The Mundanity

Welcome back to regular updates, selectively tailored for friends and family, guaranteed to bore random readers into such a stupor that they may be unable to find the Back or Home buttons and end up becoming our next great fans.

First off, the oil change guys have a new sign and new cardboard cut-out. Darth Vader is most displease with your apparent lack of oil changes. I'll try to get a crappy cell phone picture.

So Mrs. A's birthday was Saturday. She turned an undisclosed age. Let's just say it starts with TH and ends in IRTY. That's right. Three decades ago, Mrs. Austin was brought into this world and the doctors didn't have the sense to warn the rest of us. Her birthday was spent jumping out of a plane. If you've already checked Flickr, you've seen the pictures. A very calm, very mellow Mrs. A went up some 2 miles before leaning out of a plane and calmy decending back to Earth at 120 mph. Chute opened, landed on her butt (to save her bum knee) and everything was right with the world. She would later describe it as "...the most peaceful five minutes of my life." She also said it was the best sex she ever had, which made me flinch a little, but that's a different entry that starts with D and ends with IRTY.

That evening we went with Mr. and Mrs. Invincible Girl, aka Mrs. A's brother and sister in law, to the Melting Pot and proceeded to get hammered while eating fondue. It's always a blast to go there because you have to sit and eat slowly. It makes for good conversation. No wonder the 70's Swedish swingers loved it so much. It's deliciously decadent and everyone should experience it at least once. Not the swinging part, the fondue, you sickos.

The remains of the weekend was spent swearing at our home network setup. After constant rebuilds of machines and (I'm sure) annoying calls to Mr. IG, we ended up calling a service. I won't say who because they haven't finished yet. It was a little disconcerting when after a couple hours the guy said it was a difficult issue to resolve and he'd have to call a bigger geek. As if I wasn't a big enough geek, now I have to hire geeks to help me in my geekness.

I have a mixed view of my role as tech support for Mrs. A. To me it's been a year long struggle to setup and keep up multiple machines on different operating systems, different network interactions and different purposes. When you have to restart all machines because the laptop can't get online, it's a problem with your setup.

Mrs. A seems to think that the glass is more than half full. I was able to keep the site up and the network stable enough for her to earn some money and be able to pay for the upkeep and the eventual overhaul. Very optimistic, but I still feel impotent that we had to bring someone in. It's all that Alpha Geek Male hormones I guess.

But, good news is the house is coming together. Got all the home theater stuff worked out, sort of. I still can't record TV, but I got it back to the way we had it at the old house, plus it's in a smaller room so the sound is a little better. Lord of the Rings is pretty awesome to watch now. We still have to set up the office, a task to which I'm not anticipating with anything but trepidation. (That was a terribly passive sentence, sorry writers.)

The kids are unchanged since we last spoke. Gregory is still having breathing issues. They've changed his medicine a couple times and he's had a few visits to the Pediatrician. He'll have to see a Pediatric Pulmonary and Pediatric Cardiologist for his little murmur and his breathing and in the meantime he's on steroids and some medicine in a nebulizer. For those who remember the first go round with the nebulizer, as you can see it's been a good year long fight with this and we just want him to be better. He wakes up every morning coughing, he starts wheezing if you play with him too much. It's just sad that he's not even a year old and he has breathing problems. It just doesn't seem that fair.

Well, I won't get mopey about it. I'm sure he'll grow out of it given time and proper treatment.

Oh, by the way, I hate computers.