Christmas 2006

Well Christmas has come and gone and we had a great one. This was the first year Brooke was really excited about Christmas and learned how to rip open presents. We did many celebrations including a few in Oklahoma City and a few more in Tulsa.

In Oklahoma City we did Christmas with my dad and then Saturday before Christmas we opened our gifts for each other and stuff we got Brooke. Heather and I didn't get each other too much. I got a new MP3 player and Heather got my old one (advantage: Jason). I got a killer Creative Vision:M 60GB player. Heather got me and Brooke Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat and an extra set of Donkey Kongas. We got Brooke a bunch of Barbie stuff, more Dora Doll House things, books, a workbench/mechanic pitstop thing, and a Dora Game set, and some other little stuff.

In Tulsa we went to Heather's parents house, my mom's house, and my aunt's house. We also managed to get a swim in for Christmas which was a first for me. Brooke had alot of fun going to all the different family member's houses and opening gifts. Santa visited her at Nana and Grandpa's house in Broken Arrow. He brought her a Dora Scooter, a Dora Sit and Spin, more Barbie toys, a pile of Books, some Backyardigan plush dolls, and some other misc things. Nana went to get Brooke's cousin Alaina the day after Christmas so Brooke and her got to play together a little.

We stayed until Wednesday afternoon and headed back to Oklahoma City. Before we left town we had lunch with Ceth and Amy. I was wanting to see Jaime and Justin but neither were in town when we were there so it didn't work out this year. No Coneys this year but we did make a few stops at QuikTrip (QT)

Key gifts for me :

Final Fantasy 3 DS game
Castlevania : Portrait of Ruin DS game
Guitar Hero 2 PS2 game
Best Buy giftcard
Polaris sweatshirt
Money, money, money

Brooke:
Zoo Duplo block set
Dora talking cash register
Hungry Hungry Hippos
Old Main, Go Fish, Slap Jack, and Crazy Eights card games
Diego rescue field journal
Doodlepad Pro
T-Ball set
Basketball goal
A crap-ton of Barbie dolls/furniture/etc.
A ladybug raincoat/boots/umbrella
A Madeline doll
A refrigerator phonic teaching thing
Backyardigans CD

Heather:

Robe
Shoes
Money
CD's
Books
Zoo Tycoon 2 Collection
Magic Bullet
Pyrex storage containers (she asked for them!)
Quesadilla maker


I don't have too much in mind for my money. I did order the first Guitar Hero because I'm having sooooo much fun with the Guitar Hero 2. I'll also probably get Neverwinter Nights 2 for the PC when I finish the 2 DS games. There are a few CD's I might pick up as well. I'm also going to pick up Donkey Konga because the Jungle Beat game is too hard for Brooke and it's not really about playing the drums it's more using the drums to take Donkey Kong through an adventure. The rest I'll probably just hang onto until something cool I can't live without pops up.

I think those are the hilights (pics). We had a great Christmas and are looking forward to next year when Brooke will be even more excited about Santa and Christmas.

Oh!, Christmas Tree

We got our tree up this weekend. This was the first year Brooke helped out. We also put a little fiber optic tree on our entry table and put some of the little Dora and Spongebob ornaments on that tree. It's officially "Brooke's Tree".

We also got all the lights up outside. Did the usual this year... red and white alternating big C9 lights with icicles on the house outline. Did one red tree and one white tree. Decorates the large holly bush with red/white minis. Put Mr. and Mrs. Claus in Brooke's window this year.

See pics of the decorations

Classic

I was shaking Brooke around today . . .

"Stop Dad, you're making me nervous".

I have no idea where she picked that up. And as we were laughing she was like "What's nervous?". So she doesn't really know what she said, but it was funny.

A Fun Wiikend

So last night about 11:45 Heather took off for GameStop to pick up our previously preordered Nintendo Wii. She got right in and back home. We got the Wii, another controller (Wiimote + nunchuk), Zelda: Twilight Princess. The Wii comes with Wii Sports.



The only thing different than setting up any other console you've ever had is the Wiimote light sensor. It has an ultra thing cable that's quite long so anyone should be able to install it with any configuration you have for your home entertainment system. To get going we just set it on top of our tv screen and ran the cable down the side of the TV. We're planning on doing a proper install today.

The thing setting this console apart is the controller. The Wiimote is a slim remote control looking device that goes in one hand. There is a nunchuk attachment that goes in the other hand and they are connected by a short cable. It feels really natural holding it, and it's not nearly as difficult to get comfortable with it as you might think.

In a few minutes we were trying out Wii Sports. We tried them all but the golf. The baseball is alot of fun. With 2 players one person is pitching and one is hitting. The hitting motion is just like hitting a baseball. It's not as complex, you can swing up for getting air and what not, but you use the basic hitting motion. Bowling is probably my favorite. Again, you use a normal bowling motion. You can hook the balls as well. Boxing is the weirdest. It's a little chaotic and kind of hard to tell exactly what's going on... I'm sure I'll get into it the next few days. Tennis is pretty fun as well. You can do backhands and forehands.


I started Zelda this morning. It's fun as well. So far I haven't gotten into much content that requires the use of the Wiimote sensing ability. I did just finish a fishing pole quest and that does require you to use a fishing pole motion. I can't wait to get the bow and arrow and try that out!

