Posted by Dave Minor
Thu, 20 Oct 2005 13:56:25 GMT
I left town. That’s right, we picked up the family and headed south. I’m not sure of the impact that really had on the Sox, but I have to think it probably had some effect.
Back in the spring, we both (Sarah has felt this way for a long time) felt a strong urge to move closer to family. Settling into a groove in Chicago for 9 more years would have been fine, except that the kids would not want to move as teenagers probably. Sarah found a great job in Hot Springs, AR, we found a great house and moved down in August. Hot Springs is a really neat town and we love it here so far. Having my folks 20 minutes away is great too!
During this process, we were shocked to find out we’re expecting our third child! So come first week or so of November, I’ll be increasing my tax exemption status! We’re excited and glad to be closer to family during this time.
The other news of the year is that I’ve moved away from PHP development and embraced Ruby on Rails as a framework to do agile web apps. This is cool for a couple of reasons. 1) Have you seen RoR in action?? and 2) This is a unified environment that Doug and I can both agree on for doing development together. He’s definitely still the smarter one, but it’s nice to have a common plane to develop on.
Posted in Look Inside, Family, Programming | no comments
Posted by dminor
Mon, 13 Jun 2005 17:47:00 GMT
My 5 year old doesn’t want to go to his sitter’s house today. He seems to want some time to play around the house without his older brother telling him how he can/cannot play. I told him that as long as he stayed out of my hair, he could stay at home today. Within 5 minutes, he was in my office pulling things off the fax machine, asking questions, and generally interrupting.
I said to him, “What was the one thing I said you had to do to be able to stay home today?”
“Not mess up your hair,” he responded.
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Posted by dminor
Tue, 08 Mar 2005 00:14:00 GMT
Our boys got hermit crabs as pets right after Christmas. We liked them so much we bought some more. One of the original crabs has died and another has died in the last few months, so we have three remaining now.
Last night, we noticed that one of the crabs, “Sharky” had changed shells! Alas, his name will probably change now from “Sharky” to “Sandy” which was the name of the former resident of said shell, although that is yet to be determined. It was pretty exciting to see them do something BIG like that. Mostly they just lie around until we take them out to play or bathe.
So that’s the exciting news from here. Sorry our life isn’t more interesting than that.
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Posted by dminor
Fri, 04 Feb 2005 16:57:00 GMT
From Family News this morning:
AP – Polly Pocket Reps fear a PR disaster is imminent after Wednesday’s near-fatal crisis aboard a Polly Pocket Bowing 747 flying round-trip from Kids Room to Mama Office and back to Kids Room. A cute, fluffy boy, Chippie Hamster was aboard when he pushed his way half way through the window beside his seat. When he started the suicide jump, the Captain Cameron was alerted of the jumper and landed the jet quickly. “I was weally lucky that Allison, my head flight attendant, saw the jump in pwogress.” said Cameron. It appeared that Hamster’s hips were too wide to fit through the window. Luckily, EMS arrived on the scene soon. “ I just didn’t know what to do. I tried to pull him through and then push him back in…he was stuck….he was just squirming, pooping…it was awful.”, said EMS veteran Karen Minor.
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Another EMS vet Scott Minor, knew there was no other way to get Hamster out other than to cut him out. So Minor and Minor worked as a team, with the jaws of life and cut through the fuselage. Witnesses at the scene say Scott Minor used super human strength to bend back the material between the windows so Mr. Hamster could escape. Hamster was checked for injuries and taken back home to rest. When asked about his heroic actions, S. Minor said, “Whatever”.
Hamster resides in Kids Room and lives next door to him brother, Chip Hamster.
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Check back next week when I expect lawyers on behalf of Chippie will sue the rescue team for causing the trauma that actually caused him to want to jump out the window! We must sign an act keeping our rodents from watching Law & Order.
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Posted by dminor
Mon, 01 Nov 2004 22:17:00 GMT
Here are some shots of the kids ready to go out on the town. They definitely had a good time, but were tired and ready to come in.
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Posted by dminor
Tue, 04 Nov 2003 03:51:00 GMT
The funniest thing just happened to me. As a parent, I don’t let my kids eat all of the halloween loot that they collect. I dip into their bags every day or so and take a few out so that they won’t have that much sugar (plus I like it). Also, when I allow them to get a piece from their bags, I ask them to share a piece or two with me which they willingly do most of the time.
Tonight during dinner, we started talking about having a piece of candy after dinner. I asked how much they were going to give me and they started feeding off of each other. The numbers each of them were going to give me kept going up! When they couldn’t stand it any longer, they went to pick out the pieces they were going to give me. I think at that point, my total was around 15 pieces.
They each chose a several pieces and put before me. I praised and thanked them for sharing and for their generosity. They lit up! They started putting fist fulls of candy in front of me! When it was all over, I had 40 packages of candy in front of me. I’m not sure if it’s trick, or treat. At least I won’t have that twinge of guilt for taking candy from their pumpkins when they are not around—for a few days anyway!
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Posted by dminor
Sat, 01 Nov 2003 01:24:00 GMT
Here are a couple of snaps from the beginning of our halloween adventure.
We’ve been to one house and G has counted his loot at least 6 times!
It’s 5:20 and we’ve only had 3 groups come by. We’ll be heading out soon.
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Posted by dminor
Tue, 21 Oct 2003 03:22:00 GMT
My three year old is really having a tough time getting it through his mind that he is not say certain words like “stupid-head”, “pooh pooh head”, and generally “stupid” anything. I have been threatening to wash his mouth out with soap.
So tonight as the bath water is running and he is rebuking me for putting bubbles in it(?!), he puts some bubbles on his mouth and I suggest he can wash his own mouth out. He rinses off and says, “There, no more stupid words.” Which, now that I write it is only funny if you heard it. The emphasis was used like words were stupid—not saying he would not say stupid anymore.
Anyway, I had a hard time not laughing. I thought it would make a really good blog. I guess not.
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Posted by dminor
Tue, 07 Oct 2003 02:34:00 GMT
Words from my wife when my 5 year old comes home saying how he can ride a bike with no training wheels. Now, we went through this in July. His friend learned so he thought he could too. He couldn’t. He was just too wobbly. We figured next summer. He was really wobbly. Today, he shocked us! He did very well. I think he has grown an inch or two since summer. I can tell that we’re going to have to keep the driveway clear of snow this winter so that he can hone his skills.
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Posted by dminor
Mon, 06 Oct 2003 22:33:00 GMT
Disclaimer: This is an email I received from a recently married family memeber. I’ll of course not change their names as we all know who they are anyway, and if you don’t know, it doesn’t matter if you know their first names.
Coming up on 10 years of marriage myself, I find this extremely refreshing to remember those young, foolish days of love, and I am encouraged to think that this would never happen in my house—now or then.
Dear all,
We thought you all might like to share in our first marriage disaster.
It happened last night at about 11:00 while I was studying and Monica
was in the bathroom trying to figure out how to fix our leaky faucet.
She had quite enough and was tired of waiting for me to figure out how
to fix it. I’m sure some of you have caught on to what is about to
happen, I just wish I would have when I told her where the power screw
driver was.
I was studying hard, not paying attention to the electric screwdriver
making noise in the bathroom, when all the sudden I hear a scream from
the bathroom accompanied by the sound of a large waterfall. So I got up
from my slumber and what did I see…Monica trying to re-enact the Great
Flood and covering up the hot water knob on the sink with water shooting
straight up to the ceiling. “Ben, do something-it’s really hot,” she
exclaims and leaves me with the burning hot water shooting through our
roof. First dumb thing that comes into my mind-”How in the world do I
turn this off?” So I pulled a towel off the rack and covered the hot
water and it dawned on me that obviously the hot water shutoff is under
the sink. I turned it off just as the electricity in the bathroom shut
off because water had gotten into the outlet on our wall. The bathroom
was completely soaked and all she could do is laugh and all I could do
is act like I would have known to turn the water off before unscrewing
the faucet.
Now for a few funny things: I was actually studying about the Flood for
a test in archaeology when this all happened. Also, Monica had decided
to experiment with the hot water faucet knob before fixing the cold
water knob which was causing the problem. Funny thing is this-the cold
water shut off knob under the sink does not work at all-it needs a new
part because it is threaded. So, if Monica had worked on the cold water
knob first like she should have, we would have never ever been able to
shut it off!!
Sorry for the long story, but here are the morals of the story. Men:
hide your power tools and lock them up, and for goodness sakes, take
care of things before she tries to. Women: There are better ways to
get your man’s attention, put the power tools down, we’ll fix it
eventually.
Talk to you soon,
Ben and Monica
I’m just impressed that he had a screwdriver!
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