I will be at ALA Annual conducting "man on the street" interviews through CLA / IT ALA.

I thought I would start out this post with a little thing that I learned about yesterday when I was at toyrus with Elden. For the past several months, and maybe before this, Elden has been referring to little game cartridges as ds. They were not really game cartridges, per se, like video games, but they were of cartridges from his leappad books things and his leappad doll. I had often wondered why he kept referring to these cartridges as ds. After spending about an hour playing with the toys, riding on all the cars, he heads over to the gaming area (btw, this is a great time killer), and yells out ds, ds!!! I can’t believe that I didn’t realize this before. All this time, he was referring to Nintendo ds (dual screen just in case you didn’t know what that stood for), or more or less handheld video games in general.

When Brennan, my eldest was younger, I was pretty adament against video games in the house. He has ever really been interested in handheld video games, although he love nickjr.com. Elden on the other hand, was exposed to Nintendo at the YMCA daycare. When I came to pick him up one day, he was sitting next to this older kid, I would say around 10 or so, watching him play Nintendo. I think ever since then, he has become almost obsessed about them and talks about them all the day.

Now that his 3rd birthday is rolling around the corner, just in about a month to be exact, I am actually thinking about buying him a handheld gaming system. I am not sure about the Nintendo, but perhaps the Leapster or another alternative. I haven’t decided quite yet, and actually I would consider the Nintendo, but Den thinks he is too young for it. I checked out the game selection, and heck I am sure if we did get this for him, I would probably pick up the Sims game or even the latest Guitar Hero for me. Hehe!!! I am a tech chick.

I think the clincher was when ever we were at my SIL house, I noticed that all three of her boys were always playing video games. In fact, all three of them had separate game consoles, including her husband. LOL! And ya, I would bitch to Den about this stating that never ever would we buy video games for the boys because I didn’t want to even risk the fact that they would spend all day and night playing video games and forgetting to finish their homework. But of course I am a hypocrite. I have spent many hours playing Sims and yes, staying up all night long trying to build an elevator on Sims tower, or in general playing that damn game (all versions of the game).

Other deciding what to get him for his birthday, I am also figuring out what to do for his birthday party. I think for sure it will be a local park. Nothing too fancy, but something fun for him. We skipped out on his birthday last for year for some reason. I don’t want him to grow up and feeling bad that he never had a birthday party. I am sure that wouldn’t be true, but you know, you just never know.

I know I haven’t been on here for a while. I just never sat down long enough to write a blog entry. Twitter, Facebook, and SLISlife (I am the adminstrator and mod for this networking site) have been keeping me busy, and not so much Flickr these days either. I haven’t been taking many pictures. I do have a fun second half of the week planned as well as a fun weekend coming up! I will be at Palms Spring for a little mom’s getaway. Den went to Yosemite for a boys getaway the week previously, so I think I deserve a little time away. : )

We just saw two contractors this past weekend to get price estimates on work on the house before we move. We will most likely be in early, mid August. One of the contractors said that it would take him 20 days. We plan to get started in the second week of July. Hopefully, they won’t be too off schedule because we also have to get this place worked on before showing to renters.

Okay, I am starting to ramble.

Today was Brennan’s first basketball game. This is his first time in a team sport. So far he has had two practices. He didn’t have too much fun the first practice because he pretty had in his mind that he could just go right out into the court and start throwing balls right into the basket. He didn’t think that he had to do any sort of practice. So that first practice was quite frustrating for him. The second week was much better. He still got a little frustrated, but he definitely started relaxing a little. At the game today, or actually yesterday (Saturday), he definitely enjoyed himself and remembered to have fun. The highlight of the game according to this coach, was when Brennan ran around the entire basketball court with the ball in hand. He didn’t dribble the ball at all, but literally ran from one net to the other net and back around to the first net, with both teams chasing behind him. I did record a video of it, which I would totally be posting to Flickr, but I had to take back the desktop back to the computer tech. I don’t have a card reader on this laptop. I did have one a few years ago, but it seems like perhaps I threw it away. Actually, I did have one, but it was for one of those bigger cards, not for an SD.

Anyways, Brennan really had a great time. I like that they don’t keep score of baskets, but really emphasize the fun aspect of it. Although, during the game, you could hear a bunch of dire hard idiot sport fanatic fathers, getting a bit crazy over getting their 4-5 year children to get the ball into the basket, or so on. I was just trying Brennan to get his hands out of his mouth and not to be so loud. He is a nail biter, which bugs the heck out of me. He told us after the game that he had so much fun and that is was better than the practices. I am looking forward to the second game next week.

So an update on our desktop. I had taken the previous week it to a computer tech after about 4 months or more of having this problem. We were unable to install any type of software or download any sort of driver or upgrade of anything. When you clicked any admin. type files or folders, an error message would come up. So for the last several months, I have been searching for solutions, but I finally gave up. So to get things clear, I am probably the reason why the computer got all jacked up. I was fiddling around with it because I was trying to get it to run faster. Vista tends to really get bogged down. Plain and simple, it is just an unstable system and it has been a nightmare.

