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It has been a long time since Jen and I have been able to stay a whole week at the beach, but this year we finally were able to. We ended up going much later in the summer to Sunset Beach with my family which worked out well for me and work. Tucker is finally old enough to battle the waves, Claire got to fly a kite and go putt-putt golfing. Jen and I went kayaking for the first time aound the island, which was a blast. We paddled around the marshy area betweem the island and the intercoastal waterway. The wind and current was a little more then I expected. The only problem was that the only boat launch on the island was blocked off due to the new bridge being built so we had to sneak the boat in on a little beach area on the back of the island. The weather was perfect the whole week, no rain. 12:20 PM | Comments [0]

So Jen and I finally got new cell phones. Jen's old phone got a crack in the display and she started using an old borrowed one from a friend and then mine went through the wash, destroying it, and I had to start using Jen's old pink cracked phone. We looked at messaging phones and smart phones from AT&T, our courier at the time, but unfortunately if you did not go for the iPhone you were pretty much stuck with an overpriced Blackberry or Windows Mobile phone. I really like the iPhone, but Jen wanted a keyboard and I didn't want to have to install iTunes (glorified spreadsheet music manager memory hog) or pay the extra monthly fees just for the iPhone or Blackberry. There was a lot of hype around the Droid phone, but it is only available at Verizon and we will NEVER switch back too them. So that pretty much left T-mobile and Sprint in our area. Both of them have Android based smart phones, so after comparing the plans we went with Sprint and the Samsung Moment slider Android phone. I was... [Read More] 10:38 PM | Comments [0]

So it is NC state fair time again and Jen and I decided to go early this year on Friday after work. We met up with Ryan and Jessica and started our journey. Things seemed pretty similar to years past, except it was cold, really cold for down here. We walked around a bit looking for some of the chocolate covered bacon we had heard so much about and Jen has been dreaming about, but could not find it. We had to settle on some pizza and powered sugar covered elephant ears (fried dough). My eyes were a little larger then my stomach as I was only able to get about half-way through the elephant ear before feeling like I was going to hurl. We walked over to the petting zoo where Jen and Jessica fed carrot pieces to an assortment of greedy little animals. After that we looked at the farm animals. There were some piglets and their mother, baby ducks and chickens, plenty of cows, and some of the weirdest dressed lambs I have ever seen. They were dressed... [Read More] 11:45 PM | Comments [0]

Tonight the Canes took on the Pens at home and Jen and I got to go. The Canes haven't been doing so well so I figured that it would be another beating, and it was looking that way up until the 3rd when we started to play. It was looking like a shutout for the Pens but then Whitney scored twice to put us into overtime and then into a long shootout were we lost. All things considered, I was pretty happy with getting a point. We seemed to be glued to the boards and dumped and chased on just about every play. I think they may have figured out that we were always going to dump it and play around the boards after the first few minutes. Our passing was off and it felt like no one knew were their teammates were so there would be passes that weren't just off, they were to random areas where no one was -- well actually a Pittsburgh player was usually closer then we were which didn't help. Our seats were on the upper ledge which was nice in that we had a great view with no one in front of us. Overall... [Read More] 11:01 PM | Comments [0]

So Jen and I have found that many of our weekly TV show recordings coincide with hockey games. As long as there is only one show recording, all is fine, but when there are two shows and a live game on, we have to choose not to record one of the shows. We tried getting around this by using Hulu to see the missed shows but playing that on the TV was not enjoyable. AT&T Uverse has not made it up the road to us yet so their 4 tuner box is not an option. After some reading I decided to buy a AVerTVHD Duet TV tuner for our Windows7 desktop and plug it into the cable and use Windows Media Center and the XBox as an extender. The card two tuners and only gets ATSC and ClearQAM channels so it should be able to get all of the HD cable channels and just not the NTSC cable channels, or at least that is what I thought. Well after fighting with some bad coax cable and some odd tuning by the card, I only ended up with two channels and a few subchannels!. Not exactly what I had in mind. I did some research... [Read More] 10:50 PM | Comments [0]

So it happened again, I got another kidney stone in under a year! Right before leaving for work yesterday my back started hurting and within 5 minutes I was was in extreme pain. Nothing like the other times. It was the same feeling of pain just a lot more intense and this time it was making me sick and every time I tried to drink any water I threw up. It took everything I could to just write an email to work and give Jen a call to take me to the hospital. The drive to the Cary WakeMed hospital was possibly the longest drive ever. The ER was pretty much empty, but Jen still had to park a mile away as all the ER spots were full and the giant doctors lot right next to the ER is restricted. Once in, they took great care of me and after some pain killers, a CT scan, and some waiting I was allowed to go home. After some sleep and lots of water, I finally passed the stone and am all better other then a little sore. I guess I am going to have to drink more cranberry juice... 4:54 PM | Comments [0]