HerdingChaos

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.

Surgery recovery is going well. My teeth finally feel like they are mine again. Most of my gums have feeling again and my bottom lip is almost back to normal.

I am about done with oatmeal, ice cream, anything mixed in a blender (with milk to cut it), and any and all potato based foods.

Today I was given very good news. I am allowed to have “meatloaf consistency” foods. These include: fish, soft chicken (whatever that is), chili, meatloaf (duh!), and pasta.

All these choices!

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.

Last night I finished the last of the Jack Aubry and Stephen Maturin series from Patrick O’Brian. It was 20 full novels plus the start of another. More than 7000 pages. I really liked the entire series. Some of the books were better than others, but I enjoyed every single one.

Speaking of great literature… Jessica Stover’s latest installment is a short story called Greyfeather: Catch. This is the second story from the Greyfeather universe that Jessica has brought to life. I loved the entire thing. The first story was in the collection called Aidmheil. Both Aidmheil and Greyfeather: Catch are limited editions but you can still pick up copies here: Aidmheil and Catch.  I own both and they are strongly recommended.

Whenever I finish a really good book/series I am conflicted. I am happy to have enriched my life with the stories, but I am sad they are over. But all is not lost. I have a strong feeling that Jessica is just getting started and I am patiently waiting with great anticipation.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,249110,00.html

The video is my favorite part.

The short version is that someone built some battery powered light brite looking images of the mooninites from Aqua Teen Hunger Force and the law enforcement establishment in Boston went nuts. And I give FOX huge credit for turning something so stupid into something so humorous with such clueless and funny coverage.

I have mostly finshed the OS X side of the install of the Macbook Pro. I need to update the windows side that I am going to run under bootcamp and parallels, but I need to do that from work tomorrow.

However, I just found something pretty cool. There is a dashboard widget that allows you to add entries. This entry was made with that widget. Therefore this post is a bit of a test as well.

I am posting this from the car on my new Macbook Pro. I am connected through my wife’s phone via bluetooth. It is working pretty well. I am pretty happy with the laptop so far. I bascially got to where I could no longer trust my company provided laptop as it was not stable. So I bought this MBP to use for personal and work. Tomorrow will be my first day using it for work. Should be interesting. I am using my older posts to reinstall all of the things that I like so much about my iMac. I may try a new bittorrent client this time though.

Once I get this all setup the way I like I will be updating the blog.