Balloons forever!

Abby loves balloons, so much so that I thought it would make a great Christmas present to give her a hellium balloon kit for Christmas. She is so cute, to watch her carry around a balloon all day tied to her wrist. I broke down and gave Sarah another bolloon last night since she popped her first one seconds after I gave it to her. Abby got a new one as well, since they only seem to last 2 days or so at best. I think we are going to try to get some mylar balloons which might last longer and are safer in general for little kids. I found out last night that the tank holding the helium is not refillable, its a single use tank. So I’ll have to get another one if we run out of gas! I going to search online and try to find a better way to get hellium for balloons for Abby. They just arent’t as much fun if they don’t float.

A few handy applications

Recently I’ve come across the need for a file attribute modification program. I did a basic google search and found this one –

Chick Flick

Last night, Liz put in a movie while I was finishing up some things after the kids went to bed. I sat down with her, and watched a movie called “Much ado about nothing”. Its a shakespear play turned movie and definately a chick flick. Most of the speach in this movie is so heavy and old style english you can barely understand what they are saying. Me being the gracious husband that I am, stuck it out and watched it with her. I had to (as they say) “Take one for the team”. 🙂

Beautiful Drive

Today is a beautiful example of why I love living in Tampa. Its December 18th and its over 80 degrees outside. That may not mean anything to you the reader (other than sheer jealousy), but to me it means top down weather. Thats right, I will be driving home today with warm temps and a great breeze blowing through my hair. 75% of my relaxation is derived from driving my Miata with the top down. So today is a GOOD day!

Kids are always sick

Sunday morning Abby woke up early not feeling well. I ended up staying with her most of the day and she did end up getting pretty sick. By afternoon she was feeling a little better, but still didn’t eat much. She must have picked up some kind of stomach bug or something, because this morning she seems much better. Sarah has been sick for the past two days now, she has a cold or something, with a stuffy nose and deep cough. Seems like when you have kids, someone is always sick.

Christmas Video 2006

Much to our delight, the Christmas video for 2006 is complete!!! I was up until 11:30 last night encoding the last of the video and rendering the DVD menu. This is the second annual video we have done and its still a learning curve. I thought things would be a bit more smoothly, but we did run into a few snags. The girls weren’t the most cooperative and we waited until way too late to really do it up the way I had wanted. I did come up with a few last minute ideas that I think made it nice, but its up to the audience to decice. I have 7 separate video sections on this DVD. Aside from the main movie, I added a bloopers section, special features which include auditions with the girls beforehand, and there is a deleted scenes section as well. For a final touch I added a slideshow containing some of the best pictures of 2006. After reviewing the final product, there are many things I would change and improve, but I just don’t have time. I think it came out good and its another step in learning all the software and video techniques. I hope that year to year they will get better and better. The video is sometimes sudden in starting and stopping, which is something I plan to correct next year. The slideshow has some blurry pictures in it, but hey, we have so many pictures, you try to sort through all of them and not go crazy. I also used some new software this year to compile the video, and was able to create a nice DVD menu. I was pleased to find out that the DVD works great, the whole project turned out fairly well and we have time to mail it out to people before Christmas. If I had more time I might be more concerned about it and spend more time tweaking the scenes and correcting a few things, but I’m sure whoever watches it will like it just fine. This year, I show two new additions to our family in the video, Michael of course, but also two nice scenes of my Miata!!!

No website progress

Sorry to say that so far there has been little to no progress on the churchgang.us website re-design. I’ve been totally consumed with the Christmas video and various things going on lately and just haven’t had any time to work on it. Not to mention it took Liz days to finally get back with me on something I could use for a graphic on the site. And I didn’t like it so we have to re-do that too. I am setting a goal of Jan 31st to have the site completely done and switched over to the new layout. It just takes time and work.

Oil Changes

One of the things I’ve been doing since I got the Miata is changing my own oil. So this past Saturday I went to Autozone and got some supplies and changed the oil in the van and the Miata. The girls came out in the garage and watched me do the oil changes and afterwards we washed the van and the Miata. As always they got their bathing suits on and had a good time washing and playing in the water.

Windows Mobile 5 and ActiveSync issue

0X80070008
Out of memory
This can happen when you have set up ActiveSync to sync automatically over frequent intervals, and then you attempt to perform a manual sync. It occurs because the device thinks it is out of memory. Try these steps:
Perform a soft reset. Then attempt to sync.
If that didn't work, check available memory: Press Start and select Settings. On the System tab, select Memory. If the amount of Free memory is very small, you may need to delete add-on applications or purge old photos, videos or other large files to free up more space on your device.

It happns without warning and I can only tell its happening when I realize I haven't gotten any e-mail in pocket Outlook lately. When I check the ActiveSync screen I can see the view status link which shows me the above error. I have plenty of memory left, about 30MB total and I have a 1GB SD Card too. I haven't been able to figure out how to stop the errors, but a soft reset resolves it for a few days at a time.]]>

Sleep Deprevation

Last night I had two major interruptions in my much needed sleep. First, Sarah came into our room (but not sure exactly when) because she said she had a bad dream. I snuggled her up and fell back to sleep. A little later she must have kicked Liz, because I awoke long enough to hear Liz tell Sarah it was time to get back in her bed. Then not long after that, Michael started to cough. It started to sound fairly bad, so Liz went in and checked and he was still asleep, but was just caughing every minutes or so. So I decided I’d go out to the couch to try to sleep (Blessed are the split floor plan home-owners). I got all settled in and Michael caughed again, but his door was still cracked from when Liz went to check on him, so the cough sounded like I was right there in his room. Realizing this was not going to work, I just went in there and got him and brought him out to the couch with me. Anyone who knows Michael knows how wiggly and mobile he is. I didn’t know if he was going to stay with me or not. He laid there for a while, wide eyed and looking all over the room at any light or object he could see. He’d get a little excited and sit up look around a bit, then plop himself back down onto me and seem like he was sleeping for a minute or two, then he’d repeat that whole process. I went out to the couch around 4:30am so from then until a little after 6am, I was awake holding the ever so wirey Michael. It was nice to get some snuggle time, since he doesn’t usually do that much during the day. Although I look forward to getting a full night’s sleep again SOON! yawn….