A Visit from Family

My grandpa and Aunt Diana came from NJ to meet Keagan. It was a great time! We did a lot of hanging out at the house, and eating too. :)

Mom came in Wednesday, Aunt Diana and Grandpa came in Thursday, then Maria, Jayme, Charles, and Nikki came in Friday. It was nice to see everyone and have Keagan get to meet Grandpa and Aunt Diana. Keagan was rather good the entire time. All smily and loving Nikki.

We went to a "pumpkin patch" Saturday.


They sold ridiculuously expensive pumpkins. They went up to 25$ for a large one. But we wanted to carve, so we went to Walmart and got huge ones for 3$ each. Yes, 3$ each.



We were gonna go to Livesay Orchards, about 1 hour away. But it was rainy and 1 hour away. We didn't figure it would be worth the drive. This place is less than 1 mile from out house.


Everyone still seemed to enjoy themselves. And we got a bunch of cute pictures.


That night we had chili and carved the pumpkins. It was fun. Aunt Diana said she hadn't carved before. Below are the finished products. Shannon carved a Halloween Powercat, I carved a normal distribution. Mom carved a witch, Jayme a crazy face. Maria made a snowboarder, and Aunt Diana a girly face.


My mom bought Grandpa a netbook for his birthday. We were worried he'd not like it at all. But quite the opposite! He loved it! The goal is to get him wireless at his house and then he can Skype with us and see us. So, hopefully that all works out.

Sunday Aunt Diana and Grandpa left in the morning, then Maria in the afternoon. We went to Hunter Park and Pei Wei before Jayme, Charles, and Nikki left in the evening.


Mom left Monday afternoon. Now it's back to just the 3 of us. I had an awesome weekend! It was so great to see family! And for my birthday, too!

Meeting

Today at work Shannon and I participated in some testing. It was quite fun, actually. We were using Go To Meeting while on a conference call. There were 5 of us involved. 4 of us were sitting in the same room with only cubicle walls separating us (the 4 closest cubicles in the room actually). The fifth person, was in a separate room, but no door separates the rooms.

So, yeah. It was different and useful and fun.

Square in the Fun Target

I've had a short break from working on my masters report recently. Ever since I've been willing to admit that I won't be presenting on the 7th, I've relaxed a little and had some nights at home. I don't sit in front of my lap top and Shannon's watching the log window of SAS hoping that nothing red pops up. The simulations ran for 11 hours on my computer and 20 on Shannon's. But that step is over and now I just have to finish writting it all up.


In other news. I painted some black orcs! They go along with my lil' goblins. I started them a while ago and finally finished them this weekend. Next up, some new grave guard.

It's Metal.

Wednesday night I was playing the Sims2 and I noticed that things weren't really as should be. Instead of telling me what aspirations my sims had, there was this odd error/code looking text, so I decided I would restart the game. During this saving and reopening, I was a horrible blue screen.

My computer was dying.

Shannon stayed up till 4:30am running various diagnostics and trying to save my files while figuring out what was wrong. Turns out my hard drive is on its way out. There are two spots with problems and when my computer tries to access those spots it just stops. On every start-up it needed access, so my computer wouldn't load correctly.

We used it in safe mode for Thursday. That had everything working, just giant sized. We could not change the resolution on the screen, so I had an entire 15.4" monitor size window for chatting. This resolution also made programming for my consulting project rather hard.

Then last night, the safe mode stopped working.

So Shannon took her apart, and looked around. Then decided to reinstall Windows. Maybe that would not use the 2 bad spots and it would work okay. So we had game night, and reinstalled Windows.

Today I type on my reanimated computer. I don't know how long she'll last, with a slowly deteriorating hard drive, but if she can last me two months, until I'm done with my Masters, I'll be satisfied.

I owe a big thanks to Shannon. He spent a lot of time these past two days trying to and succeeding in fixing my computer. He's so great.