The weekend was a pretty good one:

Friday night went to the drive-in movie. The double-feature was Harry Potter: PoA and Catwoman. We went just to watch Harry Potter and left after it was over.
We are fortunate to have a drive-in only about 10 minutes away. It's not big or fancy, a lot of the speakers don't work (everybody listens on their car radios anyway) but otherwise is well maintained. It's 15$ a carload and most everybody brings lawn chairs, blankets, junk food, drinks, etc. Just a good family evening.

Saturday: In the morning got the oil changed on the new van, then went over to my parents to visit. My sister, who lives in Italy, and her husband (an Italian) were back visiting. They just got married in May so have the big 'newlwed' thing going on. It's always good to see them and we have a good time just playing dominoes (this seems to have become the family game lately, trumping euchre), riding bikes, having squirtgun fights, or just hanging out.

Sunday: Ran the video at the early church service, then helped my wife teach Sunday school. After lunch cut down a big limb in the backyard that was starting to touch the house.

Spent some time playing City of Heroes. This is a pretty good MMOG IMHO. I currently have a 8th level science/tanker named 'Super Froob' (my son's idea) and a 4th level mutation/blaster called 'The Carrot Avenger' (my idea). Yesterday joined the tanker up with a group for the first time. Did pretty well, although did get killed when we bit off more then we can chew. Oh well, live and learn. And I haven't gotten tired of the 'leveling treadmill' as some call it. At least not yet....

I started back to work on 7/11 after a two week vacation. At least I thought it was a vacation......

To me a 'good vacation' means during the period that you are 'off work' at least 50% of said period should be unplanned time. Nothing on the schedule.

It wasn't so for this last vacation.

June 27th-June 30th: Trip to Holiday World. Holiday World is a great little amusement/water park in southern Indiana. There is an adjoining campground, Lake Rudolph, where we shared a cabin with my sister's family. My parents came as well, but they stayed in their 5th wheel camper.

Even though HW is a great place, boy was it crowded! We went on a Monday hoping to avoid some of the crowds but to no avail. The waterpark is especially busy. The kids and I still manager to ride some pretty cool water slides like Zinga and Junger Racer. Also messed around in the wave pool and lazy river. Then we rode a few rides in the park and headed back to the campground for dinner.

After dinner we headed back for some coaster riding. HW has two of the best wooden roller coasters around in The Raven and The Legend. We rode the Raven right at dusk and although a little short was a great ride. With the park due to close in about 10 minutes we got in line for the Legend. This coaster at night in fantastic! Lots of twists, turns, and airtime.

July 1st: Spent most of the day home relaxing, although did get packed and ready for Cub Scout Camp.

July 2nd-3rd: Went to Cub Scout camp with my 7-year old. Had a good time, but we left Saturday night due to rain getting in our tent.

July 4th: Fireworks, what else? Also celebrated Logan's 1st birthday.

July 5th-6th: Spent more time relaxing, although did a few odd jobs around the house and got packed and ready for Webelos Adventure Camp with my older son.

July 7th-10th: Went to Webelos Adventure Camp with my 9-year-old and five other scouts. Had a great time, although by Saturday morning everyone is ready to come home.

July 10th: Ran the video during church. Marched in the county 4-H fair parade with the scouts. In the afternoon went over to the parents to fix a computer problem.

July 11th: Back to work, and a chance to relax!

Had a pretty good weekend. Here's the highlights:

Friday night
    - Little league baseball game. Trevor's team lost again, but everybody seems to be having fun regardless. His team has really good coaches who continue to coach and encourage the players. Unlike some of the other teams, a couple which are coached by IMO borderline assholes who rant, rave, and criticize even when their team is up by 10+ runs. Yeesh, this is minor league, little league baseball!

Saturday -
    Went over to the parents in the morning with three of the boys. We drove (I should say my Dad drove) us around for a while in the new minivan. We visited the resovoir (sp) near their house and watched the torrent of water coming from the spillway due to all the rain we've been having. The older boys thought it was neat, although Logan slept thru most of it.
Got home around 4pm and then at 6pm had some Webelos scouts and their families over to make tie-dyed t-shirts and talk about scout camp coming up in a couple of weeks.

Sunday -
    Ran the video announcements at church. Got to see our new pastors in the pulpit for the first time. I think they are going to work out just fine. Our new senior pastor likes to preach barefoot (gasp!) and is a woman to boot (double gasp!). For a UM church this can be pretty radical.....
    In the afternoon, took Evan to a band camp south of Indy. He'll be there until Friday, but a lot of his friends are going so he should be fine and have a lot of fun. On the way home ate dinner with friends.

That pretty much sums up the weekend. Now this week we'll be busy with Trevor's baseball tournament, then packing and getting ready for the trip to Holiday World on Sunday. Also count in two scout camps and my two-week vaction starting on the 27th is pretty much booked......
 

Well the luck I mentioned about a new van in the previous JE was needed. The wife talked back-and-forth with the salesman about a dozen times on Friday before sealing the deal.

We are now the proud owners of a 2005 Dodge Grand Caravan SXT. Has a lot of bell and whistles, and we like the color as well.

Coupl of pics here

Anybody else looking at new wheels?

If all goes well, the wife and I should be buying a new car by the end of the day.

We've had our eye on a 2005 Grand Caravan SXT at a local dealer for about a week now. It's a nice van, although I probably won't get to drive it much. That's OK, because I still have the '95 Wrangler. :)

 

It appears that due to the recent slashcode upgrade I have unlimited mod points. At least after I mod a post and then go back to my homepage it seems to reset back to 5.

Anybody else getting this?

Not much to talk about. Too busy. Maybe later....

This was the first weekend in quite a while where we didn't have an overwhelming list of things to do. So it was quite relaxed, relatively speaking...

Saturday
---------
* went to a few garage sales in the morning, until it started raining.
* Trevor's baseball practice - rained out
* Griffin's soccer game - rained out
* messed around with my old 450mhz box. I have it dual-booted with win98 and Fedora Core. The video card was acting strange under win98 so I tried to fix it. Ending up have to reload win98, but still didn't fix the problem. I think I'm going to pitch the dual-boot and run linux-only.
* Read a book
* fixed the flat tire on Griffin's bike
* Last week a friend gave me shoebox containing about 10 Atari 2600 games. Since I don't have a 2600 I thought I would have go searching for one (hence the aformentioned garage saling), but then I remembered the same friend about a year ago gave me an Intellivision 2 with one of those 'system changer' modules that plays 2600 games. So I pulled out the whole messed and voila! It worked. Well, all but two of the games worked. And the paddles for super breakout are mucked up. I also spent a lot of time cleaning the various hardware of several years of dust and dirt. Pics here: Geek stuff

Sunday
--------
* skipped church to sleep in (at my wife's request of course)
* lazed around the house most of the moring
* went to child protection training at the church in the afternoon. Only lasted about an hour.
* helped spray paint Evan's school project.
* went to church youth-group at the associate pastor's home. Had a good time.
* played some civ3 and BF1942.

All in all, a pretty relaxed weekend. The coming week should be fun though, with either scouts, a track meet, baseball game, or soccer game pretty much every night. Ah the joys of parenthood!

My Alma Mater, Indiana State U. was hacked recently. It appears that student records from 1991-2001 were compromised. Good thing I graduated in 1990.......

I work in the I.S. deptartment at this place: Subaru of Indiana. Yesterday I got to drive a Legacy and an Outback all over the state. Drove first to Indy, then down to Bloomington, over to Terre Haute, up thru Crawfordsville, then back to Lafayette. Weather was good, except for in the morning when it rained.

Put about 260 miles total on both cars, then got to fill out some kind of J.D. Power survey when we got back. Not a bad way to spend a day at work.....

Wow. Another fairly busy weekend, or at least Satuday was. Do they ever slow down?

Saturday morning: Changed the oil/filter in both the Minivan and Jeep. Oldest son & I took about 7 gallons of used motor oil to the city recyling station. Got home and did a little yardwork, raking up old leaves & trash that had accumulated in the yard over the winter.