So far I'm very pleased. It seems like a lot of fun with the unique controls but I also didn't have to spend 600.00 on the console like the PS3!

Here are a few pictures from the first night.

Bummer

The Pride of Broken Arrow won the BOA National Championship yesterday.

Whoa!

I plan on spending the rest of the day under a blanket crying

Pic

The kids are coming to get presents

So this was the first year we took Brooke Trick Or Treating. This year she was a princess and she had a lot of fun going around to our neighbors and getting candy. We just did a few houses and then we all passed out candy to the kids coming to our house. Brooke LOVED doing that. Bailey was locked up in Brooke's room, so he would bark which signaled to Brooke to run into the entry and wait for the kids to come to the door. She would say "the kids are going to come and get presents".

We decorated the front yard again this year. We added a few new things this year. We got a skeleton that lights up and we also added some little pumpkins on stakes.

Heather carved two pumpkins. One was pretty standard and the other had carvings on the front and back. The back would cause a shadow on the wall of a cat, and the front was two scary rats. Pretty cool.

Brooke's cousin Alaina was here right before Halloween so they helped scoop out the gunk from the pumpkins.

I took pictures.

This, That, and More Stuff

Just an update since I haven't posted in a while . . .

I'm 32 now. Brooke is 3 now. We had a party that was off the hook for Brooke! Hello Kitty style. She had fun. Heather's parents stayed late after the party and watched Brooke so we went and saw The Departed. It was GREAT! Really cool story, great acting, violence... another classic Scorsese movie.

We are potty training Brooke now. We started 2 weeks ago and we've had several days already with no accidents. Obviously we're still doing diapers when she sleeps, but first thing in the morning we get up and go and most days she tells us every time she needs to go. The first day or two she didn't quite get it but I think she's picking up now. She called me one day early and work and it went like this . . .

Me; "This is Jason"
[pause]
Me: "Hello?"
Brooke : I WENT POOPOO IN THE POTTY

Pretty funny!

We have our Nintendo Wii on preorder and will be picking it up in a couple of weeks when it's released. No PS3 for us. We wanted to get one to EBay but no luck, but we're still happy to get a Wii for us to actually play.

OBA was this past weekend in Edmond. My friends Ceth and Amy were in town for it so we hooked up with them and ate dinner Saturday night. In talking with them it sounds like Union is pretty terrible these days which stinks. Broken Arrow is doing well but from what they say basically all the other bands in the state are lousy. Ceth says most kids don't care about marching band. I don't understand why they even join if they don't want to succeed at it.

We went to the OU v. Colorado football game last weekend. My aunt had suite tickets and took us along. It's definitely an experience! It's posh. Each suite has like 3 or 4 rows of seats that are roomy and comfortable. There is a full kitchen area in each suite and personal host for each suite that is there to take care of you. Outside the suites there are lounge areas with couches and tv's and big buffet lines with all sorts of good food: burgers, chili, brisket, sandwiches, wings, etc. In the room they have more wedding appetizer stuff... fruit, cheese, crackers, more wings, cake, pastries, etc. Then anything you could want to drink... beer, soda, wine, on and on. It was cool and hopefully I get to go again.

Work is good.

Guess that's it. Best line I can think of from Brooke :

'When I get bigger I can go to Wal-Mart by myself. Then when you guys get bigger you can go with me'.

The new rig

Well I built a new PC this week. My friend at work Erik built one a few weeks ago and I went with a very similar system.

• Gigabyte 965P Motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Duo (CONROE) e6400
• ATI X1900XTX Video Card
• 2 GB RAM
• 320GB Seagate Barracuda Harddrive

It went mostly smooth. Had a few hiccups. The first one was after I had everything put in the case I came into the ofice to plug it into the monitor and make sure it booted... it did! While I was talking to Erik online using Google Talk (tangent... all my friends/family should get a gMail account and use gTalk to chat online with me. You'll need an invite from me so let me know) I noticed the pc just shutoff. I booted it up again and it did it again. Erik said it sounded like a overheating problem... and indeed it was. The CPU was getting up into the 100 C temps. I shut everything down and proceeded to get the heatsink/fan correctly installed on the motherboard. I found this to be a big pain. I worked on it for a bit and then gaveup and went to bed. I woke up at 2:50 in the morning and it was driving me nuts.... so about 4:00am I had the fan installed correctly and everything looked good! The next night it was time for loading on the software. Formatting a 350gb harddrive took over an hour. Then I had a little problem with one of the front USB ports... turned out a connector had wiggled out or was never put in correctly by the case manufacturer. No big deal. I put everything in closed it up and it's under the desk now!

I probably saved 500.00 or so doing it myself... but that doesn't mean it's the right choice for everyone. You have to be comfortable doing that kind of stuff and realize that I don't have a company I can call if my pc doesn't work (like Dell support). Those are issues to consider for sure.. . there's a lot of piece-of-mind knowing you can pick up the phone and have Dell fix your computer.

I took a few pictures along the way (you can click the image and then at the top of the image click "All Sizes" to see bigger versions if you're intersted in seeing the details)

I just realized this is probably not interesting to anyone but me... oh well, it's my blog!

