We also bought blinds for the two bedrooms upstairs. I am a bit worried about one because they don’t make non-custom blinds in the right size for the window. We ended up with one that was about 3″ shorter than it really ought to be. Hopefully it will not look tacky. If so, we might have to return it and get custom for that.

I spent the entire morning cleaning, especially upstairs. My granddad and cousin Megan came to visit today for the first time and see our house. It was really cool having them up to see us. We did not do too much. We showed them the house, talked for a while, and then ordered a pizza from Dominos. Megan took advantage of some time with a computer (she is staying at my granddad’s without internet at the moment) and got me to give her a copy of Thirteen which is apparently one of her favorite movies (it is really good).

After that, I met Lori’s mom at Chili’s to get the electric screwdriver to put in the blinds, and we did the aforementioned touch-ups on the paint. Then I ran out to get the correct sized Blind for one window (the one that is going to use the smaller size than it is) and hit up CVS for some deals and freebies before coming on home.

Unfortunately, it is 10:38 now and I have not gotten to the blinds. I think I’m going to get some sleep for church and tackle that project tomorrow instead.

Afterwards, I headed to work and made it through a pretty normal day. I think the plan for tonight is to stop by the library, possibly go through some VHS tapes, and also do some contracting work.

I have been going through our old VHS tapes and labeling them, sorting them (blank, keep, and discard), and digitizing some of the important stuff. I have some nice old home videos that I duped last night. I’ll probably post them online after I edit them a bit for length (it is about 1 hour and 45 minutes of footage). Excitingly, I have been able to reference my old post on video editing tools. I definitely would not have remembered the names of many of these pieces of software after 2.5 years of non-use.

As I went to college, I shifted to having a lot of campus food. I did often eat the cafeteria style hot line at the GMP rather than fast food fare. I supplemented with a few things like occasionally making ramen or a Zatarans in my room. My sophomore year, I went off my meal plan and cooked with my friends. The food was good, lots of delicious things had over the next few years, but it was different than things my mom or dad would have cooked often.

After I graduated and married Lori, it was mostly vegetarian cooking for the next few years. I was fine with it and it was cheap not having to buy meat, but again, it was very different than a highly meaty diet that I’d eaten the few years beforehand. Then as time has passed, we have brought meat into our diet after Lori gave up vegetarianism.

That brings some new things that we eat fairly often that I rarely ever had before though. The example that made me think of this is hot dogs. My mom doesn’t like hot dogs and I can only remember eating them a handful of times my entire childhood and only about once that I definitely remember her making them for me (a birthday party when my parents were still together, possibly my 5th b-day). Another is pasta. My mom made pasta for me occasionally (she made this excellent spaghetti casserole one time that I have been craving, it is similar to spaghetti pie that we got a recipe for from Holly though), but not nearly as much as Lori and I have it. Also, if I had it, it was often in a TV dinner style thing or just your standard meat sauce spaghetti, nothing remotely exotic. Another example I was thinking of is grilled cheese. I love grilled cheese, but I don’t think I had had it more than a few times in my life before college. We just did not make it nor did we have tomato soup (a common grilled cheese accompaniment in our house).

I wonder what the future brings for my diet. Will I continue eating as I do now or will things switch up drastically?

I thought of this because someone said their grilled cheese was so good that it was “better than mom’s” and I thought “well that is easy since I don’t think my mom has ever made me grilled cheese”

We talked a little bit more earlier today about names, but we are still waffling. I expect that to be the case for a while and will be surprised if we settle on anything 100% definite before the baby is due, but maybe I am wrong!

Today, I cleaned up a little bit, worked a decent amount on my CafeID stuff while watching some TV, went grocery shopping, grilled some chicken for this fabulous salad Lori made us, ate dinner and then worked a couple more hours on the CafeID stuff. Now I am getting ready for bed as the time change will wreck us in the morning.

Also, Matt G. might be sad to miss out on his quirk, but I updated Wordpress today and I think I killed the error that causes my Google Reader posts to be spam instead of the real content. We’ll see…

Oh yeah and I tested all our smoke alarms like you are supposed to do when the time changes and now one is chirping at me. How did I manage this right before bed time?

Things have been pretty good for me. I am really happy that Lori and I are going to finally have our first little baby boy (I never announced that here did I!?!). It is so exciting and scary still lol.

I am a little bummed tonight to be honest though. It is supposed to be Game Night but attendance has been absolutely terrible since our hiatus for Christmas. The past few nights it has mostly been Alex and Brian and last week no one showed up until Heather stopped by about 9:30PM. We ended up just talking and it was completely fun, but it is sad that others have not been able to make it out in such a long time. Everyone that doesn’t make it seems sad to miss out. I guess people have just gotten so busy with their own lives.

