Not Necessarily Interesting News

Christmas was good. Not many presents all around but nice ones. We gave my son a Lego Mindstorms NXT. This is an awesome piece of kit. I’ve been working with him on building some advanced things. The programming language is very robust and very capable of advanced logic. We’ve only scratched the surface.

My wife got an iPod Nano and the Nike+ attachment for it. She’s training for her second marathon in February and the Nike attachment makes things even better. It’s basically a very advanced pedometer. It tells you your pace, how far you’ve covered, and how far you have left to go right into your headphones while your workout music plays. After your run you can upload your workout data and shows detailed info on your runs. It’s an amazing little piece of technology.

I got a safari rack and basket for my Defender. It’s still at the buddy’s house I bought it from. I’ll upload pics of it when I get it. I’m in no hurry because once installed I can no longer fit my truck in the garage. From my parents I got a very, very nice scanner that does slides and film. I’ve got boxes of slides from the family going back 40+ years that I’m going to start scanning in before they totally degrade. This pic is a scan of a slide of me around age 9. Look at those pimping collars! The scanner will do true 4800×9600 DPI and can do 4 at once breaking them into separate files for me to edit later if need be.

This weekend I was awakened by my wife and son saying he had a tooth almost out. It had to be pulled before he could eat because it was hurting so bad. So, in my bleary-eyed semi-conscious state I wandered into the bathroom with them and got out the string.
“Ok, I’m going to count to three. One.” Pop! Out it came. Ok, out came most of it. It broke in half. A bit later I got a hold of the rest with the string and removed it too. Lots of blood but no whining about pain. Damn, I’m good.
This was all on Sunday morning. This morning my wife goes in to wake him up and he says, “Good morning, Tooth Fairy Mom.” She looked at him puzzled. He then explained that after we tucked him in he got up and finally, 3 days later, put his tooth under his pillow and it was still there this morning. My wife was caught off guard and didn’t know what to say.
He figured out a way to set a trap for us and executed it flawlessly. Clever kid. I think he’s pretty much figured out the guy in the red suit too. I didn’t think we’d make it through this Christmas but we hoped it’d last one more year.

Today was my birthday. I’m officially legal. Twice over. It’s scary to think that people born when I graduated high school are now graduating high school. Makes you feel old.

My birthday is never an exciting affair, we did about the same thing we do every year.

We go get a Christmas Tree. I look forward to this. My birthday means the real start of Christmas around our place. It means the decorations come out. The house starts smelling like pine and presents start appearing. I think of my birthday as ‘our’ day.
Dinner was potstickers and my wife’s famous fried rice. She only makes it for special occasions so I badgered her into cooking some up. 🙂
We then went down to our favorite little hole in the wall game store and picked up a new card game. We are suckers for little off-the-wall games from small game companies. Someday I’ll have to post a pic of our game closet.