incognito...

On my way home from work a few weeks ago I heard about a story on NPR that made me laugh. The concept to me is genius and was lucky enough to find the original article written by a journalist at the Washington Post.

During the early morning rush in the entrance to the L'Enfant Plaza building in Washington D.C. a man in his late thirties wearing a t-shirt, jeans and a baseball cap pulls out a violin, throws some change into the case and starts to play. This is nothing out of the ordinary as street performers are a dime a dozen, but this one is different. His name is Joshua Bell and he's "...one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made."

Let the social experiment begin...

the full video can be found here

Like sands through the hour glass...

So are the days of my life...

I blame my mother for knowing that intro as well as the cheesy melodramatic music that is now playing in my head!....I wonder if Bo is still alive....

So anyways back to the point of this post. My life has switched gears. I'm not really sure if it's a downshift or an upshift or maybe it's both! My lovely, beautiful, amazingly awesome wife is with child which means that the measurement, the very gauge at which I tally my life has switched from the universally accepted years to the rather diminutive unit of weeks. Everything is in weeks now. Months and years are no longer an object that can be quantified by your brain. It's really a rather strange phenomenon! You wake one day up and everything is normal, you're 26 years old and you have about 8 months until your next birthday. The next day however you wake up to find that you're 1352 weeks old and you only have roughly 32 more weeks until you're 1404 weeks old! People come up to you and ask you, "Hey what are you doing next month? Maybe we can get together and have lunch." and you're still stuck trying to figure out what "month" means....mon...monnnnthhhh. Okay so its not actually that bad and I totally understand why its broken down that way for the first nine months, I mean during those 7 day intervals amazing things are happening! In one weeks time your soon to be prodigy goes from looking more like Kermit the Frog's earlier years to a micro-machine version of your great uncle Harry. Its unbelievable! My kid is growing his/her arms in a week and I can't even get my dirty dishes off of my desk and into the dishwasher in that time! He's 8 weeks old (inside-womb-old) and already he's more efficient than I am!!

Here's where I really don't understand the whole week thing though. The baby is born and they're 4 months old but no one says they're 4 months, no! They say, "He's 16 weeks" Why? Is it because 16 is a larger number and it makes the parents feel like the baby is older than he/she actually is, or is it because the parents have forgotten how to use the month and year measurement and it takes them a bit to get back into the habit of using them.

In any event I'm sure these next 32 odd weeks will go by quick.

We live in a Harry Town!

So Amazon.com is doing a contest to find the Harry-est town in America. The town that on a per capita basis, is pre-ordering the most copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows wins! The winning town receives a $5,000 Amazon.com gift certificate to a charitable organization of its choice. Currently Snohomish is number 10! Our town rules!! Now if you'll excuse me I have to go order our copy...

The Happy Couple

Tanis is playing WoW!!! (World of Warcraft for all you non gamers) She's currently a level 9 Night Elf Priest named Shaelea but she'll be higher in no time. This is a picture of the two of us. (We're happy I swear) I started a new night elf hunter named Frogurt so we could level up together. We're also getting her into the Liquid Courage guild which I and many others from Seed church are apart of. It's the best guild ever! Anyways its really awesome that she's playing and I'm super proud of how well she's doing. I have the best wife!

So if any of you start playing WoW and/or you're on the server Cenarius look us up!

Watch your back!

Frogurt and Shaelea

360 ethernet

Tanis and I purchased an Xbox 360 a couple months ago and with that came the need to hook it up to the interweb so that we can destroy our friends in a friendly game of Uno via Xbox Live. Since our house was built in 1922 (just a few years before the Internet really took off) we don't have a nice network (Cat 5) outlet like many of them new fancy schmancy homes come with, and because our home network is not yet sans-wires I knew I had a interesting home improvement project in front of me.

We had a two prong outlet right next to the TV outlet so I figured the best place to install the network port would be in the existing TV outlet. They have this sweet multifunctional system out there now that allows you to do just that. You get to pick and chose the ports you want (CAT 5, phone, TV) up to six different ports and put them into one outlet! It took a couple trips to the hardware store to get the ones I wanted but I think it turned out pretty good.

The problem I ran into was that the TV outlet wasn’t installed correctly. The guy that put it in decided that drilling straight through the wall from the outside instead of feeding the wire under the house and up the wall was a better way…or at least easier. This meant I couldn’t follow the tv cable as a guide to help me feed my CAT 5 cable up the wall. The other issue was that the hole didn’t have the appropriate non-electrical box that allows you to screw in a standard face plate and wasn’t the standard size to even fit the box in the first place. Our walls our made out of wood ship lap which made expanding the hole a little more difficult. (also excuse the state of our walls. We're in the process of removing the wallpaper.) In the end though I was able to feed the wire up the wall and connect the 360 to Xbox Live.




While I was at it I replaced the two prong outlet because as you can see from the pictures, it was a little scary looking.