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A friend alluded to this the other day but I had not heard anything about it. I happened upon this article tonight and it got me wondering if Linksys had in fact stopped production. I search Amazon and found that the extender I had purchased back in February was no longer available. This totally suck as I plan how to design our home theater in our new house. One of my thoughts was to have the Media Center PC be located in the office and the TV’s would be served up by the extenders. I guess this won’t be happening.

I’m writing this post to publicly thank my wife for an awesome lunch today.  It’s snowing (raining, sleeting, etc.) here in Wisconsin today so she is home with our son since schools and day care are closed. I left and came back this morning so I could run out and get milk and a couple of donuts for them. on my way out the first time I asked her if she would through some of the left over chili into my lunch bag for me.  Now if I had been the one doing this I would have put the ice pack and the chili in the bag and been done with it.  Carrie however put the ice pack and chili in followed by shredded cheese, crackers, corn bread (buttered), a couple of chocolates and two oranges.  Now that’s service.  Thank you Carrie!

I’m a very warm blooded person.  During the summer I can barely stand it.  The mere thought of going outside starts me sweating.  For some reason during the winter I completely reverse and am cold all the time, no matter how many blankets we put on the bed.  Usually I like winter, or at least the cold. I’d rather be cold than hot since it’s so much easier to put a sweater or jacket on.  Ah well.

I need a day of from work.  This week has been very busy.  This last two months has been very busy.  It’s the same thing every year.  We have our projects typically for three months as a time but the last three months of the year have two weeks less time to get stuff done so it’s always a rush.  It also seems that we get more work to do during this time.  Not fun.

About a month ago Carrie came home from class and heard water. Initially she though it was just the aquarium being loud because it was low on water. Well she was actually partially correct because infact the water was spilling out of the aquarium and onto the shelf, through the shelf, into the drywall and mixing with all of the electrical wiring.

After about an hour and a half of cleanup, a lot of cursing and donating the fish to a local pet store we made the decision to use this incident to do a small remodel on our basement. I hope to complete this project this weekend and put our office back together.  I also have some pictures that I will share showing the mess that was made and my subsequent remodel.

I say all this as an excuse as to why I’ve not updated except for links lately.

Speaking of updating, when our office is set back up my plan is to upgrade to Movable Type 4 and redesign stearnsfamily.org.

I bought the house that we live in back in 1999.  I had it built so it was brand new.  It’s not eight years later and really starting to show it’s age.  I’ve known for awhile there was some rot on the brick molding around the garage and set out to replace it this weekend.  Friday night I pulled of the worst piece only to find the sheathing underneath was roting also.  Today my Dad helped me replace a strip of the sheathing and now I’m letting things dry out before I prime everything underneath and put up the new molding (not to mention the siding that we had to take down.

On top of this the dryer seems to be acting up (also new back in 1999), the dish washer has a gasket that is loose (although it’s not leaking) and the gasket around the refridgerator is busted up a bit. I guess this all makes sense, eight years is a pretty long time and the house has be largely maintenance free this entire time.

Carrie is starting nursing school full time in about a week and a half and I realize recently that this was inspiring me to make a change and start to work towards something.  My days have been pretty much the same for the last year and a half and this was really starting to wear on me.  I was beginning to realize that I was not working towards anything but the weekends.   

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Would you believe that I’ve forgotten to blog? This year has become one of the busiest I’ve ever had at work. It’s been crazy. Between our upgrade and the wonderful new dates for daylight savings time I’m staying pretty busy. I need to try this blogging thing again to use as an outlet.
Ok, so I’m sitting in a coffee shop right now because Carrie and Henry are meeting some of Carrie’s high school friends. I should really not be blogging right now but rather be catching up on some work which was the whole point of coming here…
Oh yeah, I may be setting up a blog for my mom later this week. I will post links once we get it up and running.

So where have I been? While I have been neglecting this blog I have been spending some time learning the ins and outs of video editing and posting a few over at our family blog, check them out.
Not a whole lot else to speak of. It’s cold here but most of you that read this site are also from the mid-west so you already knew that. I was supposed to go to the gym this morning but it was just too cold to get up and go.
In the jealously department a co-worker is in Hawaii for the next two weeks and my sister-in-law and brother-in-law are in Italy for the next two weeks. This really makes Carrie and I want to travel. Time to plan our summer vacation.

Here’s something that’s always annoyed me…
You receive an e-mail on a regular basis either because you are a customer of a company or because you sign up to receive said e-mails and you decide you want to stop receiving them.
So you follow the unsubscribe/opt out process only to receive a confirmation e-mail stating that the process was successful. Sure it’s only one additional e-mail but you’ve already indicated to the company that you don’t want to receive e-mails from them.

Christmas is over but the un-packaging of things took far longer than the opening of gifts around our house. In 2006 we had the arrival of our son; and as with any child born in these times, that comes many toys for at Christmas. As it turns out, with the arrival of toys comes the arrival of plastic coated carboard, celophane tape, and hundreds of twist ties.
Being a gadget hound I was quite familiar with the bubble packaging that most small electronics are packaged in. Children’s toys packaging however is far more annoying in my eyes. These toys are for use by children and thus are built to withstand years of abuse. For that matter why do the toy companies feel the need to encase the toys in so much material and afix them to the cardboard in such a secure manner?