Moved in!

What a blessing to be in our new house! We spent two weeks before moving in painting, packing, and tearing down the aviary. Moving in has been just as hard! But we count all our blessings, especially those friends that helped us out with packing, moving, or baby sitting. Thanks to you all!

San Francisco

Well over the weekend Travis, my business partner, and I drove up to a client to give their computer network a thorough inspection. That night we stayed at Travis' friend's place in downtown San Francisco. This two bedroom apartment on the third floor rents for $3800 - I am just trying to get a house - this is literally twice our house payment!

There is something appealing when youa re driving to locations that are considered exotic. I get this same feeling when driving through Hollywood and Vegas. And then you get there, you are slapped with reality.

I remembered as a kid going through Vegas, and my parents were trying to distract my little brother from seeing the postcard sized advertisements for Porn and Prostitutes.

My First Snow Cave

Going to the snow this weekend with my family allowed me to fullfill a childhood desire, to build a snow cave. While my brother and I were trying various ways to actually create a snow shelter, I kept thinking about a recent Popular Mechanics article where the authors took a 3 day survival class out in the dessert. It said the first three days are when the majority of lost people are found. During these three days, the state of mind of the lost person usually determines if they survive or not.

Back to the snow cave: It took us about 2 and a half hours to build one, and we cheated - we had a shovel. Having no experience we learned alot and I would like ot think that I would do well in the first 72 hours.

First we decided to build it against a hill. This would make it easier providing one of the walls. We dug out a hole and then compacted the snow around the hole terracing it as you would if you were laying a foundation for bricks.

Then I began to compact snow away from the shelter and used the shovel to cut out compacted snow bricks. This sounded like a good idea, but the snow was very dry and the bricks kept breaking in half. Also this still did not address how we would be able to 'lean' the walls in the center and have them arch like the ice bricks in an igloo. After we built the walls up about four feet, it really became obvious that arched walls would not work.

Version 2.0 - my brother thought that we could still use our walls would then fill it with snow until we had a nice mound. Then we could compact the snow on the top and dig it out. This worked good, as we had plenty of snow uphill to shovel - but I was looking for something faster.

I climbed to the top of the hill and we built a large snowball. We rolled it around until it was about 4 feet in diameter (and weight a few hundred pounds!) and rolled that down the hill. It grew to 5 feet in diameter and delivered a ton of snow (it also broke down some of the walls we made previously).

A few more minutes of moving snow boulders and shoveling loose snow created quite the mound. Digging out out was the easiest part.

After we finished, we found ourselves scared to allow my kids to go in. There was easily a few hundred pounds of snow that made up the roof. My brother walked along the top to test how easy it would colapse and it held up.

In the end, our shelter was about 3 feet wide and 3 feet tall. Of course, you still need something to keep you dry since the floor is all snow and ice.

After our challenge, I decided to search the internet for recommendations on building a snow shelter. I found a video of someone in Finland doing the same thing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jNFy0MKyqY

Other Snow Shelter links:
http://wildwoodsurvival.com/survival/shelter/snow/index.html

Cubby Bear

My son is in Cubbies, that is his age group in our Church's AWANA program. Each Tuesday night, the teacher draws a child's name and that child gets to take Cubby Bare home for the week. Well we left him in Bakersfield on our way home from my uncle's funeral (http://www.gjfreepress.com/article/20071109/OBITUARIES/71108014). My mother-in-law mailed him back to us, but with this holiday coming up, AWANA does not start for another week, so Jacob gets to have Cubby Bear for three weeks.

Anyway, cubby bear comes with a little journal that kids use to write what they did, and parents help out by taking photographs. Since we have Cubby Bear for three weeks, I helped make some eleborate pictures of Cubby's Amazing adventures.

As you can see, Cubby has been travelling to Europe and Egypt. Meanwhile I have been teaching my 4 year old how to use PhotoShop.

Jacob the Wiz

I posted a while back about my oldest son's ability to use tools - 9 months ago he took the doorknob apart on his own with my screw driver, three months ago he was helping me rotate my wife's tires and was wielding the impact gun himself. Someone has been unlocking the shed and our gate, today I learned that he knows the combination to all our padlocks and is the cuplrit!

What an exciting challenge he has turned out to be. This kid soaks up everything I teach him like a sponge and of course learns plenty of things on his own. Today his most recent experiement is to make his own drinks. Today it was milk and juice.

Super Mario Bros theme song via electric guitar

OK, so I posted a while back a video of Super Mario Bros being beat in less than five minutes. A friend told me how cool that was and it made me think of a video I found of someone playing the theme song and all the sound effects with thier electric guitar. Wierd - maybe not even worth posting. I will let you be the judge.

Personal Website

So I FINALLY updated my personal website. It is so inconvenient as compared to Blogging! The important part was updating the photo gallery - of course now with Flickr that is easier to do as well. Anyway, take a look at my photo gallery, I love my family and this is how I get to show them off!

I made this gallery with Adobe Photoshop album. I love this program! Unfortunately it no longer exists. Adobe has now bundled its features with Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 - I think I needc to upgrade and give it a shot.

I still keep my funny stories there too. That is the only bad thing about a blog, it is linear - posts can be sorted in group but there really is no good way to post stories, goals, and beliefs without them getting buried.