Dustin’s Weblog

Its 5:30 and I now have a week off! Since its been a nice long four months since my last post I guess I have some catching up to do.. and will probably miss most of the important stuff, if there was any. If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook this is all stuff you probably already know

Family Events: The kids are growing fast! Sawyer is talking about everything AND he plays a few games on the Wii and a racing game on Xbox. I think that he also said his first swear word.. but we are going to try and forget about that. Morgan is even starting to play the Wii and doing a little bit of talking now, she has a few words down pretty good including “Dada”, “Mama”, “Baba”, “Kitty”, “Hot”, “Cold” and “Meow”. I don’t think that the kids are huge Thomas The Train fans, but we have an electronic Thomas train set that we will be buying additional track and cars for to give on Christmas that we all enjoy playing with. OH, AND we found out that our baby due in April will be a BOY!  We are planning to do a home birth again if all continues to go smoothly, the only pain about that (for me anyway) is the insurance company - CIGNA. When Morgan was born in 2008 UnitedHealthcare covered us 100% after only a little back-and-fourth. CIGNA on the other hand is not being as nice about it.. but I think that NY State law is on our side and we will be covered in the end.With the third child on the way we needed to upgrade Kim’s truck to a van - a Kia. So on top of all of our other bills, we now have a more expensive auto-loan to pay for. Oh well.. I’m getting used to the debt and being poor I guess. To add to that, we now have a cat with no name.. exactly what vowed never to get after having to find a new home for our ferrets when Sawyer was born, but sometimes family life isn’t about me and what I believe are the right choices I guess! Seemingly related to all this, but possibly not, I am now on blood pressure medication to try and control my chronic high blood pressure.. something my doctor and I had talked about years ago, but I initially resisted.. but I don’t think that I can put it off any longer. So far it seems to be going well.. we’ll see though.

Other: I’ve been trying to do some “casual” life-logging lately to keep a digital record of things that I would usually forget, but might need to recall someday. I’ve been using a free Evernote account for this, and so far it has been pretty awesome. I can scan in documents, or jot them down with my Livescribe pen and be able to search for text within them from their web gui or my phone! I’ve also tried to tie it together with my social media accounts using Tarpipe, which is another cool site that I would recommend if you use Evernote, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Delicious and other such sites. For this vacation I have a pile of tasks that I’ve been trying to keep track of with RememberTheMilk.com.. we’ll see how well it works out as a to-do list over the next 9 days.

Oh yeah, I also tried some J2ME programming for my phone over the last couple months. If anyone is interested I wrote a little app to run in the background while you take pictures with the Samsung Eternity to geoTag your photos. I posted it here.

First post in a few months, so here are a couple of updates.

Sawyer is growing up fast! He is saying quite a bit more these past few weeks. When before he would just kind of make sounds if he didn’t know how to say a specific word, now I think he is actually trying to say the word.. even if it doesn’t come out quite right all the time. Some words he has no problems saying at all are NO!, Momo (Morgan), Lawnmower, Cars and Bike.

Morgan is also getting big! She is trying really really hard to start walking. She pulls herself up on her own when she is near a chair or table, but that first real step on her own might still be a few weeks off. She has four teeth now and getting good at biting.

Now that we are three months into 2009, its probably a good time to post.

Sawyer is now TWO friggen years old (as of 2/14).. and he is definitely a two year old, he plays a lot with MegaBlocks (Legos for little kids, which I also enjoy playing with) and his taste in TV shows has changed a little since when he was a baby-baby, instead of Teletubies, we watch more “Imagination Movers” and “Handy Many”. Morgan is starting to become a lot more alert over the past few weeks, she watches her big brother and her parents move around the house and she is a lot more vocal than I remember Sawyer being at that age.

In other news Kim and I decided to stimulate the economy some by purchasing an Elliptical exercise machine. Even though I know exercise equipment is notorious for being a waste of money, I’m determined (today anyway) to use it for every dollar its worth.. I’m getting oldish, and being fat is probably not a good idea anymore. If nothing else, I now have something to blame when I gain wait.. I can be one of those people who say “____ doesn’t work, I tried it.” and exclude my personal laziness from the equation.

Today I decided to put a security freeze on our credit. It seems like a lot of identity theft has been going around lately, and at the moment there really isn’t any reason anyone should be examining our credit reports as we definitely do not want any more credit cards or loans right now. I have read a little bit on those identity protection services, but to me it sounds like the biggest part of what they do is freeze your credit.. and thats something I can do myself. From reading about this on the NY state web page I kind of expected it to be more of a pain than it was. Of the three credit reporting agencies, both TransUnion and Experian allowed me to do the freeze online after asking a few questions about my credit history. Only Equifax makes it difficult for NY residents by making you send in a written letter and ID to make the request. Once Equifax steps into modern times and lets you freeze/unfreeze online managing this should be a lot easier!  Anyway, just thought I’d post my experience here.

Tonight Kim, Sawyer, Morgan, Myself and our nephew will be going to Chuck E. Cheese for one of Saywer’s playgroup friend’s birthday parties. I’ve only been there once as an adult.. and it really is nothing like the video arcade I remember it once being, but at least I still enjoy eating pizza.

Today was probably the most productive day we have had in a while! Kim brought her car in to get new tires, the old ones were beyond bald. Sawyer and I cleaned the basement office AND the cable guy came to disconnect business class RoadRunner, the final step in moving all my sites over to a VPS at Slicehost. And after all that was done, Kim and I even had enough in us to go out to UNO’s Chicago Grill for dinner while my sister-in-law and her boyfriend babysat. To me, the “date” tonight was the highlight of the month.. things have been very crazy around here lately and just getting out and not being “dada” for an hour or so was a good feeling. We stretched the evening out by checking out Hobby Lobby, a new hobby store in Webster that was on the way home that neither of us had been in before.

I think the next time there is productivity time I may set up a family wordpress page for both Kim and I to post to.. she currently blogs at MySpace, and I’d like to make this site a bit more ME oriented and post the family stuff to the family blog. But we’ll see.. it took me two weeks to do like 4 hours of work migrating the sites, so another easy sounding project isn’t likely to go much faster.

OH, and the this month’s election went totally went awesomely! I am very optimistic about what our next president will do for this country, a very different  feeling I had in 2004!

Sunday, October 12th at 8:18am Morgan Jean Runnells was born in our bathtub. She weighs 8lbs 6oz and is 21 inches long. Both Kim and Morgan are doing great! Kim did an amazing job, this was a home birth with no pain medication or anything! So far Sawyer is adapting well to being a big brother too.

Since this wasn’t at a hospital there are a few things the hospital did with sawyer that we have to make separate appointments for, like a hearing test. Meg, our midwife is able to do almost everything else herself, including the birth certificate paperwork and blood tests. Kim and I will do her foot prints in a few days when things calm down, we have those for Sawyer, and we’d like to have them for Morgan too. Kim also took the above photo of Morgan, and I took the border from Sawyer’s hospital photo and made it pink.. so now we have a “hospital photo” of Morgan too!

The new baby should be here any day now! The official due date is Oct 10th, but if Kim has any control over it she is going to be popping the baby out early.

Not really any other news that I can think of.. maybe worth noting that the shifter in my Civic locked up at a gas pump at BJ’s Wholesale Club’s gas station in Victor NY last monday and needed to be towed away to get fixed… but aside from that, nothing exciting. I’ll post again when the baby is born!

Here are a few of the many things that have happened in the last few months that I haven’t blogged about.

