Kate's First Birthday Party

So we lucked out and got the one weekend day thus far this summer that actually got sun.  The party was lots of fun.  Some answers to frequently-asked questions:

1) Yes, we hired a Backyardigan to play with the kids.  Actually, so we don't get Cease & Desist notices from Viacom, we hired a "Backyard Friend."  Its name was Uniqua.  She's the pink and purple ladybug, not the hippo or the kangaroo.

2) No, we didn't kick the keg.  This was largely Bub's fault.  His excuse?  "I just wasn't feelin' it..."

3) Kate loved it.  Yes, she made a big mess with her cake.

4) There was enough parking, the lawn came in enough to actually be able to call it a lawn and not "a big pile of dirt with a couple sprigs of grass coming out of it," and no one got nailed with an errant horseshoe.  There were no major disasters of any kind.

5) More photos are available here.

Thanks to everyone for coming!

Remember the Commodore 64?

Anybody remember what goofiness was required to display what was on a given floppy disk on a Commodore 64?  I spent many hours playing/copying games back in the early 1980s on one of these machines, and I remember how you used to have to load directories from disk and then use a LIST command to see them.

LOAD "$",8

I also remember that when you got a fresh game from the store, you'd pop the disk in the drive and type

LOAD "*",8,1

which loaded the game program into the appropriate memory.  Problem is, sometimes you'd absentmindedly add the ",1" to the request for the disk directory when you wanted to see what was on the disk and end up accidentally causing a cavalcade of junk characters to end up all over the screen.  This article does an awesome job of explaining why that happened, as well as some other interesting things about how the C-64 worked.

Brings back memories of spending long hours locked in my basement with my Commodore, and of using a hole puncher to turn single-sided disks into double-sided ones.  :-)

Kate Is One Year Old!

It's Kate's birthday today!  Send her a quick birthday wish at Kate@Hespos.com, if you like.

Her latest exploit is practicing her walking.  For weeks now, she's been able to balance in place.  She can also walk along a wall or with Mommy holding her hands.  Her record unassisted is six steps.

It's also Uncle Rob's birthday.  Don't forget him.

A Bottomless Morass of Projects and Running Around

Kate's first birthday is tomorrow, and we've been planning her party for the upcoming weekend.  Thus, projects are falling into three buckets:

1. Get done in time for the party
2. Get done as soon as humanly possible, but not necessarily in time for the party
3. Get done whenever

The lawn fell into category #1.  Thirty yards of topsoil were spread by hand, after moving around via wheelbarrows and the dump cart on my John Deere.  (Thanks, Jimmy and Jack!)  About three quarters of that was tamped by hand or by repeatedly running it over with heavy things.  Two big bags of Scott's seed were spread, followed by starter fertilizer.  And the grass is coming in.  It's growing surprisingly fast, and you can see a difference from day to day.  Yes, that's true.  Every morning, I peek into the back yard before I go to work and I assess the grass situation.  I do believe that we'll have something that passes for a lawn on August 1st.

A major project in category #2 is demolishing the basement.  We have a mold problem, thanks to a moisture problem.  And the basement demo needs to be done before any projects get started on.  Over the weekend, we were finishing up the demolition (Thanks, Jimmy and Paul!) and I have about 20 bags' worth of material to take out to the dumpster.  From there, it's just a Shop Vaccing away from having the mold abatement guys come in and do their thing.  They wanted to charge me to get rid of half the sheet rock in the basement, and I figured I could save some money by getting rid of all of it myself.  (Well, with family help anyway...)

Of course, this means that all other projects are in category #3.  This includes weeding the garden, pouring various concrete slabs, digging out and transplanting the arbor vitaes around the foundation, painting the porch and a bunch of other things I'd like to be doing right now.  But first, the basement.

On top of all this crap, our garage fridge broke down last night.  Until recently, the garage fridge was our kitchen fridge.  So in the grand scheme of things, having it go on the fritz now means a couple o' skunky beers and not an entire fridge-full of spoiled food.  But still, it sucked to have to go out to Home Depot last night and negotiate with the floor nerds for favorable pricing on a fridge that doesn't need to be - how should I say? - cosmetically perfect.  While I was there, I ran into a family friend who gave us a window air conditioner while we wait for our central air system to be replaced.  (Thanks, Don!)

Notice a theme here?  I couldn't have done any of this without support from family and friends, so thanks to all of you who have pitched in to help us renovate.  Extra special mega-thanks to Jimmy for graciously giving up his spare time to share (and, often, absorb much of) the grunt work.