This blog update was supposed to be up for yesterday, but I got behind with a bunch of things and so, here it is today instead. This week has flown by, seems like it was just monday but, nope here it is on Thursday. Most of my time was consumed reconstructing my “about me” page (which is on the black strip above), so if you get an inkling to check it out after you are done, please feel free. I think I did an okay job on it being my first attempt at collage and mapping an image. If I really understood Photoshop, that would help.

Speaking of photo related stuff, I think that I am going to pursue photography as a hard-core hobby. I have really enjoyed having a small camera with me, plus having the ability to use Pete’s SLR camera. I will now have to learn about the flash and the proper way to use it. I have been inundating myself in photography websites, seeing techniques, content and lighting. I figured that I would stay pretty safe with nature photos, but would like to expand into head shot and stuff like that.

Jen has signed up one new member with another very interested, so that is very exciting. I have posted new picture albums of Eric, in case you went here directly.

I am getting ready for American Samoa, in fact I will begin to start lying out clothes and other things that I will take with me. Here is a picture of car that I saw on wednesday walking to the aquatic center. It made me miss the Mr. Arfns Mobile although, I never needed this much duct tape!

The last part of this post is about Callaway Landing which is located just down the road from me that is being threatened by the addition of the local waste water treatment plant.

[from their website] Present day Callaway’s Landing is a 50-acre remnant of a 154 year old, 600-acre river bottom family farm in Farragut/Concord, Knox County, Tennessee. It straddles the southern end of Concord Road with most of the farm within the corporate limits of the Town of Farragut, while the remainder resides in Knox County, in an area traditionally called Concord. The main farm house (known as the Big House) constructed in 1911, the marble barn of similar vintage, a post Civil War sharecroppers shack, a World War II vintage apartment built for and used in support of the defense department efforts in Oak Ridge, and a 1940’s style gas station and store stand as mute testimony to the sometimes flowery history of the farm known as Callaway’s Landing.

Notice something different? Yep, you guessed it… I had Jen cut my hair. Why? well, I was trying to let it grow out, and was trying to get some thing like Johnny Depp or John Travolta (in Swordfish) or even Harry Connick Jr. However, I have enough curl in my hair to keep it from lying straight. If I want straight hair, I have to use a straight iron to mash my hair and then apply a bunch of product to keep it tame. If I do not straighten my locks or have any product in my hair, I look like this:

It was a rather surprise for the people at church because they had just seen me at church service a mere 4 hours earlier with my long hair and when we went to our Purpose Driven Life class, it was short!

This weekend was a good football weekend, everyone came out of it with a “W”. UT had a conference win against arch-rival Alabama, Furman shut out Elon, UVa beat up on Duke and the Packers won. The only thing left to find out is if my Fantasy Football team, The Knoxvillians, can muster a win this week. I hope so because I am next to last and there is not much separating us.

We went to our first Saltshaker on Friday night and one the guys is a big photographer. He has a 6.0 MP camera that he primarily uses. I was very impressed with his work. It inspired me to get to learn more. If you know of any good photography theory website, please let me know.

10.22.04 Translate that Shizzle
I have added a picture from the Expo 10k to the Misc Running Pictures.

Here is a website that is pretty funny. It takes a URL, it has worked best for the root URL (cnn.com, jenandterry.com, yahoo.com ) apart from other links, and converts it into gangsta speech, brought to you by the infamous rapper Snoop Dogg. The site is call AskSnoop.com. This is after Snoop’s SNL monologue where he is asking white people to stop using his snoop speak.

Right now, I have digital cameras galore. As I stated from my previous posts, I want to bring a compact, lightweight digital camera to American Samoa with me. So far, I have gotten a Minolta Dimage x20 and a Canon S200, also, there is a camera at Officemax that Jen has seen that is cheap. I will probably be selling one of these. So, if someone who needs a digital camera, or have one they are willing to trade, I will entertain offers.

