8 Minutes of Luke Playing
I feel blessed to have a kid who can entertain himself. We just try to keep him out of trouble!
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Super Fun Weekend
After all the stress lately, this past weekend was exactly what was needed. Some family came up and we went out to the Great Bend Airfest. I was really worried that I would be dissapointed by what showed up, but it was completely awesome. There were several vintage planes out there from the 1940’s, mostly WWII trainers and such, but the really cool ones were the B-25, and the P-51, both beautiful planes.
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I took a bunch of pictures, but here’s some of the highlights:
Whoops… didn’t see that until later.
I have to say the P-51 is one of the most beautiful planes ever made.
There’s a lot more pictures, so click through to see them, or check out my gallery to see A LOT more.
08.29.12Vacation Concludes
Well it’s obvious that a big chunk of my time was spent playing the launch of Guild Wars 2. It’s phenomenal. You don’t need to go all out like me, but if you want to get on board, it’s $60 at buy.guildwars2.com. No I don’t get any kickbacks or anything. I’ve just really been having a lot of fun, and it would always be cool to play with awesome people like you. And compared to the price of a Wii/PS3/Xbox360 game, I think it’s an incredible bang for your buck. I wish my computer was beefy enough to Livestream some of my gameplay, but I’m only getting about 35 FPS as it is… so if you want to watch some action, head over to www.guildwars2live.com.
Luke and I played a lot this weekend. He sleeps until about 11AM so I’ll hear him wake up and go to greet him, and it’s so cool watching the big smile on his face every time he sees me first thing in the morning. Usually it’s 6PM or so until we see each other for the first time, so it’s been really cool spending more time with the family. I was able to give Andrea a little help with the daily household stuff, so it was KINDA a vacation for her too.
He is officially walking EVERYWHERE. He will rarely crawl at all anymore. I think he realizes his little fingers can reach more stuff when they’re off of the floor. Andrea took him to the store to use up the rest of his giftcard he got for his birthday and got about 20 different Hotwheels cars. He has a blast with those things on the coffee table. He’ll roll them to you, and you’ll roll them back. And he’ll pick out a car he wants you to play with and hand it to you (and usually take from you whatever car you WERE playing with). It’s gonna be so fun when he’s a little older and we can set up a bunch of the race track and go down the stairs and over furniture.
While I would be feeding Luke I had the laptop set up on the counter in the kitchen. I got to watching Tabletop, a show that Biebs turned me onto a while back where Wil Wheaton plays various boardgames or card games with internet notables. It’s a pretty fun show, and if nothing else introduced me to some pretty cool games I didn’t know existed. Or maybe it’s my social substitute for real people coming over and playing real games. I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve used the poker table for actual games of cards. But that’s just part of being busy, and having busy friends.
The repaired lawnmower is still working fairly well. Though I noticed there’s a crack where the wheel mounts on that same corner of the mower. It’s just a matter of time before it reaches its end of life. Until then I’m going to keep mowing on. The garden is out of control. Or rather the grass in the garden. I don’t know how you’re supposed to grow stuff like pumpkins and watermelon. The pumpkins are okay, but the watermelon vines have almost completely been swallowed up by the grass. I can’t mow it, or I’ll mow over the vines. We’ll see what happens. I’ve got about 3 watermelons on the vine right now, and had a recent explosion of pumpkins. I was worried we were only going to end up with 4 or 5 small ones, but since the heat wave ended, there’s probably 10 new ones and a couple are getting pretty big!
I never did get around to rotating the tires on the cars, but there’s always next week for that. There’s a lot of stuff I can do car wise, especially on my car. But it’s all minor stuff. As it cools off earlier and earlier I get more excited about working on the cars. It’s just hard to get motivated when it’s 90+ outside.
So all in all it was an awesome vacation. I didn’t play GW2 continuously, and honestly, I’m going to take my time with the game and relesh every bit of it. Like I talked back when I was playing Skyward Sword… you only get to play a game for the first time once. Most of all, it was a great mental refresh. Work can get the best of me sometimes and I really was starting to feel burnt out. I go into tomorrow knowing that it’s going to be crazy and hectic, but I’m almost ready to deal with it. I mean heck, I could probably hang around here for another week and not miss that place, but eventually… I would. I really do enjoy what I do.
