Lots of Summer 2005 kids stuff

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Wednesday, July 13th, 2005: Happy Birthday, Payton! Went to my parents this afternoon for a birthday party. Payton got an RC car, an RC hover disc, Pac Man World for Gamecube, Fairly Oddparents for PS2, a Lego car from Jammie, a Lego kit from my parents and some other random small things. The lego kit included a motor and let you build various animals, including a robotic monkey (pictured below) that climbs along a string. Here’s video of it. This evening we went to Casey’s baseball game.

Payton and his cake	Payton opening more presents while Emily assembles his Lego car	Robotic Monkey

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Thursday, July 14th, 2005: Today I took the kids to Wal-Mart. Normally I avoid that store at all costs, but Payton really wanted some toy from there and had birthday money to blow. While they were in the toy isle, I stopped to look at shoes. And a mother and son comes down the isle, arguing with each other. It went something like this:

(whiney voice) “Moooom, I don’t want any new shoes!”
“Your need some new shoes, the ones you have look horrible.”
“But I don’t LIKE any of the shoes here!”
“You need new shoes and we’re buying new shoes today.”

They argued back and forth like this pretty much the entire minute that I was in the shoe isle. But here’s sad part – the son was my age. He looked like a completely normal guy and I’m pretty sure he wasn’t retarded. But he was arguing with his mom about shoes like he was a bratty 5-year-old. Only with a lot more cursing. I shoulda snapped a picture of them.

Later we went to Burger King for lunch. I was hanging around the counter for a few minutes, waiting for somebody to take my order. I decided to show off for Emily and reinact a scene from Family Guy. I grabbed the microphone at the register and said, “Hey, is this thing on? TESTICLES!” Only I didn’t actually push the button on the mic. Emily smiled and said, “Dad, I think she’s ready to take your order now.” I looked over and the cashier is staring at me from the other register. Luckily she seemed somewhat amused by it and didn’t treat me like a bratty 5-year-old for playing with the mic.

After Burger King we went to Target, home for awhile and then to swimming lessons. This evening I taught Emily how to skateboard! She bought a skateboard at Wal-Mart today and this evening she decided to go out and try it out. She came back in 3 minutes later saying she couldn’t stay up on it. So we went out for maybe 30 minutes and I taught her how to stand and ran next to her on it and caught her a few times. A very nice father-daughter moment. Tomorrow we work on turning and I’m gonna loosen her wheels a little. She ended up staying out until 10pm, skatboarding with neighbor kids and then my neighbor Bethany took her to McDonald’s for a Sundae.

Tonight me and the kids watched adult swim and got to see the actual episode of Peter from Family Guy yelling into a fast food mic. I guess it was a new episode and they were just playing the commercial for it all week. It was so nostalgic, seeing Peter reinact my Burger King thing.

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Saturday, July 16th, 2005: Went to the mall book store with the kids. Bought the new Harry Potter book, Matilda, a calendar for Emily and a couple of books for each of them. Then went to Steak N Shake for supper.

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Sunday, July 17th, 2005: Took Emily Payton and Casey to see Fantasic 4 at Eastgate today. Mowed most of the lawn this evening.

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Monday, July 18th, 2005: For some reason I thought today was Tuesday and I took the kids to the Y for swimming lessons. I’m an idiot. Since we were in downtown Alton, we went to the riverfront park for awhile and chased geese around.

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Tuesday, July 19th, 2005: Me and Emily got haircuts. Took the kids to swimming lessons this evening.

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Wednesday, July 20th, 2005: Woke up at 7am, took the kids to get donuts and then to my brothers house. Me, him and Bruce put up a new ceiling in his room today. Went home and worked for a couple hours, then took the kids swimming all day. Had Little Caesar’s for supper.

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Friday, July 22nd, 2005: Two and a half years ago i wrote an article on phonelosers.org raving about how great the Vonage internet phone was. In the article, I put referal codes for people to click on so I’d get money for people signing up. Yesterday I got my first check! $50! And it only took 2.5 years! I rule. That not quite as bad as when I signed up as an affiliate with amazon.com in the late 90’s – my earnings are up to about $12.00 on there today. I have to get up to $25 or $50 to have a check mailed to me.

