| 2013-03-07 22:24:20 954 This has been a crazy week. Started out on Saturday morning: kenneled the puupies and dropped EJ off at the Pierces'. Then we headed to wonderful Madison via the brand new Canton Parkway. Fastest route to the Sestis' yet, cuts off several minutes and many redlights. The girls went shopping and Andrew and I went to the Turcotte shooting range. I managed to shoot my revolver twice. This is what happens when I take things apart and put the hammer strut in backwards. We still had a lot of fun shooting Andrew's .22 and 9mm. Then we headed to Fresh Market and picked up some ginormous steaks and organic broccoli. Got back to the house and had a wholesome meal. I ate my entire ribeye. It was wonderful. Later on the girls got back from their lingerie shower for the eventual Christy Gray. Got up on Sunday and had brunch at PF Changs. Emily spent a good while shopping while I warmed up a bench. Had a great conversation with a 71yo man with 6 children and 21 grandchildren. We finished up at the mall with another trip to Fresh Market. For supper Monday night, I cooked the salmon patties and deviled crabs that we had picked up at Fresh Market. They were very delicious. Tuesday morning I woke up and felt like I had lice. I had scratch marks all over my face and neck. I am not sure if I did this to myself or if it was all rash. I took some benadryl and went to work. By 5 I was in bad shape. I got up Tuesday and took this awesome picture of myself. I did not go to work, instead I headed to Emily's clinic in Maben. Got a shot of dexamethasone and a prescription for more. Makes my first $4 Kroger prescription ever. Yay for 50 fuel points! The meds did not do much for me on Wednesday. By Thursday morning I was in a lot better shape. Now, late on Thursday night, my face is kinda cleared up, but I still have a lot of rash on my torso and legs. I am planning on heading back to work in the morning. The big question is, where did I get this crap from? Emily blames the crab I had even though I have never had an issue with shellfish. I blame the Lone Star Tick I found on my leg 14 days before the rash showed up. Lone Star's do no carry Lyme disease at least. It seems like I suffered from STARI, except that the rash I had was not correct either. Anyway I did not end up with a bacterial infection, just a lot of crazy itchy rash. Emily's diagnosis of a crab shell allergy may be the correct one after all. Who knows. |
| 2012-11-18 22:45:26 953 Last tailgate of 2012 is in the books. Had a super busy week so finally got to make my Kroger trip on Friday night. Emily got busy with a sweet potato casserole and cornbread dressing. I got the truck loaded and started building a meat tree. Then I met Jeremy out at the tailgate spot and unloaded the truck. Jeremy and Jennifer dropped me off at home and I put chicken and waffle kabobs together and also contructed a bacon explosion. At this point it was around 10:30PM so I decided to give up on finishing the meat tree. The turkey breast was finally thawed out so I stuffed a good bit of minced garlic under the skin, put it in a ziplock, and doused it with pineapple juice and a bit of Tony's. I fixed the ham up by rubbing it with mustard and brown sugar. By this point it was pretty late so we finally called it a night. Got up at 6:30. I dressed Eliza Jo in her maroon romper. The three of us made it to campus right at 8:00. Ben had beat us there from Madison by leaving at 5:45. I warmed up the grill and started cooking the bacon explosion. The heat was low so we had to start more charcoal to finish it. Also toasted the chicken and waffles on the grill. I learned an important lesson about the Kroger chicken. Kroger was out of the precooked strips that I usually get so I went with the "restaurant patties." The problem is that those patties have a slight pickle flavor to them. Not the best thing to accompany waffles and syrup. Other than that snafu, breakfast was great. I had the smoker lit by then and put the turkey on the bottom grate and the ham on the top grate. Shortly after getting the smoker going, we headed into the game. We ran into John Kennedy and then Jeremy Brown as soon as we got into the stadium. The game was rough starting out. Eliza Jo was a doll. Emily held her the first quarter and I took over in the second. Nearing halftime she was waking up and antsy so we got out as soon as the quarter was over. Of course we had to stop to get Emily two bags of boiled peanuts. We headed back to the tailgate where my smoker's charcoal was pretty much cold. I started new charcoal and pretty quickly had the smoker heated back up in the 250 range. Emily and I had Jeremy's TV so we did not miss any of the game. By tailgating north of Scott Field, we were able to hear good things happen about five seconds before we saw them on TV. Poor directv folks would have been another 10-20 