So I’ve got a few more vacation days in the bank for the rest of the year, which feels good too. Might take some long weekends, or save them for the holidays, I dunno. Maybe actually go somewhere on the next vacation… but honestly… my favorite place on earth is home.
08.16.121 Year Old
Lucas recently turned one. Instead of getting professional pictures done, we bought a nice camera. I wanted to see what we could do ourselves. We don’t have much for a studio. Still not enough light without a flash indoors. I’ll have to get more experimental. And somebody wasn’t liking his outfit too much, so the photoshoot was shortlived.
Mom went to the store
While she was gone, Luke and I wanted to put a smile on her face when she got home.
Luke’s Day
Luke had a different day today. Mom had a job today so Luke got up and got to roll around in the basement of the radio station at the embroidery shop down there. Then it was swim lessons, and home. After the sun set we played around in the driveway and crawled on Daddy’s car.
It Hurts
Luke got his first big boo boo today. First one big enough to cut the skin.
He was trying to get up to the table in our computer room like he’s done countless times before. But this time he missed when he reached out and went face first into the leg of the table. At first we thought he just got a bloody nose from the bonk. But when we looked closer he actually cut his nose on part of the leg as his face slid down the metal table leg.
Of course he cried. Cried like I haven’t heard him cry before. Real pain. I think I know why it is you feel so bad for kids like this when these things happen. Because they just don’t deserve it. When an adult walks face first into an I-beam, you figure, well that’s payback for something stupid they’ve done. But when it happens to a baby, it just feels totally wrong because they’re so innocent.
We were pretty worried at first. It looked like it sliced in pretty deep because the skin had a white-ish look too it. But as we looked more at it, it started turning a dark red, more like a blood blister. We were worried that we were going to have to take him in to get checked out. But the fact that he stopped crying about a minute after we picked him up and soothed him, and then back to his normal self within 5 minutes really calmed us down. Heck he was back to crawling around and wreaking havoc.
So he’ll be fine. Just like all kids do.
07.13.12The box is always more fun than the toy…
A 20 Minute Project
This is gonna be fun!
I’ve had these cards from Club Nintendo for a while. I wanted to display them in some way but they really would look best with frames. Frames are so expensive though… except at the Dollar Tree! $1 per frame. Much better than the $3 or $4 I was finding elsewhere. Thanks to my officemate Kate for revealing to me this awesome deal!
And I’ve got a helper! These cards show every portable game system Nintendo has released to date. And with the recent announcement of the 3DS XL, these cards are already out of date. Haha.
I think it looks good. I’m debating putting them on the wall behind Andrea, or setting them up in the soon to be “studio” room. I’m afraid the glass in the frames will create some reflection problems, but never will know until I try.
Meanwhile, Luke was having some mischevous fun of his own.
Just What I Needed
Yesterday was the first time in a while I didn’t leave the house. Well I didn’t leave the driveway at least. No work, no travel. Just some honest to goodness free time.
First I slept in. I highly recommend it if you ever get to try it, but like anything else, you don’t want to get used to it. So I rolled out of bed at 8:15am and started up some coffee, and went out to the garden and pulled up a nice batch of potatoes and a fresh yellow onion. We didn’t have much for breakfast, but I fried those up and Andrea made some muffins and it was a pretty alright breakfast! Just needed some bacon and eggs to be perfect!
Afterwards I went back outside and aired up the pool for Luke and I to play in. It was a hot day, but didn’t feel too bad once you hopped in. Luke did pretty good, but the water was a little bit deeper than his bathtime, so he had to get used to the fact that he couldn’t just crawl and flop around like he’s used to. He inhaled a big gasp of water once, and that was a little scary, but he coughed it up, and went right back to playing again. Haha.
I also got to play some of my “new to me” Super Off Road game I scored for 99 cents on eBay. I remember renting the game back in the day, but I never owned it. I probably played it for almost an hour non stop. I made it as far as race 40 and was getting my butt kicked. That one sitting was worth the 99 cents right there. So my NES collection continues to grow.
So it was a great Sunday. And even with that one day of R&R I feel ready to face the week. Of course it helps that it’s going to be a short week with the 4th of July smack dab in the middle. That helps the motivation too.