Entries from June 2006 ↓

This morning, my Sharp atomic clock was telling me it was 10 minutes earlier than it is. Now, the whole point of the atomic clock is to never ever be wrong at all, ever, so I hit the radio button to get a signal again, and it’s still off.

I was about to ask if anyone else is having problems with the atomic time signal, but then it occured to me that my Casio Wave Ceptor watch still has the correct time, and also says it got a signal last night from what I’m assuming is the same radio signal. Odd.

Adam wants to go outside, but he can’t find his shoes.

“Where were you when you took them off?” I ask.

“I don’t know.”

“Were you in the bathroom?”

“Heh, yeah!”

They’re in there. One is in front of the sink, and one is behind the toilet. Becky goes to investigate.

Adam says “there’s one shoe here!”, picks it up, runs out of the bathroom, and Becky says nothing.

I say “Adam, I think your other shoe is behind the toilet.”

Becky says “yeah, it’s right here,” and jumps behind the toilet to pick it up.

Adam comes back in and has a complete meltdown because “I wanted to do it, Becky can’t do it!” (He picked this up from Becky, who pulls this trick with every last thing she could possibly think to be doing.)

Becky, to her credit, throws it back exactly where it was, and says “okay, Adam, it’s right there!” (She picked this up from Christie and I, since we’re forced to undo so many of the things that we might have done for Becky in the past 18 months, since she wanted to do them all herself.)

Our weekend was awesome, thanks for asking. You didn’t ask? Well, remember to ask next time.

We took Friday off, and took the kids to daycare. It felt great. That’s always great, when you can get 9 hours free from the kids, even if it costs you an arm and a leg. Usually all we do is work. Hmph.

We headed out for Target, and Christie got me a backpack / luggage thing. What I really wanted for my birthday was a messenger bag, but then I got impatient at the end of March and started using my old one, and now I’m kind of attached to it. So the super-size backpack is actually something I really needed, and also based on the theme of “carrying stuff” so I was happy.

They do not have the Nintendo DS Lite on display. Yet. I thought they might have a demo up to get people ready to buy them in a week when they debut, but apparently not.

Friday night Tim and Kiely babysat for us. They couldn’t make it out until about 6:30, but they packed a lot into the time before bedtime. And we really enjoyed ourselves, out again unescorted, where we had dinner and watched The Break-Up. It was good.

Bonus list: Movies we have seen in a theater since the kids were born.

1. Finding Nemo (2003)
2. Crash (2005)
3. Wallace and Gromit in Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)
4. The Break-Up (2006)

Saturday, I had to work from home for a little bit in the morning. Everything went okay. My new poker books came in the mail. Yay. We did that dumb thing where we plan for the grocery shopping for four hours, because we don’t want to eat out, because fresh food is better, and we like cooking… and by the time it was time to actually leave, we had to grab McDonald’s on the way. Ah well.

Also, I started to feel a little woozy with a sore throat. Didn’t stop me from making monster cookies and drinking half a bottle of wine while we watched two episodes of Lost.
Sunday the kids went to church with Christie, who had to work afterwards, so I went to pick them up. We came home to play in the sprinkler. I watched the premiere of Last Comic Standing (a perennial Summer TiVo favorite), and tried to talk to Crat on Skype Video. (Once I got my camera up and running, he was gone.)

I have, on two or three occasions, installed Linux on a “spare box” in the house. The problem with “spare box” Linux is that you throw your trashy box, a bad display, a half-busted mouse, and a crappy keyboard on it, and you’re already having a third-world computing experience. Not cool.

But Ubuntu 6.06 installed on my spare basement server (5.0 wouldn’t), so I am up and running on it. As a matter of fact, I’m not using the junky mouse or anything else with it: I got VNC viewer working on my other PCs, so I am connecting to a session there, having a perfectly happy Ubuntu Linux experience via remote desktop. With reasonable exceptions for graphics and sound (those things just tend not to work so well over the network anyway), it’s pretty cool. In its Windows days, I was only using the server for a loosely organized webserver and SVN repository, so I’m hoping to get those functions replicated and then… I don’t really know. Either way, it’s good to have a Linux installation back to play around with.

I want to remove the “About” blurb on the side there, because I don’t know anymore.

I used to write stories about my life, but my life right now is

1. my kids (private)
2. my work (best not blogged about)
3. the rest of my family (covered here, mostly)
4. my friends (you, pretty much)
5. poker (covered here, kind of)

I sometimes need to opine about music, movies, the news of the day, or goofy computer stuff I’m into, but I’ve done a couple longer pieces like that recently. I haven’t had many pageviews, search results, or comments on them. I should probably take that less personally, but it’s deflating.

I have also used this space to quickly share interesting links, which is what I continue to do over at del.icio.us/dnordquist, and on the sidebar of the same name. That’s high quality, but it’s not everything.
The problem is really about the focus of the site. This isn’t a parenting site (even though I’m a parent), it’s not a technology site (even though most of the stuff I’m writing about these days seems tech-oriented), it’s not a music and movies site, and it’s not even a much-better-than-average personal “confessional” blog. I don’t know why I should write these days, so I’m not writing. When I do know, I’m doing a much better job of it, but when I’m not sure why, it doesn’t come at all.

Anyway. That’s why I haven’t been doing it: because I refuse to do it without passion. When that’s back, so shall I be.

I got your podcast right here.

Becky Nordquist - Somewhere in the Ocean (ft. Daddy)

I hope you enjoy that.