seconds behind us. Right as the game finished, my turkey breast clocked in at 160. I took the turkey and ham off, wrapped them in foil, and put them in a dry cooler. Around the same time I got the pans of dressing and sweet potato casserole on the grill to warm up. Everthing turned out so awesome. Emily did a wonderful job with dressing and sweet potatoes. I was really happy with the turkey. It had a really strong garlic flavor on the skin side. The ham was a typical ham and everyone loved it. We finished the day off with pie that Jimmy brought. I was so full. So full. Today is Emily and my sixth anniversary. I bought us a cast iron fondue set. because the sixth anniversary calls for iron and sugar. I made an awesome cheese fondue for supper. We used toasted Kroger texas toast bread and leftover smoked ham. Then I cleaned up the pot and made a chocolate fondue to count for the sugar. It was great. Yay food! |
| 2012-08-24 00:41:48 952 It has been an awesome last three months. Emily's last trimester was a blast. We are so glad to have it over and have Eliza Jo home! On August 7th I took off for the afternoon and went with Emily to her last office visit before the birth with Dr Whittle. He set our schedule for the week by telling Emily to come back to the hospital the next evening. We came back to Starkville and had our last meal together as non parents at La Terraza. Spent a fretful Wednesday around the house tidying up. Drove over to West Point a little after 6. We picked up candy at CVS and then went to Dollar General for more candy, a small box, and some tissue paper. Emily used these supplies to put a gift together for the nurses on the short drive to the hospital. We checked in through the ER and got taken to a the same labor and delivery room that we were shown during our birthing class. I left Emily to move the car around the hospital and the nurse let me know that we would have room 23 for the night and after Eliza was born. Getting room 23 was AWESOME because is is the corner suite at the West Point hosptial. We got moved from the first room to room 23 to spend the night. We both slept horribly. At 5AM a nurse came in to get Emily up. She got a shower and we were moved back to the first room. The Pitocin drip got started right at 7AM. Pastor Hank came to visit us around 9 or so. My parents made it up by 11 and Daddy and I went to Wendy's to get some lunch. Afterward I was bad and snuck Emily some Coke and mints even though she was only supposed to get ice. Emily was such a trooper through all of the contractions she was happening. Dr Whittle came in a little after 6PM and gave us the verdict that it was section time. Baby Eliza was facing the wrong way and Emily was not progressing. So that was the scariest thing ever for us. Emily got wheeled away into the OR and I got put into the staging area to put on my scrubs. Sitting there with a mask and hairnet was one of the most stressful waiting rooms of my life. From there I was summoned into the OR and got to sit beside Emily's head. Lucky for me there was a sheet between me and the operating field. Horrible sounds came from the operating field. Dr Whittle told us that he had a smiling baby looking up at him. After a few more minutes he was able to show us a freshly born bloody baby girl at 8:05! She was a screamer. The nurses cleaned up Eliza in a corner of the OR and I stayed with Emily. They brought Eliza over to us and showed her to Emily and I. Then they let me carry her to the nursery. It was awesome! She was so calm. Her eyes were opened and they looked at me the whole time I was carrying her. After I handed her to the nurse, all of our family swarmed the nursery windows. Long after this, I finally realized my mom got a picture of me in the nursery trying to take off my shoe covers. It seemed like forever until Emily got out of recovery. She was so groggy. The nurse pulled Emily's bed up to the nursery window so she could see Eliza. I was so happy to finally see Emily and know that she was OK. At that point it was late Thursday night. Section patients have to spend 48 hours in the hospital. So that would be late Saturday night which made discharge on Sunday morning the earliest possible. So we got to spend two wonderful nights in the hospital. I purchased lots of fast food for Emily and I to eat in West Point. We finally got discharged late on Sunday. Getting home was the greatest thing ever. |
| 2012-06-26 22:23:15 951 Emily's birthday weekend was great. I got up Saturday morning and cooked breakfast of my normal standbys of eggs, grits, and biscuits. Experimented with filet mignon, red peppers from the garden, and onions to come up with a great meat dish. Shortly afterward, Emily and I got on the road to Columbus. My parents' present to Emily was a mom to be package at Brickerton. I dropped her off and took care of my own important business, like checking out the HUGE Lowe's, getting a current copy of 2600 at the mall, and checking out the guns at the pawn shops. Emily was done around 1 and we headed toward Birmingham. Had a great lunch at Five Guys on the way. Checked out a baby store in Mountain Brook. It was a lot of fun getting there because I was able to drive on some of same roads that the first triathlon bike course that Cory and I participated in. From there we headed downtown to another baby store but it turned out to be just a furniture store. We have plenty of furniture at this point so we did not even go in. Next stop was checking in at the Tutwiler. Awesome old hotel that has been made up as a modern Hampton. Nicest Hampton I have ever stayed in by far. Best part was that I had gotten us a king suite with Hilton points. We had a corner room on the third floor. Was nice to rest for a bit and watch a few episodes of Pawn Stars. Supper was at Metro Prime, the steak place that we ate at for Bryan's bachelor party. It was excellent for the second time too. Had breakfast at the hotel. The Hampton breakfast was pretty close to what I have grown accustomed to in Slidell on my work trips but seemed better. I guess it tasted better because of the nicer location up on the eighth floor. Then we were out for more baby shopping. We drove all around the Summit looking for the Babies R Us and finally found it at the old Bruno's. It was the motherload of all things baby. I have never seen so many strollers anywhere but Disneyworld. Hit a few more stores at the Summit and then had PF Chang's for lunch. Drove down to the Fresh Market and loaded up on some good groceries before heading home. Had to stop in Columbus to buy some more dog food so that I could pick up the heavy stuff. |
| 2012-06-22 22:40:51 950 What a week. A raise and no cavities on Monday. Had a great supper with Emily at Restaurant Tyler the night before her birthday on Wednesday. I had a two pork chop dish over grits that was covered in popcorn. Seriously. Emily had fish that was breaded in ground popped popcorn. Very interesting dining experience for little ole Starkville. On Thursday I brought home a great supper of McChickens and fries so that we could get on our way to West Point. Our trip to West Point was to the hospital for our first child birth class. I think I am forever scarred from the video. The video. On Friday things seemed to break at will at work early in the morning. Luckily everything was fixed a little after lunch. Tonight Nathan came down and the three of us watched Brave. Tomorrow is the beginning of Emily's birthday trip. |
| 2012-06-18 21:54:48 949 Today has been a great day. Had my annual xray/cleaning dentist visit to Dr Ferguson and had no cavities. Then at work I found out that I did get a raise this year. Yay! U-verse DNS is horrible. I learned this the hard way now that I am using the U-verse modem to handle DHCP for our network. What makes it worse is that the U-verse modem can not be configured to pass along any other DNS server than the ones they have defined. The inlaws' Netgear AP died yesterday and I took them my airport. I set up time machine for them too with an old USB Seagate I had. The good news is that I have another airport ordered and on the way here tomorrow. In the meantime I've been setting resolve.conf on our macbooks manually to point to my local DNS server and I found an awesome new email to flush the DNS on Lion: sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder Blew out another rear wheel bearing on the fixed gear on Friday's ride home for lunch. It was nice and crunchy. Today my new 6901 bearings were in so I put them in the rear hub. Put everything together and it felt really silky. I had noticed a little wobble in my bottom bracket and just happened to have a Tange 115mm in my stash so I replaced it too. During this replacement I noticed that my poor Dura-Ace left crank has a small crack in it right at the bolt engagement area. Years ago I calculated that I had 11k miles on it after buying it used on eBay. Guess I have gotten my money out of it, though I plan to get a few more miles out of it. I also checked on the creaky headset. It is in bad shape and will need to be replaced before too long. The brake cable was in such bad shape that I had to replace it too and the casing. Good news is that a little tune up let me see some larger problems and get a lot of noises taken care of. |
| 2012-06-15 20:03:44 948 Nothing like a buffet Chinese restaurant to make you feel skinny in comparison on a Friday night. Nine years today from our first date and pregnant Emily had a desire for Chinese. Completely out of her normal character. The biggest part of my porting my number was getting it to google voice. I ported it to google for $20. Once my internet service came back, I set up my google voice account on my newly purchased OBi100. Now I can make calls for free from my home phone base station. The biggest feature is that I can put the OBi anywhere in the house that I have a network drop. So far away from the nursery! |
| 2012-06-15 18:32:03 947 I am now a U-verse customer and sesser.net has its first new IP in years. This all started from a wish to move the home phone base station from the nursery where the home run phone line comes in from outside. My first step was ordering a go phone from Amazon. That was a whole $15. I added $15 of airtime to the go phone and started the AT&T process to port my home number to it last Wednesday. The rep scheduled the port for Friday and told me to call DSL support to keep my service from lapsing. My phone call on Thursday went well and I was assured that my voice and internet accounts had been broken apart. A little after noon on Friday, an AT&T rep called me and finalized the port to the go phone. We tested calls both ways and everything was good. Twenty minutes later, my DSL was dead. So I called DSL support and entered support HELL. Nothing worked. Eventually I was sent back to account services and found out that I was a U-verse customer and no longer had DSL. Seems like the rep on Thursday lied to me. The saddest part of the story was that I had to wait on equipment and could not install it until Tuesday night. To keep up with our desire for the internet tubes, I added the hotspot feature to my iPhone for a few days. The modem came in and I got it set up Tuesday night. So far it is really nice. It actually seems faster. There is less latency on my ping times to campus so this has to be a little bit better at least. |
| 2012-05-09 23:17:50 946 Spent last Thursday night in a data room. Moving a rack six feet and turning it ninety degrees was a load of fun. The issue was that it was dragging a two inch conduit that the rack could not roll over. It took a lot of moving back and forth on the raised floor to maneuver everything around. Luckily there were five of us there to move it and everyone was a burly dude. My boss showed up when the move was complete to tell us how good it worked. I guess that is his job :) On Friday I worked until lunch and then headed home. Wrapped up some errands at the house and then got on the road to Madison. I took 12 west until it crosses the Trace and headed south. Pegged my cruise on 50 and cars were still passing me. The best one was a Leake County Sheriff's car passing like I was sitting still. After a while I made it to Kevin's house and hung out with Michelle and Kato for a bit. Kevin rolled up on his motorcycle. We loaded up and headed to packet pickup. Then we explored the bike course. I felt like Cory was with us in spirit because his favorite thing ever is to drive a course the day before. Then we met up with the Sesti's and had some great hibachi. Afterward we headed to bed. I woke up at 5AM. Kato really wanted some of my fruit cup. His temperament is a lot like Maggie's, wants attention but is very quiet about it. Kevin and I headed out a little after 6AM. Rolled into the course and was really surprised at how many people were already there. This was not a Cory+Jim race where we arrive before anyone else. The bike racks were pretty full but we found a good spot closer to the entry from the water. Because we were not going to wear bike shoes, being close to the water was actually in our favor. After a while the race started. We lined up near the rear because all of our swim times were going to be horrible. The swim course ended up being pretty shallow for the first leg. I was almost able to walk to the first buoy. I got out of the water a little ahead of Kevin and headed into T1. Got my shoes on and headed out right as Kevin got there. I almost ran over some mom wandering around with her kid in the transition area. The bike was AWESOME! By starting on the back of the swim, there was a lot of people to pass in eight miles on a bike. I lost count at 25 of people passed. It ended up that I had the 16th fastest bike in the race. Coming into T2, a guy in front of me nearly crashed in his dismount because of his bike shoes. I ran like crazy through T2 and I am sure I looked like a champ. A quarter mile out though the lack of bricking caught up with me. The first mile of the run was so hard for me. I walked a decent chunk of it. After the turn around I was able to run pretty well. As I got to the finish I was able to get a decent sprint in. Crossed the line and I got a drink and walked back a bit to cheer the rest of the crew in. Screaming at Kevin and Tommy to sprint to the finish was awesome. After I ate pizza and two Krispy Kreme's I found out that I had managed to place third in the Clydesdale division. Then I had to wait around for the rewards to get my nice little 3rd place ribbon. Happy day! From there Kevin and I headed back to his house and we got showered up. We went to Hamils for lunch. I had ribs, chicken, livers, and apparently gizzards as my meats. I did not realize what the gizzards were, I thought they were some kind of country fried steak strips. From there I said good bye to everyone and went to Fresh Market to pick up fish and lobster mac and cheese to feed to my sweet wife. I had a nice drive back up the Trace to cap off a great quick trip to Madison for a triathlon. |
| 2012-05-02 22:18:28 945 I am in the middle of three weekends of fun travel. Two weeks ago I got up and cooked Emily breakfast. Then we headed down to the Sestis'. Met up with Kevin and some of Sesti's coworkers on the way to Warrior Dash. The line for the busses to the Dash was crazy long at the fairgrounds. We spent nearly an hour in it. We ended up missing our 3:00 wave and ran with the 3:30 wave. It was great fun. I think I slipped and slid sideways nearly as far as my forward progress. The scariest obstacle for me was the balance beams because my balance is horrible. The second scariest thing was being at the top of the 16 foot tall wall and trying to start on the way down. Going into this, I did not realize there would be swimming. The water seemed to be about 55 degrees. The horrible thing was that the water cleaned nearly all of the mud off and then the last obstacle was crawling under barb wire in a mudpit to get extra muddy for the finish. It was a blast though. Emily and Kallie were at the finish chute getting pictures of all of us. The "shower" out there was a guy with a firehose. I got rinsed off a the best I could. The smartest decision of the day was that I had a towel and a dry shirt to put on. I donated my shoes and had flip flops to put on. It took us forever to get through the line to leave too. After getting cleaned up at the Sestis' we went with them and ate Mexican with Kevin. From there Emily and I headed home. This past weekend a group of the guys decided to take a quick trip to celebrate Bryan Ware's upcoming nuptials. Sesti, Kevin, and Josh came up Friday night and we ate some of the spicest pizza ever at Dave's. Everyone stayed at Bryan's except me so I stopped by Hardee's on the way over for a load of sausage biscuits on Saturday morning. After Bryan took care of his domestic chores of watering the plants and cleaning up the house, We drove to the original Dreamland in Tuscaloosa. We had to wait a few minutes for a table to clear out for the six of us. After we sat down, the waitress told us that we could take three slabs of ribs and then asked what sides we wanted. We went for all three, beans, potato salad, and cole slaw. Sesti and I ate until we felt sick. Everyone else ate just enough. Dreamland ended up being pretty cheap for the amount of food we consumed. From there we headed to the big city to the Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum. Of course I love old bicycles so it was really cool to see a bunch with motors strapped to them. There was plenty of awesome stuff to look at. All the while, there were a hundred motorcycles running around the track that the museum overlooks. Then we headed on to downtown Birmingham where I had gotten us rooms at the Doubletree. Yay for Hilton points! Bryan's brother in law Philip met us there and we headed out for dinner. It was a few blocks to walk to Metro Prime. This place was a lucky find, I only found it on the Thursday before we left. I wish I had had room for the Bacon Lolipops appetizer but all of us were still pretty full of ribs. I had the bone in filet medium rare with a side of lobster mac and cheese and it was awesome. I cannot wait to be able to take Emily to this place. On Sunday morning, our intention was to check out the Pancake House that was across the street from Metro Prime. The line was out of the door. We headed down to the IHOP on Lakeshore that was right up the road from Emily's old apartment at Wildwood Crossing. Of course the line was out of the door. Then we decided to scrap breakfast and just drive to Tuscaloosa to Five Guys. This was a great decision. Eating Five Guys with a bunch of friends was much more fun than my first time with just Emily. She really did not think it was so great. I am now a fan of the bacon cheese burger with grilled onions and grilled mushrooms. For dessert, Bryan and I headed next door to the pay by weight froyo place. We said our goodbyes to the Jackson crew and Bryan, Jason, and I headed back home. It was strange driving through Columbus on a Sunday knowing that Emily was working the clinic at Wal-Mart. Was a great weekend with the guys! Weekend three is in front of me. The Soak Up the Sun tri is in Madison. My plan is to head down to Kevin's Friday night and we are going to run the race with Tommy. Going to be a new course this year so I am interested in how my no training time from last year will compare to my no training time this year. |