Family reunion via Facebook and Halo

Just wanted to share this weird experience I've recently had;

A little background; When I was 10, my mother had remarried, and my half-sister was born. I left home at 18, and my sis was 8 and just didn't get along with my mother. Long story short, I've seen my little sister very infrequently since then, once for sure when I got married and she was 11 or 12, can't really remember seeing her at all during her teen years. Her and my mother moved out of state, etc.

Awhile ago, I added my little sister to my facebook friends. She's 19, now, and recently had a baby. Very weird, because, in my mind, she's still this little 8 year old girl, and I used to babysit her husband.

I had some facebook post, an update to my gamercard, and she replied, very excited that I had played ODST. I asked her if she plays Halo, and next thing I know, she and her husband are on my xbl friends list.

Just... weird.

Then I had this freak out thought that she might actually be a better player than me! I used to have to help her on NES Super Mario Brothers! Checked out her bungie profile, and was releived to see that my k/d is much better than hers, but she's definitely a lot more productive with her br and sniper rifles than I am.

The thought occurred to me that I might have at some point, played against her or him. I'm freaking out at the thought that teabags might have been exchanged.

Posted by jikado @ 2:45 pm EDT | Permalink | 2 Comments

Rewards of not smoking

     My wife and I both quit smoking about a year ago. About 3 months ago we got her a new laptop as a "reward" for quitting, although I must say that not smoking is it's own reward. So, she's got her laptop and that was that. Then, the other day, she asks what I want to get for me as a "quitting" reward. My ears pirked up. I hadn't even really considered it, but now, since she asked, it's all I can think about.

     We're not rich, but we ain't broke, either, so I figure she got an $800 laptop, I can figure about a $500 reward area. I hardly ever spend any money on myself, even less now without the smokes, so the idea of being able to get myself a "big ticket" item is pretty exciting. The last time I did something like that was 4 years ago when I got my HDTV. I don't even buy many games, really. So, what to do with about $500?

1. PS3 w/LBP, and a second controller? Probably not...

2. $500 Best buy shopping spree? This sounds fun. The "money" is actually a reward my wife got from her work. It's basically a blank gift card. There's an amount, but no retailer attached to it. They have a list of participating retailers, and you assign the card to one, and Best Buy is one of them, as is amazon.com. The best buy option would allow me a good amount of damage. A turtle beach headset, L4D, Fable 2, Fallout 3, an lcd pc monitor, couple of dvds that I've passed up on...

3. Amazon.com pc upgrade. I think this is what I'm going to end up doing, but this is where I need help from 2o2p. I built this pc a couple of years ago. It was the first I've ever built by myself from scratch. I built it cheap, getting some parts used, and from all over the internets. What I want to do is get it up to speed so that it could comfortabley run vista, not that I would install vista, but as it is now, I don't even think I could. Here's what I htink I need to improve; New, 200-300 GB HDD, at least another GB of memory, a current-gen video card, hopefully  a capture card, a light-weight decent looking lcd monitor, probably even a new processor. Then, maybe a new case with some kind of wicked quiet cooling system. What I DON'T need is some awesome gaming pc.

Thing is, I don't even know where to begin. I mean, I did this once, but now, I can't even figure out if my mobo would support an upgrade. I can't figure out what type of socket the processor is, it took me a few minutes to figure out that I'm currently using an AGP graphics card, but I'm not sure if that was because it's what I had, or if it's all that was available on the mobo. Where do I go on my computer to see who made my motherboard? I've lost all of my instrucion manuals and boxes. I could just opne it up, but I don't think tha't sgoing to tell me anything, other than "You need a can of compressed air". How can I tell how much memory it will support, what socket type the processor is? All of this work that goes into it just makes me want to just keep trudging along with the pc I've got now, keep dealing with it's sluggishness, keep trying to manage my files to fit on the HDD, etc., and just go back to option #1.

I ran dxdiag and this is what I got;

       System Manufacturer: NVIDIA
       System Model: AWRDACPI
               BIOS: Phoenix - AwardBIOS v6.00PG
          Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2800+,  MMX,  3DNow, ~2.1GHz
             Memory: 1024MB RAM

Ugh, just reading this now is giving me a headache. I hate the pre-packaged compaq stuff you see at best buy, loaded with all it's ad-ware that they charge you to remove. I don't need all the stuff that comes with a new pc, I've got the perfect mouse, a good, solid keyboard. They always want to throw in a printer that I don't need, to replace the one I don't use now.

I miss my "computer guy" friend I had back then. When I say I built my pc from scratch, what I mean is I asked him what to do and just did whatever he said. I think what I did was build an uglier, cheaper clone of his pc.

 

Posted by jikado @ 12:57 am EDT | Permalink | 1 Comments

Go. Do.

http://www.metallica.com/index.asp?item=601119

 

New Metallica Single "The Day That Never Comes".

That is all for now.

Go. Do.

Posted by jikado @ 2:22 pm EDT | Permalink | 4 Comments

Good daycare is hard to find, unless you get lucky.

