While riding bikes down at the loop around the magnolia, a fellow walked by with a dog named Leo. He was a shelter dog and very friendly.
Too Much Work!
Being self-employed, my work comes in spurts. After a particular long project, I snapped this pic with googley-springy-eyes (minus the glasses and springs) to show the deadline-looming stress level. Arg!
A Simple Summer
Our summer has been very simple so far. No big vacations. In fact, we have mostly stayed home. Thank goodness for the Wii, Harvey (the RV), and squirting the kids with the water hose while they jump on the trampoline.
The End of a Life Stage
There are many stages to your life:
- You can roll over
- You can sit up
- You can hold your own bottle
etc.
We are almost through with the sippy-cup stage.
Yes, our garbage can needs cleaning. Hey- it's garbage!
Christmas Gifts: Still New!
The kids get so many gifts for Christmas, we usually stick a few in the attic and then bring them out later as a surprise. During this slow summer, it's the perfect time for Mega Marble Mania!
This thing took many hours to build. Keighly did most of it. Here she is finishing up:
Once complete, it is a Rube Goldberg type contraption that endlessly cycles marbles through gears, ramps, chutes, and augers.
Harvey Repairs
I finally got through working on Harvey the RV's fuel problem. When we purchased it, the "only" thing that was wrong with Harvey was the fuel gauge in the dash. I dropped the tank once and thought I had fixed it by exercising the fuel sensor float arm. But after I put it all back together, it still didn't work. Not only that, now it wouldn't crank!
I dropped the tank AGAIN and took the whole thing apart. I discovered the brass cylinder float for the fuel sensor had a hole in it, so it wasn't floating at all. No wonder the fuel gauge didn't work! After contemplating just putting on a cork, I went to the local Ford dealer and bought a new brass float for $7.
I also purchased a new internal fuel pump. There was no aftermarket pump for my assembly, so I had to rig a retro-fit design.
Here is my buddy Pat-O helping me test the pump. It is a strange feeling to hook an electric pump up and drop it in gasoline and then touch the wires to a battery! But- no explosions, everything worked exactly as it should.
All that is left (that I know of) is a new water pump and we should be good to go, hopefully salvaging some of the summer.
Quiet?
Since all three kids now have Nintendo DS Lites, we have noticed strange times during the day when there is not the normal level of hollering, yelling, screaming, running, and general "being a kid"-ing.. I'm not sure if it's a good or bad thing, but at least we have a few moments peace.
Apparently, they are playing WAY TOO MUCH Nintendo!
No Parking On The Grass
We parked in a shady spot to make the kids-swap from Nana after they had stayed the weekend. While were were chatting, Keighly explored and found a 'No Parking On Grass' sign.. Whoops!
The Last of the Treehouse
I finally got around to finishing cutting down the remaining trunk of the pecan tree that grew out of the middle of our house.
Here I am refueling the chainsaws. The area is about 8x10’. We hope to enclose it for extra closet space.
I put a fan in there to hopefully blow out all the exhaust from the chainsaw. Before the fan, Janet said the whole house smelled like exhaust. Plus there was the burning lungs, blurry vision, and headaches. The fan helped with all that, but added blowing chips (hence the eye protection). Here I am going at it.
I had a very hard time keeping the chainsaws going while constantly cutting horizontally. I cut 4–6” discs– anything heavier and I couldn’t carry them out. To get them out I carried them back up the ladder, then walked to the edge of the house and dropped them.
I ended up cutting 23 discs (you can see each cut on the wall in the pic above). The tree trunk was about 13 feet high. I weighed one of the discs and it was 80 pounds! My wee computer-user body was not ready for that, but I did it.
No more treehouse!
Old School
After many battles with playing games on the Wii, homebrew has finally advanced enough so you can play games straight from a hard drive. Hurray! We use the cover flow style loader called CoverFloader.
One of the advantages of having Homebrew on your Wii is you can play games and programs written by people like you and me. A large number of those programs are emulators, which allow your Wii to emulate another system. I installed an NES emulator and we immediately started playing the original Super Mario Brothers! It was heaven, I felt 10 years old again! As I perused my youth through NES roms, I HAD to play Metroid (one of my all time favorite games). Here’s a pic of me fixing to beat it by destroying the Mother Brain:
The Rewards of Passing
I made a deal with Keighly and Ian. If Keighly passed (with straight A's) and Ian passed (with A's and B's) I would buy them both new Nintendo DS Lites.
They both passed with the proper requirements..!
So I purchased two new Nintendo DSLs:
A one-of-a-kind pink-on-the-outside, black-on-the-inside for Keighly...
And an Ice-Blue one for Ian (not sold in the US!)..
Keighly gave her old, very worn and used original NDS to Emily.
A Natural!
We had a visit from some long-time friends Tony and Emily Lymon who brought their daughter Collette. At one point she picked up one of the many practice chanters laying around and started tooting on it. The other kids all grabbed theirs and started marching in a circle! She is a natural! (Note to Tony and Emily: it's never too early to start bagpipe lessons!)
Up!
We went and saw Up tonight (in 3D!). It was very good, the kids really enjoyed it (above: Chandler, Ian, Emily, and Keighly). The first 20 mins were kinda sad as they set up the story for why Mr. Fredrickson has become the way he is, but after that is was very status-quo Pixar/Disney: clean and fun!
