HerdingChaos

As you can tell I have not updated this blog for 5 months. The super abridged version of the past five months follows.

Early July: Loren became potty trained.

Mid August: Celebrated 11 years of marriage.

Late August: Went to Sea World San Antonio with the family and had a blast.

Mid September: My beloved dog of 8 years is diagnosed with splenic hermangiosarcoma.

Three days later: I have to take him to the vet and say goodbye because he cannot breathe without pain and cannot eat or drink.

Late September: I spread my wings and complete my bi-annual flight review allowing me to execute the privileges of my pilots license once more.

Early October: Took Andrew and Tracy for a flight in a rented plane. They loved it.

Late October: Tracy turns 6.

Halloween: We all dress as pirates!

Mid November: I bought a plane.

Late November: Andrew turns 8.

Which brings us to this month. I have been working more crazy than normal the last couple of months. Not that work is a good excuse to miss out on other stuff, but that’s what was happening. After tying up a few milestones at work, I took vacation from the 7th through today and did PIC’s 10 day instrument rating course. Today at 2pm I did my check ride and I am now an instrument rated pilot. I am also tired. In the last 10 days I have flown 30 hours in the plane and 9 in the simulator. Probably would have been more but the weather was really bad for three of the 10 days and we focused on ground instruction. Regardless I am looking forward to going back to work for a break from this intensive course. I think the course was great and would recommend it to anyone. But do not fool yourself, it is a lot of work.

Today I called a seller about a plane.

Today I called a aviation medical examiner and made an appointment to update my FAA medical.

Today I called for an insurance quote on 2 different types of planes.

Today I put together a spreadsheet with a breakdown of expenses, investments, and rates we need to reserve per hour of operation for the plane.

Today I still have not flow since I put .6 on a Piper Warrior on Jan 7th 2003.

Today two of my children are old enough to go flying with me, and the third can come if I have mom along to help.

Today I resume my course because now I can take my family along.

Tomorrow (well not actually tomorrow.. I mean the figurative tomorrow); Tomorrow I fly.

Becky and I just went to the US Virgin Islands. It was the first trip without the kiddos in a while. We flew into St. Thomas but spent the entire time at St. Johns. The vacation was the best ever. I really enjoyed the snorkeling and floating in the water on the beach and partying with friends. We did some mild hiking, lots of swimming, and a ton of partying with friends. We were there for a wedding. The groom and his family are long time friends. Having them on the island made the trip that much more enjoyable. Becky and I had some great couple time with just the two of us. Then at night we would typically head over to the other villa and party with the groom’s family until the wee hours in the morning. Then sleep in until 10 (or later), rinse, repeat.

Things to remember for next time:

• When snorkeling you must reapply the sun screen.
• Rum is cheaper than bottled water on St. Johns.
• Get a 4×4.
• Drive on the left.
• You can show up at the 6am ferry at 6:10am and make it (this would have saved us 30 min of sleep on the return)
• Rent at Hertz, not Budget
• Do not expect anything or anyone to be in a hurry or on any time line other than “island time.”
• Once you are adjusted to island time you understand the beauty of the previous bullet.

I highly recommend Rendezvous Villa while staying on St. Johns. I also can recommend Capt. Phil on the Wayward Sailer for a good time of sail and snorkel.

In related news, you really cannot take less than a 3 week vacation from work and expect to actually get that time off. I have about 60 hours worth of work piled up waiting for me to tackle. I might get caught up in about another 2 weeks. A few years ago I took off from Thanksgiving to New Years and that was perfect. Not much was left for me since I was gone so long. I am not sure I want to do any more 1 week vacations from work. It is just not worth it.

We took the family out for a night of bowling with my brothers and my mom and dad. It was an early Father’s day get together since dad is doing some traveling this month. We had a great time. Loren is only 2 and used the handicap roller thingamabob to let her bowl. Loren beat both Becky and myself in two games.

Tracy holds on to the ball and runs for the lane. Then she just drops the ball in a such way as to avoid hitting her feet and jumps out of the way. Becky called it random placement of the ball. Becky and I just barely scored higher than Tracy.

Bowling genes must skip a generation.

I had jaw surgery 4 weeks ago to correct some damage that was done during a softball game ~2.5 years ago. The surgery went fine. Pain was about what I expected and similar to the original injury. The swelling from the surgery was worse than I was expecting but still not too bad.

I spent two nights in the hospital. I then came home and lived in my lazy boy recliner since laying horizontal did not help the swelling of the face. When I got home I looked a bit like Fat Bastard from the Austin Powers movie.

I got off the codeine before the first week of recovery. I really don’t like the way the narcotics make me feel and I would rather deal with the pain. By the end of the second week I was feeling pretty good. I was a bit restless.

