Melarky

Welly loves to do projects with me, and if we’re hanging out together you can usually hear him say “We’re doing guy stuff…”. Doesn’t matter what we are doing, it’s “guy stuff”. He has also started referring to any hardware store as the “guy stuff store”.

Yesterday we went to my dad’s garage to visit Scotty (he was finishing a project that I’ll let him post about, but let’s just say it’s incredible and I can’t wait to read about it on his blog). We stopped by Cal Ranch first and picked up some little leather gloves so he could have gloves just like daddy (he’s pretty dang cute in those “glubs” as he calls them).

He was really good the whole time we were there, and put his hearing protection on while Scotty was using any power tools. It was getting a little late, and we were about to head out when I looked over and saw Welly crouching in the doorway nodding off then snapping his head back up (while the orbital sander was blaring). I quick woke him up before he could get a power nap in before bed time and we said good bye to Scotty.

I love doing guy stuff with Welly, and I can’t wait until Hilly is old enough to join in.

UPDATE: I just went to my brothers site and saw that his wife posted about the project he was working on. Go check out the Adirondack Chair Scotty made.

We sent some pictures of the amazing Pac Man blanket Mark’s sister, Holly, knit for our son to spritestitch.com (spritestitch is a video game inspired craft weblog). Check it out!

Hurry over to the mom blog, for a give away! Just leave a comment and you can be entered in to win a carseat canopy! These things are great! Anyone can enter! Hurry over though, cause the giveaway ends this afternoon!

CLICK HERE TO ENTER!

There’s nothing like sitting in comfort while your jousting ostriches, fleeing ghosts, jumping barrels or saving the last human family. This is why it was a nessicity that we recover our well-used, overpressurized game room barstools.

We liked the barstools we purchased a few years back for our growing game room (/kitchen). The price was good at $20 a stool, but mostly we liked that they were plain black (flames, car logos, and the Tasmanian devil just isn’t our thing). Over the years they were well used, although most of the abuse came from our kiddos. I think I caught my son on more than one occasion stabbing the seats with a screwdriver or pencil. The plain black cover eventually started flaking off, the fluffiness was gone, basically they looked ready for the dumpster, and they have now turned into the pancake of a cushion you see now.

Continue reading about this project.

While the wi-fi at our house did a sufficient job for surfing the net, when it came to using the wi-fi to steam media, it did a less than stellar job. We mostly noticed it when someone would use the microwave the same time we were steaming a movie from our computer upstairs to the TV in our family room downstairs. We tried a few different solutions to fix it, but came to the conclusion that wiring our house with CAT-5e would be worth it for us. Often we stream media not only to the TV in our family room, but to the arcade computer in kitchen/dining room and to Welly’s arcade computer in his room as well. So there was no doubt it would get well used. It not only improved our streaming capabilities it eliminated the mass of endless feet of cable cords we had rolled up under the desk.

Mark tried explaining to me the technical side of the project, but it didn’t all get through. I must have asked him a million times, “Now why are we doing this?”, “How much is it going to cost?” and “How many holes are you going to make in the walls?!” and “Why are we doing this?”, but he assured me it was going to be great.

Mark did a lot of research on the internet using mainly Instructables to help him. Monday Mark took the day off and along with his brother-in-law, Gary, wired our house.

Continue reading about boring wiring

So that whole pizza deal I posted, apparently didn’t exist. I got my info from deals.woot, a usually very reputable site. Maybe they were tricked too. Well, sorry anyway.

I’m really loving my camera. Most of my practice has been inside with the kids. For the majority of the shots I’ve used the built-in flash since there hasn’t been a lot of sunlight coming in the windows (theres been a lot of overcast and snowy days). Today there was some sun, unfortunately I wasn’t able to get outside so I opened the windows and took a few. They were okay. That picture of Wellington doesn’t really look like Wellington. But it was the best one out of the bunch.

I tried to get a close up of Hilyard’s fluffy baby hair but he wouldn’t hold still. So this is the best one I got of him.

Click here to see more samples.

Some of you may not know this, but my wife is pretty darn competitive. We took a math class together up at USU, and she seemed genuinely upset if she didn’t do better than me on an assignment and/or test. It was actually pretty eye opening, I had never really seen this side of her before, and it’s only getting worse. It’s now made its way from scholarly pursuits into stuff that really matters…video games.

I think it started when we got our first pinball machine. It didn’t save our high scores, so she would keep a scrap of paper around that kept track of who was in the lead. Once she started tracking pinball scores, it was a natural transition into tracking video game scores. Lately, we’ve been picking a game or two, and then we play that for a while and see who can get the highest score.

This past Christmas, I knew I wanted to make something for Melanie by hand, but I wasn’t sure what until I came up with an idea for a high score board:

Here is the finished high score board proudly displaying who REALLY wasted their youth!

Click here to read how the board was made

On Wednesday, 2/10, Little Caesars is having unlimited Large Pepperoni or Cheese pizzas. No coupons, just show up. – No Limit – for $3.99

I just thought I’d give you all a good laugh.

What seventh grader thinks, “Hmmm…It’s picture day, I think I’ll wear my pearls.”