April 19, 2009

Spring is here and of course there are plenty of projects to get done. Kelly started to paint the laundry room with green and blue. That leaves Jarrett's room as the last one to do. We know that its going to be a Lightning McQueen themed room. We have seen a few examples now we just need to pick the one Jarrett likes.

October 1,2008

School has started and for the first time in 5 years all the kids are in school. The girls love to get up very early again for the bus. Jarrett is going a half day in the afternoon so he get to sleep in a bit.. Kelly seems to enjoy the 4 hours of no noise in the house. So far Jarrett thinks school is ok, although there are a few day where he would rather stay in his pajamas and just stay home.

The deck in back looks to be pushed off till spring of next year since the yard didn’t get started till midsummer. Contractor issues have been the norm in this addition, and we got a lot of excuses for the delay. Now that the yard in, I’m not happy with the results we got in the back yard. So I am re-seeding and fixing a few issues with erosion in the back. I should have it all ready for pre-winter seeding so that this spring will have it nice and thick.

Kelly has started do decorate the house for Halloween.. Kimberlyn and Anastasia are looking for what to be this year and Jarrett is ready to get the candy again. We will go back to the old addition where our other house is, since there are many more houses there. Kelly has all but two rooms painted, Jarrett’s room and the Family room. She has the paint for the family room so I’m sure we will be painting again this weekend.

We went to one of the newer pee-wee golf courses in the area last Saturday, it was a bit smaller then some of the other ones in the area but It had some of the best courses. We all liked the cave and waterfall, and Jarrett really like the water hazard on a few of the holes. He kept fishing his ball out over and over again on purpose. We all celebrated as Kimberlyn and Jarrett each got a hole-in-one.

Kimberlyn doing some fishing.

Jarrett likes the blue waterfall (not sure if thats cool or somewhat gross)

Kelly taking her shot, as Jarrett gets into position of guarding his ball.

Since my only option for internet is the area’s slowest DSL provider with their so called fast internet package of 960k, I started to implement two ways to save some of my bandwidth at home. Since I have a good number of PC’s at home all downloading Windows updates from Microsoft and virus definitions from Symantec, it just made sense to have one machine download all the updates for the machines in the house and redistribute them from there. I started using Windows Server Update Service (WSUS) and Symantec System Center to do this.  

WSUS 3.0 with SP1

Symantic System Center 10.2

So far everything is working updates and virus definitions are being pulled from the server like i wanted it to.

I will add a IT Projects tab to the site for my computer stuff.

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July 22,2008

A large and powerful storm woke us up at 6:05AM Monday morning. I've never seen the wind this strong before so I took the kids downstairs to be safe. After it passed we found ourselves without power, but safe and no damage to the house. Some of our neighbors were not as lucky as they have some minor damage. The National Weather Service said that most of the damage was a result of straight line winds.  94 mph wind gust were reported.

Estimates are that we won’t have power back for up to 5 days, since so many trees fell on power lines. Luckily I have a generator to keep the fridge running, a few lights, TV, DVD player and a computer or two up.
Getting to work was also a challenge as most of the streets had fallen trees on them. Here are a few pictures of the damage in our area...

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July 15,2008

I went to Missouri and picked up some fireworks for our first 4th of July in our new home. And I kind of went a bit overboard picking up some of the coolest multi-staged fireworks I had ever seen. I will admit though some of the larger items looked very cool but were also quite loud.

It took less than an hour before a local cop showed up to remind me that fireworks are illegal in the state. He was very cool about it though since he said every forth house is letting off fireworks he still has to respond to complaints though. He just let us know to keep it down a bit and left..

Note for next 4th of July, buys more mid size fireworks and just a few of the larger ones. :P

Added a few more pictures of the kids.

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May 12,2008

We moved to a new much larger house in November 2007 and have spent our last few months getting moved in.

The site has been down for a bit since the new location doesn’t have speedy internet.. Just slow DSL..Ugh....So i moved the site to a hosting company.

Jarrett loves the new house since he can go out and play in the large dirt piles around the house and the woods out back. He especially likes to go exploring our new area.

Kimberlyn is now in her own room and is trying to keep Jarrett out of it since he likes to mess with his big sisters stuff.

Anastasia loves to lock everyone out of her room. She likes the quiet time in her room away from her younger brother and sister.

Kelly is finding plenty of thing to buy for the new house, pictures, blinds, rugs, etc, etc Painting the rooms now look to be the priority for her.

I’m working on the network at home and going on exploring trips with Jarrett. We found a nice stream behind the house about a 50 yards back. So were going to have to make paper boats and race them.

Here are some pics: