Happy Birthday Mom!

The Tuesday before last we got the family together to celebrate Mom's birthday. Jay and I drove up to the office, and he got a tour of the new place (and the climbing wall no one can use). We stopped by Dad's desk and picked the garage door opener, then Jay took off. While I worked, Jay headed over to Mom and Dad's house. After reading Jay's blog entry about CO2 detectors, Mom decided new CO2 detectors would be a good birthday gift!
When the afternoon rolled around, I called Jay to let him know Mom would be home around four or four-thirty, and he could spend some quality time with her until it was time for dinner. Dad had reservations at a place across the street, so we took off from work and I got to see his new vehicle. We stood around out front until Mom and Jay showed up, and sat down to wait for my brother and his wife. Dad had to talk them in and eventually we saw them coming from the patio out back of the restaurant. The odds of them jumping the fence and taking a shortcut through the patio were slim since Kristy will be delivering her first baby in two months!
Once they were seated Nick showed me the 3G iPhone he picked up. I played around with it for a while and decided it's kinda neat. Kristy also fielded some pregnancy questions. The conversation died down once the food showed up. Cake and ice cream at home wasn't in the plan this year, so we shared a couple deserts before everyone called it a night and headed home.

Bush Speaks on the Economy

I had to laugh this morning when the usual morning shows were preempted for a speech by our beloved president. Fox put a little stock ticker in the corner of the screen, and I was laughing as the numbers spiraled down from +304 as he kept talking.
I know, I know, I know about cause and causality, but I think think it was a amusing coincidence if nothing else.

Sanctuary For All

I stumbled across this show a couple weeks ago. It stars Amanda Tapping, of SG1 fame and you'll notice cameos from other SG1 cast. Sanctuary started off as a series of eight web episodes, each one is a fifteen to twenty minutes long. I'm not sure they had a ton of money to spend on sets, so it looks like they opted for green-screen special effects. The production values are pretty good, but scenes do look 'weird' once in a while.
I say it started off on the web because it looks like SciFi picked it up as a series for the fall. If you want to see the original web episodes you can find links to them on the Sanctuary fan site or I'm sure you can find them on youtube or bittorrent sites.
If you enjoy scifi, fantasy, X-Files, Buffy, and assorted shows, you might wanna give Sanctuary a try.

Shave and a haircut [explicative deleted]

Friday I worked from home because my co-worker caught something from one of his kids and he sounded like hell when I had to conference him into a call for work. Usually when one of us is out, all hell breaks loose. It wasn't too bad though. Slightly elevated levels of stupidity, but I was able to call it quits around 4:30 or 5pm.

Jay didn't exactly make it through the day unscathed though. He actually has the whole weekend off including Friday, so he was running around doing domestic stuff. Sometime around noon Jay got out the clippers and was going to cut his hair. I was working in the office across the hall when I heard angry yelling. I ran into the bathroom and saw that there was a minor problem. See the picture to the right. Several people (including his Mom) has told him to just shave it all down, but I guess he's going to let it grow out, and just wear a hat to work in the meantime.
Friday night Jay, our friend Bill, and I went to a supper club in Miesville. They had a really great steak dinner. I'm glad I ordered the medium size because I barely finished that!
Saturday was pretty low key. About the only interesting thing we did was drive out to a grocery store in Kasson. Jay read something in the paper about how this little store had 45+ different types of brats. They've got some wild choices like taco, hash browns and cheese, Viking, Packer, bacon cheeseburger and pizza just to name a few.
Today we started watching No Country for Old Men. Jay went to make pancakes about half way through, and our friends Paul and Erin came over. They were going to pick up a litter box, and some cat toys that Snuggle never plays with. Erin joined us for pancakes, and we chatted for a little before they packed up all the loot and went off to look for their first kitty.
We finished watching the movie, and right now we're suffering through Saturday Night Live. Michael Phelps was hosting last night. In case you were wondering SNL still isn't funny. Remember when it used to be funny? Yeah, not since high school.
Later today we're going to a retirement party for a co-worker of Jay's, then back to the grind tomorrow morning.