In other news, Pepsi Throwback is back!!! I am stoked. I went ahead and bought 3 12-packs when I found it on sale. The first is mostly gone though as I was a good boy and shared with friends who came over. It is supposed to be available until some time in February. I will have to stock up some more before it is gone until who knows when.

I saw some ducks that reminded me of the albino duck that used to come behind our apartment at Wellspring. I really miss the ducks a lot from there. It was so cool to be able to sit out and watch them along with the tons of baby ducks. We also saw some peacocks (though they were not fanned out) and a bunny that looked kind of like Oreo but with pointy ears.

Afterwards, we went to the petting zoo area and Lori got to spend some time with her llamas. They are so greedy with the food though. We also petted a few goats and saw two of them get into a fight (one of which had and oddly shaped horn that followed his jawline instead of going up like normal) over some food. We checked out the cows briefly, but only from a distance as we did not want to step in some nasty mud that was near them.

Realizing the time, we hurried over and checked out the place where they exhibit art and produce. We saw a 166 pound pumpkin and another that I think was about 140 something pounds. There were some giant watermelons too and other impressive vegetables. We did not really have much time to peruse the art (it was about 9:50 and the area closed at 10:00), but we did notice there was an antique bike display on the upper level. Looking at it from below, I saw one of those old bikes with the huge front wheel and another that had what looked like a metal wagon wheel on it with huge spokes. By the way, I always wondered what the practicality of a huge front wheel was. Apparently this site says that since there were no chains, the wheels were attached directly to the pedals. As a result, the only way of gearing was to… make the wheel bigger so you could go further on a single rotation.

After this, we realized that we did not really want to ride any rides and were a bit low on cash anyway, so we ate about half of an elephant ear before we were too full and then got a couple caramel apples to go.

Saturday started out with disappointment as I realized that I forgot about the Honors College Champaigne Brunch until it was too late to go. I was really upset, but Lori cheered me up and we had some spaghetti together for lunch. We watched a bit of TV and then left for the Engineering Tailgate. They had barbecue, fried chicken, corn, green beans, hash, rolls, and banana pudding to eat. I stuffed myself even though it was not the best bbq and hash ever (it had a bit of a sour taste). They also had an open bar. I tried a little bit of scotch, but I did not want to drink too much. The best part though was that I saw Dr. Matthews. We had some small talk about what I was doing for work now and such. He eventually asked if we ever went to football games. I said occasionally, but it was a bit of an expense that I didn’t want to pay for a lot (this is a bit of an exaggeration though since I hadn’t been to a game since the 2004 season, jeez I can’t believe it has been that long). Anyway, he asked if I was going to that night and I said I didn’t have a ticket and then he floored me by saying “would you be interested in going if you had one?”. I was like “definitely!”. He then proceeded to give me two extra tickets he had to the game! (Actually he accidentally gave me three, but I realized and gave him back his personal ticket to the game)

So now I started the process of finding someone to go with. I called Matt Gerrald (already there), Erik Murrah (busy), Chris Altman (busy/didn’t get call in time), and Brian Cope (didn’t answer or return my call). By that point, it was definitely getting to the point where it would be a stretch to get Lori back home and get to the game before traffic got terrible. Fortunately, she said she would go with me if no one else wanted to go. So we stopped by the tailgate that Matt was at and chatted a bit (it apparently won the prize for Publix tailgate of the game) before heading over. The game turned out to be so much fun. Sure the Cocks could have played better (they only won 14-10 over a team they were hoped to significantly outclass), but a win is a win, and the best part was that Lori had a lot of fun. She really got into the cheers and watching the game, especially after I helped her understand a few of the finer points. It was exciting the whole time since it was close also. She expressed interest in going to another game this year, but we will be out of town for Florida and I imagine Clemson tickets will cost too much. We will see though.

Sunday was a good day as well. Sunday school was nice (we ran into Elizabeth and Daniel Smith afterwards too. They kept nursery, so they were not in class, but it was really good to see them for a bit, Colin is HUGE now compared to when I last saw him), Lori’s mom made pork chops, mashed potatos, and mixed veggies for lunch, and then we had my football game. The game was fun even though we lost. I wish I had played a bit more of the game, but I almost hurt myself near the beginning so I had to stay out for a few minutes. The reason it was so much fun though is because I got my first pass reception of the season! I did not make it tons far after I got it, but I was glad to at least catch it. Either way, because of how other teams faired, we are still in second place going into the playoffs which gives us a bye week. I then had a nice evening at home with Lori and got some cleaning and work done.