     I think one of the toughest challenges of having children is when the time comes for you to leave them in the care of another person. For about 10 hours of the day, that person, or people, are your replacements, responsible for raising your children as you would. One needs to find someone that connects with your family on many levels, agrees with certain principals and morals. A daycare provider needs to understand the levels of discipline needed for your child to have a continues set of boundries, even when you're not there.

     Until recently, my kids had been going to a childcare center. One of those 'stores,' where there are teams of women, each focusing on a specific age group in seperate rooms. This worked pretty well for my wife and I. We never had to worry if one of the women needed a vacation, there'd be other women there to watch our children. Our kids were getting plenty of social interaction; with so many 'watchers' there, they were able to have plenty of kids running around, playing together. All of these things came at a cost, however. We learned that we had been paying more for just 2 days a week than our neighbors were paying for an at-home childcare for a full week.

     We had to get in on that. We started our search in the regular classified section of the paper, didn't really find anything. Online searching seemed more promising at first, until we realized most of the online information was beyond out-of-date, and if we wanted better search results, we'd have to join one of the pay sites. Eventually, we came across one lady who was just resuming her business after hanging it up for a while.

     She seemed to have her ducks in a row, so we decided that we could leave our kids with her for a few hours every day. I won't say that I regret ever doing so, but looking back on it now, I wish had continued to look a bit further. Not that this first lady is completely a terrible person, I just don't think she was ready to resume her business of in-home daycare, or to handle a 5 year old boy. All of her experience seemed centered around infants, which is fine for my 1 year old. One of the problems, I think, is that she didn't have any other kids there, aside from her own 1 year old girl. So my 5 year old, the one had spent his whole life in a day care center full of other kids to play with, was now stuck spending his days with only 2 babies for company. I'm not trying to make excuses for his behavior, just pointing out possible causes. Most of his behavior problems here are just a matter of listening to the adult in charge, and eating his vegetables. I had never heard any complaints about his behavior in the almost 5 years he had been at the center. After less thana month, this lady gives us a 2 week notice that she will no longer care for our oldest child. She's fine with the youngest, but not the oldest. Well, we're not going to split our kids up between two daycare providers. I really thought we were about to get into a pretty hairy pickle. We now have two weeks to find affordable daycare, when it took us almost  a month to find this one, and I thought that was by just dumb luck.

     Luckily, however, I was able to strike gold on my first call yesterday. At least I believe so. The first number I called was a woman listed on the state's website of liscensed providers. I said she had an opening for my 5 year old, but not my one year old. Knowing that these things aren't always up to date, I called and asked. She confirmed what I had thought, and said she had openings for both of my children, and agreed to meet with me last night at 6. I arrived a little early, and ended up staying for over half an hour, with my youngest in tow (my wife had stayed home to take the oldest one swimming, we though it best if he didn't know about all of this, so he couldn't hold it as leverage with his current daycare provider). This new woman is perfect for our family. She's got 3 other kids the same age as my oldest, all starting kindergarten at the same school in the fall. One other kid already goes to that school, he'll be starting second grade. She's got 2 other kids about the same age as my youngest. She's got a big, huge yard with trees for the kids to climb on, a little wooded area where they build forts, a playground area with a swingset. She's been in this business for over 20 years! I called 2 references so far, one of them currently has 2 children enrolled, and the other had her kid there from the time it was an infant to the time it was 11 years old. Both were just pouring out praises for this woman, and her helpers. Her helpers consist of her mother, 2 'adult' ( 18 and 19) daughters and her 15 year old son. All of this, plus her rates are actually less than our current provider.

     My kids won't start there until after the fourth, but I can't wait. If I were a kid, that's where I'd want to be.

Posted by jikado @ 7:22 am EDT | Permalink | 2 Comments

First 48, tonight at 8 p.m. Central time

    Just want to put up a word to let people know that tonight, at 8 p.m. central time ( 9 eastern) on A&E's show "The Fist 48," they will be covering the investigation of the murder of Kristine Larson, my wife's cousin. I've blogged about it before. Most of the family is unsure if they're even going to watch it. There's going to be some information on here that the family is not even aware of.
I hate asking for money, but while I've got your attention;

A memorial fund has been set up to help with funeral costs and for her 2 year old son Darion: of which Kristine's mother, Deb, and her husband, Dan, are in custody of.

If you would like to help the fund is located at:

Anchor Bank
1030 Hastings Ave.
St. Paul Park, MN 55071

Just to add to that, this family is in the middle of a real bad series of events, starting with the murder of Kristine, then last week, Kristine's grandmother passed away, and just yesterday, Krisitine's step-brother (Dan's 16 year-old son (Dan, by the way, was once a member of this site as Lester Ziggs, and a founding member of GSN) had to have open heart surgery to remove some stuff that had been covering the outside of his heart. The same kid may also possibly have thyroid cancer. The financial costs of all of these events is really mounting.

Thanks for reading, sorry it's such a downer of a blog, I'll try to post something more cheerful later, maybe some pics of nekkid chics, or something.


Posted by jikado @ 3:28 pm EDT | Permalink | 0 Comments