Yes, I'm alive!

In case anyone wondered, yes, I'm alive.
Thanks for calling to check on me, FO. :)

I have lots of things to write about and some cute pix and videos that I'm going to try to put up soon. Things are going well at Casa de H. We had plans for Jen's cousin with the twin boy babies to come over for dinner last night, but they fell through. Oh well. We're going to play Halo 2 and maybe some Burnout 3 on Xbox. We've been playing a ton of Burnout. It's a great, great game.

Here are two videos of Brendan playing. He's so much fun to be around!





Lately, I've had a little bit more free time on my hands, which is good, but I still feel like I'm too busy. The consulting has slowed down, but now I'm really working on mom's website. I'm trying to get her to start using Google ads and we're working on getting new pieces up for sale. It's good experience, but I don't think I do it fast enough. Oh well.

Andy is getting cuter and cuter. He'll lay on his belly for a while now without getting fussy, and he rolls around under her baby gym a lot. He makes lots of facial expressions and noises too. He's generally a good little baby, and he just adores Brendan. Brendan seems to get along well with him too. The other day Jen told me that she woke up to find Bren quietly playing with Andy with one of Andy's little baby toys. It was cute.

I'm happy because we have DirecTV now. Thanks to my brother who gave us a dish and one of his old receivers. We haven't watched much of it, because we're afraid we'll get addicted, but at least we have it. Bren has watched cartoons quite a bit on it...I helped put the dish up, so now I'm not afraid to go on my roof. That's a good thing. Here he is up there.



I have to both tattle on myself and pat myself on the back: when we were setting it up, I called him on his cell so that I could tell him where to stop when I got a signal. We generally knew where the dish was supposed to point, but not exactly. Well, after about 10 minutes, of nothingness, I told him "Ooops, guess what; I forgot to hook up the feed cable from the dish to the box!" I was trying to figure out how to hook box to TV and totally forgot the other important cable. Uh-oh. But later, after we fixed that, we still couldn't get a signal. We tried for an hour, including going on the net and driving around to look at other houses. The net said point it directly south at 55 degrees elevation, but that didn't work. it looked like other houses were pointed directly south, so that kind of confirmed it. Bro was ready to just give up, but I said let me go up and you stay down here. So, I went up there, and he'd read the elevation ruler wrong. He had it set to 45 degrees. I fixed that and moved it more toward true south, and it worked. I never told him what I did though. I didn't want to make him feel bad. :) The funny thing is that considering that the DirecTV satellite orbits at 22,300 miles out, just 10 degrees of elevation off made us point almost 3900 miles away from where the satellite really was. Amazing! Want to know how I figured that out? This.

Thanks to the DirecTV, we've also rearranged our various video devices and cleaned up our front living room. Definitely a good thing! Here's Dad and bro before they left.



When I was a kid we had one of those old giant satellite dishes. I learned a lot from things like discovery channel. I also remember turning the dish to different satellites. What a weird concept today. You know that they are using those kinds of dishes to build the Allen Array

We also lately took the boys to a park and duck pond a few miles away. I'll let Jen put up the pictures of the boys, but here are two interesting features of the place:

Duck Bath:


Chess Table (or checkers):


That's all for now...