So my week hasn’t been too exciting. I’ve worked, played, ate, etc. A couple days ago I got up at 7am to go help my brother drywall, then me and the kids went swimming for the day. I spent 4 straight hours in the water, got burned a little. Started the new Harry Potter book that day which so far isn’t too bad. Hrmmm, what else…Jammie and I hijacked murd0c’s journal yesterday which is rather amusing.

This evening we went to Shirley’s house – she was my babysitter until I was about 13 but I still manage to visit her a few times a year. Hung out at her house for about an hour, then went to Wal-Mart and home. Emily rules – the lady in front of us had about 20 items in the express lane so Emily loudly counted each item as it was scanned. They looked back at her a few times.

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Saturday, July 23rd, 2005: Went to a birthday party for Tami’s daughter Alexis. That lasted a few hours, then went home. Took Tami’s kids with me, though, and they spent the night. Had some pizza for supper, sat at the laptop working on web site junk all evening. Gotta love Payton’s shirt in this picture:

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Monday, July 25th, 2005: Today’s weather forecast: “Very hot and humid. Mostly sunny. High around 101. Highest heat index readings of around 115 in the late morning and afternoon. Southwest wind 10 to 15 mph.” OMG HOT! I wonder if it’s safe to hang out in the pool all day when the temperatures are like that. I think that’s what I might end up doing.

Yesterday Tami came and picked up her kids around noon. Then we went to Target for groceries and to buy another birthday present for yet another birthday party. The kids went to this one by themselves and I stayed home. After the birthday party, Beth took my kids and hers to her parents for swimming all day. They didn’t get home until around 8pm. I spent most of the day staring at my laptop screen, working on website stuff. I completed my very first PHP-enabled page!

For the past year I’ve been wanting to insert PHP code into certain parts of phonelosers.org. Every time I’ve tried, I’ve failed. I chalked it up to me being stupid. But then I registered brad-carter.com and had it hosted through Go Daddy and every PHP thing I’ve done on there has worked flawlessly. So it’s the phonelosers.org host that sucks, not me! Which is nice to know. What really sucks is that I don’t understand exactly WHY most code doesn’t work on phonelosers.org. If I knew that, maybe there’d be a way I could work around it. I’d have so much cool stuff on phonelosers.org by now if things would just work right. I really want to create user accounts, themes, shoutbox, instant messaging and integrate the comments system into it all. But nothing seems to work.

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Wednesday, July 27th, 2005: Our cable internet has been spotty since Friday or Saturday. Every day it’s been up just for a few minutes at a time, then it’s down for an hour. Occasionally it works but it’s never for very long. Until the evenings, then it seems to work just fine all evening and all night. But as soon as morning is here, it’s down. For the past 2 days I’ve been using my cell phone as my internet connection during the day. The bad part is that the cable company doesn’t believe me. I tried calling them on Monday and was finally hung up on after being on hold for 10 minutes. So I tried again yesterday. I held for 5 minutes, got a person, they took a report and then they transferred me to repair. I held for another 10 minutes, got a guy in some other department and he transferred me to repair. So I held for another 10 minutes and talked to repair.

I explained the problem to him, assured him that it wasn’t on my end since the neighbor’s internet was out too. He asked me to try a website. I did and it just happened to be working at that time. I should have lied because he then became skeptical of me. He wanted me to go through all the standard troubleshooting routines with him – unplug the modem, disconnect the router, reboot my computer a hundred times, etc. In the end, he refuses to send anyone out. My new theory is that the outage is being caused by the heat since it’s only down in the daytime but works perfectly at night. It’s been in the upper 90’s all week. Currently it’s 68 degrees out (10:00am) and the internet is working. The high today is 80 degrees so we’ll see if the internet holds up. Maybe I can just aim my garden hose at the cable stuff on the telephone pole to cool it down whenever it stops working.

Yesterday I started clearing out my basement. I gave away probably 20 old computers to a neighbor, 10 monitors, a bunch of ISA/PCI cards (apparently they read my ramblings – hi Beth & Ryan!). I gave away an old kitchen sink/counter to another neighbor and I’ve stacked a bunch of ceramic tiles on the porch to list on Freecycle, which I’ll probably do today. I’m probably going to visit NYC next month so my goal is to completely empty out the basement (aside from my office) before I go. Today I have a bonfire planned to get rid of the piles of scrapwood. It’ll be a nice night for it since it’s cooled down so much outside.