When I took it to the tech last week, I received it back. The tech told us that he had to install something to make the system more compatible with older bit systems. So my understanding, is Vista is 64-bit, where older systems, such as Windows XP is 32-bit or 16-bit. He thought that was our problem, but as it turns out, that is not the problem. I think the fact that I messed around with some of the settings, I essentially deleted some of the admin. functions. I did take the computer back on Thursday, and he told me that he was just going to do a fresh install and reformat the harddrive. Then I asked him how much was he going to charge. He told me $275. I was like are you crazy! I responded to him and said that he didn’t even fix our original problem. He charged me $85 + $45 for a system analysis, which btw is completely bullshit. So he then said, okay, I will charge you $200. I told him that I would call Den and ask him what he thought. Den didn’t answer the phone at the time, so I told the tech that I would have to come back another time to think about what we would do. And that I wanted to talk to my husband. So then he responded by saying how busy he was, and like he had over 70 computers that needed to be fixed, but that he would only charge me $150, but that it wouldn’t be ready until this coming Monday. I tried to get him down more because obviously he just pulls out prices out of his ass. He tells me that first on Friday he would have to erase the harddrive and then on Saturday, he would check the systems (bullshit), Sunday he was closed, and then Monday he would be able to actually reinstall the system software. Well he called me Saturday, just as we were going out the door for Brennan’s game, and said the computer was ready. I told him that I would pick it up Monday. Den feels that we shouldn’t have to pay the $85, since he didn’t fix the original problem to begin with. I told him, perhaps I was not clear to him what the problem was to begin with and that we simply should not pay that amount. I will at least tell the guy that since he finished earlier than expected, that we should pay less than the original price. I didn’t sign any type of contract or form, so it’s really like a wheel or deal situation. I don’t feel as strongly about how Den feels about the originally $85 because I don’t think that I really explained to him what the problem was. Plus, I left this disk that was one of the kid’s game. He said that he ran this game and it it worked fine. But this game just runs of the disk, so it didn’t actually need to install. He really should have done the formatting in the first place because I sort of had an idea that it was something that I did. I admit that I have tendancy to fiddle with the computer, even if I don’t really know what I am doing. I did stuff like this for years, where I even screwed up my computer at work. I remember one time, I accidently deleted files from someones computers, but luckily, I realized that I could pull the files from the network.

I did appreciate the comments that I received about my entry about my inability to speak out. Also, I know that I don’t comment that much to other blogs. I would like to do that much more, but a lot of the blogs that I go, I keep forgetting my password, and so that is the reason. Also, I really don’t make an effort to make this into a popular blog. I really do write for myself. But of course, I do appreciate a comment or two once in a blue moon. But like I said, I don’t really make a grand effort to popularize this blog. Perhaps in another blog, such as my polymer clay blog.

Speaking of, guess what??? I actually did some experimenting this past week. Mainly, on my same paper beads. Those things are really taking a long time to make. I did work more on technique, but the outcome was the same. Things look a bit more tighter. So I will continue to work on those types of pieces, and hopefully one day soon, have any actual piece made. I did start on another piece, but really I think I want to veer away from jewelry pieces. Well at least production type pieces. I really take a long ass time to make just one piece, so it doesn’t make sense for me to try to create a dozen pieces to try to sell. I think I will be giving up on that side of it, but try to focus more on techniques and the perfection of a final art piece. It just took me several hours just to make a cane. In fact the design of cane is simple, but I had it sketched out for a few months now. It is just taking me a long time to get it right.

Tomorrow we don’t have anything planned. I think I will probably do some more claying tomorrow, but other than that I may relax a bit. I have lots of work to do. I was just given a couple of new projects that I will have to start working on. Oh, and I still need to finish watching the rest of Season 4 of the Oz.

I have been enjoying my nano for a week or so now. I am glad to be getting back into podcast again. I really didn’t listen to many podcasts with the shuffle, and when I had a working mini, I was only listening to podcasts.

So right now, I am listening and watching to:

1. Dawn and Drew Show – I’ve been a fan of theirs for a long time. Perhaps I should become a minion.
2. Craftcast – I enjoy listening to her interviews with polymer clay artists, but she does interviews of all types of artists.
3. Simply Ming – I used to watch his show on the Food Network, plus he is a hot asian guy to look at.
4. KCRW’s Good Food – I like watching food shows. I just don’t cook that great.
5. Oprah’s Soul Series – Discovering yourself and Oprah. What more can I say?
6. – Tony and Friends podcast I eventually want to purchase his “No Reservations” series. I don’t think we have the Travel channel anymore, so I have been missing this series.
7. B&N Meet the Writers – It’s interesting to listen to authors talk about their published book.

After the Discovery launched, I did a search and subscribed to the NASA podcast.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend!