And you thought I forgot

Reviving the old blog.
Its been over a year and a half since I posted anything.  I have some great excuses for that.  Did you know I have two kids now? I am also completely finished with school.  Finally got that second piece of paper.  Following up on my last post I did technically start my last class in Jan 2014.  I failed to mention that I still needed to complete a comprehensive exam in lieu of a thesis.  I am now finally able to admit publicly that it took me two tries, so I did not graduate until Spring of 2015 (exam is offered once a semester).  The way my department runs the exam is to to create a pool of problems from every class offered in your specialty, including all those undergrad classes you had half a decade ago and are jam packed with trick questions.  They randomly pull 10 problems from this pool (and like all good engineering problems, they are usually multi part) and then you are given two hours to complete 7 of them.  My school is quite generous. This is how they manage the fact that you haven't actually taken all the classes in your specialty. The department does show a little magnanimity by allowing you to bring both a pencil AND an eraser to complete the exam.  They also allow a calculator.
So, after off of who would want to take a break?  I mean really, all that wasted time to sit quietly with your thoughts?  I've heard my thoughts and unless I am drunk they do not seem especially interesting. That means I jumped right into new major projects.  The new house is chock full of fun projects.
After we bought it in 2013 (holy cow I have been slack in posting) the first thing we did was gut the kitchen.  Full removal, including a wall.  After replacing it with new kitchen, minus the wall, we had a baby then moved in.  I am not exaggerating the brevity of that time table.  The new baby was born, the plumbers finished a few days later, the baby came home, then we moved to the new house that weekend.  A lot happened in that week.
Now that school is done I have started the next big project.  The new house came with a mostly broken swimming pool. The repair process has evolved into a full back yard remodel.  Currently the yard is completely cleared, the pool is partially repaired (with a whole bunch of extra rework to make it more functional), and the concrete forms are laid out for the new patio.
Please don't mistake my involvement in this work.  I have hired almost all of it out.
I have managed to complete some small projects. For example I did finally hang that very expensive piece of paper on the wall.

Still trucking

No, I haven't fallen off the face of the planet.
New baby, new house, same job, same school.
Start my last class on Friday.  I think I might take a break after I am finished.  Some place quiet, and maybe tropical.

Oh how times change

Oh, how times changed.  My wife is not a morning person.  Her normal idea of early morning is about an hour after the sun comes up.  On weekends, when there were no real obligations driving our schedule I would wake up by my definition of late, usually around 7, then have a few hours to myself which I would use to get very important things done, like play video games.  My wife would wake up around 9ish, wander into a cup of coffee, then breakfast, then a shower.  When it was all said and done, on the really lazy days, the house would finally be up and ready for the day around 11 am.

Then baby.

Having a child changed all that.  My schedule stays the same.  Even after the infant feeding schedule turned into the toddler approximation of a reasonable routine waking up around 9 was no longer in the cards.  I still wake up at my normal time of somewhere around 6, but I no longer get to sleep in until 7 and more often than not I am up in the 5:30 range.  This is because this is when Max wakes up. 

Today is a perfect example of the change in our routine.  I find the family, at 8 am, playing outside in the last bit of reasonable temperatures before the sun finishes obliterating the prospect of having a good time with out the judicious application of water (either in sprinkler or pool form).  At 8 am, the entire family has been up, had the chance to dress, had a big breakfast of pumpkin spice wafffles (it is technically Autumn now), and I have even mowed the lawn.
Its hard to explain, without getting long winded, how surreal this seems.  In a reasonably short amount of time, we have gone from "don't even try to do anything before 10" to "Its a slow morning because it is after 8 and I have only done one useful thing".

My lovely wife has come such a long way.

I have a feeling this will all change with the arrival of baby #2.  I think we will be back to "don't even try to get anything done before 10".  Not because we are all sleeping in, but because it will take us 3-4 hours to wrangle 2 kids through the morning routine.

3 months later, I remember to post.

So its been a while.  I am sure over the last 3 months I have had a lot to say, I've just said it to people instead of the black hole of the internet.  I've also lost a lot of my disdain for social network, so those venues  have received most of my pictures and posts.
Things are changing around here.  We have been house hunting because we decided we needed a bigger place.  Mostly because by the end of the year we will be upgraded to a family of four. My desire for a station wagon is increasing.  A luxury sport wagon packing a supercharged V8 would be nice, but I would be just as happy with a German biturbo V6.  In reality, if I actually got one it would probably a 10 year old Saturn.  I thought a college degree was going to get me a great job and make me rich.  Maybe my university lost the paperwork for my ridiculously large salary.  I should call them.

