A while ago, Amanda’s dad gave us a whole bunch of plants for our new office. Sadly, some of them have died, since the move was delayed for something like two months. However, we are now in our new office, and the plants will do better (that’s the plan, although some of them don’t seem to be on board with the plan). The office looks like this:

Here’s our orange tree that is blooming like crazy (not sure if 8 counts as crazy, unless you’re playing cards):

And the rest of the plants (some of them aren’t doing so great):

That’s the amount of time that has passed since I last updated my site. Way TOO long, if you ask me, which none of you did. Life is progressing, ever rapidly, and I’ve obviously been busy. Busy doing what?

• pulling cable in the new building (the LLHSLC)
  • network
  • television
  • phone
• learning all the ins and outs of our new records software at the school
  • setting up the web interface
  • fixing permissions for people
  • giving them accounts so that they have permissions in the first place
  • helping people figure out how to do things they were trained to do (even if I wasn’t trained at all for that task)
• helping Amanda with the Ellendale High School play (lighting, sound, set, etc.)
  • every school should have a CD player hooked up to their sound system (we’re not in the 80’s anymore)
• learning Perl
• it’s a programming language
• and I already wrote my first useful program
• you can do really crazy, non-useful stuff with it

I noticed today, that my last post was from July 4th. I also noticed that it said nothing about fireworks. I love fireworks. Just thought you all should know that. There’s just something about blowing things up, and the anticipation of seeing what comes next. We went to a show, and then had a few youth over and put on our own show. The one we watched was pretty cool, but doing your own is a whole lot more fun. I’ll have some pics of the one we went to shortly.

This week was a busy one, and in the middle of it all, I killed a bee in the computer lab. It was probably more of a wasp or something, but then it wouldn’t fit in with my title. We’ve been installing new software at work, and getting trained on that which gets a moderate-high on the exciting scale. Read more

Yesterday, we made our annual ‘dump’ of computers. We ended up dumping exactly one metric ton (2200 lbs. for anyone who doesn’t know) of old computers, monitors, printers, TVs, etc. As we were leaving, Casey noticed a pile of bikes, and being the bike fanatic that he is, we went and took a look. He almost missed out on a Fuji bike frame, but it caught my eye, because it was orange. I just thought it looked neat, but Casey said it was a good bike, and he was pretty pumped. The truck we were driving in has no air conditioner, and the back window doesn’t close. When the truck is full, it’s not a problem, but once it’s empty, the dust comes swirling in the cab if you have the other windows open. It’s gross. Duct tape saved the day, and we had a nice cool trip back with all the windows open (except the back one, of course).

It’s that time of the year again. All the students leave, and we are still here. It’s sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo boring. I could cry. But I won’t…yet.

Sometimes, ‘older’ people say the best things. Most of the time, they just don’t realize how their audience is going to interpret things. Occasionally, they know exactly what they are saying, and it just knocks the socks off of you to hear them say it. Quote of the millenium: “Love your wife, love God, and keep your zipper up.” Very sage advice, but not something you expect from a very well respected ‘older’ gentleman. My wording may be a bit off, but you get the point.

I finally sorted all the photos we’ve taken since last November. My computer had died in mid-December, and thus I was unable to do anything with it until January. Now it’s February, and I realized that I had quite a few photos to take care of (around 200 or so). So I uploaded a couple new pics of the guinea pigs, and a bunch of our pics from Christmas.

I still don’t care much for the institution of Valentine’s Day, but I do like to celebrate my love for my wife, and since it had been one full year since we were engaged, I took her out for dinner. Then we went to Menards, and looked at all sorts of stuff for a new house (still don’t know which one we’re buying, but soon). We had a good night out on the town, and it was good to get out of Ellendale for a bit.

I got a call yesterday morning from Cherrie. She said, “They’re putting the rafters up, someone needs to take some pictures.” Work on the LLHSLC is in full swing, even though it ought to be too cold and snowy for any sort of construction. God is definitely favoring TBC right now, and the progress they are making on the new building is astounding. I’ll put up a few pics, just so you can see how it’s shaping up. For more pics, you can go here.

My present from Mandy yesterday was a new fish. I picked out a big, fat, very pregnant molly. She’s white with some orange coloring. Should be having babies any time now. There will be more pictures when she does.

I like snow. I even like ice. I just think it should stay off the road and keep out from under my tires. Mandy and I left for Nebraska on Thursday afternoon, and hit the worst weather ever near Pierre, South Dakota. We drove 45 mph for the next eon, and finally arrived in North Platte on Friday at 3:00 AM. Almost went in the ditch once, and that was exciting. At least the bad roads kept me awake.
We spent the majority of the weekend doing wedding “stuff”. It wasn’t too bad, and I’m still alive. I was actually excited to get back to work this time. We got all the parts for our new storage server, as well as 2 Kodak DX7630’s. It was awesome, and we had lots of fun today playing with our new toys. The edn (sorry, edn killed end in a drive-by shooting on Saturday).

We took 1.43 tons of computer parts out to the dump today. Wow. I can’t believe the three of us hauled moved that much weight around. In other ‘massive’ news, I finished watching volume three of Invader Zim (the ‘massive’ being the flagship of the Irken empire). It was pretty good, although not quite as stellar as the first two volumes. It got pretty morbid, and not so funny anymore. There was one about Zim getting rebanished to Food Courtia. That was pretty funny. The Christmas one was a little dark, but among the better episodes. Zim Eats Waffles wasn’t quite as good the second time around, but Tak was stellar in her own evil little way. The one’s that focused on Dib tended to just go on and on and on and on…well, you get the point. He’s always out to prove Zim is an alien, and he always loses, horribly. That plot only works so many times.

We had a power outage today, and it was fun…
Ok, actually, it was kind of crazy. Fortunately, we have battery backup systems for all of our servers, and we were able to go in and shut them down the right way, so that we lost nothing. Hooray for battery backups!