. Oh well, as much as I loathe pouring money into their coffers, Best Buy has a great sale on a 320 GB Western Digital for $75.00. It's got 16 Mb of cache and it's 7200 rpm so it's all good.

Oh, did I tell you about the Acer? We wanted to get the kids a DVD player for the car and Hayden a protable video game system for trips. Instead of that we bought an Acer Aspire. It's this little laptop with a 10 ince screen. It has a 160 HDD and a 1.8 GHz processor with a GB of RAM... so it's definalty not a powerhouse by any means. What I did was crunch some movies down and put them on there as well as all the NES, SNES and SEGA games I had on there. Now it's a little media player with 2,000+ games and 100 movies. I think that beats a DS-lite any day. Hayden's stoked and I actually like having the thing around the house since it's got a built in wireless NIC.

The best part about it is having it in the car. We went to gymnastics last Saturday and since I had both the kids I took the laptop. Seri and Hayden got to watch Bolt on the way to the gym and Seri watched Cinderella (one of her favorites) while there. After we went to Sonic for grilled cheese sandwiches and I war-dialed into one of the 5 wide open networks I found and surfed around. I can't believe that it's 2009 and that still is so easy to do. Good stuff. I hopped onto their printer and printed off every page of the Onion as fast as I could... and then we went home. Yeah, I love this little laptop.

We'll be in NY in late June. Mom got a cottege off of Lake glow-in-the-dark so that will be fun. I don't have classes till June 1st so I'm going to try to convince Joy into letting me tear out our tree and replace it will a nice garden. I might even get all crazy and finish off the cubby under the stairs!!

Last but not least, congrats to Heather for becoming a M.D. That hat is completely ridiculous. I'm glad you got sorted into Hufflepuff. I totally expect some blank perscrition forms when I get up there!

Hayden vs. the haircut

When I was a child, my father would make weird and inappropriate jokes all the time. I used to tell myself how I would never subject my child to such behavior. Apparently, my Arnold genes are just too hard to ignore.

Walking into Sports Clips I had two weird thoughts enter my mind at the same time. First I was telling Hayden to stay still or he might loose an ear. When we entered, he didn't see any ears and called me out on it. I pointed out the broom and dustpan. Not thinking that I significantly terrorized my son, I decided to tell him that the girls at Sports Clips will smooch you if they think you're cute. As he was getting into his barber chair I wispered to him "Watch out Haydish, she's gonna smooch you!" The result was Hayden with this tight-lipped look on his face for the whole haircut.


I don't know what had him more worried, loosing an ear or getting a smooch but, it was obviously not a great experience for him. He did stay still though... so that's a plus. Also, following my Sister-in-laws advice, I let Serenity play with shaving cream. It was really easy to clean up and made the kitchen smell like a bathroom, but in a good way.



About 10 minutes in, shaving cream fun on the counter changed to shaving cream fun on the tummy... which apparently a much more fun exercise!