Kevin Lawver's blog about life, programming, culture and learning.
I took the boys to Tybee Island today, nominally, to go a photo safari. I had my lovely Nikon D80. Max was sporting the Powershot and Brian had the backup Samsung. Of course, I knew we wouldn’t be taking pictures for long after they saw the water. I got a bunch of shots in, though, since I wasn’t going to near the water.\
Here are a couple of my other favorites from the set:
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So, I am totally obsessed with this rental house we’re in. Like, cataloging both its faults and its features. It’s for sale, (for more than I think it should be, but I don’t know anything about the Savannah market.) and it would be both cheaper and easier if we just bought this house instead of some other house in the same basic neighborhood. My list so far:\
Good:\
The sun doesn’t BEAM into the house through the windows, so we can actually have our blinds up all of the time. (We could never do this in Va, due to how the house was oriented. People thought I was a vampire, I am sure.)\
The backyard is really shady and level.\
Large family room.\
Large bedrooms, including master big enough for K’s office.\
Pantry (this somewhat makes up for the smallish kitchen).\
Door to backyard from master. This is great when the kids get dirty, we just shuffle ten feet to my shower. (The door to the backyard from the mudroom didn’t turn out to be so useful- yet.)\
Situated so that we don’t have to see our neighbors if we don’t want to.\
Shed.\
Attic.\
Skylights in master bath and hall bath.\
Bad:\
Side of the house with the driveway is on a “busy” neighborhood street.\
No sidewalks, but this might be true everywhere.\
Kitchen is kind of small.\
Wallpaper/painted walls not to my liking.\
Peel and stick tile in 2 bathrooms and mudroom.\
House trim needs to be repainted.\
Sky-lights in the family room make it really hot and too-bright in certain spots.\
Probably the biggest negative is that there isn’t any wow factor. For some reason, this just doesn’t feel like my house. I guess I should make the decision based on financial criteria rather than emotional, but I don’t think I can. I LOVED my house in Va within 3 seconds of opening the front door. I want that experience and passion again. On the other hand, being detached emotionally frees me up for other things- like cooking- instead of decorating, painting, etc!
Kevin is working way too much. He’s up everyday before the alarm and is even out of the house before I wake up.\
I am not sure if it is because we are new here, because we are renting, or maybe just due to it being summer, but I feel like I am on vacation with no to do list. Wheeee. The boys and I just goof around all day until it’s time for me to make dinner. And I actually have been cooking, even breakfast! (The boys got used to having a hot breakfast after a week at Babb’s house and a week in a hotel. Boo. No more cold, continental ones for them. Ha.) Last night I made enchiladas and tortilla soup for the first time and they turned out fabulously!! Sadly, Kevin worked really late and missed the first presentation.\
The house is nice, but the kitchen is a bit small. Everything is a mess, but a functioning one. I am not even bothering to unpack everything. There are still boxes everywhere and I don’t really plan to change that, since we don’t have any visitors coming soon :(. The boys are sharing a room, one room is a play room that no one uses- but it’s pretty, one room is full of food storage, and that leaves the master for us and K’s not-yet-set-up office.\
The boys seem to be happy but miss Kevin. Max has been alternating between playing on the computer and reading Harry Potter. Brian flits from toy to toy. He likes to run and scoot around the circle of the house (living room to dining room to kitchen to family room to entry way to living room, etc). We also play in the sprinklers a lot and then he hops in the shower to get his feet clean. We don’t have tv yet, so in the wee morning when I am not ready to be awake and in the afternoon before Brian crashes for a nap, we watch the same 4 videos. The other day I splurged and bought Flushed Away, so make that 5 videos.\
That’s pretty much our life so far!
Today is Kevin’s last day at AOL. He’d been there for 13 years. Can you imagine? That is the same amount of time spent in school. AOL helped him find his passion, meet like-minded people, travel the world, pay off my student debt (hey, super thanks for that), and develop into an awesome web dude. Over 100 people went to his goodbye party. Which, wow. Thanks, AOL. You’ve been awesome to us, which we’ll always appreciate. Bye now. Have a great summer. Keep in touch!\
ETA- Oh noes! Kevin doesn’t have the internet attached to his hip anymore. I am going through withdrawal already.
I took that with my lovely new camera the other day on my way out the door. Spring is here, and that means my allergies are going crazy.\
Things are crazy right now. I might get back to regular blogging (you know, more than once or twice a month) in the near future. Or not. I post much more often over on twitter, and semi-regularly on the ficlets blog (where I try to pretend I know something about writing).\
I’m working on an all-new blogging tool for this blog. I’m doing it for fun as a break from work, so don’t expect to see it anytime soon, but it’s been a lot of fun to play with. Lawver.net has been running Movable Type for almost six years, and actually hosts several blogs scattered over a couple of different domains. I like it and all, especially the static publishing that allows this site to be somewhat performant even when Dreamhost has database issues (which seems to happen more often than not, unfortunately).\
It’s Saturday afternoon, which means it’s time to go get the boys ready to head over to my parents’ house so Jen and I can go on a date. Hooray, date night!
Kevin has the stomach flu. 🙁 He took a couple of vaction days and it totally blows that he is sick instead. Booooooo.
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What you see above is an entire episode (lucky #13) of the public access show I was a part of back in Tucson. It was called Tech X and was nominally a computer call-in show. We took a few computer calls, but had much more fun screwing around with our friends and making fun of the callers, each other and saying extremely inappropriate stuff.\
I only did about twenty episodes. I watched a few on the plane today, and the first five or so are really painful to watch. By episode ten, though, when we moved to Saturday nights at 10 (opposite the local news and then SNL), we really picked up steam. We were actually funny for short stretches!\
I played Otto the HED and was basically a fat head floating behind the two “stars” of the show, Lee King and Hugh Mongous. Yeah… ummm… just watch it. Or don’t. You’re an extremely strong or masochistic human being if you can make it to the end.
Well Steve got me, and well, since I’m awake and everyone else is in bed, why not? I like a meme as much as the next guy, so I’ll play along. Here are five things you probably don’t know about me, even if you’ve been reading this blog for almost eight years:
Jen already posted her list, but since I’m in California, I’m not late with mine. I honestly can’t believe it’s been ten years. It certainly doesn’t feel like it. She said all the important stuff – that it’s been way easier than we thought it would be, and while we’ve had “issues” over the years, we’ve figured them all out together and come out the other side stronger and happier for it. Jen puts up with a lot. I travel too much, work long hours, am distracted when I’m at home sometimes (part of my New Year’s resolution, and I’m getting better, but it’s still hard to switch gears) and other stuff that’s not as important, but probably just as annoying.\
Jen already gave a partial list of stuff that sticks out to me, but I was thinking about it last night, and here are some other things that have made the last ten years fly by:
After I posted my New Year’s Resolutions, I started thinking about taking control of my time, and what I was really trying to do, and it’s come down to a single goal: reducing my guilt. I have goals and ambitions, things I want to accomplish, help with, and see get done. These things keep getting put in a bucket, and it’s now full to overflowing. It’s a massive burden of guilt (self-inflicted, of course) that’s not helping me get my time under control, or more importantly, my health.\
So I’m doing something about it… Instead of fooling myself into thinking that I’ll have some great meadow of free time open up, I’m admitting defeat and removing goals. It’s not easy. Here’s what I’m doing about it: