Beta Beta Beta

So with the extra time on my hands due to unemployment, I decided to work on some projects that have been around the house. One of these projects is to try and find a way to get my old high school marching band tapes onto the computer. Problem #1 is that I don't have any way to do it. I know that there are stores that can transfer my tapes to cd, but I don't currently have the money and I am a little leary on giving these special memories to a stranger. I remember that Dan had a toy that he bought that could transfer the tapes, but I could never get it to work. So I found his little machine and brought it home again. After some internet searching I found out that the version that I have has a problem with windows vista and I need a newer version. So I upgrade the newer version and get the silly thing to work. Problem #2 is a bigger problem. The tapes are in the beta format. At the time it was the better format of the two, but vcr's had better marketing and won out in the format wars. I was hoping that a friend on facebook would have one sitting in their basement, but no such luck. Dan was able to buy me one on ebay that I can hopefully sell for the same price so it isn't a total waste of money. So far the machine only will run for a couple of minutes before it locks up. I can't tell if it's the machine or the tape. I am trying to edit out the mess ups, but still have some work to do.

Yes I still know I have a blog

Yes, back in February I promised to blog more and I can confidently say I have failed miseribly. So, let's go over my life up to this point. The major thing is my job. Back in December of '09 we found out that our company was going through a merger with another company, but that was all the detail that was given at that time. It's a slow process, but I was looking forward to working for a larger company and was very proud in what I had accomplished in the year at my current company. So over the first couple months of the year, I was doing my thing cautiously since I wasn't sure what the new company had in stock. During that time we all had to go through the interviewing process to see where we would fit in the new structure of the company. April came about and they were finally nailing down everyone's job titles and positions. I was called into my meeting and informed that there would not be a position available for me. Son of a B****. But they gave me 4 months to find something before I was shown the door. I thought, Heck, four months shouldn't be that bad, but little did I know in this economy. The four months flew by pretty quick. The four months was very difficult since everyone knew I was basically fired so I am not sure they were comfortable around me knowing that. To the upper management of my current company as well as the merging company I was non existant which was extremely disspointing having praised the "family" of co-workers that I had. Finally my last day, just sitting at my desk, fuming at everyone. I though for sure I would get an exit interview, or at least have to fill some paperwork out and turn in my key.... but nothing. So, I stood up, threw my key on the VP's desk, bit my tongue from saying something nasty, and headed out the door. Only felt this bad leaving a job one time before and that was when I left the radio station.

Update: It is now 6 months since the above post. I was getting ready to post the post above and got hit with a virus so blogger has made me nervous. The interviews have been few and far between unfortunatly. There have been a couple that I would have loved or been perfect for, but no such luck. I keep plugging away every day. Back to my routine that last time I was unemployed. I get up every morning and get ready for the day. Take William to school and come back and search the net for jobs. I have 6 or 7 internet places that I look at and then to searches for major companies around here. I am getting quite a few projects done around the house after doing a major landscaping project for uncle Dave. Wish I had the money to finish the basement before Easter, but I have been in untra conservative mode for money for months now. How Jenny is keeping the heat on with what we make with her part time job and my measly unemployment, I don't know.

August... Seriously

My last blog post was August? I need to get back on the horse here. It so helped that I could blog at work. I just don't have the interst to get onto the computer when I get home. But tonight the boys begged me to play "monster trucks" on the Wii, so I thought I would stop by and say hi. I will say that the monster trucks on wii is very cool.

So last night we decided to take the boys out to eat and then over to Kohl's to buy me some new shoes, and to let Jen return some stuff. This has been the plan for two weeks now, but something always came up that didn't allow us to follow through on the plan. Most times it was Jen's work calling her in for the night. We usually don't go out as a family to restaurants since it can be a little pricey with 5 people now, and you never know how the boys are going to act. Even though saying that, the boys have done real well lately. The only hiccup is if we go to triangle park there is a mad rush to get outside and feed the ducks halfway through dinner, but we figured they could handle Cracker Barrell. Lucky for us it was snowing outside and Cracker Barell wasn't that busy. The only part that I don't like about Cracker Barrell (at least with 3 kids) is all the toys and candy that you have to walk by twice going to and from the restaurant. We sat down and the boys did really well. Andrew was having fun with the golf tee game even though he didn't really get the concept. He just took out all the golf tees and color coordinated them back in the triangle. Christopher was happy with the crayons. We ordered our dinner and of course it was time for the inevitable "pee break" with two of the boys. As of this point Andrew is still fighting us on his potty training, we might have to get hardcore on him. Anyway the food arrives and I am trying to move stuff out of the way so that Christopher can't grab a hot plate and move all of the crayons and stuff. My plate is placed in front of me and I am moving one last thing, and wouldn't you know it I knock my full glass of pop onto my plate. Son of a B*****.So I am picking ice cubes off of my plate and trying to drain as much of the liquid as possible. The waitress says she will get me "another one" and will also return with a towel. Well she comes back with a stack of paper towels and "another" pop. Dumping the pop was totally my fault so I didn't expect to get a whole new meal, but I thought it might be a nice gesture on their part, but alas they didn't. I did ask for some new bread to replace the now soggy break on my sandwich. I only asked for two pieces, but I should have asked for for since the other side was totaly soggy as well. But hey at least my fries didn't get wet. Jen just laughed at me. So besides my problems, the boys did fantastic and ate all of their food. We payed the bill along with another trip to the bathroom for William and headed over the Kohl's. I took the boys with me to look at shoes while Jen returned my shirt. I made the mistake of not strapping Christoper down so he escaped for a minute which caused a little panic on my part. Lucky for me Jen showed up to wrangle the kids and I picked out a pair of shoes. I was amazed at the 25 pairs of shoes they had I would only even consider wearing 1 of them to work. I tried them on and they fit fine. We picked up some socks and headed to the checkout. Jen forgot her coupon at home, but they still gave it to her just on her word. Antoher qhick trip to Walmart to pick up juice for the boys, but with the snowstorm, there was a run on juice. We got home, put the boys to bed, and settled in for LOST.

I am going to attempt to blog more. if nothing else to catch up on what's been going on. It's really not that much. Maybe I will run an update on the basement remodel. Drywall is done, now it's just a matter of mudding and sanding (the part the sucks)

night Golf V

I noticed that it is the middle of August and start calling around to see if I can get information about night golf. I remembered the name of the guy in charge so I call his office and get all of the information. Much to my surprise it is only a couple of weeks away. So once again I invite everyone in my address book to play with me. This year I added inviting all of my facebook friends who live in Fort Wayne as well as put out an email for people at work. Once again I get a few people saying it sounds like a lot of fun, but again they start canceling or saying they can't make it. Comes the night of the outing and no one has indicated they want to play. I was considering not going myslef, but, screw it, I have fun. Also by now I know a few of the guys so I figure there is a chance I would get teamed up with them. I show up early just in case someone shows up and grabbed a beer and dinner. The dinner was a bit of a dissapointment. They had a pulled pork, but it didn't have any sauce on it. They let you put your own sauce on, but the pork was so dried out and tough that all the sauce in the world wouldn't have helped it. The bratwurst looked a little scary, but the beans and potatos were very tasty. So I sat there and had a few beers waiting on the off chance that someone would show up. When no one did I ended up getting paired with Dr. Phil, who I had played with before, and his brothers. We headed to the first tee with a cold beer in hand and prepared for a night of fun. They actually postponed the start of the round because it wasn't dark enough, but the threat of rainy weather in the area made me think that we might want to get going. The first hit of the year was a little disspointing, but still not too bad for the 3 or 4 time on the course this year. Bewtween the 4 of us we made a pretty good team all contributing to the effort. Once again the beer cart was never too far away :). By the 4th hole we were one under par (legitamate) and playing pretty good. We had felt a few drops as we approched the tee, and then it started to really come down. We all scramble for the rain gear and umbrellas that we had remembered to bring with us. We continued to play the hole in the hopes that it would stop or at least let up. We finished the hole and the rain let up and then stopped. The rest of the night only sprinkled a few times which was lucky for us. We finished up a little after midnight and went back into the proshop to wait for everyone to come in. We waited and waited for one last team to show up, but they never did. I have said it before where there is usually one group who has to "play in" and make everyone wait. (That really pisses me off). We started to walk out to the course get tell these a-holes to hurry up, and even grabbed a cart to run out there, but finally decided that the group must have finished and just left the course. Still annoying. I think we ended up 2 under and in third place or something like that, once again I don't think the people who "won" were actually keeping score. So we all got out little prize and were done for the night. This is still alot of fun to play in and I am sure I will play again next year. Hopefully one of these years I can take a big group with me. They were supposed to move the outing so it wouldn't conflict with HS football, but they didn't. Hopefully next year they will let me know when the outing is and I don't have to hunt them down.

School Days

William started his first day of Kindergarten a week ago (yeah I am behing in my blogging). He is actually repeating Kindergarten. He did really well last year with his speach delay, but we thought another year would do him good and that now would be the best time to have him repeat a grade. The other factor is that he is changing schools as well and going full day so he wouldn't notice it as much. I missed his first day the last time due to the new job, but I decided I wasn't going to miss this one so I just went in late. Jen had a pretty good plan for getting everyone up and around so we put that into play on Monday. They allow parents of Kindergarten kids go bring the kids to their classrooms on the first day only so we decided ot make it a family trip. Everyone got up and around and we actually headed out the door on time. As we are pulling out of the garage, the heavens opened up to a down pour (perfect). We got near the school and the traffic came to a stand still. So we muddled through that and worked our way through the "drop off" process. all the parents were parking to drop their kids off so we had to park kind of far out in the parking lot. Lucy for me we threw a couple of umbrellas. We attempt to unload all the kids in a downpour with the parking lots flooded. I took Christopher's cup of juice and put it on the floor and of course it hit a blanket and bounced out and UNDER the freakin van. I am dressed for work with an inch of water covering the parking lot, but finally I said forget it and took my umbrella down and hit the cup so it would go behind the van and of course it got caught by the back tire. Finally I got the stupid thing and grabbed Christopher. So here I am carrying Christopher, holding Andrew's hand, and managing an umbrella as Jen took care of William. We got in the gym and William takes off like a shot to his homeroom. We did our best to keep up with him. He went into his room, put his backpack away, and found his seat and sat down. No fuss, no muss, happy as a clam (Thank God). We said good bye and waded back to the car and I took off for work. It's been almost two weeks and William is still having alot of fun. He get's to eat lunch at school every once in a while which makes us a little uneasy because of his peanut alergy, but so far so good.

