Before the two-day snowstorm hit, we made a trip down to San Antonio for Jason’s graduation from his Air Force basic training.  We had a good time and got to see most of the Metz family for a couple days, even if the hotel room was a little cramped for Xavier and Ali (they did not like being in one little place for more than about 5 minutes…).  We explored down town San Antonio, saw the Alamo, went on a little riverboat tour, and went to the San Antonio Zoo.  If you’ve never seen it, the San Antonio River Walk is a really neat experience, with lots of restaurants and shops all right on the water and winding pathways throughout.  They don’t even have any railings up, so you are literally walking just right there next to the winding waterways.  We had to keep a really close eye on the kids, but there were a lot of ducks in the river that would walk right up to you, so the kids had a great time watching and chasing after them.

I did one big album with pictures from San Antonio and of all of us playing in the snow.  Check it out here.

This year marked my first full year as a working mamma with a full-time career to handle in addition to raising the kiddos. It’s been a challenge; balancing work and family life is hard, but I’m fortunate to have the two most amazing kiddos and sweetest hubby in the world to support me.

Josh’s job is going well for him to. I dare say he actually loves his job–which is great.  He’s been truly blessed to have landed a career that allows him to endeavor in all his nerdy exploits and get paid for it.

But, of course, our year revolved around those two amazing kiddos of ours. And of course, a big year for them equates to a big, proud year for Mom and Dad.

For starters, both kids are now potty-trained!!!!  That’s right, NO MORE DIAPERS. Ali, our over-achieving two-year old, was fully potty trained by the end of October, with little effort exerted on our parts.  She seemed sort of content to stay in her pull-ups, so one day Josh and I just decided we would do away with them, and she’s been dry ever since.

Both kids are learning SO FAST right now. Xavier recognizes his letter (X) everywhere. He’s started writing his name, recognizes the letters of Ali’s name, my “M,” and can spell “red,” “brown,” “blue,” and “green.”  He colors in the lines of his coloring books, draws most of his shapes perfectly, and is an animal expert.   He’s a budding techie, and is in every way, the duplicate of his father.  He loves cars, trucks, planes and trains, all things Wolverine (or super-hero) related, and building things with Play-Dough.  Xavey is also the single most vocally affectionate person ever.  Over the course of our break, Josh and I have heard “I love you” from him at least once during each of his waking hours, often more. Don’t be fooled by that though-he’s 100% boy, and loves to do all sorts of mischievous things to get him (and Ali) in trouble.

Ali is also learning fast, and super independent. Her approach to everything is, “I do it!”  Ali knows her “A,” and loves singing, dancing, and doing anything with crayons, glitter and glue (who’d a guessed?). She is in most ways, my mini, right down to her incessant desire to have someone play with her hair or rub her back while she’s falling asleep.  She’s truly coming into her own now, and unlike me, is already nurturing her loving side (or maybe just her bossy side, in which case, yes, she’s just like me) by constantly playing with her baby dolls. Ali is our little firecracker, a big ball of beautiful, joyous energy.

Xavey’s big goal for the year is to learn how to do a flip on the trampoline (yeah, the grey hairs are starting to sprout). Ali simply wants to be Picasso and paint some more.

My immediate, easily attainable goal is to get Josh to a concert. He’s roamed around for twenty-six(ish) years now, and still has NEVER been to a concert. We need to remedy this given my love for all things rock.

Long term, our goal is still to get outta Texas.  Northeast, midwest, Pacific northwest. I’m not picky. We just want to be somewhere where our kids can actually enjoy the outdoors. That’s hard to do here, when four to five months of the year temperatures are near or above 100 degrees.

We’ve got one final gallery for the year, with all of our holiday pictures right here.  Enjoy the pictures, and Happy New Year!

Great editorial on Nintendo.  Sums up why I don’t own a Wii.  Quite frustrating, good thing Mass Effect 2 comes out soon .

The pumpkings:

He even recognized that one of the characters had the same name as him. It was hilarious, one of the characters said “Where’s Professor Xavier,” and Xavier started cracking up and said “He said my name!”  So yes, my son likes X-men, my job as a parent is complete.

http://www.joshandmeg.net/gallery/v/josh_and_meg/summer-2009/?g2_page=1

The process is going pretty well so far, I got all the data copied over and the drive installed; but I hit a snag when I realized I didn’t have any more SATA cables.  So now I need to pick up a few of those, and then continue by installing/setting up Ubuntu Server.

Man, I totally called this a while back.  I hope those people get the death sentence.

Ryan – Let me know if you decide to upgrade yours, I can help you through it if you want.

As you can see, up until the first of the year we lived in relative anonymity from the spammers, and were only receiving a few posts a day.  However, something happened at the turn of the year that put us on the radar, and we started receiving several hundred a day during that high point which lasted for several months.

On a related note, it was around this same time frame that Megan’s email started getting spammed so much that she had to abandon Outlook altogether because of its worthless junk mail filters, so I set her up with Thunderbird so it would at least be a bit more manageable.  But during that time she was receiving over 400 junk emails a day.

So what happened?  The chart shows our spam comments have dwindled significantly, and my junk email has dropped from around 40 to 50 a day down to virtually 0.  I maybe get 2 a week now.  I hope a spam warehouse was raided and people are rotting in jail for it, but I’m sure that’s not the case.  Maybe they are just taking a break for some reason.