Initially, this camera that was going to take on my trip would be Jen’s camera after I returned, leaving our older camera, Canon S45, as our main camera. Well, I think that I want to keep two small cameras. I have enjoyed, for the limited time, carrying a small camera with me. Just knowing that I could capture some pictures at anytime is powerful. The advantage of the Dimage is that is uses AA batteries, good for traveling and the S200 uses CF card, which is compatible with our S45. Here is a picture that I took with the Dimage (Auto mode, Flash Auto)

I just finished reading John monihan’s blog about his excitement in Iraq and id he have some recently. Apparently, there was some mortar fire inside of his compound for the first time. Apparently, they were interval pot shots, in that, they were following a straight line and their last shell had a direct hit into their command post. Luckily, the ordinance hit a rafter in the roof, causing the shell to detonate in the roof instead of penetrating into the rooms. Another stroke of luck was that it was lunchtime, so it was not fully staffed. John is fine, and I pulled a picture of the roof, which was fixed in about an hour.

Here is a picture of some mortar fire at our place here in Tennessee. well, not really, the grounds crew have been at our house (my office is an old 1940s house) to remove tree limbs and to fix some small holes in the roof. Well, yesterday, they wanted to get some rope up to the roof. So what better way to get a light object (the rope) up in the air by tying it to a heavier object (a brick). On the second throw, we heard a - crash - and bunch of glass shattering. We then heard our boss, start yelling up a storm at the grounds crew. Now our boss W.S. is a super nice guy and I had never (in the whopping 2 months) seem him so irate. The grounds crew scattered away like roaches when hit with a bright light.

I didn’t watch most of the Green Bay game last night and I think that was a good thing. My second favorite team is the Titans, so it wasn’t a total loss. Still, I am very excited about the UT/Georgia game. It was a nail-biter up until the last second. I believe that it will good year for the Vols. My guess is that we will lose another game (either Notre Dame or South Carolina) but will end up winning the East but losing the SEC championship and we will win our bowl game. I’ll look back and see how well I am at this prediction.

Eric has been sick since Sunday. We think that we are passing a germ around since I was almost since on Tues/Wed. Eric was sick on Sunday/Monday and Jen has been feeling bad for the past few days with last night feeling yucky. The good news is that Pete is going to be visiting, so maybe we can share it with him! Haha

Yesterday at work, we collated, stuffed and address 1396 envelopes to go o American Samoa for our project. There were approximately 8 of us who worked from 10-3 non-stop except for lunch. There are the actual surveys that we will be collecting when we are there. hopefully, if send them ahead of time, we will get a better response rate. Today, I had the nice experience of having my 40 GB USB drive fail on me. And of course, the files that were on the drive had not been archive to another medium. Also, these file are extremely important to my work for Samoa. We found out that it had to do with a problem with the file systems, since it worked with Windows 98 on a different computer. Our group only has one CD burner, so we took the important files off the drive and I am in the process right now of reformatting.

If you don’t watch Saturday Night Live, you should try to catch some of the this season’s shows. The debates have been the source of comedic relief and they have a deep well to draw from. Seth Meyers portrays john Kerry and Will Forte plays Bush. Seth gets my vote as having his character down, but nobody can beat Darrell Hammond and his Bill Clinton imitation. Darrell is by far the best President of all time, better than Chase doing Ford, or Carvey doing George Sr. Oh yeah, and Tina Fey is raow!

Observation on Sunday: Sunday, I ran 12 miles after church through my neighborhood. During this run, I could tell that winter is approaching. why you ask? Well, it was because of all of the road kill I passed while running. In less than 2 hours, I found 4 dead squirrels on the my course. Then when I was going to the Math Lab at night, I passed by another dead one. All these animals trying to get their nuts in order, but ended up getting splat!

As I posted in my last entry, there were two Arthropods that flew around where we were and proceeded to eat the tree. after a little of Sherlock Holmesing (yes, I verbed a noun, oops, I did it again!) I figured it out what it was. The creature in question is called an European Hornet. Click on the picture to find out more information about it. The insect may have been the volume of a pinky finger and the length of a thumb.

Okay, I have found my new car. It’s made by a French automobile company called Venturi and the vehicle is called the Fetish. An ALL electric sports car with 242 hp and top speed of 105 mph, this innovative eco-friendly car has the power and sleekness that someone like me wants needs!

Oh, did I tell you it’s only $664,000??

10.18.04 Carbon Dating
Eric is over his sickness. Thursday and Friday he was still very clingy and lethargic. I am not sure if I posted that Eric came home early on Thursday from preschool, but he did. Friday was pretty quiet… I forgot what we did. Sheesh.

I ran on Saturday morning, but had to cut my 14 miles to 12.8 due to an “accident.” Only runners would really appreciate my dilemma and everyone else would think it was, er, icky. I was able to run the 12.8 with a 9:31 average mile pace, so that was a pleasant surprise. Later that morning, Pete and I did some yard work, he mowed and i put some fertilizer down. I would have liked to have gotten some seed down, but I missed my chance. We saw two wasp/hornet type anthropods that were eating a broken tree in my front yard. I will post the pictures when I download off Pete’s computer. I used some of Melalueca’s Prespot to kill them, as Prespot is an excellent ant killer. It worked, they stopped eating and began dying. I am anxious to find out what they were! Anyway, as a result of working outside, Pete was waylaid for the rest of the day with allergies. He’s just allergic to a little work.

We had a poop incident on Saturday afternoon. Eric, after making a deposit in his diaper, took it off and started to spread the joy around his crib. Need less to say there was a decontamination party with Pete and Janet cleaning Eric, Jen using Sol-U-guard to sanitize the crib and I was in charge of starting laundry (sheets, bumper guards, clothes…) After that incident, he was back to his old self. Jen and I were glad for Pete and Janet that Eric was back to his old self.

Janet, Jen and I went out to shop. I’m not sure all that we bought, but Eric got his Christmas present, the Incredi-block.

He really loves it. Cary Smith, whom I worked with at the SCC had gotten Peek-A-Block for her boy Jed and sung their praises.

UVA lost big this weekend. In their first real test to contend for their top 10 ranking, they were beat by a faster team. FSU was able to out gun UVA on about all fronts, they shut down their offense, they negated their defense, Hagans wasn’t as effective, Miller not as utilized, Lundy stopped, Big E got dinged up. UT on the other hand, escaped losing. After coming out strong in the first quarter, they had a lackluster rest of the game, even trailing for a part of it. Late TD sent them ahead of Ole miss and they came out of Oxford with a win. Had Eli still been there, errr, the result would have been different. Furman won, no details known.

This is exactly what I am trying to do with our website. We have a bunch of old files that are just taking up space. So, I have been in the process of seeing which files are extraneous and getting rid of them. By the way, I have updated our Pager Page, which is now a text messaging page that will send a message straight to our cell phone. The pages that we have for our friend’s kids is lacking about a year worth of births! Also there are a number of pages that are not of the same format, in terms of color and style. hose pages will need to be corrected in the future. Why have I been doing this you ask? Well, the other day, I got a new toy. Meet ‘Da Kruza’

I got this new baby off eBay this week. Unfortunately after I had already bought it, I found it for about $10 cheaper on a different website. I am not too mad, because where I found it was not a place I would have ever thought to look. So, I made the decision with what information I had… sound familiar? Da Kruza weights in at a 1.0GB storage size, which replaces my trusty rusty 256MB Lexar JumpDrive that I have had for a year. There was no way that I could fit our website onto something that small. So now that I have it on a “Giger”, our website is now portable, which means that I can work on it at home or at work.

Eric has been sick. He broke out into a rash very suddenly on wednesday. Jen called the nurse and she had him come in that afternoon, thanks to a cancellation. The diagnosis was that he had a virus, or rather, he was in the last stages of the virus. he was no longer contagious, but as a common reaction children often break out into a hives type rash. He might still have something though because he is not quite well. He’ll be in a great mood and then in a bad mood, almost faster than me!

I love Firefox! I have having so much more fun with this browser. The two things that I like about the most are 1)The Mouse Gestures and 2)Sage

Firefox has many extensions that are small programs that run for Firefox. one of the programs is a Mouse Gestures Extension that allows you do perform commands with only using the mouse. For Example, when I want to go Back on a website, I do not have to Click ‘BACK’ or hit the ‘backspace’ key. I just have to Right Click and move the mouse to the left! “Beautiful!” as Tony Bruno would say. The only thing that I would like to see is the ability to convert Firefox bookmarks into IE bookmarks (i.e. shortcuts). The reason is that I carry my Favorites on Da Kruza and so not everyone has (but should get) Firefox. So it’s a matter on convenience for me.

WAHOOWA, WAHOOWA
UNI-V, VIR-GIN-I-A
HOO-RAH-RAY, HOO-RAH-RAY
RAY! RAY! U-V-A!

Granted that Clemson is not as good of a team this year, but Virginia looked good out on the field. Despite the speed of Clemson’s defense, Virginia was able to make some adjustments to take control of the game in the second half. We still have Miami and Florida State still on the schedule, so those will not be easy, plus Va Tech is always an emotional game.

I found a pretty good shot of American Samoa, that little Island I will be working on in November. I am leaving on November 5th at 7:15am, I get into American Samoa at 9:35pm, with total flight time of 21hrs 20min. I leave on the 20th at 10:52pm and get back on the 22nd at 12:01pm. That is some major flight time!

Like I had in my previous post, I have been drinking myself silly. When I got home, I had some more diet coke, took an Aleve and felt better today. I am going to go swimming at lunch.

Here is an online Myer’s Briggs test:

Extroverted ( E ) 51.43% Introverted (I) 48.57%
Sensing ( S ) 55.56% Intuitive (N) 44.44%
Thinking ( T ) 62.16% Feeling (F) 37.84%
Judging ( J ) 59.38% Perceiving (P) 40.63%

ESTJ - “Administrator”. Much in touch with the external environment. Very responsible. Pillar of strength. 8.7% of total population.

Eric is now an efficient walker. Since Friday, he walks from place to place almost 80%of the time. He does still crawl when he gets excited or tired, but for the most part he will stand up and walk to you or whatever is interesting. He is also shaking his head occasionally when he does not want something. This usually happens at dinner time.

I am guessing that he is about 23 pounds and will be getting a 15 month check up soon. He loves going to preschool and church (same place) where he plays with kids his age during the week and older kids during the weekend. Yesterday with Jen, he was rolling a ball to her and when he would miss, he would go get the ball and roll it correctly. When I was playing with him, he would take his size 2 soccer ball, get 1 foot away and with both hand, throw it at me.

I figured out what I am getting myself for my birthday. I am getting that digital camera that I blogged about earlier. After considering about 8 different compact digital cameras, I have decided to get the Minolta Dimage X20. Why you ask? First of all it’s a 2 megapixel camera. Although, in the word of megapixel’s more is better, I know that I am most likely NOT going to make 8×10 prints and these pictures are going on the web. Also, this camera uses AA batteries. So when I am in Am. samoa, I won’t have to worry about juicing up the camera, I can just go get batteries! The draw back is that it uses a SD/MMC card which I will have to buy a card. In a perfect world, I would have gotten a camera with a Compact Flash (CF) card since our Powershot uses that type and it could be interchangeable. I am trying to bid on one on eBay and guess that it will be about $125 plus however much the card is going to be. I guess that I should think about getting a carrying case too.