I was up at 8:30 this morning and ready to leave for church before 10:00. Min didn’t get up until 10:00. She had been really exhausted between work and school and all of our other activities. She hasn’t been getting enough sleep for weeks. She is working the “B” shift this evening after church.
We almost made it to church on time today. But at least I was ready early. Art and Danielle brought Michael to church today for the first time.
After church the Ralstons, my dad and us went over to Perry to get lunch at the Silver Lake Family Restaraunt.
So I decided that it was time to post this picture on the site. This one will prove whether or not Eric reads the site on a regular basis. This picture was taken sometime around fifth grade. It was taken during the winter, in case Eric’s winter coat didn’t give that away. This is a model railroad that Eric and I were working on in the basement of my grandmother’s house when she used to live down the road from my parents up on Peoria Road in Covington. Back then she was just three houses away but more have been built since then and she now lives with my aunt and uncle in Leicester. Dad built the train tables for me down there in my aunt’s old graphic arts studio. She ran a studio out of the basement for years but had moved to Leicester at this point. Probably just about a year before this picture was taken. Then the studio was converted to be a model railroad. We never got very far into the modelling bit of things. The track was set up and working which you can kind of see in the background and there were some buildings on it. In this picture we are holding one of the train cars to commemorate the opening of our railroad. You can see some fake shrubs sitting around and some trees and a little tiny church. It was an N scale model so everything was really small. I still have the trains and all of the scenary packed away in the basement.
Holy Cow we were dorks! Oh wait… ARE dorks. Darn.
Min went to work at 3:00 as usual on Sunday. I got to spend the afternoon and evening at home with Oreo. He loves his days being lazy with his daddy. He just sits quietly beside me while I am working on the computer.
I played the MUD this afternoon. Saw a couple of different people hop on and off throughout the day. I also watched some stuff on eBay that was ending today. I had been very hopeful to get this one item but it just ended up getting to be too expensive for me. So I had to let it go. I do think that shopping on eBay is good for me because it lets me “do a lot of shopping” without buying very much and what I do end up getting tends to be at a very good price. At least I think that it does.
I got Danielle hooked on listening to podcasts tonight. She downloaded iPodder and I hooked her up with some cool podcasts and now she is excited about it.
Chicago had a train derailment today caused by an engineer driving the train at almost seven times the speed limit (69 in a 10 zone). It turns out that the engineer was new with that company but had been at CSX for years previously. I guess that explains it. CSX was the same company that had their trains going at totally ridiculous speeds in Rochester and killed an elderly couple just last year. I think someone needs to begin an investigation.
Min got home at 11:30 after stopping at Tim Hortons to get me some treats like a danish and a hot smoothie. Mmmm, butter cream. She was very impressed by all of the work that I had done around the house. It looked completely different when she got home.
She had been excited about trying out the new Sega Dreamcast now that we have one game for it. So I hooked it up in the office to my computer monitor (one of the really cool features of the Dreamcast is that it has VGA output and since we have VGA input on every device in the house that works exceptionally well.) We fired up Shenmue and gave it a try. We were instantly impressed by the amazing quality of the graphics output by the Dreamcast. It doesn’t seem like an aging system at all. The audio and video in Shenmue are amazing, for a console system, and seem to me to just about compete with any 3D games that I have seen on the current reigning systems. We do always get the impression that the Dreamcast is a lot older than it really is just because it is no longer on the market. But the reality is that it was the first member of the current console generation and even though Sega is now out of the console business it is hardly obsolete. We don’t yet have a memory card for the Dreamcast nor a good place set up to play it so Min played Shenmue for fifteen minutes or so to try it out but then we gave it up. Now that we know that everything works I am going to be working on buying some much needed parts like additional controllers, memory cards and additional games. Thanks Andy, we love the Dreamcast.
We weren’t quite ready for bed yet and Min had just cooked herself some dinner so we popped in Are You Being Served? into the Mac and watched an episode (the one where Mrs. Slocumb gets hit on the head with a golf ball) and then we went to bed.