Category: Uncategorized

  • Has it been a month already?

    Wow, one month since my last post. Where does the time go? Well I guess those with kids know how much time flies when you spend it with your kids. That is a good thing by the way.

    img_0014Lets start with the most recent and work backwards..Valentine’s Day, ok, I guess I am early. Since it is always so crowded on the actual Valentine’s day, Danith and I have an unspoken custom to go early. This year I took Danith to The Melting Pot. The Melting Pot is a fondue restaurant in Minneapolis. We had the 3 course meal, a beer cheese fondue, followed by the broth and meats and then a white/milk chocolate dessert fondue. With our wine it was a great dinner. I apologize for forgetting to rotate the picture of Danith and her Tulips, but too late now. 🙂

    img_0012I got a new Cannon camera to finally replace the two 5 year old camera’s that were our “primary” cameras. This camera is hackable and it allowed me to upload new features into the camera that out of the box it does not support, like faster or slower shutter speeds, better movies etc. One of the additional features is the ability to either greyscale all except a highlight color, or to swap colors. Now in the quick test I replaced Brandon’s shirt color from blue to red. Now in the picture on the left there was too many shadows to have it work well, but it is just an example of what it can do. The color highlight will save me time in photoshop to make nice highlighted pictures.

    Another time waster for me is scanning old pictures. This time I send a large batch of photos, close to 500, to Scan Cafe to be scanned for me. I have not gotten them back, but got to see the thumbnails online and picked a couple that made me laugh. The first is me and Randy Vath in middle school during my “skater” days. The second is in high-school, Brad Nuss and I were “featured” in a Post Bulletin article about the advanced physics classes that Mayo offered. Of course they picked us doing something extremely geeky and moving equipment.
    rickrandyrickbrad

  • Exciting kids weekend

    2009-01-09-19-40-20_upsidedownThis past weekend was pretty exciting for the kids. Friday night was Brandon’s cub scout pack meeting. During this pack meeting Brandon earned his Bobcat badge. At the moment he has to wear it upside down until he does a good deed.. But the exciting part was that during the pack meeting we had to pin the badge on him, but with him being held upside down! After the meeting the pack had a pizza and movie party with lots of young sugared up kids running everywhere.

    2009-01-10-10-09-52_img_02Saturday was Brandon’s first skiing lesson at Afton Alps. He was in a smaller class with just 4 other kids and loved every second of the class. They spent the day going up the small magic carpet and down the meadows bunny hill, navigating obstacles and learning how to stop. By the end of the day we was so much more confident that after two lessons from dad. Click here to see a small crappily zoomed in phone camera picture of him in action.

    Not to be outdone, it was a busy week for Aiden as well. He started potty training on the 5th and this was his first weekend at home with underwear on. There was a nice ending to a very stressfull day on Saturday which was filled with accidents, Aiden asked to use the potty before bed and actually went this time!

    Sunday was so much better for Aiden.. He learned the feelings and only had two just missed pee accidents, otherwise he told us everytime before he had to go. The other landmark for him is that he is now comfortable in his new bed and has slept mostly through the night all weekend. Yeah for sleep for mom and dad!

    Back to work and the grindstone today… Enjoy everybody!