Happy New Year to everyone. Here’s hoping 2010 is the best year yet!

Home sick with a nasty stomach thing….so much fun….

I tell ya what, that’s the last time I ever eat that much cabage and sausage….I’m just sayin….

Via Ace.

Now I can eat my salad in style!

I am a blessed man!

I was on the internet before most of my friends and family. Mainly because I went to Georgia Tech and they gave us email addresses back in 1993. Or at least thats when I first started using one.

Anyway, back in the old days, I frequented several user groups dealing with realtime strategy games and military computer games. Back then I had a tag that went at the end of each one of my “posts”. I would change what the tag said from time to time and they were pretty random.

I did a search tonight and found some old user group postings that are still out there in cyber space. Some from 1994, but most from 1998 and 1999. Here we are 11 years from the oldest post and they are still out there for everyone to see. Let that be a lesson to you!

Anyway, here are some of the tags I used back then. Like I said, these are pretty random.

Save the whales! Collect the whole set.
—
Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips
over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come – Matt Groening
—
All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power – Ashleigh Ellwood Brilliant
—
The day after tomorrow is the third day of the rest of your life – George Carlin
—
So many stupid people, do few comets

So long ago!

My buddy John took me hunting Saturday afternoon and I finally got a deer! Yay me!

Just a little doe, but it’s something.

She stepped out with another, smaller doe around 6pm. They both stopped at the edge of the power line easement we were hunting and looked right at me. I waited until they starting moving into the easement, then I put my gun up and lined them up. Just into the easement the bigger doe stopped, and then the little one stopped right in front of the big one. They were broadside to me and technically I could have shot both with one bullet, but I didn’t want to get greedy. So, I lined up on the bigger one and shot.

The shot was around 110 yards or so and it dropped the bigger doe right there. The smaller one ran off into the woods, stopped and looked at me. I chambered another round and hurried a shot, which missed.

There was still 20 minutes of shooting light left, so I was going to stay in the blind to see if anything else was going to come out, but I noticed the deer I shot was moving. Looking through the scope, I could see her moving her head and trying to stand up.

I didn’t want her to get up and run off and I didn’t want to cause undo suffering, so I gave up the hunt and walked over to her.

When I got to her, it was obvious what had happened. I had shot her in the spine and paralyzed her from the front shoulders back. She was trying to stand up with her two front legs. She was thrashing her head about when she saw me, but then she settled down and just looked at me. I felt bad for botching the shot, so I quickly put her out of her misery.

I hate making bad shots. I even talked myself through the shot, but I still hurried it and shot high. I usually shoot high and right. This shot appeared to be right on, just high. Oh well, at least my poor shot didn’t cost me a deer.

The season ends Friday, so I am going to go one more time Wednesday afternoon. I hope to take Nate and I hope to see something. More for his sake than mine.

I had to purchase printer ink today because I had to print a report with lots of color pictures. I normally print to our copier for two reasons. The first is that it is MUCH quicker than my little desktop printer. The second is that the copier uses cheap toner while the desktop printer uses some exotic ink made from baby seals, uranium and the sap of a redwood tree. One particular 5,000 year old redwood tree, named Herman.

But…I needed color prints.

So, I ran down to the local office supply store and bought a new black and color cartridge. If you are thinking how much cheaper it is to just get the cartridges refilled, you are right, but that usually takes at least a day. I don’t have a day. I have TODAY.

After signing a second mortgage on Casa de WunderKraut, I finally had the ink in my hands.

This brought to mind a funny info graphic I saw last month. Via The Consumerist:

I feel fine….

I feel happy….

Yeah, so the family desktop caught a virus. Its that dang Virus Scan 2009 or whatever that pops up to tell you that you have a bazillion infections and you need to buy their product. Oh, it also puts nice pr0n links on your desktop. Lovely little thing.

For whatever reason, it keeps slipping past my virus scanner. If I catch it, I can kill it before it installs, but this time it did it to either Jen or the kids and well, its dead Jim!

But on the plus side, I was running out of room on my hard drive and that hard drive was 4 years old, so it gave me an excuse to do a clean install on a new hard drive.

The biggest issue right now is getting Norton back on the computer. I swear, Norton has THE WORST website I have ever seen! No joke. It took me 30 minutes of hunting around the site to find a place to log into my account. That tends to be one of the first things people need to do you know…geesh.

Anyway, I found my license and yet trying to download it caused the site to time out. Sitting on hold for 40 minutes last night was no fun. I logged a service ticket today. Maybe I can get this thing resolved.

Once I get Norton back up and running, I will either hook up the old hard drive to get my data or use my Carbonite backup. I would rather get it from the hard drive as that would be faster, but not sure if it will work. The virus lives in the registry and is not attached to the files I need, so the risk is very low, but not sure I can get it to do what I want. We shall see.

Not having the desktop has cut into my writing time. I could use our laptop, but the “A” key has gone missing. Oh sure, you can still type an “a” but it takes a bunch of effort and really slows things down to a crawl. Who knew so many words have the letter “a” in them?

The home computer rebuild is going very well. I settled on using ESET virus scanner. It had good reviews and I like that its not a giant like Norton or McAfee.

Some of the issues I was having were because Mediacom decided to have an outage. Silly me thought it was because of things I was doing.

For some reason my ATI video card driver started acting up once I installed a few of the Windows updates. So I had to uninstall and reinstall that.

Last night I was able to use SharePOD to bring our music over from the iPod.

Finally, I loaded up Carbonite and started downloading my back up files. I never did a full system back up, only the things I care about. That meant that all our pictures, movies and various goodies were backed up. 6,542 files later, I now have all the esentials on the computer.

The old hard drive was junked up with random programs I had used over the years, so it is nice to have a clean computer. The only thing I am going to install at this time is Pinnacle Studio so I can FINALLY work on the Christmas DVD….

REPOST: Today is the 2 year anniversary of Mei joining our family. Some call it Gotcha! Day, we call it Mei Day!!! Thought I would repost what I wrote that day 2 years ago. Hard to believe it has been that long.

Original Post:

This is just a brief followup to my post about getting Mei. To recap, we flew to Nanchang today and were told we would get our babies today, not tomorrow. I am too tired to write how I feel and what all this means to me, but rest assured I am on the verge of tears. I can’t believe she is finally here.

Thank you for all your prayers and support. Continue to pray for us and our bonding time with our new daughter.

Here are some videos from today. I did not get the moment Jen was handed the baby as I was taking a picture.

Part I

Part II – about half way through. The first half is of another family (Moore’s). Then you see us.

Part III

Thank you Jesus. Man God is too good to me to have blessed me with four wonderful kids and a perfect wife. He has blessed me. I don’t deserve any of it, but He loves me enough to bless me.

I am a blessed man, a blessed man.

So what do you do when you don’t have much money and the wife has left you alone with three kids for the night?

Easy….

Make three different types of Rice Krispies treats…..

I was listening to NPR’s Morning Edition on the way to work this morning. Why? Because our radio stations suck and I didn’t want to hear “Free Bird” for the millionth time…I really need to get satellite radio…

Anyway….

They had an interview with Shankar Vedantam, who according to NPR “is a science writer for The Washington Post and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University”. He has written a book called The Hidden Brain which deals with the fact that we have conscience and an unconscious parts of our brain. The topic caught my interest and it was a very interesting interview.

The basic premise is that no matter what your conscience brain decides, there is always the hidden brain at work. Meaning that you may lean towards certain political parties or types of work or anything, not necessarily because you reasoned it out in your conscience brain, but because of input from your unconscious brain.

To explain what the heck he was talking about, the interview turned to race.

From the time we are born, our hidden brain starts to make associations about the world around us. I am not a professional but I figure our brains do this to make things easier. If we can establish a pattern, then you do not have to remember as much, you just look for the pattern. Broad generalizations work well too. All these associations and generalizations happen behind the scenes and can influence the conscience brain.

This line of thought clicked with me and it really got me thinking.

We are raising our kids to be color blind. That is sometimes difficult to do in the Deep South because our children will run into lots of opportunities for them to form broad generalities and stereotypes. We have always been this way with our kids. Practically, we do not identify people by their skin color. If our kids, who are currently a minority at their public school, are telling us about their friends, we don’t ask if they are white or black. Sometimes they volunteer the information which usually comes out as them saying their friend is “brown”. Our oldest is 9 and I have begun to talk to him about the South and slavery and the Civil Rights movement. Nothing deep, just explaining that there was a time, not to long ago, where we treated people who were different from us very badly. Often times these conversations come up after some program at school. I want him to have the truth and my prayer is that he learns to avoid stereotyping people and to give everyone the same chance.

Now….here is where the premise of the book got interesting to me.

Let’s assume that you lived in a community with a small African American population, and lets assume that the small population was predominately upper middle class. Let’s also assume that there was a small Hispanic population that was predominately below the poverty line. A child being raised in such a community would begin to form certain associations. Namely that in his city, black people were the same as him and that Hispanic people were poor. This kid may have great parents who are teaching him that judging someone because of their race is stupid and that we should give everyone a fair chance. In his conscience brain, he KNOWS this….but his Hidden Brain is screaming “Yeah, but look around you!!!!!”

Here in our town, its about a 50-50 split between white and black. It may actually be a majority African American city now, I don’t know. In our town the majority of the people living in poverty are black. In our town the majority of crimes committed are committed by African Americans. That is the reality in which I am raising my kids.

Why is it this way? I believe it has NOTHING to do with a persons race, rather it is a product of opportunity and history (they have only had 40 years of “equality”) and more importantly the breakdown of the basic family unit. Then there is the U.S. governments war on poverty which has doomed millions to a life of dependence. In the inner city you have MULTIPLE generations living dependent on the government. You have little boys talking about what they are going to do when they go to prison…I am not joking…that was one of the saddest stories I have ever heard…

So there it is. There is the reality that my children see everyday and there are the basic truths we are trying to teach them that “all men are created equal”. Its a war for their minds. Ultimately, they will have to make up their own minds and I hope and pray that they make good choices.

At the end of the interview they talk about whether or not color blindness is in fact a good thing. It’s an interesting thought. I think that while we try to live color blind, as the kids get older I am finding that I am able to discuss race more openly with them. Such as telling them about poverty and dependence on the government and talking about why the African American community in our town is plagued with poverty and crime. It gives me the chance to point out that these issues have nothing to do with the actual color of a persons skin, but rather from a spirit of poverty, poor decisions, the lack of fathers, etc.

So we shall see. I may wait for this book to come to my local library and check it out. It is an interesting premise.

….Clowns are evil….

Given my irrational hatred of clowns (see here), I love this Wal-Mart commercial:

Further proof that clowns are of the devil.

Just above clowns on the evil list are mimes and garden gnomes…

I know we live in a free country, but come on, there should be laws against this. I mean, nothing good can come from this:

International Clown Hall of Fame

*shakes head*

I read through their website, or as I like to call it “Clown Propaganda”. Chilling stuff man, chilling stuff.

Says their site:

Dedicated to the preservation and advancement of the “Art of Clowning.”

Um….there is an “Art of Clowning”? I thought it was just called being creepy. Didn’t know there was an art to that.

…this museum maintains a vast archive of clown artifacts and library

Artifacts forged by Lucifer himself! I imagine squirting flowers, buckets of confetti, horns, red noses, pentagrams, voodoo dolls…you know, typical stuff.

Learn about the different types of clowns and their contributions to “Let the Laughter Loose”

Hold on a second, there are different types of clowns?!?!? How can this be? I have seen one to many clown movies, so I understand that to “Let the Laughter Loose” is clown speak for kill everyone!

I vote we march on West Allis, Wisconsin with pitchforks and torches and demand that these clowns cease their clowning ways and rejoin civilization or be forced into Clown Re-Education Camps.

Update: He made it out of surgery ok.

My brother-in-law, Jon, is having his tonsils taken out today….at the ripe age of 30.

After having read up on the procedure and watched a few YouTube videos (which I will spare you), all I can say is no fun….

Here’s to a speedy recovery!

For some strange reason, I woke up with the theme song to “The Greatest American Hero” running through my head…

It’s a busy weekend at the WunderHouse.

Jen and the kids are heading down to her sisters house for the day. They will have a great time!

I have to go into work for a few hours to finish up something. Not something I like to do, but it isn’t too bad.

Then I may go shopping and later I may start painting the room recently vacated by Madi and Mei.

Jen and I have been having lots of discussions about the house, mainly the kitchen. If you remember, last year we had the floor retiled and I painted the walls. However, the BIG ticket items still remain. Namely, replacing the cabinet doors, the hardware and the drawers. Right now the drawers do not have nice slide rail things….its just wood on wood. Then we need new countertops and backsplashes and finally we need to remove the oven and stove and replace it with an all in one unit. The wall of cabinets that is currently housing the oven would then be turned into a pantry. An honest to goodness pantry!

Here is what it looks like now:

Anyway, I figure that may cost $10k. Then there is the hall bathroom which needs to have the floor replaced. So add a bit more to that.

So, how to pay for it all? Yeah, that’s always the trick isn’t it.

At this point saving up for it would take oh, I don’t know, a year and a half….IF nothing else came up….I could use my yearly bonus to help, but that is never a sure thing and Jen wants to go to Disney before the kids go off to college.

Luckily I think we have a good solution. We have a loan that we will finish paying next March (2011) so the thought is we are currently paying a loan payment, so why not just get another loan for the improvements and knock it out at one time? This move would be budget neutral and would get the house “Sale Ready” if we decided to sell it.

Speaking of…It was around this time 8 years ago when we bought this house. I remember because Jen was BIG pregnant with Charlie and we were in the house about 2 months before he was born. Anyway, at the time I had this grand idea of a Five Year Plan.

The plan was to clean up the house and sell it after 5 years and buy a bigger one in a nicer area. Well, then we had another kid, then we had yet another kid….. The next thing we knew we had been here 7 years! Last year Jen and I talked about what to do and we decided that you know what, a bigger place would be nice but we don’t NEED a bigger place. So we decided to stay put for now.

But we would at least like the place to look nice if we are going to stay here….and if not…having the kitchen redone will definately help the house sell.