Discover Cards

A couple of weeks ago, we lost one of our credit cards, so, we thought it would be best to get a new account. A couple of weeks go by, and no cards show up. I finally get around to calling them and it turns out that they didn’t ship them in the first place, but they did change the account. They sent them two us next day, which was actually two days because I called at night.

The cards arrived today and what a surprise, the look like crap! I liked my old silver discover card, it worked for me. Now I have this orange one. But it gets worse, Amy’s has this 1960’s hippy van/bus thing on it!

My Card


Amy's Card


I figure, I’ll keep this one for a few months, then order a replacement.

Alex & Me – Night Out

Amy and the kids haven’t been feeling well, and Amy isn’t getting much sleep because when Aidan goes to sleep, Alex decides it is time to play, and either keeps Amy up, or wakes up Aidan.

The idea was for me to take my car up to the Sears Auto Center / Jiffy Lube and have them change the oil, transmission fluid, and replace a tag light (I pulled over and issued a repair order for the tag light and to have my window tint checked). Since that place is attached to the mall, I’d take Alex in for some fun, dinner, and stop and pick up a new belt for myself.

Well, the shop changed their hours and closed at 6 before I got there, causing me to completely forget about walking through sears and getting a belt. Alex and I did have a lot of fun even though they removed the play area from the mall. We through pennies into the fountain, got on a couple of quarter rides, and had some candy. We also grabbed dinner at McDonalds, I had a double quarter pounder with cheese, and Alex had a cheese burger happy meal. That boy has been eating cheese burgers fairly well. It was funny, I was telling him that my burger was the same as his, but mine had two meats, and he said, “I don’t like meat, but I like cheese burgers.” LOL

Amy, on the other hand, didn’t get much sleep, Aidan decided to be awake the whole time we were gone.

Trip to West Virginia

This Saturday we went to visit my grandparents in Philippi West Virginia. The trip out was interesting, we ran into a pretty heavy snow storm in far Western Maryland and into West Virginia on I-68. It was worth it though, my grandparents hadn’t seen Aidan yet, and it got us out of the house for the weekend and my grandmother really likes babies!

We arrived Saturday afternoon and it was still snowing. My grandmother had a brand new flexible flier sled and told Alex that I would take him out sledding. Even though it was snowing a lot, there was a good wind and the snow was very light so it was all blowing off. Even so, Alex got to go out and play.




On Sunday morning, we made a trip to the nearest Wal-Mart which is about 25 miles away, the trip took more than thirty minutes. The point was to get Alex some gloves, some window washing fluid for the van, and some travel packets of formula for Aidan. Of course, they didn’t have the travel packets, but we left with everything else we wanted, plus a shirt for Alex, and cookies for all of us to enjoy.

Alex got to play in the snow again later Sunday, this time with gloves on his hands. I wore myself out pulling him on the sled (I even took two runs on the sled myself). Somehow I ended up with a headache later in the evening and ended up going to bed at about 7 o’clock Sunday evening.

The trip back was the best, we took the short cut through the back roads since the weather was good on Monday. Like the trip in, Amy was monitoring for wireless networks with her computer, which was pretty entertaining. Around lunch time we wanted to find a diner but ended up stopping in Frostburg at Pizza hut for lunch. We were back on the road in about an hour and stopped at the outlet mall in Hagerstown. I took Alex to the play ground while Amy shopped. Unfortunately (or fortunately) our replacement credit cards have yet to arrive, so she was limited to cash, but for $60 she bought 2 pairs of pants and 3 shirts for both Aidan and Alex. While I was at the play ground with Alex I got on the ham radio for a few minutes, that was fun too.

In all, good trip.

Now that is a long delay!

Surely a typo, but it was a shock seeing this on the blackberry this morning before I got on the train!


-----Original Message-----
From: bormp-request@lists-wmata.com
Sent: Thursday, February 16, 2006 6:37 AM
To: METRO Alerts
Subject: Metrorail eAlert on the Red Line

A 1000-minute delay is in effect between Fort Totten and Tenleytown-AU in the direction of Shady Grove.

Vice President Dick Cheney Shooting

It seems that, at least the media is making a big deal over why the White House or the Vice President’s office did not inform the public that Dick Cheney was involved in a hunting accident. Must they report on every aspect of the Mr. Cheney’s day to day activities that have nothing to do with his duties as Vice President?

Breaking news: this just in from the White House Press office “Dick Cheney was taking a leak yesterday and his aim was off, and some landed on his shoe.”

I think they did exactly what they should have done, accidentally shooting someone while hunting is embarrassing enough, nobody would go around advertising it if they didn’t have to, and the last time I read the constitution, I didn’t see the part about informing the media of the most embarrassing moments of our elected officials. The mainstream media is just ticked off about a small town Texas paper getting the story from a local before it was aired on CNN and the rest. The Vice President’s office and White House did exactly the correct thing, when the story broke; they confirmed it and that was that.

The late night talk show hosts sure had fun with this one. Jay Leno said, “That's the big story over the weekend. ... Dick Cheney accidentally shot a fellow hunter, a 78-year-old lawyer. In fact, when people found out he shot a lawyer, his popularity is now at 92 percent.”

Myspace

Why is myspace so slow?

oh yeah - I have a myspace - I don't know why

http://www.myspace.com/josephdurnal

Snow, What Snow?

Ok, so it snowed Saturday night and Sunday morning. By seven thirty in the morning it was reduced to flurries in my area. The governor was on TV telling everyone to stay off the roads and the media was making such a big deal out of dangerous roads. We had planned to go to my sister’s house in Dover for Aaron’s birthday party. After shouveling out and getting ready, the sun was out, so, we decided to go. I had thought about taking the long way, around Interstate 95 to Delaware route 1, but after seeing that the road conditions were much better than had been described on the news, I decided to go the normal route, across the bay bridge. That was a good choice because there were only a couple of isolated spots on the road where there was slush, even on the state routes on the eastern shore. The worst travel we experienced was a slushy Delaware route 8, I’m sure it didn’t snow that much more on that side of the state line, I guess it says something about Delaware’s snow removal capabilities. Anyway, I didn’t think the snow was all that bad in the Maryland area.

Alex’s Generosity

While I was out shopping, Alex had some M&M’s after eating his lunch. When I returned, I asked Alex if he saved any M&M’s to share with me and he said yes. So I asked him, “Where are the M&M’s you saved for me?” and he replied “In my mouth!” his term for what happens when you eat something.

Aidan the Smiling Boy

I was up early with Aidan today and he sure was in a good mood. I was on the ham radio for a little bit and I put Aidan in his bouncy chair. Took a break from what I was doing and Aidan was so happy and smiley. Again, I had enough time to grab the camera and take a some good pictures.

More PBEM CIV

I had a great night playing Civilization IV with Amy and Brandon in our play by e-mail game. I have a whopping three cities, and I’m still spending more than I make and don’t have much of a military. Amy is still killing all of us, I’ve never done so poorly in a game of CIV before.

Blog Template Update

Can you believe it? I changed my blog template. I’m sure that the changes are obvious, I added a family of pictures at the top. I’ve been very happy with the general template from blogger that I lightly modified once before, but it seemed to be missing something. I think it is fixed now.

Super Bowl Snacks

Back in the day, I didn’t think that Super Bowl snacks would ever amount to much more than chips and dip or something else from a bag in the chip isle. This weekend’s shopping list included several items indented to be consumed before and during the Super Bowl game, most notably, crab meat and meatballs. I think the crab meat dish is going to be something that I’ve never tasted before, but I’ll probably like it, and I already know I’ll love the meatballs, made with a secret sauce that includes grape jelly and chili sauce. MMM I’m really looking forward to overeating on Sunday!

Installed some lights

Last night when I was laving to go get Andrew I turned on the light that is just inside the front door and it seemingly burned out. While I was at Costco getting gas, Amy called and said that none of the lights worked on the main floor. I talked her through resetting the breaker and wondered why a light bulb burning out would blow a breaker.

It turns out that something failed inside of the light fixture causing it to arc and crack the plastic casing that holds the bulb. I was hoping to find that plastic casing, but realized that I might have to buy a new light fixture, which is what I had to do in the end. Below is a picture of the new light fixture installed.

While I was at it, we had needed a chandelier type light over the kitchen table since we moved in. In the summer, it isn’t so bad, there is plenty of natural light, but in the winter, even during the day, the sun just isn’t at the right angle to make that side of the kitchen very bright. I had to modify it with a power cord that would reach the wall socket and that had an on off switch, since there was no light socket above the table in the kitchen.

