fish sticks and guitar music

My niece and nephews staying with us are pretty fun.  We just had dinner and they were a blast tonight.  I wasn't able to spend most of the day with them (like each day since Sunday) because I had a study group for a quiz I have tomorrow.  But when I came home, we had a great time.

Dinner was a classic dinner at the RFC.  Yeah, you guessed it.  Fish sticks.

We love fish sticks at this house.  We eat them all the time.  My father is actually quite in love with them.  We have them about once a week but tonight they were also accompanied by home made baked fries and a romain lettuce salad.  Yum.

But the best part of the evening was sitting in the front yard.  We haven't had a great bench in the front yard so it normally gets quite a bit of neglect.  But for Father's Day, we got my father a new bench and it's changed how we spend time here at the RFC.  It's warm so now we can spend as much time as we'd like out there.  We all sat around the yard on the bench and some camping chairs.  I got my guitar, my father played his, and we sang songs that the kids knew and loved.

Summer rocks.

life is like lego star wars

So I've spent the day with my niece and nephew.  It's been a blast.  I have learned a lot from my nephew who is 5 (although he claims to be 200), mainly that babies are born knowing how to do backflips, climb houses and jump off without getting hurt.  Little did you know, right?

You can learn a lot from kids.  I have found that my nephew follows after my own love of videogames.  While the rest of the family was getting some sleep (8-hour time difference calls for some jet-lag) he played games on my computer for quite a while.  In fact, in anticipation, I bought some games on Steam for just this occasion.  Not too long ago, I sent them a link to Sushi Cat, a flash game that is well known and easy to play and they have loved it.  So, since Steam decided to have a major sale, I thought, "why not?"

So in a depression of spending way too much money on things that don't matter, I thought, I'll buy some for me to make myself feel better.  Here's the list of new games:

(For the kids... and myself)
Plants Vs. Zombies
Peggle Deluxe
Toki Tori

(for me)
Audiosurf
Deus Ex
Deus Ex: Invisible War
Half-Life 2
Half-Life 2: Episode 1
Half-Life 2: Episode 2
Half-Life 2: Lost Coast
Left 4 Dead
Left 4 Dead 2
Portal
Team Fortress 2

So yeah... I may have gone a little overboard.  It's okay though, I figure that I've wanted these games for a while and they were all on sale.  Nice.

Just so you don't think that this is all we do, I've also had them on the trampoline and playing outside.  I'm not THAT irresponsible.

1 @m 5u(h @ d*r|{

So I just wrote a program that will change what you type into craziness.  Let me give you an example aside from the title of the post...

$o i ju57 wR*73 a PR*graM that Wil) [han9e w4@7 y*U tyP3 int* cr@Z1n3$5_  |37 Me 91V3 y*U an 3XaMPle @$ide FroM th3 717|3 *f th3 P*$t___

Yeah.  I know.  I'm a dork.

(I'm not sure how I feel about having the "h" be a 4...)

Although I guess it's not all that surprising.  It's what I like to do.  That wasn't an assignment or anything, I just did it because I had some spare time one day.

Dorkiness runs in the family though.  I'm the first in the family to officially study dorkitude, but everyone loves it.  My oldest brother has been as dorky as I since I can remember.

I remember when he worked coding HTML locally (and I hope you know that I spend all my time with people who will argue for quite a while about how HTML isn't a language for no more reason than to show how much they know about HTML and coding), and in his spare time... you guessed it... he taught me.

This was WELL before the days of what some dubbed "FakeTML" programs like Dreamweaver, iWeb, etc.  That was back in the good ol' days when you coded each line yourself, and the walk to the computer was 2 miles, uphill both ways... in the snow.

His dorkiness and mine are the most similar in the family.  Most everyone else has their own outlets.  Songs titled, "Love is like a Refillable Mug" were invented at the RFC, a brother has 4 pinball machines, my father used to collect VCRs and bread machines, a sister did have a collection of snow-globes, and the list continues.

