Gabe Goes to the Dentist

Gabriel went to the dentist yesterday for his first checkup and cleaning. They took him back there without me. Being a conservative in an increasing overbearing nanny state, I assume they were getting him alone to ask him if he feels safe at home and check him for marks. Anyway, he did very well and had no cavities. He was very proud of the sticker and toy they gave him, and Asher threw a fit of jealousy over them. It was still a much better experience than we expected, though. Gabe is growing up. It probably didn't hurt that he thought the dental assistant was cute, either.

Gabriel On Two Wheels!

Gabe recently began riding a bicycle. He required almost no help at all. He was focused on learning so that he could keep up with his friends in the neighborhood. I pushed him around a few times on his bike and he did pretty well. Then a couple days later we find out that he had been riding the neighbor's bike unassisted. Their bike was a little smaller so he kept riding it for about a week. Then we got him to try his own again and he took off. He rides up and down the sidewalk and manages to go around Asher, who tries to keep up on a little plastic trike, without a problem. I think next year when Isaiah is old enough to allow us to start riding as a family again we will get Gabriel a bike that attaches to mine so he can help pull the other two in the trailer. That will be a long chain of stuff going down the trail.

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.