It is kind of hard to take pictures of lights.

More Civilization

I’ve been playing two games of Civilization 4 for a little while now. The first, a play by e-mail game with Amy and Brandon, hasn’t progressed very quickly, but it has a lot of potential. So far, Amy is kicking our butts, she’s lost more settlers to barbarians than I’ve been able to create so far. Of course, she did get lucky with the goodie huts. The only goodie hut I was able to get only gave me a map of the area (actually, I think I found another one with some gold).

My single player game, on a huge archipelago map is getting a little crazy. For one, it runs real slow and takes a long time to load. It is a lot of fun however. All of the map has now been occupied, which has caused my score to stall a little. I’ve fought a couple of wars earlier in the game, but I just started a war with the Romans who while not quite as advanced as me, have at least fighters and destroyers in their arsenal. I’ve already lost a couple of stealth bombers over their cities. My goal is to surround the Germans, my land is on one side, and the Romans are on the other. The Arabs had a defensive pact with the Romans, so, I’m at war with them too, but I have a couple of other computer players at war with them, so, I’m not too worried about it. I did send a fleet of battleships to their area to bombard cities and to intercept warships that might be trying to help the Romans. War, even in Civilization 4, has a lot to do with logistics, which I’ve been setting up over the last few days. In the archipelago map, it is all about shipping convoys, and making sure all of your cities have airports. I expect to have a lot of military capability left over from this war, but will probably need to spend a few turns making money. I really hope to finish this game with a conquest or domination victory, the only victory options I selected for the game. It has been quite fun.

Oatmeal

I skipped breakfast at home this morning so I bought some oatmeal from the cafeteria here at work. Basically, it is plain oatmeal with toppings. I chose brown sugar, honey, and granola. Interestingly enough, oatmeal and honey are hard to mix together. Maybe next time I’ll use chocolate chips.

Didn’t Blog for 10 Days

Can you use Blog as a verb? I guess I just did. Anyway, it isn’t that I haven’t had a lot of interesting things to Blog about; I’ve just been busy doing other things, like feeding Aidan, playing with Alex, sleeping, playing Civilization 4, getting on the radio, or whatever.

Also, I didn’t really want to push those pics of Aidan down from the top :).

Interesting Outlook Problem

A customer was complaining that she wasn’t getting any e-mail. Of course, I figured that it was a typical problem where the customer was working offline and didn’t think much of it. That turned out not to be the case so, I had to do some investigating. Eventually, the customer told me that sometimes she would see the some of the missing message in the Large Mail search folder. I started my search there and found that some of the messages were indicating they were in the folder “Top of Information Store”. This was odd, because mail never really goes there. I could not seem to figure out why this was happening, so, I was about to delete the customer’s mailbox and re-create it again. Before I did that, I wanted to see if there were any rules I need to make note of because they would be deleted along with the mailbox. That is when I saw it, the customer had a rule that said mailbox sent to the customer should be moved to “customer name – mailbox” or, the root folder, also known as, “Top of Information Store”. Mystery solved, rarely do I enjoy the helpdesk type work I get stuck with way too often, but this one was kind of fun.

Aidan in his Crib

I don’t know why but I put Aidan in his crib tonight while we were putting Alex to bed. Aidan sleeps in his cradle in our room and the crib is in Alex’s room. He smiled so big, I just had to grab the camera.

Today is my Birthday

I’m twenty-eight years old today. I guess that qualifies as pushing thirty.

General Class Ham Radio License

Back in October, I passed the Morse code exam, one of the required elements for the General Class License. Last week, I passed the written exam. The General license allows you to operate on almost all of the amateur radio frequencies, using CW (Morse code), voice, or data communication modes.

So far, I’ve made four contacts using my new license privileges, three yesterday, to Vermont, Indiana, and New Hampshire, and today’s contact was to the former Yugoslavia, now known as Serbia and Montenegro.

Unfortunately, those contacts were made using single side band voice. I have yet to actually get good enough at using Morse code to copy weak signals. I often call CQ and get no response; it could be that my sending is just that bad. The catch 22 is, to get good at it, you have to practice a lot, but to make a contact, you have to be able to send and copy the code on the air.