It’s been quite some time since my last post.  Things are alive and well though, just very busy.  Connor has been going with Laurie to a gym and sport class at the YMCA along with an art class that he has been enjoying and I have been taking him to Father-Tot swimming on Saturday mornings.  Now with DST starting earlier it feels like spring is coming sooner.  Time to clean out the garage, clean out the shed, take the snow tires off the car…

Here’s Connor playing outside last week, he loves those golf clubs.

I also (finally) brewed my vanilla bourbon stout, just in time for, err.. spring.

I also have everything fixed up on the old VW GTI and it’s ready to sell.  I just need to take some spiffy pictures of it to put on Craiglist and it’s ready to go.

Now I just need to get the patio cleaned up, the furniture back out and the BBQ ready for another season!

Happy New Year 2010! Hope everyone has a great year and had a safe New Years!

It’s been a very busy time of year, just wanted to say Merry Christmas to everyone out there!

Connor is 2 years old today!  Well, it’s after midnight now so technically yesterday.  We had his 2nd birthday party today at the clubhouse which is part of our townhouse association.  Everything went really well.  I’ll get some pictures together shortly.

It was a lot of work but we had a lot of help and it turned out to be a fantastic party.  I am really exhausted though.  The entrance has no stairs and instead a twisty handicap ramp that reminds me of a waiting line at Great Adventure.  So I spent a lot of time carrying stuff to/from the clubhouse either around this mess or hurtling the railings.  I am thoroughly exhausted…

This morning I was messing around with NTP on my machines as I noticed all my systems were out of sync.  For some reason I completely forgot to configure NTP on all my Linux boxen.  So shortly after doing this I noticed my e-mail died.  After a little bit I noticed Alpine was displaying an error; it couldn’t connect to my IMAP server.  A quick look in the logs found this amusing error from my dovecot IMAP server:

Warning: Last died with error (see error log for more information):
Time just moved backwards by 29 seconds.
This might cause a lot of problems, so I'll just kill myself now.

http://wiki.dovecot.org/TimeMovedBackwards

Connor recently started trying to climb out of his crib and was successful with getting out; not so successful with getting down.  After a hard spill he stopped for a bit but has started back up so we decided to move him in to a “big boy” bed.  We opted for the fire truck bed here:

Connor's New Bed

There was some debate between us over which bed to go to and what size bed as well.  You can see Laurie’s blog post (http://demandred.dyndns.org/simplylaurie/?p=32) regarding that.  We finally opted for a toddler bed given he is only two years old, well, in 6 days.  It took a little while for him to get adjusted and we needed to spend some time with him before he got comfortable but 30 minutes after leaving his bedroom, he’s sound asleep (thank God).

Our regular camera got messed up so Laurie took these on my camera phone and I posted them up here:

http://demandred.dyndns.org/photos/Connors_New_Bed-2009

A while back Laurie kept her own personal blog.  Then I went and started this one up for both of us to use as a family blog, which I have been mainly posting to.  Laurie decided to restart her blog again as a more personal blog.  Figured I’d post a link to it over here for her.

Simply Laurie

In other news our 4th Anniversary just passed this week.  Laurie bought me an Eli Manning jersey and I got her tickets for the opening of the New Meadowlands Stadium to watch Bon Jovi (May 26th).  That should be a blast

It’s been some time since I have made any posts… A lot has happened lately in our lives.  Some of it I am not ready to post on a blog as of yet.  In the meantime, I finally managed to get my new car under the US Gov’t's CARS program.  I posted up a lengthy “review” of it over on my car forum, enjoy!

http://demandred.dyndns.org/cars/?p=58

260hp, 260ft-lb/tq, 14.0@104

I’ve been trying to purchase a new car and take advantage of the governments Cash for Clunkers (CARS) program.  I’ve been looking to trade in my 1991 Acura Legend 4spd auto which qualifies under the program.  I’ve been following the progress of the program since rumors of it first came about this past March.  I put a downpayment on a new car, that qualifies under the program as well, on July 14th.Here I am and still no car.

First my car was submitted the Tuesday after everything started but was rejected because the dealer didn’t have everything in place.  Then apparently it was rejected a second time.  I gave all the paperwork required the first time through.  I’ve had the car registerd consistently under my name and insured for the past 9 years and i have all that paper work.  The dealer sent me things to fill out, sign and send back to them.  I’ve done everything and still no car!

The dealer calls me, sends me more paper work to fill out and sign.  I send it back as soon as possible…  This back-and-forth has been going on 2 weeks now.  If I knew this would be more complicated and stressful than buying a damn house I would have opted out of it!  Totally not worth all this frustration for the money.

I’ve seen other people get their cars already, it’s taken them a couple of days to do the transaction.  This is just rediculous.

Update:  The dealer got a hold of me this evening to tell me the NHTSA rejected my car because it wasn’t insured for more than a year.  I suppose sending in a copy of my current and last insurance cards, showing well over a year of coverage, wasn’t enough.  So the dealer said he resubmitted everything with a letter from my insurance company with proof of insurance.  To top things off, the dealerships are supposed to be able to check on the status of a vehicle via a website provided by the NHTSA which the dealer stated wasn’t working either.  This bag of fail puts Mary Poppins purse to shame…

Earlier today Laurie had her first doctor’s visit in regards to the pregnancy.  I tagged along as well.  After the exam, everything went well, Laurie had an ultrasound done to better determine how far along the pregnancy is.

We got to hear the baby’s heartbeat, which was 160bpm, 1bpm faster than Connor’s was at this age.  The pregnancy is 7 weeks and 2 days in with an estimated day of birth to be March 7th, 2010.  Laurie has another visit with the doctor in about 1 month.