From right to left: my angler fish, Meg’s mocking jay, Ali’s crazy cat on top of a pumpkin, and Xavier’s vampire bat.

Ali as a mummy

Megan went all out on Ali’s costume this year.  It was the first year Ali actually wanted to be something scary, and she turned into an awesome mummy.  Surprisingly, there are never any mummy’s out.  It seems like such a no-brainer type of Halloween costume, but if you start thinking about it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a kid out trick-or-treating as a mummy!  She was quite a hit with everyone, and she loved getting to put fake blood and makeup on.

Xavier wanted to go as Spider-Man this year, so he got a store-bought costume.  It was a pretty neat Spidey outfit though, the mask was a whole-head one, and his Spider-Man suit had fake muscles built in.

Xavier and Ali as Spidey and The Mummy!

Slightly neater picture of my angler fish.

All the pumpkins in the light.

Either way, when our painting reminded me of the Nest, I had to order one to go on the new chalkboard wall. It came in a few days, and I immediately opened it up.  It really is a thing of beauty, it makes you wonder why so many aspects of home electronics have made very little progress over the past couple decades.

Installation was a snap.  The box includes a nifty little ‘Nest’ screwdriver, with 4 different heads for several different screw sizes that might be holding your old thermostat in place.  The instruction booklet gives you the helpful pointer of taking a picture of the old wiring before undoing it, but it’s really pretty self-explanatory.  All the colored wires go to their applicable label, with the exception of the auxiliary wire, which in my case was blue, and connects to W2.  I’d imagine there are different setups depending on your particular HVAC, but I can’t imagine the majority of situations are much different from mine.  The Nest installation manual even takes a little jab at the laziness of a number of thermostats, explicitly telling you not to hook up any jumper wires because the Nest is intelligent enough to send the proper signals to each.  Mine had one jumper between Rh and Rc, and as instructed I hooked my red cable up to which one fancied me, Rh in my case.

The Nest wire connectors are very simple and elegant. You just push the small tab down next to the label, slide the wire in and then let go of the tab. The tabs are spring-loaded putting pressure against the wires to secure them in place.  The unit itself is much more compact than the thermostat I was replacing, so I trimmed down my wires significantly so there was just enough length to reach the connectors.  Once everything was in place I secured my Nest to the wall using the supplied screws.  The Nest is really quite light, so I didn’t even bother with drywall anchors. A genius little touch is a built-in bubble level, right above the wiring connections, so you’ve got no excuse for mounting it crooked.

Once you’ve finished the wiring, you simply snap on the face plate (which includes the screen and rotating dial), push your HVAC breaker back in, and the Nest pops to life.  There are some set up steps to go through, essentially just connecting the Nest to your wi-fi network.  I must say the user interface works well given that all you have is a rotating dial and a push button screen.  You essentially have a rotary list of characters for entering your wi-fi credentials, which you scroll through using the rotating ring around the screen, and then push the screen as a button to select each character.

After you’re connected, you set a temperature range for each function.  So if the Nest is cooling, you set what temperature the Nest should let your house rise to when your away, and if it’s heating you set how cold it should allow your house to get.  After that, set whether you want cooling or heating, set the temperature you want, and you’re all set. From here on out you simply spin the ring to what temperature you want throughout your daily routines, and the Nest will learn your schedule and begin taking care of it for you.

Unfortunately you do still have to set it to cooling or heating.  It’s this aspect that I have my one main complaint with the Nest.  Why do I still have to go select heating or cooling?  It’s this precise situation, where during the spring and fall when temperatures range widely, that I always forget to switch from heating to cooling or vice versa. Generally I won’t remember until I’m sweating and wondering why it’s 80 in the house, until I come to realize the thermostat is still set to heat.  I understand you wouldn’t want it constantly switching between heating or cooling just to maintain an exact temperature, but I believe this could be solved a couple of ways. One way would be to use a buffer range, set by the user, so that you allow the temperature to float a few degrees off before kicking on the necessary function.  This should work great in the spring and fall seasons when it’s most needed because for one, most people set things cooler in the winter, and a bit warmer in the summer.  Maybe 68 or 70 when you’ve got winter clothes on is comfortable, and 72 or 74 is alright in the summer when you’re in shorts and t-shirts.  So in the spring and fall when you are transitioning between these settings you’d be less likely to be bothered by the temperature floating off a few degrees.  In the summer or winter it’s a non-issue because the temperature will only naturally be going in one direction and only heating or cooling will be necessary. Another even simpler option would be to use the outside temperature to determine which function is needed.  The Nest knows pretty precisely where it is since it connects to your wi-fi, so it’d be simple to check the weather for the area and set the function accordingly.

Update:  An update to the software somewhere between 1.0 and 2.0 enabled a new ‘Range’ mode, which is essentially the exact solution I described.  You set an upper and lower limit, and the Nest lets the temperature float between the two, heating or cooling when necessary.  I used it throughout the month of October and it worked great.  I think my unit kicked on for maybe a total of 10 hours for all of October!

But, enough of my nitpicking of that one negative.  The last piece of the Nest that I should mention is your personal dashboard that you can access at the Nest website.  It let’s you connect directly to your Nest and set temperatures remotely, look at historical energy use, etc.  It’s pretty slick and a welcome addition to the whole package. There are also iPhone and Android apps, but I haven’t messed with those as I don’t use either of those mobile OSs, but I believe they’d offer similar functionality to the web dashboard.

If you are even remotely interested in this thing, I recommend you jump right in.  They’ve recently updated the hardware just a bit as well, making the Nest a bit more streamlined and thinner.  It is essentially the only thing like it on the market right now, and supporting this innovative company can only push the industry forward.

* happy 5th birthday sweet girl *

Things are pretty settled down for us now, and we’ve started getting out and doing stuff, and taking pictures again. We took the kids to the Cincinnati Zoo last week during one of the beautiful spring days we’ve been having, and we dyed Easter eggs with the kids and Grandma Rhonda yesterday. Here’s the first album from our new camera with pictures from the zoo, Easter, and some older ones from my birthday last month.

The kids had quite the extended birthdays this year. In all, I believe they had about 4 or 5 different celebrations. May was an incredibly busy month with us moving across the country and all, so instead of having individual parties for each of them, we just had our own little family parties for them on their actual birthdays. While we were still in Texas we then had a combined party for friends at a big putt-putt/family fun center place. Everyone had a great time and it was a good time for the kids to see people in Texas one last time. We played putt-putt, rode bumper boats, and played a bunch of games in the arcade. There are some pictures from that event in the album I put up in this post.

Those celebrations were good, and the kids got plenty of presents, but we were so busy that Meg didn’t get to make her annual cake masterpieces. So, once we got somewhat settled in Ohio, we wanted to throw a party for all the family members in Ohio and for Meg to make the kids their cakes. Grandma Lil was gracious enough to let us use her house so the kids could swim. Since two cakes were needed this time, Megan and Sarah tag teamed them, and they turned out completely amazing. Xavier wanted a lego batman cake, and Ali wanted a butterfly cake, and they both got awesome versions of both.

Ali's whimsical 4th birthday cake

Xavier's Batman 5th birthday cake

More pictures of the cake and from the party are here.

Our Jack-o'-lantern Family.

Pumpkins from left to right: Ali's 'Kitty-Bat', Xavier's ghosts, Megan's owl, and my Angry Bird.

Oh, and Meg and I free-handed ours, cause we’re BAs like that.

We’ve been in our new house for about 5 weeks now, and we still aren’t quite settled yet, but we are getting ever closer. So far we’ve painted Ali’s room as well as our bedroom and bathroom, unpacked all of our stuff, installed new lights in the office and kitchen, ran wiring in the basement for the new home theater set up, closed the pool for the winter, attended 30 different soccer events (including games/practices), and went to GE Family Day at King’s Island. …It’s been a bit of a whirlwind. But now that the master is done (and my  eyes are no longer being assaulted by the hideous rust color) and soccer season is over, we should finally be able to finish settling in, and maybe (possibly), have some time to enjoy our new home.

Xavier sitting on the front porch on his first day of kindergarten!

The kids are adjusting to life in Ohio amazingly well. They both had a blast playing soccer this year, and Xavier scored his first goal during the last game of the season! It was the only goal scored, leading to a 1-0 victory for the Tigers (they got to pick their own team name). Xavier is loving kindergarten – especially riding the bus. I drove him the first couple days, volunteering my chauffeuring service for the year, but my sweet son politely demanded to ride the bus. We had assumed the novelty would wear off (and that I would get to see my potato off to school each day) but it hasn’t… Maybe that has something to do with his seatmates – Cali and Lucy.

Ali is in  pre-k  this year. She rides with Josh to and from school each day and recently went on her first field trip. Despite her wishing and begging to go to kindergarten with Xavier, she’s transitioned to being in preschool alone really well. Josh and I were both a little worried that when it came time for the kiddos to move to separate schools this fall, Ali would be upset. …to be honest, she’s barely noticed. I’m fairly certain this has to do with getting Daddy all to herself for a solid hour each day.

Both kids are loving the big new yard.  They’ve been driving their Power Wheels around on the weekends, crashing into things (like trees) and generally giving me plenty of reasons to worry. This past weekend, we caught Ali holding on to the back of Xavier’s jeep  -laughing – as he dragged her behind him, much like a water-skier gets dragged behind a boat. I’m considering erecting a barricade around the perimeter of the yard, something to try to keep the kids out of the woods, given the nasty poisonous vines that lurk in there. And for those crazy folks who think my worry is a bit overkill, just check Josh’s pictures on facebook for the battle wounds he received when he attempted to take on the vines this weekend.

Xavier at school on his first day.

Josh has taken exactly 0 pictures all summer, and I’ve been nearly as bad – having to borrow Ry and Sarah’s camera to get some pictures of Xavier on his first day of school.  Fortunately, we saw Cindy a lot this summer, which means we’ll have plenty of photos to peruse somewhere.

As for what happened to this summer – I have no idea. I think it got lost somewhere between Texas and Ohio.

Check out all the pictures here.

Its been a very hectic few weeks, but we are finally getting settled into a routine for the summer. Our routine is set to be disrupted yet again in late August, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start back at the beginning.

Last fall, Meg and I decided we had finally had enough of Texas, and wanted to move. We considered Washington state for quite awhile, but in the end we decided to come back to Ohio to be closer to family while the kids grow up (we’d still like to end up in Washington after the kids are grown ). With the decision made we started applying for jobs like crazy, and early this year I got a job offer from GE Aviation. I took the job and we started on a whirlwind of activity to try and sell our house in this bad housing market and at the same time find a house to buy in Ohio. Our house sat for about 6 weeks with very little activity, and our first house hunting trip didn’t really lead to much. Thankfully God blessed us greatly one evening when a potential buyer saw our house and made us a good offer that very night. We negotiated just a little and were under contract. 

With our house sale pending, we made the move up here, had all our household goods put in storage, and are currently staying with Ryan and Sarah (thanks guys!). We immediately restarted our house hunt, and found the perfect place. The downside is that we can’t move in to the house until the end of summer, so we’ve settled in to our routine at Ryan and Sarah’s, and so far haven’t killed each other yet! Austin and of course Xavier and Ali are there as well, so Ryan and Sarah have quite the full house. 

We haven’t been taking many pictures given all the craziness, but I did do an album of all of our last Texas adventures several weeks ago. Check it out at gallery.joshandmeg.net. 

Stay tuned for more updates, but I’m sure it’ll be pretty hectic until we finally get settled into our own place.

traffic at the site making a huge jump the past few days

an insane amount of searches for 'easter cupcakes'

Pretty interesting how having just a tiny piece of content that happens to be a popular search term drives a ton of traffic to the site. Maybe we should actually start writing interesting stuff on here…

Even though the design is over a year old, it has fortunately held up really well, and I think it will be a nice looking theme for some time to come.  As I was writing this post and looking up the time frames for how long the redesign has been in the works, I found an old sneak preview post I had done back in January of 2010.  It details the changes that were planned pretty well, and I can gladly say that it turned out pretty much exactly as the layout mock-ups portrayed.  I’ve got several things left to do, and now that I’ve gotten the site in a completely usable state, I can focus on the technical details of some of the new features.  I’d like to get a better date-based archive page working, and I am going to do a Gallery 3 theme in the same style as the new site so that it all flows together better.

One of the biggest functional changes is the new threaded comment system.  If you’d like to reply directly to someone else’s comment, simply click the little ‘reply’ link and your comment will be displayed directly underneath as a thread of that comment.  If you don’t like the mystery man face portraying you after you leave a comment, you can go register at gravatar.com.  It’s a neat system so that your Gravatar (globally recognized avatar) can be recognized at any site you leave a comment on.  Keep in mind it is linked to whatever email address you used when you commented, but it does allow you to register any number of email addresses under the same account.

If you hadn’t been here in a while, here is a screen shot of the previous layout of the site:

joshandmeg.net version 2.0

Quite a big difference .  I’m trying to dig up what version 1.0 looked like, I know I have a screen shot of it somewhere.  If I manage to find it I’ll add it to the post.

Sweet!  I found the full html version of joshandmeg.net version 1.0.  I was hand-coding each post back then.  Here’s a screen-cap of the original site:

joshandmeg.net version 1.0

It’s pretty neat to see how even though 2.0 was a big improvement over 1.0, it still kept the same style and basic layout.  Pretty cool to see the site through it’s various forms over the years.  Version 1.0 launched on August 7, 2004.

Click around the new site, explore, and let us know in the comments how you like it, if you find any problems, or any other feedback you may have.

There are a ton of great pictures, so be sure to check them out here.

Also, I added a new module to the Gallery 3 install that allows you to download a .zip file of the album you are currently viewing in case anyone wants the full resolution files