End of Summer Garden Party and Tour

Yesterday morning I put in a few hours of work. Not the ideal way to spend Saturday morning, but it was something that had to be done during 'off hours.'
When Jay got home from work we went to a party hosted by Jeff Bailey, Amber, and Declan. It was a chance for them to show off their house and the work they had done on it. Their were also some friends there I hadn't seen in a while and it was good to catch up with them. Paul's theory that you don't need TV if you have kids gained more support. Declan got all the grown-ups to sit on the ground around the fire so he could play "Duck, Duck, Come Get Me!"

DirecTV Goes Back to TiVo

Looks like DirecTV might offer HD TiVo receivers again! Woohoo! They briefly offered a HD TiVo, but then killed off support with the switch over to MPEG4. DirecTV has their own DVR which is okay, but like I've said before it's not as polished as a real TiVo.

http://www.engadget.com/2008/09/03/hell-freezes-over-new-directv-hd-tivo-on-the-way/

Wrap Up of the Last Month (or so)

Some events that I haven't gotten around to writing about before now.

The father of a very good friend of mine passed on in early July. He had been sick for a long time so his death wasn't completely unexpected. Jay and I went to the viewing and it was nice to see the 'old gang' again despite the circumstances.

We had a new roof put on the house. Some of the shingles were tearing and it had been showing its age for a while, but it wasn't to the point of leaking or anything. The recent hail storm didn't even look like it took much of a toll on the roof. Jay hired a couple co-workers to do the work. Jay and I pretty much ran around and cleaned up the crap that hit the lawn. We even put in a conduit for the satellite dish so we wouldn't have cables running across the roof and down the side of the house.

Rochester Pride was the same old, same old this year. Jay and I went to the drag show Friday night and met up with our friends Paul and Bill. The music was frickin' loud! We wound up taking off by 10:30 or 11 pm. Jay had to work the next day, but I went down to Central Park for the Pridefest celebration. I ran into a few other friends but didn't wind up staying very long.

Since most of the TVs in our house are now HD sets, and we had the roof done, I figured it would be a good time to upgrade to the DirecTV HD service. After a little bit of haggling I got DirecTV to cut the price for the HD receivers in half. I have yet to get a descent explanation about why they charge customers for leased receivers, but oh well. Well when the guys showed up to install the new equipment I assumed they'd put the dish on the roof where the old one was.

Unfortunately they couldn't get line-of-site to all the HD satellites from the roof, so that conduit we ran to the roof was wasted effort. Eventually they found a corner of the yard where they could mount a dish on a pole. I think it looks kind of white-trash, but meh. The SD DirecTiVo wasn't compatible with the HD service so if anyone out there can use it, let me know! Now we have a DirecTV DVR which I think is less polished, and actually slower than its four year old TiVo counterpart. The HD programming looks nice though.

My friend Paul's birthday party. There were a ton of people there and his boyfriend (Erin) even made him a cellular peptide cake with mint frosting. If you don't get the reference, go watch the Star Trek: Next Generation episode Phantasms.

The company I work for broke ground on a new headquarters (or mothership as the owner calls it) about a year ago. We finally moved in and most of the stuff critical to running the business worked. Power, water, and phones were all in place. Don't laugh, a week before the move the toilets didn't even flush. Some other things like the network weren't 100%. But hey, who needs a stable network in this day and age? Now, almost a month after we moved in the building is still a work in progress. The whole move was handled with the usual company approach: shoot first and someone will sweep up the wreckage later. The thing that really pissed me off though was the e-mail some self-righteous twat in marking sent out. Her 'guide to the new building' basically boiled down to: the company doesn't trust employees, don't touch anything, and big brother (security cameras) is always watching and always recording. Despite all that, the building is kinda cool looking.

We inherited a big-ass 50 gallon fish tank from Jay's parents.

He gave it to them as a Christmas present years ago. They've got so much stuff going on that they felt like they couldn't keep up with it, so now it's sitting in our basement.

Last Sunday Jay and I went down to Winona for his aunt's 60th birthday party. We stopped at Whitewater on the way over to see what things looked like a year after the floods. We met up with Jay's parents at a campground they used to go to. Everyone had problems figuring out where stuff used to be because some of the landmarks are gone.

Last Tuesday was a Home Depot day at Valley Fair, at least for the Rochester store. There were probably about fifteen people altogether. It turned out to be a pretty nice day, sunny but not too hot. Since we went on a weekday, the lines weren't too bad either. We hit all the rides we wanted to by around six, and Jay's manager (our ride) wasn't feeling well so we went home at that point.