Sawyer has been moved to the larger bedroom and is sleeping in his “big boy” bed. He had been trying to get out of his crib for about a day and then finally broke loose.. so we needed to move him into a bed that would hurt less if he fell out of it. He seems to have adjusted pretty well, but now he is back to waking up in the middle of the night and crying one or two times. I think this is because when he first moved to the new bed I would go in there to check on him if he cried.. seeing how it is new and all, and then he got used to it. I believe the solution will be to just let him cry for longer and longer periods until he finally just gives up.. this worked for us in the past when he was in the crib.

Our baby girl will be born somewhere around October 10th IN OUR HOME (probably). I’m no hippie or advocate of home births, but this is something that Kim really really wants to do, and as long as everything continues to go smoothly I’m not going to put up too much of a fuss. And many years from now it might even be cool to say we had a birth at home. PLUS, let the record show that Kim has granted me one FREE argument win that I can use at anytime to immediately win an argument with her!

Company picnic. Today was the company picnic for ShoreGroup (my employer). Lots of fun, but most of the time I wound up just chasing Sawyer around.. instead of mingling with co-workers and I probably should have. But hey, it was a “family” picnic, and family is all about chasing kids around and not getting what you want!

Money! I need some. Actually, I need A LOT of cash.. and SOON. Insurance does not cover crazy stuff like home birth, so we need to come up with more than just bill and grocery money for the next couple of months. We are considering selling a bunch of crap on craig’s list and ebay sometime soon. I’ve sold one of my better domain names for a bunch of money, which should help.. but we still have a ways to go. Its a long shot, but I’ve been experimenting with a different ad networks for the userbar websites.. so far Google Adsense continues to be the only one that generates any reasonable revenue.

I guess thats it for now!

Yeah! Webster, NY is totally on Google Street View! A friend and I were just poking around on Google Maps trying to track down where a Geocache in Harris Road Cemetery was and saw the blue “street view” roads! But, like other cities.. not all roads are covered.. you can see our circle though, which is pretty exciting to me for some reason.

Soon I’ll be adding Save/Load buttons to The Userbar Designer for subscribers. The Save/Load functionality seems to be working correctly.. the save file are just gzipped XML with the form data from the designer. All I need to do now is setup some sort of Premium Account Manager page to handle user creation and subscription payments. I’ll be using PayPal for payment and instantly activating accounts with IPN (Instant Payment Notification).

Tonight I also installed the Last.FM Pidgin Plugin.. so ‘buddies’ in my contact lists can see what I’m listening to in my status message. Seems to be functioning so far.

Man, longest time in the past couple years that I have gone without posting I think. Definitely not because nothing has been happening.. in fact, this may have been the most postworthy couple of months I’ve had in a while… I just haven’t been able to find the time. And now that I do have time (Kim is off with her mom and Sawyer is sleeping) I can’t remember very much that has happened! So I’ll start with the big one - IT WILL BE A GIRL (probably)! On 5/21 we went in for Kim’s 2nd trimester ultrasound (posted here if you are interested),  and the ultrasound tech says that in her opinion it is a girl. This is good news, name wise, because we were having a hard time coming up with a boy name. Before Sawyer was born we had done a lot of thinking about both boy and girl names, and came up with what we liked way back then.. and for girl names, Morgan Jean Runnells is what we decided on. I think it will be a nice name.

With the pregnancy still moving along fine we are planning on moving Sawyer to the bigger extra bedroom and will put Morgan in his current room. This meant painting. Kim picked out a good beige color for Sawyers new room and we painted it a couple of weeks ago, his current room is light blue but this might work good for a girl’s room too if there are pink things around.. maybe.

Other events from the past two months:

• I my copy of Grand Theft Auto IV, which may be one of my favorite games of all time.. though I don’t get that much time to play it these days.
• The whole family got a bad cold and then got better.
• Gas prices passed $4/gal making my commute to Syracuse close to $30 a day with tolls. Luckily this is still only a once a week thing.
• Kim and I found a couple great houses on nothnagle.com closer to the thruway, only to find out they were model homes for new builds.. and a new build is something that I don’t think I have the patience for to do again. We are not really that actively looking to move anyway.