What has my family been up to so far this year?
Dejaquan started taking boys gymnastics lessons once a week on Jan 24 at the Wisconsin Gymnastics Academy in Brown Deer (Whitefish Bay's gymnastics program is only geared towards girls). Sarah takes him to there after school each week. Norah started taking swimming lessons once a week on Jan 16. It's the introductory thing where each parent gets in the pool with their child. Norah is slowly getting more comfortable in the water because of it. She no longer has to have a washcloth on her face in the bath now when I wash her hair.
We are getting close to having our trip to England this spring all planned out. We'll be staying in Manchester the first couple days, then traveling about Yorkshire, visiting mostly castles, the east coast, and the Minster in York for a couple days. It's the two days right before our friends ' wedding at the end of our trip that we haven't solidified on. Tentatively we'll be visiting the potteries near Stoke-on-Trent, which is apparently not a very popular tourist area. Here's our planned trip ala Google Maps
Other miscellaneous musings: I got a used PS2 with some games a few weeks ago, and Dejaquan's really enjoyed playing ssX3, a downhill snowboarding game. We got out the Lego picturing making set tonight and Norah played with it for almost 2 hours. Sarah told me we can't let her play with it much because it would be a great item to take with us on the train on our trip out to Oregon this summer. A couple weekends ago we rearranged a few rooms in the house: switched the location of the fridge and table in the kitchen, moved the entertainment center into the front room, and redid the furniture layout a little in the living room for the first time since we got the entertainment center over 5 years ago. Sarah even wallpapered a wall and painted the other walls in the front room. While we're on our trip to England, we're having our (only) bathroom redone, so even it is getting simplified, too.
Norah's going to turn 4 in less than 2 weeks. Now that she's getting out of what I consider the terrible 3's, I need to remember what Sarah has encouraged me to do: be more empathetic and not so strict. It's a struggle figuring out how to get my children to accomplish what I feel they need to in order to stay healthy (brushing teeth, going to bed on time, etc) while keeping everyone happy.
Computer related: at work & at home, I've played with using Greasemonkey to remember passwords, as well as to allow broken javascript code from an internal webapp that only works on IE to also work with Firefox. I'm also now managing our personal finances with jGnash. Very easy to use. Just this past Friday I setup an RSS feed for some of our subversion repositories (I hate managing which source code repositories to send automatic emails from--RSS provides much more control in that anyone can choose to get updates--with an RSS feed instead of automated emails, you can't call them "spam" anymore). I hate having to use Windows & Outlook at work, but at least there's a good RSS plugin I finally found for Outlook: Blogbot
One last thing (a gripe): My Chemical Romance's 2006 album, The Black Parade was my favorite album of 2007. And close runner up was Muse's, Black Holes and Revelations also released in 2006. Too bad they ware released too close to the 2007 Grammy's to be eligible for this year's Grammy's. Awesome artsy alt-rock.