Yard Work

There are a few things that have been bugging me for years now. One is the state of the landscaping around our house. When we moved in 3 years ago I knew it was in need of some attention, but with having two babies and lack of funds, that project kept getting pushed into the back burner. Finally the kids are a little older and we had a few dollars in the bank so we decided to work on the landscaping. First I defined the area on the side of the house and transplanted some hostas over there with some edging. I ended up taking a Friday off work to try and get some stuff done. I thought that it might be easier to get stuff done since things would be open longer on a week day than a weekend and Jen wasn't working. I had to tear some bushes out of the front planter. I could have killed myself trying to dig these bushes out, but I decided to take the easy way out and invite my father and brother in law over and had them bring a truck. The bushes were no match for the truck. The yard dipped where the bushes were so I decided to grab a load of dirt to even it up. As always looking for a good deal, I found a place on the Northwest part of town. So I ran over there and grabbed a load of dirt. My father and brother in law helped me spread it out to even it. While I was doing that, Jen was on the hunt for plants. We hired a landscaper to come up with a plan for our front yard, but we wanted to see if we could save a little money by buying some of these plants at a home improvement store. She found the rose bushes at Home Depot for a pretty good deal. A little while later, Jen and I loaded into the truck to get the other bushes. I found out that a member of the board of directors of the Credit Union also owns a landscape business. I thought it would be a good idea to give him my business and maybe he would swing me a little deal. We came back with all the plants that we needed and spent the next couple of hours planting 25 bushes. Jen and I had a pretty good system down where I would dig the holes and she would put them in. We finished just in time, since I was totally burned out and I had been at it for about 12 hours. I got up the next morning and headed out for a mulch run. Another trip across town to save a few bucks which by the time I put gas in the truck actually didn't save me anything. I had to make two runs since the one truck load didn't quite cover everything in the front yard. So another 8 hour day of running across town and moving mulch I was spent again. Sunday I think I might have putted around the house a little bit, but spent most of the day recuperating. Talking to Jen later on, she tells me that the money we used to work on the landscaping she had actually put aside to buy a new TV. (I think the TV would have been cheaper). Yeah I was a little bummed about not getting a new TV, but the front of the house looks so much better and I think I enjoy having that project done than I would enjoy a new TV. If nothing else, I am not embarrassed to go outside and talk to the neighbors, and I am sure they are breathing a sigh of relief that we aren't a bunch of hillbillies. Now we just need to maintain everything, plant some flowers occasionally, and refresh the mulch every couple of years.

You have to be freakin' kidding me

So months ago I felt the first tinges of pain like a kidney stone when we were on vacation in Alabama. Then a few weeks after that I spent a night in the hospital with the pain again. After the hospital stay I had a follow up with my urologist. He didn't seem to be too concerned about the size of the stone that would require a procedure. He gave me some medicine that would supposidly help pass the stone. Then I had to have a follow up xray in week. So I go through all of the stuff of medicine and drinking tons of water. A week later I went for my xray and was hoping for an immediate response from my doctor whether or not I still had the stone. Unfortunatly the doctor wasn't in, so I had to wait for a day to get the results. Finally the nurse called and said I was "all clear". I was thinking, "thank God" I didn't even feel it pass. whoo hoo!! at least I thought.... A couple of weeks of later I felt the same pain of a stone. What the hell? I figure that the nurse read the xray wrong. So I down a couple of pain pills and start the process of drinking tons of water again. Every time that I get ready to call my urologist, I start to feel better. Finally I feel some discomfort in my bladder, but again it's just discomfort and not pain. I thought maybe I passed it and was a bit irritated. So then last week I was leaving for work, I felt a little tinge of pain in a very bad area just South of the bladder. I thought about calling sick into work, but finally just decied to grab my happy pills and go to work. After getting to work I down my big container of water. As I am going to the bathroom I fell extreme pain in my (you know). By definition I had one stuck in the chamber and it freakin' hurt. I get back to my desk and pop a few happy pills and just try and sit still until they go into effect. I quickly call the urologist to see if there was a procedure they could do to get it. After bouncing a few calls with the ditsy nurse she tells me that they can get me into the hospital the next day. The next day!!!!Forget that. And I have to go to the hospital. Son of a B***ch. They called in some more medicine to help, but I am thinking, forget that I will just go to the emergency room. We have already reached our deductable for the year because of the first visit, so it would be free. I decide to get the medicine and try and tough it out. I am getting ready to leave work, but remember I had a huge glass of water a short time ago. I have to pee, but I am thinking its going to hurt. I go into the bathroom and do my thing, and by the grace of God it just comes out without any pain (either that or the pills were taking effect). This thing is freaking huge. I only have passed one stone in my pass and never really saw it. The rest have been blown up by sonic stuff. After passing it I feel soooooo much better. I actually finished out the day at work. Of course then I am pissed because i got the all clear from my urologist. I found out later that some stones don't show up on xray. The emergancy room visit was a CT scan so that's how they saw it. So after a few days of healing I feel alot better and know for sure that I am all clear now...

Soccer for kids

We decided that it was time to start getting the boys involved in sports. We wanted to start William a little earlier, but with Christopher being born last year, all of our free time was spent with that. We missed the first opportunity to get William involved with the local parks and rec, but we have signed him up for an Upward program that starts next month. We did make the deadline for getting Andrew signed up for every monday and wednesday of July. First practice that we showed up to we had no idea what to expect. We can't even get Andrew to keep his clothes on at home, so who knows how he would act around other kids. Would he pay attention? Would he want to participate? I am happy to say that he ran right out onto the field and is having a blast. He actually listens to the coaches. There are a few things that he still does on his own terms, but overall I am glad he is having fun. It's hard to believe that it ends next week, but now that we know he can handle it, we will make sure we sign him up more often. I wonder what other sports that he might be able to do...

Greekfest

I am soo far behind on my blogging. Let's see if I can catch up...

So I get a call from "cousin" Marc inviting the family to meet them down at greekfest in downtown Fort Wayne. I think the last time that I was at greekfest was a long time ago and it was in the Northcrest shopping center and not downtown. I missed germanfest, but decided to give this one a try. Also, I thought it would be a nice time to visit with Marc and Chris since I hardly get together with them. We load up the family into "herbie" and head downtown. I find a parking spot across the street from headwaters. We go into the fest for a very resonable $2 for Jen and I. After a little walking around we finally find Marc and Julie with Chris and Cami and the kids. Marc and I run over to grab some food for the families. A couple of gyros a eggplant lasagna thing and a pop was about pretty pricey, but very tasty. As we are heading back to the table we run into the Kannings who join us. It's a little hard to visit since the music is a little loud and we are pretty close to the stage. I try a greek beer and it is very tasty. Seconds after eating the boys get antsy, so we head over to the kids rides at the fest. It only cost a buck for the boys to ride the rides. The picture above is William bailing on the ferris wheel and letting Andrew ride it by himself. You can see the look in the above picture, William is like "this thing is going to do what?" and Andrew looks scared as heck. Another ride has these little planes that go round and round, and both the older boys loved that.

After the rides Christopher was getting a little cranky that he couldn't ride the rides, so we called it a night. We didn't really get a chance to visit that much, but we are going to try a guys night to let us be able to catch up. I would probably do greekfest again in the future, just for the beer and gyros.

Just the tooth

The other night I was giving the boys a bath and noticed William kind of playing with his teeth, but didn't think anything about it. The next day William presents a tooth to Jen that had fallen out. It kind of freaked us both out since we thought it is a little soon for him to be loosing teeth. Instead of calling his Dentist or any professional to ask if we should be worried, Jen decides to call Carrie. I don't know when Carrie became a tooth expert. According to the experts (Carrie) it's a little early but not unheard of to loose a tooth this early. The good part is that he didn't freak out about it,which is good since dealing with loose teeth gives me the heebie-jeebies. Jen and I have to quickly decide what to do about the tooth fairy since we didn't think we would have to deal with this for a while yet. We let William take the tooth to school the next day to show his teacher, but then the following night his tooth was replaced, by the tooth fairy, with a quarter.

Goodnight and Big Balls

I started watching "wipeout" last year and found it to be a very humorous show. It just amazes me how these people can continually get the snot beat out of them and keep going. It also amazes me that these people aren't seriously hurt. They time the challenges and some of them can take 10 minutes. I can't imagine doing these stunts over and over again for 10 minutes. I get tired just watching it. The boys started watching it with me on occasion and fell in love with the show. It must be a guy thing seeing people get smacked in the face. They ask me almost every day if the show is on that day. The other part that is very funny is the tag line that the host says at the end of the show. "goodnight and big balls". The other night we were putting the boys to bed. After tucking Andrew into bed, William goes to hug him goodnight and says, "goodnight and big balls". I thought Jen was going to fall over laughing. It's just something you wouldn't expect to hear from your 6 year old.