Most Wonderful Time Of The Year

So it's started. The fall season is the best season :

• College football starts
• NFL football starts
• The best part of baseball : playoff races and playoffs
• Halloween
• Awesome weather
• My birthday
• Brooke's birthday
• TV shows all start up new seasons
• Thanksgiving
• Leads right into Christmas time

Definitely hands down mine and Heather's favorte time of year. What do you guys think is the best time of year and why?

SoaP

We saw Snakes on a Plane Friday night. It was pretty awesome. Over the top with the attacking snakes and some awesomely funny lines. Good times.

My Top Ten Drummers

So I was watching a Rush DVD this morning and it got me to thinking about my favorite drummers. Alot of my friends over the years ask me for my opinion about drummers. Who I like, why, etc. So here goes. I am taking the wuss route and not actually ranking them, these are just my favorite 10 in some order.

Neil Peart - ok, with one exception I'll rank. He's my favorite. Neil is the drummer for Rush. To me he has all the things I look for. Chops, chops, and more chops. A unique style - most notably would be the ride cymbal pattern that can be found in a ton of different Rush songs. I think he has a good sense of musicality as well. Alot of drummers with insane chops tend to lose site of the fact the band is trying to create a good song. They simply take a song and then show how many awesome things they can play on top of it. I've never felt that Neil's parts are distracting or take away from what the band is trying to do. He also led a project Burning For Buddy where he gathered alot of great rock and jazz drummers to pay tribute to Buddy Rich.

Tommy Lee - Obviously this isn't about great drumming skills. After my Duran Duran/Michael Jackson phase I discovered Motley Crue. I had a neighborhood friend named Chris Nolan. There was an older girl in the neighborhood that would babysit him from time to time. Once when I was over there she pulled out the Shout At The Devil album and I was HOOKED! I've been a huge fan of Motley Crue and Tommy Lee since. To me Tommy is the essence of a cool, bad boy, rock and roll drummer.

Mike Portnoy - This one may not be a common name to everyone. He's the drummer for Dream Theater and considered year after year to be the best drummer in rock. Dream Theater is a band full of guys with amazing talent on their instruments and Portnoy stands out. If you just want to hear some amazing licks and fills this is the guy.

Dave Grohl - First made famous when he was the drummer for Nirvana, he is now the frontman/songwriter for the Foo Fighters. This is a guy that combines good technical skills with a lot of style. The thing I've always loved about Grohl is how hard he hits. I read an article in Modern Drummer where he was talking about sticks he would use that were just basically 4 times the size of a normal stick and no real shape to them. He said they were just like tree branches cut down. He plays LOUD all the time. It's great! My friend Justin used to tell me I kinda look like Dave (back when we both had long hair) - something about the big mouth/teeth I guess.

John Bonham - No drummer list can be made without mentioning the drummer from Led Zeppelin. In my opinion he was the original heavy metal drummer. What I love about Bonham is the sloppy style. Listen to some Zeppelin albums and you'll hear how loose his patterns and beats are. He seemed to always have little ghost notes and such going on with his bass and snare. I guess he wasn't a big fan of just straight bass-snare-bass-snare standard rock patterns.

Larry Mullen Jr - Yes, the drummer from U2. Yes he's really worth mentioning. When I was a young up-and-coming drummer I was all about chops. If a guy could play fast and lots of notes I figured he was the best. I'm guessing half of what Neil Peart and Mike Portnoy play Larry couldn't play. But I've learned style is also important when you're a drummer. To me Larry sounds like Larry and noone else does. In the early days of U2 he would play alot of his standard patterns using toms and interesting hi-hat patterns. Listen to Sunday Bloody Sunday. That pattern is really cool and not boring at all. It's not loaded with notes or complex parts, but it's totally unique.

Stewart Copeland - master of the hi-hats and drummer for one of my favorite bands The Police. Another guy with a really cool style but he could back it up with great chops. In the early days he would play fast and some of the early live recordings the tempo by the end of the song wasn't even close to what it started as because Stewart would play like a spazz and speed up. He was also the master of using hi-hats in fills and between patterns to add really cool unique sounds.

Jimmy Chamberlain - Jimmy was the drummer for the Smashing Pumpkins. What I loved about his playing with the Pumpkins were the really cool basic patterns. Another drummer that didn't seem to be happy playing standard rock beats.

Will Calhoun - the drummer from the band Living Colour. He doesn't get as much love as he should. He's one of my favorites for sure. What I love about his playing is the way he blends funk, hip-hop, and rock elements to create awesome drum parts.

Dave Weckl - In my opinion the best drummer in jazz today. You have to have a great understanding of music to even play jazz, and this guy doesn't just play jazz but does amazing things. He made his name as the drummer for the Chick Corea band and is now a successful solo artists. I have all but 1 of his solo discs and they are really cool if you like jazz and want to hear some amazing drumming. Every fill he does sounds like something I couldn't play.

No disrespect to Buddy Rich

Well that's the list. Who did I miss? I can think of alot of drummers I like that didn't make my list. Who's on the list that you think is ridiculous? Do you like any of the drummers on my list? Why? Discuss . . .

I did it, I did it!

At approximately 8:45am on August 5, 2006 I dodged a blue shell!

I was using Peach on the Poltergeist 4000. I was doing a 150cc trying to get my rankings up to 3 stars.