Today was fathers day.  I spent most of the day playing with my son.  It was a lot of fun, and I"m sure the grass in my yard enjoyed the extra sprinkler time.

Wish list

Most of you know I want a new car.  My truck is handy.. very handy.. but it isn't much of a family vehicle and is kind of cramped.
It could carry Max in a pinch, but that's about it.  I've been trying to get a handle on my needs for a vehicle, and then balance that with my desires (Bugatti?), and then cap it all under a budget.
I haven't had much success.  I think I finally know what I want and it doesn't exist.  So listen up automotive industry.  I would like a vehicle that has great cargo and hauling space, can seat 5 (which we all know actually means 4) and gets great mileage while still being powerful.  You may think that these desires break the laws of physics.  I say you just aren't trying hard enough.  How about something like a scaled down Chevy Avalanche with a small turbo diesel.  Take the new Chevy Coloroado world truck platform, put on 4 doors and that ridiculously small 4 foot bed, but give it a folding rear cab wall so I can have a 6 foot bed for those odd home depot runs.  Give me a 200+ HP diesel engine with nearly twice as much torque.  I was thinking 240 HP with 375 ft lbs would still be able to return something in the high 30 MPGs on the highway.
Drop the sucker on the market for under 30k and you will realize that the small truck market hasn't died in America, it has just been ridiculously under served and ignored.
Since this doesn't look like it will ever happen.. maybe I will just buy a station wagon.  I hear Audi is bringing more TDI models to the U.S. next year.


*UPDATE*
I looks like Toyota has the basics down in a concept truck they debuted a while ago.
http://www.trucktrend.com/future/concepts/163_0712_toyota_a_bat_concept_truck/photo_03.html
http://www.trucktrend.com/future/concepts/163_0712_toyota_a_bat_concept_truck/photo_06.html

Found some time

Hey look, I found a few minutes to blog.  Max is sick and I had to stay home with him today.  He is napping.. and instead of watching my lecture I decided to make this post. I think my priorities are in the right place.

oh yah.. this thing

School bit me hard, then it was the holidays.  Now I am back to work and school has started again.
ASU has decided that students don't benefit from winter breaks so we get all of 3 weeks off now.  I guess that would make sense if I wasn't a working professional with a family.
I may stop these posts.  I was doing really well at getting 1 a month, but I feel that there are more parts of my life that I am no longer willing to share publicly.

I think I snuck by that one.

I think I was successfully able to sneak by that last birthday.  No party or anything, I didn't even claim my Tuesday game night veto vote.  My wife was awesome and got me exactly what I wanted.
Tom was awesome and got me football.  Don was awesome and got me beer at football.  E and C may have been the awesomest because they got me the ability to go to football with my wife, T, and D.
Thanks everyone.

Ok...  my wife is the awesomest, but seriously Eve and Cody, Tom, and Don:  Thank you.

WOOHOO

Being lazy

Thought this was funny, thought I would share it. RG3PO- the Redskins' new quarterback.

Pictures as promised

I had to go to a third party application to stitch my pre-work photos together which is why this took so long (also.. see my previous post).

I have a bunch of photos I want to post of the backyard adventure, but I know none of you faithful readers really gives a damn.  So here you go.. A pre-work panoramic shot, and a current state panoramic shot.  Its very nice to have a usable back yard.

How it used to be

How it is now

I give up.

Fail.
I give up.  Apparently the only way I am going to solve my photo editing problems is to reinstall windows.  They aren't real problems, and its not a problem with photos.  The problem seem to be with my windows 7 libraries and no amount of rebuilding the databases seems to do any good.  Windows just refuses to properly link the libraries to the programs that rely on them.. like windows live photo gallery (supposed to be the native solution for photo corrections and stitching images together into panoramic shots) and also windows media center (which I use in almost every room of the house). 
This systemic issue has limited the usability of my entire home network of machines.  My media just does not go the places it is supposed to go.  Want to play music from the media center in the living room?  Nope.. the computer is pretty sure there is absolutely no music available on any computer anywhere to play.  Want to look at you photos?  Nope.. sorry, there are no photos on any computer anywhere.. ever.  Period.  Stop asking.
Never mind that if you open the library in say.. explorer.. sure enough everything is there.  If you open a specific file.. sure enough.. there it is.  Ever try to play a play list by manually browsing your network paths using an xbox controller to select and play each individual file?  Of course you haven't because that would be ridiculous.

"Just use itunes.. or a mac.. it just works."  Shut up. You're an idiot.  You really think their god awful solutions would really work better in my situation or perform the functions I need them to?

I think the root of this issue is my use of a home server (i.e. network shares) coupled with some difficult system recoveries instead of a fresh install.  I now recover my system from back ups instead of doing fresh installs (when things like SSDs go bad) because the cable companies (and specifically COX) feel the need to encrypt and control all their media.  This means that if I wipe my machine and start fresh, especially if I do any hardware changes in the process, I have a pretty good chance of locking out playback of any of my recorded TV. 

I guess the answer is to catch up on all my recorded shows and then delete them all so I no longer have any ties to my system in its current configuration.
Come to think of it, unless I do an "upgrade", when I move to windows 8 I will have the same problem.  Just to be clear, this is the cable companies fault, not Microsoft's.

Placeholder

I meant to post this weekend.  The backyard adventure has made significant progress.  I tried to post pictures but was having an issue getting the edits right.. and then I got distracted.  The internet is a hole people.
I will try to get the images up this week.

Time to catch my breath

Took my final on Thursday. It did not go well.  The gold lining (its better than silver) is that the semester is over and since none of the available summer classes are useful to me I will have 3 whole months of "vacation."  Now my job and family obligations will be the only things dividing my time into this neatly managed chaos I call my life.  Wasting none of this precious time my loving slave driver of a wife is whipping me back into action on the backyard adventure.  The scope has expanded a little to also include repainting the exterior of our home since it well overdue.  Luckily she is a kind mistress and isn't asking me to do any of it.  The painters start early Monday morning and expect to be finished that day.
My good friend Erik, who is an architect and has a focus in landscape architecture, fixed my plan and has created a nice design that I will be following pretty closely.  He had some excellent input for my plant choices and pergola and designed a structure that would meet my shade needs. 
We will be making a big push in the next few weeks to get most of the major elements completed (irrigation, trees, lawn, major shrubs).

Road Warrior

It feels like I have been doing a lot of traveling lately.  Its only two trips, and one was really an overnighter, but they all involve flying.  That makes for for the year, and its only April so compared to normal I guess I have been traveling alot.  They are all work related so that means scheduels are tight and my days are busy.  The most down time I get is crammed into a seat on an airplane and the most I get to enjoy of the places I go is looking out the window of the car.
Its ok though, I still get to see new things and I don't mind air travel at all.  I have become rather proficient at handling the modern day hassles.  I don't even get bothered by the people who haven't flown in the last 5 years and are bewildered by all the TSA restrictions (who inevitably hold up the entire line).
Its pretty awesome that my wife is so cool with all my travel.  Its not easy to handle a toddler by yourself.

It just keeps coming

Now its been 3 months.  Fuck you school.
Well, I guess this is a good opportunity to demonstrate my resilience and perseverance in the face of adversity.

yah, its been 2 months

Wondering why its been 2 months since the last post? Life. Shitty shitty life.

Backyard Escapade: Stage 2 is complete

Stage 2 is complete.
First up, a lovely Panoramic shot at the end of Stage 1 (clearing):

The next step involved a lot of help from friends digging and demolishing.  We dug a nice hole for pavers and demolished a fence column (full of concrete) to widen the gate.
The gate has been on my list of desires for a few years now and I am very happy with the extra space.  It is 90% complete in this photo.  I still need to lay a run of step pavers to extend the sidwalk out to match the new gate width and put in the last gate slat (after cutting notches for the hinges).

Before (Stage 0):

After (Stage 2):

Thanks Clark, Tom, and Cody.

The paver patio is a big step and big thanks to Cody for sacrificing so many days to get this done before Christmas.

 

Big hole provided by Tom, Cody, and Aaron.

 

Filling in the whole we just dug.. thanks Cody.

 

So sweet.. Pavers brought to you by Cody, John, and the Corporation of Awesome Wives and Girlfriends.

 Now I can start Stage 3: Trees.

Then its Stage 5 &6, gravel and grass.  I hope to have those done near the end of February (grass planting season).

Baby leaps

First step is done.
It was dark when we finished last night so pics will have to wait, but here is a preview.

Guess what is next on the list.

The Backyard has begun.

Pre:

The Plan: