First Road Trip for the Jeep
We all loaded up in the Jeep and headed to Wichita for the weekend to re-celebrate Andrea’s birthday. I’m always a little nervous hitting the road with a vehicle I’m not yet familiar with. But everything went uneventfully as hoped!
It is pretty nice to have all that space for loading stuff up. We leave for less than 48 hours, but with all the stuff we take for Luke, it feels like we’re going to be gone for a week. And I found myself wondering how we would ever fit it all in the Cutlass before.
Pit stop
The trip itself was pretty fun. Went down and ate an awesome meal at Andrea’s sister’s house, then went out for some cosmic bowling in Wichita. That was fun. I bowled my new personal best. A 161!
As always, I enjoy going on these little trips, but I always love getting home too. It’s getting late. Time for me to download a new podcast to my phone, put my earbuds in and drift off!
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!
[youtube=http://youtu.be/1md1IgPcdJE]
10.7.12I Love Fall
I think Fall is my new favorite season. Not sure if it’s the rewards from all the gardening all summer, or if just that this summer was so brutal that the relief from the heat, and knowing that it won’t be coming back any time soon is liberating.
We spent the weekend with plenty of company. Friday night Dad, Carrie and Jake came up. Dad and Carrie were heading up to the K-State game, so we watched Jake and their dog Wally for the weekend. I had to work Saturday but Jake, Andrea and Luke came in a little bit before I got off and Jake was able to do a little recording. We went to a friend of ours’ wedding after that and Jake tolerated it while Luke was ready to play the whole time. Both boys were well behaved though.
When we got home Jake wanted to play GoldenEye. He’s probably the only person I know that has had the desire to play GoldenEye in a decade or so! Haha. I turned on the “all guns” and “invincibility” and he went to town. It was fun watching him.
Andrea’s sister Catrina came up last night and we played some Texas Hold’em and then a little Friends trivia until I just couldn’t stay awake any more.
Luke had me up earlier than I wanted to be this morning. It was okay though, I really appreciate the mornings more as I get older. I fixed Luke up some oatmeal and let the dog out. Overnight quite the frost had moved in and it almost looked like snow. The final nail in summer’s coffin.
A little later, as everyone else started to wake up for the day, I cooked up an awesome breakfast of french toast, potatoes from the garden, and bacon with some piping hot coffee. It’s hard for a day to go bad when it starts off like that!
It was a lot of fun having a full house, and with the colder weather outside, it felt kinda cozy. It was quiet after everyone took off and I found time for a little nap after playing some GoldenEye for myself. =)
We took down the barrier to the kitchen for a while tonight and let Luke run back and forth between the kitchen and the living room. You gotta stay with him or else he’ll get into the dog food and water, or the trash, but he was having so much fun rolling his cars on the kitchen floor and just running around enjoying his new freedom. It’s so amazing watching him. How everything is brand new, and he just wants to play and learn. There’s so much innocence there, that it’s hard not to see him a pure and good. That’s when he’s in a good mood at least. It’s easy to feel differently when he’s in “destruction mode”. Haha!
I also got all the pumpkins harvested after last night’s frost took out the vines. Luke had a blast playing with them all.
Super great weekend for sure.
09.26.12Super 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.
[youtube=http://youtu.be/Qj_2CFR8U24]
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.
Andrea Builds a Yoshi Kart
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZd2PVB0Fu0&hd=1]
I’m trying to get better at video editing. So I’ll probably be using more mundane clips like this in the future to figure out what I’m doing. Nevertheless, enjoy this short video of Andrea building a Yoshi Mario Kart out of K’nex (look like Legos to me)!
07.14.12It 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.