if(weather == good) kids.location = outside;

The weather is nice and the kids have disappeared. We have to drag them into the house for meals kicking and screaming. The TV set is lonely. Every evening they have to go to the neighbor's house with the big yard and nice swingset and load their toys up to come home. The next day they drag everything back over there. Parenting is becoming easier and the kids are healthier. Now we just need hammocks for mom and dad.

Our PC went up in smoke

I've done that which I hoped never to do - bought a PC with Windows Vista on it. Our eMachines went up in smoke after 2.5 years. We needed something quick and cheap. I didn't feel like going through the effort of converting to the Mini Mac. There's a familiarity with Windows that's hard to give up and we own a lot of expensive software for Windows already. Visula Studio .Net and Office 2003 are quite expensive and I got them from UI before graduating for $20 because of their super student deals with Microsoft. I do have Linux on the PC, too, but Juno doesn't support it and I only really like it for writing code.

I found Vista to be absolutely obnoxious for about an hour. The first bootup took forever and the annoying notifications and menus were all on by default. I just went bit by bit and turned everything back to the "Classic" mode so that it basically looks just like XP now. Everything is a little flashier and prettier, but I can't see anything that really changed functionally yet. Everything is roughly where it used to be.

Anyway, we got a Compaq for $325 that has a 120GB SATA HD, 512MB PC4200 DDR2 (soon to be 1.5GB for $40 more), DVD burner with Lightscribe, an open PCI express slot, 3.33 GHz Celeron, and my old 80GB IDE HD with XP and Linux and all our important files. All it really needs to become a good home PC is a nice video card for that PCI express slot.

Off with the Awning - Off with the Chimney!

I got Spring Fever last weekend and tore the steel 8'x4' awning off of the front of our house. It was warping the roof, leaking, and rotting the wood. In its place will be a facia board with a painted steel gutter. I did this in preparation for removal of our brick chimney - at least the four feet of it above the roofline. It has been removed now and I am beginning to build up the new one. It will be concrete block covered with stone veneer that matches the front of our house. That will look way better than the brick did. The quotes we got for the work were astronomical, and I'm finding that it is more due to the hard labor than extreme skill required. It saves me money and trips to the gym.