But here's the best part.  That's why we are so dang cool.  Each of us has our own passions and yet, although some of them are stupid enough to be creating a program that changed the letters of a sentence, we still accept each other, despite the dork that lives within.  I have never heard anything but positive things about what I find fun and interesting.

I guess that's what family is though.  It's not the blood that binds us, but the attitude we show to each other for our passions, or problems and even our mistakes.

Plus, they're a fun group to vacation with...

PS - The image at the beginning was taken from a Google image search.  I thought I HAD to add it because I did a search for "nerd programmer" and within the first 10 images, I found a picture that looks amazingly like my brother...

look who's talking 2

So we have two little babies in our family. We talk about them, and how much we love them, and here's the funny thing. They aren't born yet.

These two kids are so loved and adored, and yet we haven't even seen them yet. One of them, we don't even know if it's a boy or girl (But is called "Brian"). I'm so excited to have more babies in the family.

it's a christmas miracle

It was a longer and busier day at work today, but there was something that made it much easier to get through. It was a Christmas Miracle.

Yes, homemade bread.

Ah, the powers of delicious bread. Well, the snow started

The roads got bad for driving...

But I made it into work and we had a great feast of fresh bread and jam. (and there was much rejoicing.) But the fun part was after work, when I got home. Ali-G (Most people call her Ali) came over and we made honey butter (and one honey "butter" made of margarine) for the delight-filled treat. We made them into Christmas gifts for people.

What a good day. It really was fun to take a day, bake bread, make honey butter, talk, laugh, eat, breath, digest, you know, the good stuff.

I'm so thankful for family, friends and the chance to take the time out of my day to do something for someone else.

little swiss miss

I woke up this morning and sat down with my mother. It seems that the settlement from her accident in 2005 is pretty much done. Now what is weighing on her mind is how to take the money.

She suggested that I call my brother Tad and see what he thinks. They live in France (his wife is Swiss/French, although I'm not sure she would admit to the French part...) and we don't get to see them often. Luckily they have a local Salt Lake number (Thanks Vonage!) so I gave him a call.

My niece Teeny (Valentine) answered the phone, and we had a great time talking on the phone. I heard all about recess (after she had remembered the word for recess in English) today, and how they were playing tag with boys (how scandalous). It was so fun to talk to her and hear how she sees life. She is my Little Swiss Miss.


It made me thankful for having such a wonderful family, and for having the means to communicate with them when they are so far away.

i want to be dentist

My mother and I spent the day last week putting up Christmas lights around the house. They look pretty awesome. And the more time that I spend in the kitchen (I eat a lot) at night with the lights on around the house, the more I find myself grateful for the Christmas spirit.

And as I sit here watching Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer with Joan, Jim, Sallee and Nathan, I realize that Christmas brings out good things in me.

I've been told I look like the elf who wants to be a dentist...


I'm surprised to see how sexist this movie really is. Oh, the 1960s...

happy home-owners

Today was spent helping my sister and her husband of 4ish months move into their new house. It was a very interesting day because of what the new house means to both her family and to my parents. You see, this was the house that my mother grew up in.

One of the coolest things that happened was directly related to a conversation that my sister and I were having. She continually told me that she didn't know how long it would take until it was "her house," and not "Grandma's house."

As we continued carrying, unboxing, sorting, cleaning (I did a fair job of cleaning with Frances. Let's just say there may have been canned food that had eaten through the cans then started its work going through the shelves) and other such activities, we started to relax and put up Christmas decorations. As we sat, we realized that we now were sitting in "Sallee's house," not "Grandma's house."

It made me thankful for memories: old memories of grandma and grandpa, their spoiled food, questionable BB gun holes in the windows, etc. but I think more importantly, new memories. Sallee and Nathan are so lucky and so scared to own such a great home.




They shouldn't fear though. There is a mother-in-law apartment in the basement that Frances has already claimed as her own.