WoW it's over

I finally quit being lazy and cancelled my World of Warcraft (WoW) account today. I haven't played in almost 3 months so it was obvious I wasn't going to want to play. Maybe when the expansion comes out I'll roll a new character and play again. Hopefully some of the guys I used to play with or some guys at work that I didn't know played until after we were already all in it (Hardwareguy, Johnson) will want to do new characters and start over. If everyone is just wanting to power level up to 60 to do raiding stuff still I'll probably skip the expansion and buy another Nintendo DS game.

Still playing Mario Kart all the time. I'm trying to get my buddy Ceth in Tulsa to get one so we can play Mario Kart over the internet. That would be a blast!

It's super freaking hot here... ugh. My lawn is looking really awesome right now... next to my next door neighbor I'd say best on the street.

Mets are still easily in first place! Whooo hooo... go Mets!

j

Punta Pics

Here are pics from our trip to Punta Cana.

Pedro, Sosa, and the McIntosh's

Well as most of you know we just went to the Dominican Republic. Heather's brother got married this past Thursday at the Breezes Punta Cana Resort. It was great to make the wedding and spend time with Heather's dad and brothers, but it wouldn't be our first choice for a vacation spot.

We left Oklahoma City Tuesday morning. We had a 6:20am flight so we got up and out pretty early... like I got up at 3:30 in the morning early. We had a short layover in Houston and then went on to Ft. Lauderdale. We found a Dave and Busters close to the hotel so that's where we went for dinner. We had never been to one and it was pretty neat. It's like a Celebration Station/Incredible Pizza kinda place on steroids. And it's not so geared towards kids. They have a full blown restaurant and bar with all kinds of things to eat. Then they have a giant area with all the games to play. The video games are crazy. Then like all those places they have tons of “earn tickets” games where you can redeem the tickets for crappy trinkets. We got Brooke a bunch of little goofy toys, but it turned out that she loved playing with them. We went back to the room and fell asleep watching the NBA finals, where Miami won the NBA Championship. When I got up in the morning there was a Miami Herald in front of our door. We saved the paper for Heather to put in her scrapbook. After a quick breakfast it was off to the Ft. Lauderdale airport for our trip to Punta Cana.

The experience was not so great at the airport. We flew Spirit Air, which from what we can tell takes all the people too rude to work at the major airlines and lets them be the face of their business. When we got to the ticketing area a Spirit agent told us to go “all the way to the end” for Punta Cana. So we did... then after standing in line for 10 minutes some other lady starts in with “this isn't the line for Punta Cana'. Some of the people in front of us made a stink about it “well that lady down there told us to come here”. The lady was completely rude... she just said “this isn't the line for Punta Cana... it's over here”. So my temper flared up. I just wanted her to acknowledge it was the other Spirit rep. That made the mistake telling us to get in that line... so I said “but you can see why we would all be in this wrong line” to which she replied “this is the line for Punta Cana” and pointed where she was standing... so again I said “but you see why we're all here right” after a couple of exchanges like this she was like “yeah”. All the while Heather was telling me to shut up and calm down for fear we'd get arrested. But we didn't...we stood in another line for like an hour and finally got checked in. The plane was late boarding and we got to Punta Cana I think about an hour late.

When we arrived at the airport in Punta Cana it was pretty wacky. Finding someone with 1^st grade level English skills was a major challenge. Also you have to buy some stupid visitor card for 10.00 a person... then you literally walk about 20 feet and turn it in to someone. So it cost us 30.00 for what I have no idea. I also found it interesting that the Dominican Republic doesn't care who comes and why. There was really not customs at all to go through. Heather stood and fought to get our bags and I watched Brooke. After we got our bags some guy ran up and grabbed them on his cart and we were off. That was it. No one asked us anything about why we were there or whatnot. It just seemed odd. The next challenge was finding the right bus to get us to the hotel. HOLY CRAP! We visiting about 4 different buses and each guy was like “Breezes.. no”. We were kinda freaking out. Finally we got on one and a VIP Tour rep (the Tour company the thing was all booked through) assured us the bus was going to Breezes. The driver was nuts. They drives pretty crazy over there. Motorcycles and mopeds are really big and all the guys with vans, trucks, buses, etc. just honky at them and get within about 6 inches of hitting them when they pass. If I ever live there I don't plan on riding a motorcycle. We made it to the resort after about 30 minutes.

Checking in was a mess. Luckily Heather's dad saw us so he could show us the ropes. He had already been there for a few days. We got our room then had to come back in 10 minutes to get our keys. It was weird. We were starving so Rick showed us where we could grab some grilled chicken. It was really good. We had a quick bite and made it up to our room. The rooms were okay. Nothing super fancy, but they were clean and big enough. Heather thought the bed was uncomfortable but it didn't bother me. It was really cloudy and thundering when we arrived so we just left on our shorts/shirts and took Brooke down to the beach. I took her close enough to get her feet wet in the ocean. She seemed to think it was pretty neat. After we played for a bit we got cleaned up and went and had dinner. It was buffet style because we didn't have reservations at any of the restaurants. It wasn't bad.

Thursday we met Rick and Heather's brother Issac for breakfast. Then it was off to the pool and the beach. Brooke didn't want to play by the water at the beach. The waves were too scary for her. So we just played in the sand. She had a lot of fun. Heather, Rick, Issac and Issac's fiance Natalie took kayaks out into the ocean. I needed a zoom lens. Oh well. We had lunch at a place by the pool and then everyone went to cleanup and get ready for the wedding.

The wedding was nice. It was cloudy so not crazy hot. After the wedding we went to the beach to do pictures. Then we changed into shorts for the dinner/reception. It was nice... good food and got to visit with everyone.

Friday we had a few hours to play around at the pool before we caught our bus back to the airport. We arrived back in Ft. Lauderdale Friday late afternoon. We stood in a bunch of lines for customs things. We didn't get checked much so it wasn't a big deal just a pain with all our luggage and a 2 year old in a stroller. We had dinner in the hotel.

Saturday we had the Embassy Suites breakfast which is always nice. Then we had 4 or 5 hours to kill. Heather was feeling sick to her stomach so we took it easy and just walked around by our hotel. There is a river area 4 blocks from the hotel so we went and hung out there for a bit. Then it was back to the airport again. We got on an early flight to Houston than originally scheduled because a flight was delayed. Turns out the one we were on that departed about 5:30 was supposed to leave at 9:00am that morning. OY! Those poor people. Anyway we had a long layover in Houston and finally made it back to Oklahoma City around 11:00ish. We were in bed by about 12:30.

Overall it was okay. I think with having to deal with lines/airports everyday but 1 on the entire vacation made it a little annoying. The resort was too crowded. Lines and reservations for everything which isn't great when you're wanting to just chill on a vacation. Lots and lots of bottled water. I had a Dominican beer... Presidente. It wasn't bad... tasted just like your average beer. I didn't get much sun because we just weren't out much and it was cloudy quite a bit of the time.

Pictures coming soon . . .

One of the cooler shows on Earth

So Brooke and I went to the circus yesterday afternoon. We had great seats. We were dead center, probably 10 rows up. When we sat down I saw a guy caddy-corner in front of me shooting some pics with a pretty nice looking rig. Turns out it was KJ from work. He was there with his family. That was cool durning the intermission I had someone to talk to.

The circus was pretty neat. It's basically the same concept as the last time I went when I was a kid, but just bigger, louder, etc. Brooke seemed to like the elephant tricks and the tigers. I think it was a little long for her, plus it was late in the afternoon so she seemed to get a little tired as it went on, but overall she had a good time. She picked out a circus bear stuffed animal for her present from the circus. I wanted to get her a t-shirt too, but they didn't have any kid sizes!?!. I said to the guy "good luck selling all these to adults". That makes no sense.

We walked through the old Myriad Center (now the Cox Convention Center) to get to the Ford Center. When we were walking through we happened to time it perfect and Brooke got to see them walking the elephants out of that building towards the Ford Center. That was pretty neat.

It was a good time.

Two Screens, tons o' fun!.. and some clowns

So if you haven't been keeping up with handheld gaming news, the new Nintendo DS Lite comes out this Sunday. But if you have been keeping up with handheld gaming news, then you know that last week several large retail chains across the country screwed up and started selling them early. Sooo... we got a tip from a realiable source at work that a Target nearby was selling them. Heather took off the next morning and managed to get one!

They are way different than the other gameboy models you might have played. Not just the two screens and the touch screen and the microphone... but the wireless connectivity is pretty amazing. There are about 4 of us (soon to be more) at work that have DS's. So everyday we've been eating real quick and the playing games against each other for the rest of the lunch period. It's a blast.

Then tonight I decided to try the WiFi. If you have a wireless high speed internect access point you can play online against anyone from around the world. Fortunatly I have some cool neighbors with wirelss networks so I was able to try it out! Thanks guys. Anyway, very cool and takes handheld gaming to a new level that's pretty sweet.

Heather likes it too. And we got Brooke a Nintendogs game that she thinks is really neat. She can say "Daisy" (what we named our dog in the game) into the microphone and the puppy will come running to the front of the screen. You can use the touch screen to "pet" and interact with the dog. She giggles all the time when we're playing it.

Also going to the Ringling Bros circus tomorrow. Heather wasn't too interested so it'll just be me and Brooke. I haven't been to one since I was a kid so I think it'll be fun.

It's pretty much my favorite animal

Apparently Napoleon (click here for awesome video clip) wasn't just making stuff up when he drew his favorite animal the liger. They look pretty cool, maybe we'll get one for Christmas.

Showtime

So we took Brooke to her first movie yesterday. We went and saw the early showing of Over The Hedge at Quail Springs Mall AMC. It was actually a pretty good movie and Heather and I laughed several times. As with most animated movies these days it's loaded with celebrity voices - Bruce Willis, Steve Carell, Wanda Sykes, William Shatner, Nick Nolte, Gary Shandling and others. Wanda Sykes playes a skunk named Stella and she has some pretty funny lines. Anyway, it was a good time and Brooke seemed to enjoy going to the movies.

After the movie we went to Cheeseburger In Paradise for lunch. We hadn't been yet and it was pretty cool. The burgers were really tasty.

That's that

My Little Rock 'N' Roll Queen

No... not The Subways song... but my awesome kid! Last night Heather was making dinner and came and got me and told me to go look what Brooke was doing. I found her in the kitchen floor with a makeshift drumset assembled out of lids, bowls, skillets, pots, and pans and a number 2 pencil as the drumstick. The story goes . . .

Heather found her using the pencil banging on a candle in a jar. Heather was afraid she would break the candle jar, so she pointed Brooke to the kitchen and got out a couple of things for her to bang on. Apparently she didn't like whatever Heather gave her, so she started digging around in the cabinet and assembled her set!

After she played drums for a bit she dug around in the cabinet and found two lids and played them like cymbals... honestly, I didn't show her or give her any ideas. She just kinda figured it out.

Of course I encouraged her like crazy and told her how awesome it sounded. Then this morning, she got up before I left and grabbed her drum pieces and pencil and wanted to play some more. I'm ready to get her a DW set now.


I posted some pictures on my flickr site.


\m/

Ridiculous

I might be dropping this blog. Blogspot is making me nuts

Ain't no Sesame Street that's for sure

Well our tour of live kid shows concluded yesterday afternoon at the State Fairgrounds. We saw Dora The Explorer Live : The Pirate Adventure. I think Brooke enjoyed it, but it was pretty lame compared to the Sesame Street Live performance we saw a few weeks before.

First of all the arena wasn't nice at all. It's where they do barrel racing and such at the state fair. It's just an old concrete building with worn out seats. They had the stage sitting a towards one end and then had rope strung from one each side of the stage towards the upper deck seating with black sheets hanging off.

The setup of the stage was terrible. The Sesame Street Live stage was big and open and they had a piece of the stage that jutted out off the main stage. So basically every seat could see everything. Not at Dora! We were up in the first few rows in the stands and couldn't see things on the side from time to time. The worst part was the last act with the pirate adventure boat. For some unknown reason, the didn't have the boat in the middle of the stage. It was off to the side... so we couldn't see Ilsa The Iguana at all during her performance of 'Ilsa Turn The Wheel'. There was no point in not having the boat in the middle of the stage, but that's how they did it.

The characters weren't very good either. Boots was a black guy that whined alot. Dora looked pretty good. The other characters really sounded nothing like the animated characters in the TV show.

You also weren't allowed to take photographs because it could harm the performers... so apparently the people playing Cookie Monster, Elmo, Big Bird, etc can handle photographs better than the Dora performers. Sheesh!

As usual we bought some merch. We ended up getting her two stuffed animal characters that we have never seen anywhere. A Benny The Bull and a Tico The Squirrel. They also gave little Pirate Adventure flags to every ticket holder.

We went to Earls afterwards for dinner which was pretty yummy. Chopped brisket sandwhiches... and Brooke ate two french fries, a bunch of ketchup with a spoon, and spit out her brisket (crazy kid!).

Summer Nights, Hot Dogs, and Butt Candy

well... the baseball season is upon us. As most of you know I really love baseball and I'm excited like every year... but this year more so than the last few. The Mets had a pretty good year last year, and without losing what I think are key pieces and filling holes (First base offensive production and a closer -- filled by Carlos Delgado and Billy Wagner), I think the Mets have a real chance to win the NL East this year and FINALLY put the Braves to rest. I'm so stinkin sick of the Braves winning the NL East every year, and basically wasting the playoff spot by losing in the first round. NO MAS! The Mets won their first game with a nice pitching performance by Tom Glavine. Hopefully he continues to pitch well and our ridiculous amount of offenseive potential (Beltran, Delgado, David Wright, Cliff Floyd, Paul Lo Duca) will put up 6 or7 runs a game and lead us into the post season. I'm excited. My DirecTV package is in order and I'm ready to fall asleep every night to the sweet sounds of west coast games. I'll be keeping up with the A's a little bit as always since my Dad is an A's fan I've always rooted for them as my American League team.

Here are my season predictions so you can make fun of me in October when I miss it :

NL East - Mets
NL Central - Cardinals
NL West - Dodgers (could easily be Giants... depends on how Barry does without steroids)
NL Wildcard - Braves

AL East - Yanks
AL Central - Indians
AL West - Angels
AL Wildcard - White Sox

Yanks - Cardinals .... Cardinals win in 6.

The other big story about this year in baseball is Barry Bonds. A book is coming out that continues to pile on the allegations that he loves the "juice" and has been hitting Steroids for 6 or 7 years. He is also 8 home runs away from passing Babe Ruth to move into second all time on the home run list. He needs 48 to pass Hank Aaron... I hope he doesn't do it, because he cheated to do it... yes I probably cheated (I have to say probably because my mom and Grammy read this) on a test sometime in my life, but Bonds is going to take one of the most precious records in sports and make it his own because he cheated...that's worse! Besides, my grades never really reflected that I was cheating, or cheating effectively anyway.

We've been getting our yard ready for Summer too. When I say we, I mean Heather. She basically redid the entire front flower bed. She raised it a little, put a two level brick border around the bed, and planted 3 bunches of annuals around the border. It looks great! We're also trying to get the weeds under control, get our yard ready, and our patio ready. I'm sure it's going to be hotter than crap this summer since it was 70+ degrees several times in December, January, and February.

Till next time . . .

Match Grip?

Match Grip is slang for Matched Grip, which is a way of holding drumsticks. I've had a few people wonder what it means... so that's it. It's kind of a geeky drummer term, but not so dorky like if I had "flamdrags.blogspot.com" or "cheesadiddle.blogspot.com".

It's beginning to look a lot like March

Well as you've all read over the last few months, the weather has been nuts in Oklahoma. Starting last weekend the temperatures dropped and it rained all weekend. The this morning I woke up to snow on the ground. I would guess maybe 2.5 inches around our house. The roads weren't too bad, but the traffic reports on NPR reported quite a few accidents around the Oklahoma City area.

The wife is good. The kid is good. Work is good.

The new Prince album came out this week. As most of you know I'm a big Prince fan. I've only listened to the new one a few times. It seems okay. Quite a few of the songs he gets all the performance credit (All instruments and vox : Prince). So he's still gettin' it done as a senior citizen.

The yo-yo fad is in full effect at work. We all recently did a group buy from an online yo-yo store. I'm not sure why it has spread like bird flu here, but it has. You'll frequently see us developer types in some serious design discussions while throwing our 'yo's'. I purchased the Avenger, and so far as I can tell it goes up and down just fine. I hope to one day be as good as El Guapo.

J

Strike a pose

The Big Dance. March Madness. Road To The Final Four. Day When Everyone Sneaks Off To The Cafeteria Every 15 Minutes To Check Scores.

Today is the first day of the NCAA Men's College Basketball Tournament. This year I have watched roughly no college basketball, which is not much different than previous years. But still when the tournament comes around in March it's always a fun time. Everyone is filling out their brackets and pretending they know anything at all about college hoops. People gather at lunch in the cafeteria to watch games. Heather always prints out our brackets and hilights them with her own color coding scheme to keep track of who's beating who. I setup a Yahoo league every year with some of my buddies (I invite a bunch but only a few manage to find the 2.5 minutes it takes to register and participate). This year is no different. My picks are submitted and I'm ready for the action. I'm sure we'll have CBS on at the house all through the weekend keeping tabs on the scores and watching the exciting finishes and upsets.

The Sports Pickle had a funny story (they write fake humorous sports stories) about a guy who fortunatly was diagnosed with cancer. He was veyr excited because it meant he would be home Thursday and Friday for the opening rounds. Obviously that's exagerated, but the point is valid... this country goes apecrap for March Madness.

With that, I'm off to the cafeteria

J

A year or two ago . . .

in Oklahoma City, no so far away.... I cared about Star Wars. We were buzzing about it around the office and the Valtech guys that were knew to the office had stumbled upon a great video. After one Friday evening at The Big Chief's cube, we discovered a whole world of laughter at the expense of the kid. This phenemon probably isn't news to most of the folks reading this blog... but if it is, take a look at the video and then Google "Star Wars Kid". You will find a spazillion results and any amateur kid with a pc and some video editing software took a crack at using the original footage to make their own funny version. Some of them are pretty hilarious and some are lame. It's the Internet.

So tonight I found another Star Wars video. This one isn't so much funny as it's pretty impressive. It's a couple of young kids (maybe late high school/early college age) that put together a 5 minute light sabre fight. The whole thing is choreographed and edited pretty nicely for amateurs just having fun.

Anyway, it just made me remember when I used to care about Star Wars.

For the non Oklahoman's reading... Oklahoma spread some of it's abundance of wildfires to our neighbors in Texas this past weekend. Basically 700,000... SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND acres burned up.

How to get updates from my blog

This is for my friends/family that don't know about RSS feeds. I was digging around trying to find a simple way that you guys could get updated via email whenever I made a new post on my blog. I found a service and tested it with Heather's email and it works pretty well. One thing I noticed is it doesn't handle pictures that I've embedded into my posts, so you'll still probably want to click the link you get in the email to actually go to my blog and read my latest posts.

1. Go to Squeet
2. In the feed URL field enter : http://matchgrip.blogspot.com/atom.xml?bsuser=matchgrip
3. Supply the email address where you'd like to receive emails when my blog is updated
4. Enter the code on the page

At this point you'll be set to receive emails from this service whenever I updated my blog. You should be able to setup a free account at Squeet and do the same thing for any other site that does RSS feeds. If you really get into the RSS feeds for your news and updates from the sites you visit regularly, then I'd suggest going with a real RSS Feed aggregator like Bloglines. There are tons of sites that do RSS feeds and it's a great way to keep up with all the sites you like.

You can do a similar thing for my flickr page and be notified when I post new pictures. (The feed URL for my flickr page is http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=79723644@N00&format=rss_200)

Happy reading.

The Fabulous Five!

So we took Brooke to her first "show" yesterday. We took her to see Sesame Street Live . The show is called "Super Grover! Ready for Action". Basically Grover loses his 'superness' and with the help of The Fabulous Five (Elmo, Rosita, Telly, Zoe, and Rock Rock) sets out to find his superness and return to being Super Grover. It was actually pretty fun. It was neat to see all the kids participating by yelling things out and cheering for their favorite characters. The music was pretty good too, considering. Brooke seemed to really have a good time. She stood up for the second half and would clap and dance. And like all dumb parents, we ended up buying a bunch of overpriced stuff. A T-shrit (of course), a Zoe purse with jewelry, and a program. Looking back the program was probably a stupid buy.