Saturday afternoon/evening: At 1pm leave to take my 7-year old to Coldwater, MI where we will meet up with his Grandma. He is staying with her for a few days over spring break. Made a pitstop on the way to check out my parent's house (they are in AZ. for the winter). Got to Coldwater about 5pm. Had dinner. Got back home around 9pm. My oldest son is headed down to Florida on a RIM (Retreat in Motion) bus for a 5-day trip with the church youth group. They are making stops at the Smokies, working in an Orlando soup kitchen, going to Disney world, hitting the beach, and coming home on Thursday. The bus pulled out at 8pm, so I missed it. Kinda wanted to be there when he left....

Sunday: Ran the video machine at the morning church service. Spent the rest of the day lounging around and playing NFL Street & BF1942.

Now that I've typed this, I guess the weekend wasn't all THAT busy. I guess the 300 miles worth of driving I did on Sat. makes it seem so........

Got into work at 5:30am today. Normal start time is 7:30.

The reason? Need to leave work around 2pm so I can drive about 45 mintues south to Indy to get stuff for the pack meeting on 3/16. The scout shop doesn't close until 6pm, but it's downtown, and I'd rather get in and out before rush hour begins. But hopefully I'll only have to make this drive a couple more times. I plan on stepping down as cubmaster at the end of the school year......

Oh, and before going to Indy I have to stop and pick up a couple parts for the refrigerator. Dang thing is frosting up again (it's a frost-FREE frig). Currently the freezer is staying cold enough to freeze water, but not much colder than that.
Had the defrost timer replaced about 2 weeks ago but that doesn't appear to be the problem. The defrost heater appears to be working OK so I'm getting a new set of gaskets and a defrost thermostat. Hopefully that will fix it......

Oh, and I have a 6pm meeting tonight at the church.

Could be a long day. But an ample supply of caffeine and reading /. may help.

The Indiana Boys High School basketball tournament started last night. It was a rough night as both of the teams that I have followed off and on throughout the season, Frankfort and Maconaquah, played each other in the first round.

It was tough for me to root for one team or the other considering I now live in Frankfort and am a Maconaquah graduate.

It was a close game up until haftime, but Maconaquah pulled away for a 61-51 victory.

Story links:

Frankfort's Cold Shooting Leads To First-Round Exit

Maconaquah Advances

I don't know yet it I'm going to the second round game on Friday. The Braves play the Western panthers, a team that beat them earlier in the regular season. Should be a good game......

Here's how: new kitchen floor

A couple of the photos are not in order, must be a quirk of Yahoo photos or something. Oh well.

Putting down the floor is definately NOT as easy as the tell you in magazines, how-to videos, etc. Due to the layout of the room, I had some kind of special cutting to do on 75% of the rows I laid down.

But the result was worth the effort. I ended up about 3 feet short on quarter-round, but I plan on picking up some tonight and finishing it up.

Next on the plan: new kitchen wallpaper.......

A High School mascot name that is?

This high school: Watersmeet has been getting some press recently because it's mascot is the 'Nimrod'. If you look it up, it's not really the derogatory term most of use have come to associate the word with.

There is also a rather old (1986) list of 'best high school mascots' floating around. Here's the list:

1. SYRUPMAKERS of Cairo,GA
2. BEETDIGGERS of Brush, CO
3. NIMRODS of Watersmeet, MI
4. IMPS of Cary, NC
5. ATOMSMASHERS of Johnson Prep, Savannah, GA
6. ANGORAS of Clarkston, GA
7. FLIVVERS of Kingsford, MI
8. SQUIRRELS of Winslow, AZ
9. PEGLEGS of Stuyvesant in NYC
10. DOTS of Poca, WV

Now some of these names IMHO don't really deserve to be there. Squirrels? Angoras?

I think some of schools in my home state of Indiana a deserved some credit for creative mascots. Here's a few of my favorites:

Delphi Oracles

Logansport Berries

Northeast Dubois Jeeps

And of course the town in which I reside, the Frankfort Hot Dogs

Any other good mascot names out there?