We also had swimming lessons yesterday. Payton is getting pretty good with everything. He used to cry when they’d make him jump in the water and eventually the lifeguard would just push him in. Now he just jumps in on his own immediately. It seems like he actually likes it, although he tells me he just does it so they’ll leave him alone about it.

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Wednesday, July 27th, 2005: Beth took Emily and her kids on a walk to the park. A little later, me and Payton went on a walk towards the park too. It took about 20 – 30 minutes to get there. Hung out at the park for awhile, then went across a field and into some woods for a small hike. Once we reached a muddy creek, we turned around and went back. There were 6 kids with us – Emily, Payton, Makenzie, Tristan, Gage and some other 4-year-old whose name I can’t remember. We started walking down Aberdeen, towards the One Stop for sodas. It probably took 30 – 40 minutes to get there. Hung outside for awhile, drinking sodas, then started for home which was another 20 – 30 minutes away. We were going to spray each other down at the car wash since it was kind of hot out, but all the bays were full so we gave up on that idea.

Payton	Emily

I came home and started working. 30 minutes later I hear water running so I go outside to see all the kids soaked with the hose. So I get out their slip-n-slide and they play on that for the next hour. After the kids were inside and dried off, we went grocery shopping at Shop N Save. For the evening, we planned a campfire in the back yard so I could burn up a bunch of the scrapwood in the basement. When we got home I started lugging it all outside. Mac and Beau came over to ask what I was doing and they decided to help me. Within an hour, we had the basement completely emptied of scrapwood. And that was a lot of wood.

We also carried an old bench outside to be burned too. Once we got a small pile started burning, everyone showed up. It amounted to about 3 adults and 10 kids, roasting marshmellows, hotdogs and smores. It was fun but didn’t last too long. Me and Beau were the last ones left so I got bored and put out the fire with the hose and we went inside. I still have a huge pile to burn which maybe I’ll get done this weekend. Or maybe I’ll just put all the wood on Freecycle and somebody can come and take it from me. I just need it to be gone.

Here’s the pile of wood created by me, Mac and Beau	Emily’s guest list – she was trying to figure out how many chairs we needed	The burning bench – aka the camp fire.

A couple days ago, Jammie was talking to Baconstrips on the PLA Voice Bridge and he tried to get Jammie to send him a free PLA t-shirt. Me, being the incredibly nice guy that I am, decided to go ahead and send him a free one. But I didn’t want to blow $10.00 on Baconstrips so I compromised by busting out my Sharpies and making him a customized PLA Harley shirt. I spent about 20 – 30 minutes on it which is more time than I spend on real PLA customers! Here are the pictures of it…

Back of shirt – I didn’t have the patience to write out the original shirt text so I shortened it with a little personalization.	Front of shirt – incidentally, the APC shirt at RBCP’s Closet is no longer available.

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Thursday, July 28th, 2005: From this post on Cal’s: “why the heck would you be hanging out w/ an “X”!!! Nice guy or not that’s just plain ‘ol strange behavior in my book.”

That’s in reference to me and Jammie hanging out with her ex-boyfriend in St. Louis. Is hanging out with an ex really that strange? I’ve stayed friends with many of my exes. I still talk to ex-girlfriends from high school online regularly. (Exes from 15 years ago!) Other exes of mine are married and our kids are good friends together. And most of my long-term girlfriends inevitably end up meeting a few of my exes. My ex-wife used to go to yoga with an ex-girlfriend of mine. In fact, I used to hang out with my ex-wife’s ex-boyfriend from high school. Maybe I am really strange. Or maybe it’s really normal.

Today me and the kids went to Subway for lunch, had swimming lessons and had another campfire & marshmellow roast. Still haven’t made much of a dent in the big pile of wood. But the kids across the street are using it to build a skateboard ramp in the middle of the street.

Built the kids stilts today out of coffee cans and wire.	Emily trying out the ramp	Campfire

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Friday, July 29th, 2005: Work has been really really slow lately. I spent most of today burning lots of wood in the yard while sitting on the deck with my laptop. Made sort of a dent in the big pile of wood but I’ll probably still be burning for another week before it’s all gone. I put it on Freecycle the other day but nobody came to take any of it. Me, Emily, Payton and Casey went to see Sky High in the afternoon. Also, I registered jammie718.com for Jammie today. She really needed a domain. So go there to read all the latest updates on her…from 2001.