Afterwards we walked around the outside of the Botanical Gardens. We took a few pictures and Brooke got to see the ducks and geese. We had a pretty great day!

Last night Heather shampoo'd the carpets in the living room. They were pretty dirty.

I was listening to Radio Wazee last night and heard a pretty cool band I hadn't heard of. It's kind of a mix of grunge sounding stuff with sort of straight up rock. They're called Slave To The System. Their myspace page has 3 tunes you can listen to. It has members of Brother Kane (they had a big hit in the early 90's with 'Got No Shame') and Queensryche. I think it's neat to see some 80's hard rock/hair metal type guys do something current that doesn't suck! So it is possible.

First day of March... and summer!

What the crap is with the weather this winter. Today was HOT. No, not nice, warm, not quite as a normal March 1st day... it was freakin' hot. 92 degrees hot. Brooke and Heaher wore shorts to go shopping today. Crazy stuff.

Not much else is going down in OKC. The state of course is basically burning up from all the ridiculous heat, wind, and lack of rain.

I just got the Arctic Monkeys CD. It's the BIG hype right now. They're getting the kind of buzz The Strokes got a few years back when they were breaking in. I like it and would recommend it to my buddies that like to rock their faces off! (Grammy you wouldn't like it).

OUT!

J

More programmer amusement

I'm not gonna name names... but I think some of these snippets I've seen with my own two eyes!

Five twists packed inside of three somersaults

So the final round of the women's figure skating was last night. Heather and I watched (and cried) when Sasha Cohen fell twice in one routine to lose gold. It was quite sad. She did manage to skate awesomely after her two falls and held on to win the Silver medal. Will she be back and try one last time for Olympic gold in 2010? Do you care? Personally, I'm rooting for Emily Hughes now. She was an alternate that got put on the team when Michelle Kwan had to leave with injury. She's all smiles and it's hard to not pull for her to do well at the next Winter Olympics. I predict she'll win Silver at the 2010 games. Mark it down!

Also Heather and I have found watching the Olympics that we love the Aerials. It works like this : strap on some skis, climb up a giant hill that's packed with snow, go down it as fast as you can, fly off a ramp at the bottom, do as many twists, spins, etc before you smack the ground. It's AWESOME!







Enjoy your weekend.

The highest goal

My coder brotheren : bookmark it, learn it, live it.

Say CHEESE

After (finally) getting an email from Jamie I realized I need to get more of our pictures out there for people to see. I created a flickr site and so far have stuck one picture out there. More to come... stay tuned.

My flickr site

Anyone can comment

I changed my settings to only allow registered users to add comments (I mainly did this because I figured that would force people to register and then I'd know who left a comment). But I've decided this isn't a great user-friendly policy (I'm all about user-friendly). So now anyone can leave a comment. All I ask is you put your name/initials/secret hidden message at the end of your comments so I have some idea who left me what. My Grammy emailed me and said she couldn't leave a comment. That's no good!

Thanks!

Burnin' Down The House

Well not really... but I smoked us out.

Last night Heather went to bed and asked me to close the flue in the fireplace before I went to bed. So I did... then I poked at the pile of ashes to make sure everything was okay. Well... it wasn't. There was a pile barried under ash that was still lit (no flames, just burning embers). Well as you can guess with no ventilation the smoke started to fill up the room pretty quickly.

I panicked. I went and woke up Heather and was kinda freakin' out. By this time the living room was basically filled with smoke. I opened the back door and the windows in the living room. It was about 18 degrees outside so that felt great. I wasn't sure how to get that thing opened without burning the crap out of my hand. I ran around trying to find a flashlight... with no luck at first. (Flashlights seem to get lost in our house alot... or we have gnomes that come and steal them). I remembered there was one in Heather's car. I ran to the garage and Heather's passenger door was locked. So I had to run back inside, grab my keys and go unlock the door. I grabbed the flashlight from her glovebox. I ran back in the house and used the flashlight to see what the hell I was doing in the fireplace. I opened the flue.

I stayed up for about another hour with the windows open and the ceiling fan on trying to air out the living room. We both kind of stunk like smoke so Heather took a bath and I grabbed a quick shower.

It was pretty exciting.

Woke up this morning with a little more snow and ice on the ground. I'll be parkin' it inside today.

J

It's actually winter

Woke up today with maybe an inch of snow and ice on the ground. Heather and I already have a fire going in the fireplace. It was about 28 degrees yesterday afternoon and it's about that this morning.

I'll probably stay inside most of the day.

The Seniors Tour

I hit another milestone at work today. I was promoted to Senior Programmer Analyst. What's that mean exactly? Not much. I'm already a team lead, a member of the architecture group, and what I consider a key member of the ASAP OO team (is that my ego blogging?)

I'm excited because at least they recognized me for what I do... and most of all I get a nice pay increase. Maybe I'll get that iPod after all.

The weather sucked today. It was 61 when I got to work at 7:00am and when we went to lunch at 12:15 it felt like 35 degrees. What the crap? But we went to Ron's Hamburgers and Chili... which is a Tulsa tradition. It was nice to get a little taste of home. Now they just need to build a freaking Coney Islander here and I'm golden.

GOCK!
Jason