Here’s to hoping it stays that way.

Wow, what a weekend we had.  It was ridiculously busy, but over all it was a lot of fun and we got some awesome pictures out of it.

To start things off, my parent’s and sister flew in on Thursday afternoon to visit and help us with the kids during the Tabije-Walters wedding.  So we visited with them Thursday night and Friday morning.  Then, Friday evening kicked off the wedding events with the rehearsal and rehearsal dinner.  Grandma, Pappy G (that’s what he insisted on being called, I swear), and Aunt Gracie watched the kids during the rehearsal dinner, so it was nice to get to go out and hang out with friends for the evening.

Saturday was the big day for Mark and Stephanie, and Megan, Xavier and myself were all in the bridal party.  Xavier was adorable in his little tuxedo, although he was too shy to walk down the isle.  Megan had to walk back down and carry him.  Oh well though, everyone thought it was adorable.  After the wedding the kids went home to bed with Grandma and Grandpa again, and Meg and I got to have another evening of fun.

Finally on Sunday we celebrated an early joint birthday party for Xavier and Ali.  Since my parents were already down they wanted to give the kids their birthday presents and see them open them and stuff.  It was a blast.  Xavier got six little squirt guns that we all had a big water fight with.  Mom got some awesome pictures from it.  Unfortunately she’s only in like 1 picture though!  I guess that’s the price you pay for being the photo lady .

All in all, quite the kick off to our crazy hectic month of May.  This weekend we’ve got Ali’s birthday party, then a week off, then a friend from work has a birthday barbecue, then another week off, then Xavier’s birthday party.  Somewhere in between there I think our subdivision is supposed to have a block party as well.  Craziness!

Anyway, pictures from it all are right here.

There really is a good excuse for the lack of posts and pictures lately.  I dropped our camera onto our kitchen tile right after we got back from our Ohio Christmas trip.  After it happened I messed around with it for awhile and eventually determined that it was still mostly functional, but the screen was showing all grey.

So at this point I had to decide whether it was worth it to try and repair it or just buy a new one.   I took it apart and after a little bit of googling I came across the Canon replacement parts phone number and found out that the replacement screen was only about $40.  Figuring $40 was better than about $140 for a new equivalent camera, I ordered one.  The picture is of the old LCD after I got it out and put the new one in.  All in all, it was a pretty easy fix, just a few screws holding the camera together and a bunch of little snaps holding the screen in place.  The hardest part was probably plugging in the little ribbon cables and folding them behind the screen.

It had been killing us not being able to take pictures of Ali and Xavier for nearly two months, so I’m very thankful we finally got the camera functioning again.  Stay posted for new pictures!

So, we decided we would break down and buy some computer upgrades with some of our tax return.  I’ve been using this really great financial software (GnuCash) for the past year or so, and since I had all of the information I needed to file my taxes in this software, I was able to get them filed pretty much as soon as the IRS began accepting returns (January 16th).  So, about a week after filing, I had my money back from the government and in our bank account.

The first order of business was a laptop for Megan.  She has always wanted one, and after shopping around for a bit, I found a great deal on a Dell at Best Buy.  It’s a small (14″), lime-green inspiron 1420, and so far Megan loves it.  She’s definitely the type of person that doesn’t like to be confined to the desk, she likes to be able to use her computer wherever she happens to be.  I don’t know how she got through college with a desktop!

For me, I came across an excellent deal on a 3 year old computer that a friend at work was getting rid of.  It’s also a Dell (an XPS 600), and was a top of the line computer a couple years ago.  It works perfectly for what I need and I couldn’t pass up the price.  Right now it has two NVIDIA 7800 GTX cards in SLI (geek-speak for two graphics cards put together to be more efficient and better performing), 3 GBs of RAM, and two 250GB HDDs in a RAID 1 mirror (geek speak for two drives exactly mirrored giving me kind of a built in backup if one of them fails).

I went through a really annoying week trying to figure out what OS/OSs I wanted to run on it, and after having Vista, Ubuntu, and Windows 7 all on it multiple different times, I finally settled on the beta release of Windows 7.  I was really torn for awhile and didn’t want to give up on Ubuntu entirely, but since Windows 7 is currently free and such a huge improvement over Vista, I decided I’d go with it for awhile.  I’d also really like to start getting all of our home videos onto the computers and start doing some editing, and Ubuntu unfortunately doesn’t have a good video editing program.

And finally, completing our computer upgrades is my absolute favorite, my hp mini 1000.  I’ve been dieing to get a netbook for a long time, and finally settled on the hp.  Dell also had the really appealing Mini 9 at the time, but after playing with the hp in person and seeing hp’s MIE (Mobile Internet Experience, basically a nice looking theme for Ubuntu) in action, I decided to go with it.  It is so tiny it’s almost ridiculous.  My hand is literally like an inch shy of being able to span the entire thing diagonally (I’ll post some better photos after I fix our camera, but that’s a topic for another post).  It has a 10.1″ screen, built in web cam and mic, and only weighs a pound and a half.  It is pretty crazy picking it up and moving it around for the first time.  Even Megan likes how light and portable it is, even if she doesn’t like the tiny screen and keyboard.

All in all, we’re now up-to-date in the computer world, and all of that for a total of about $1100.  I think we did pretty good.  Now to get our camera fixed so we can get back to taking pictures of the little ones!