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Saturday, July 30th, 2005: I read about 300 pages of Harry Potter 6 today. I’ve done nothing else pretty much all day. The kids were too busy for me most of the day, with their friends being here. Payton and I went to Quiktrip for some chips and soda at some point. And we all watched Eight Legged Freaks on cable this evening which was hilarious.

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Monday, August 1st, 2005: The price for a U-haul truck from Illinois to Oregon is $2,500! The smaller size truck is something like $1,800 but still…that’s expensive! They said the trucks get 10 miles to the gallon which I think would come to another $600 just for gas out there. So right now, a huge yardsale at the end of this month is starting to appeal to me. Most of my furniture is cheap pressboard-type stuff anyway. I can buy brand new cheap pressboard-type furniture once I move! Oh yeah, I’m pretty sure I’m moving to Oregon soon. Like 97.9% sure now. And the idea of leaving everything I own behind and starting fresh with it all is kind of appealing to me.

Jammie convinced me to try out Craigslist.com to sell my furniture. So I set up an account, put up a few classifieds and I’ve already gotten reponses for things. I showed Emily the ads and told her that over the next month, our furniture was likely to start disappearing. She said, “Well at least you’re not doing like mom and telling me that you’re just trying to make more room in the house.” Apparently Emily is still a little bitter over her mom tricking her with the move last year. Anyway, yeah, Craigslist rules. Much better than just giving things away on Freecycle. Thanks, Jammie!

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Saturday, August 6th, 2005: Been selling/giving away lots of stuff this week. This morning some girl stopped by to pick up my treadmill and gave me $75 for it. Then my brother came by and we moved the piano (which he gave to me 5 or 6 years ago) back to his house. Yesterday I gave away my 42″ TV to a friend (it was old) and sold a DVD/VHS cabinet for $15. Plus I gave away a big shelf and clothes rack. The house is slowly starting to look empty. Today Emily, Payton and I spent the day at the City Museum. I think we got there around 2pm and lasted until 10pm there. My feet/legs were a little achey all day, I guess from all the heavy moving I’ve been doing this week, so I wasn’t too energetic. I brought my PHP book to keep me company.

Payton and a snake, getting ready to attack him from behind	Payton walking across a pit of water
I painted on Emily a flower, sunshine and a butterfly. Phear my artistic skills.	And for Payton, a snake.

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Monday, August 9th, 2005: I asked Emily and Payton if they wanted to go swimming today and, of course, they said sure. So we start driving and Emily asks why we’re going the wrong way. I tell her I’ve got to stop by somewhere else first. 20 minutes later, as we’re still going in the wrong direction, she says, “We’re going to Raging Rivers aren’t we?!?” So it was almost a surprise. They thought we were just going to the community pool, as usual.

This was my first trip to Raging Rivers, even though it’s been a mere 30 minutes from me for most of my life. It was a great place, albeit hella expensive. Was $50 for all 3 of us to get in, $5.00 to park in their parking lot, $25 for nachos, hot dogs, chicken strips and drinks, $3.00 for a locker. So in the end, it was 3 or 4 times more expensive than going to the local pool. But we had a great time. None of us had ever been in a wave pool before, which turns the entire swimming pool into a giant mosh pit. Then there was the “Swirlpool” which shot you into a giant funnel, spun you around and dropped you into a pool of water. I was somewhat terrified on my first trip through it but after the first time, Emily and I took another 4 or 5 trips down it.

Their waterslides sucked. They were longer than Wood Rivers but much much slower. We saw the kids’ swimming teacher from the Y who said hi to them. She was a lifeguard there. We also saw my old friend Sheila, who I enjoyed being rude to, and her kids. Hrmmmm, guess that was our day. We stayed until they closed, then drove to McDonald’s/Taco Bell for supper. Here’s some pictures.

This is a shot of most of the park. That’s the Mississippi River in the background.	This is the kid section. I couldn’t get Payton to stop for a picture, but he’s seen underneath the structure, in the middle	Payton and me