Family fun

by Grant

Some people think that a family activity is say, going to the zoo. Or if you're well off and and insane, going to Disneyland. I decided tonight that as a family we'd change the oil in our two primary vehicles. Of course, I'm excluding the girls as they don't seem to tolerate late nights very well. Actually, it's more like Mom doesn't tolerate them outside in the dark with vehicles on ramps, etc. etc. etc. So, Forrest and I got started and I put the truck on the ramp. That's always fun as you have to get just the right balance of throttle combined with instant braking at just the right time. I cheat. With a four wheel drive vehicle you have more pull at lower rpms, so it wasn't very hard. Of course, I had Forrest giving me directions which were interesting at the very least. So, by the time the truck was on the ramps my wonderful wife (no sarcasm) came out to help. This is after a rough night with little sleep before. So, I set about acquiring cardboard to lay on and sent Rebekah after tools and Titus to ride his tricycle. Forrest was upset because he was trying to help but I was not utilizing him properly so he was inventing things to do to help. So, I had to find ways to utilize his desire effectively and once I did that he was a great little helper. I remember helping my Dad and getting yelled at, ahem, motivated frequently. Not a lot of fun. So, trying to keep that in mind I'm rushing around trying to get the oil changed in two vehicles with two little ones somewhat underfoot as it's getting dark and late. But after a few minor issues (I ran out of 5w-30 oil. I'll have to get another quart tomorrow) we finished up. If it weren't for my pride and frugality I would pay to have my oil changed; but if I had done that my boys would've missed out on a great family activity. And just think, maybe if we do enough of our own oil changes we can use the money we save and go to Disneyland... Not!

Toddler/Life update:
Yeah, I don't think the girls are babies anymore. Rebekah wants another urchin to wake her up at night (although Titus is common visitor to our bedroom). I, on the other hand, am thinking about headin to a monastery. Ok, not really, but with stress at work I'm a little uncertain about more financial stress. At the WG they did another round of layoffs and I was hit by the arterial spray of one head-lopping so that made me a bit nervous. But, I'm trusting in God and doing my darndest not to worry about it. The girls have decided they're gonna start on the "terrible twos" a little early. So, we're working on tough love as one starts fussing and the other one isn't far behind.

Boring blog post 2

Hmm. so far so good. I reformatted one of my 500 gig drives to ext2 w/out LVM (still not sure what that is). Now, my driver in windows can read it. This effectively enables me to transfer my movies (vob files) to a drive that can be read in Windows. So far the only hitch in my git-a-long is that I can't get the vob files to play with digital 5.1 surround sound. The things I do for my kids. Do you think my girls will appreciate all the work I went to so they can watch Baby Einstein, do you? No. They won't. Ah well, such is life.

Boring blog post -- Don't read

I warned you.

I am working on our media center right now. Various children are running around while I'm trying to concentrate on how to create a partition and format a drive so that it's non-lvm so my ext2 driver in Windows can read it so I can get data off of it. Yeah. I didn't understand it either. To start @ the beginning, It all started a few months after the girls were born back in Spring of 07 (pronounced "ot" seven). I discovered that over the previous few months the demon spawn, ahem, I mean sweet angelic children had destroyed some expensive DVDs. So, I decided to rip all of my DVDs to a computer and then the munchkins wouldn't even touch them. In attempt to save money, I decided to recycle (how green of me) a computer that we were disposing of @ work. I took that and bought a few pieces and installed Linux w/ a Media Center preconfigured (called MythTV). Well, after a month and a half of working on it (that sounds like a long time, but with kids that's highly efficient) I had a working system that I was proud of. It served us well for a year and then it started acting flaky. I think that it realized that I had decided to replace it with a newer and shiner (albeit more expensive) media center. So, although I had been hemming and hawing, I have begun moving from Linux to Microsoft Vista. This is hard for me. Linux is the geeks toy. If you know what you're doing, then Linux is for you. Newbies get Mac (although that's changing) and hum drum go Windows. Well, tragically, Linux and my install just wasn't making me happy anymore. It lacked flash. It was single tasking (by this I mean that once I started a movie I was no longer in the media center program). It was awkward (set up lirc sometime and you'll see what I mean) and I was frustrated because I couldn't watch various shows that are streamed online (like Lost, although Heroes (NBC) does work).

So, now that I'm done waiting, I guess we'll see how the next step goes.

BTW, in case you're interested in family stuff, I am trying to keep my mind off things because life is just too frustrating right now. Hence the warning about the blog post being boring.