At right around 2 weeks from the surgery I went back to work. The only bad part about going back was smiling or laughing. People around the office came by to say hi and see how I was doing. And those that were not humor impaired were doing the best to cheer me up. However, I had one of those self dissolving stitches in my lip/nose right under the right side of my nose. This stitch had not dissolved yet. So each time I would smile or laugh I would get a nice shooting pain from my nose and it felt like someone was ripping said nose right off the face. Luckily that passed in another 4 days.

Just as I was finishing up week 3 of recovery my wife became more sick than I have ever seen her. It has been a week and thankfully she is doing much better now. But that week was rough on her. I took on kid taxi duty, tried (unsuccessfully) to keep up with all of the other things around the house, tried to help my wife as much as I could, and also tried to squeeze in as much work as I could. It was a rough week with little sleep.

I think this weekend is the start of things returning to normal. So maybe now that I am getting out of the funk I will be able to make some more posts.

I had surgery on Tuesday. Was in the hospital for two nights and then got home. My wife has been taking care of me, getting me post op meds, etc. I can’t talk right now due to the surgery so she has been doing alot of extra stuff as well. Andrew has missed most of this week of school with a high fever. Tracy is doing fine. Loren is miss-pukes-a-lot and other issues that overflow the diaper. Becky has been trying to clean up after the kids to keep me from getting whatever they have while I am in my weakened state. Then tonight as I am drifting off to sleep in the recliner (no bed for me yet) she comes down to tell me that the dog is puking and having seizures. She just took him to the emergency vet and they think it might be a brain tumor.

I love my wife. I can’t believe how strong she is. I hope tomorrow is all good news.

We left the dog with the vet for tonight for running a blood panel and watching him overnight.

And now I sign off to take some codeine and get some sleep.

Back in December Andrew expressed an interest in learning to program a computer. I did some googling and didn’t find much of anything related to kids programming. So I thought about what I used when I was his age. I used LOGO… so I loaded it up on his system and he played with it for a few days and then lost interest. I don’t blame him. When I was a kid the only other thing a computer could do was tell you that the command you typed was not recognized. He does like playing a rollercoaster builder program and a few other simulation type “games.” I always thought that someone should do something like the simulation games but with more of a focus on learning some programming concepts. That would make a great tool for teaching kids interested in learning computer programming.

Back in December my google-foo was just weak. The good folks at Carnegie Mellon University have this covered. Alice is a drag-n-drop object oriented based programming language with some built in tutoring. A friend at work pointed it out to me today and I played with it some tonight. I expect that Andrew is going to love it.

Watching the 3 month old kitten chase the laser pointer?

or

Watching the 23 month old baby chase the laser pointer?

Andrew walked up to me yesterday and said, “Dad, can you teach me how to program a computer?” I was both excited and nervous at the same time. He is showing an interest in doing something that I do but at a very early age. I want to help him learn programming but more importantly I want/hope it is as fun for him as it is for me. That got me thinking about when I first started “programming” a computer and what exactly did I do?

It started back in the fourth grade. When our class had library time there were a few of us that got computer time. Myself and two others names were up for “computer time”. We shared an Apple II. It had LOGO.

I remembered telling that little triangle (that everyone else kept calling a turtle) to make squares, circles, and triangles.

A little Google-foo later and I had several good LOGO sites. He now has a LOGO interpretor loaded up and running on his computer. He and I worked on the basic commands for a while. He picked everything up pretty quick and it was not too long before he was thinking up cool names like loopy_circle for his procedures. Now he keeps running into the room and saying, “Dad, come look at what I did!”

Ketchup!

I have not posted in quite a while mostly because I have been very busy and the blog is lower on the priority list than all the stuff that I have been doing.

Since my last post:

We all dressed up for Halloween. The kids were super cute. We had a soldier, a princess, and Raggedy Ann. Mom and Dad were super geeks and dressed up as Battlestar Galactica officers. We had a fall fest at work, Andrew and Tracy had a Halloween party at Taekwando’s school, the whole family went to a big party at a friends house and of course walked around the ‘hood getting the sugar fix.

Had a scary time with Andrew at the ER in early November. He was having trouble breathing. He is fine now and everything is good but it was a late night for Dad and Andrew.

Andrew joined Cub Scouts this year and he had the Bobcat ceremony on the 15th right before his 7th birthday. I am sure this is only going to get worse, but I feel really old when I think about the fact that I have a son that is 7.

We also celebrated Tracy’s birthday in November even though her birthday is in late October. She went to build a bear with some friends and had a great time.

Andrew wanted to go to Sea World for his birthday so we all packed up on Sat 18th of November and had a great time at Sea World. By the time we left, the kids were very pooped. The all fell asleep after about 5 minutes into the drive home.

For Thanksgiving we had a great Thanksgiving meal at my mom’s house and then headed out in the RV for some camping over the break. The camping was one of the best trips we have ever taken and was really relaxing and quite a recharge.

That is the very abridged version of the last month. So now you are all caught up!