Fun At Home, Or “Why You Shouldn’t Play Hide And Seek With A Phone”

Posted on by Jordan

Here was the plan for our weekend:

Sleep in Saturday, then Heather would go take some pictures for friends, and Hannah and I would hang out during the morning. The afternoon would be open for whatever, and then we didn’t have any plans beyond Church Sunday.

Let me tell you how things actually went:

2:00AM Hannah wakes up screaming, she was unable to explain why. One bottle and lots of rocking later, she is peacefully sleeping again. Veteran parents may have developed a system wherein both parents aren’t completely disrupted by this kind of thing. Heather and I haven’t really gotten that down. Or maybe we just forgot already. When Hannah woke up every night, we had some sort of system and I think we both felt we were sleeping ok, but now that a middle of the night wake-up is so rare we both end up being disrupted.

5:00AM The On-Call phone rings (thanks to some changes at work I am back on the roster for on-call) and a key system is throwing errors the front-line support guy doesn’t know what to do with. I did a little digging (three cheers for being able to VPN into our systems from home) and talked to the help desk guy and we decided there was a chance this was being caused because some elements of the system weren’t up from their overnight maintenance mode yet. Had I done a little more due diligence prior to heading home from work I may have been quicker to realize what was going on, but my on-call skills are a little rusty. 🙂 Back to bed by 5:45ish

6:00AM Heather and I agree that we are probably done sleeping. Somehow we have lost the sleeping in skill. I start on the traditional Saturday pancakes… right after starting a large pot of coffee. Hannah wakes up a few minutes later, and we have a little family breakfast!

6:30AM Help desk guy calls back, things are still broken. Armed with coffee, I review the error logs again and realize this must be due to an upgrade performed the night before. Queue two hours of phone calls and e-mails working to coordinate a least-downtime solution.

11ish AM Heather is taking pictures and Hannah and I are keeping busy around the house. Hannah by finding everything her little arms can reach while on her tipsy-toes and grabbing it, me by looking for quick-hit chores I can do while keeping her occupied. Wash the sheets! That’s an easy one, I will pile the blankets over here, and as an added intensive to stay out of trouble I will let Hannah play with my phone on top of the pile of blankets. That should about be her ideal distraction for a few minutes.

So, I started the wash, and sat down to see what kind of games Hannah and I could improvise. But wait, somehow Hannah managed to bury my phone deep in these blankets… Nope not in the blankets… maybe under the … nope. Not to worry I have SeekDroid setup on my phone I will just cause it to ring and know what she did with it…. “Unable to contact device” Up to this point I had been a little foggy I suppose, between the short night and the post-crisis-rush feeling I wasn’t anywhere near my sharpest. And yet, it really didn’t take too long to realize where my phone was!

You may have heard of someone who dropped their phone in some water and was able to dry it out with a bag of rice or some similar approach. Those techniques may in fact be effective, but I am willing to bet not on phones that were placed at the bottom of a running washing machine for several minutes!

And really, after that the weekend was fairly uneventful. 🙂

-Jordan

 

The Wall, We Have Hit It.

Posted on by Jordan

Actually… it isn’t that bad, after a ‘down’ weekend Heather and I are starting to feel like attacking the unfinished tasks again.

Let me catch you up on the past few weeks.

Two weekends ago, we were living in an apartment, and Saturday morning, the view was this:

As some short update posts already gave away, we had plenty of help and got things moved fairly quickly. What took more effort was unpacking and finding a home for everything that was in a box. We powered through that as fast as we could so that our house would be ready for company. Quite a bit of company as it turns out.

On the following Thursday, my grandparents stopped through on their way out to a wedding. That was the first night that we hadn’t both worked until midnight on something, but we still managed to sneak in a few minutes putting our house together. On Friday, Heather’s parents came into town, and they brought our favorite(only) nephew Holden.

He got the deluxe tour:

We took Holden and his grandparents down to the farmers market, and then later he did some fabric shopping with Heather and Pam. We quickly discovered that although the main area in our house was mostly put together, it wasn’t what you would call kid-proof. He kept us on our toes.

That crew headed home Saturday evening, leaving Heather and I a few hours to pull a few things together and grab some much needed sleep. Sunday morning, my parents, sister and brother came into town, just in time for church. We had some really ambitious plans to take them out to see the bike bridge I did a post on a while back. The triple digit heat index, combined with the fact that they had spent a considerable amount of time walking the previous day at the Omaha zoo put a pretty solid kabosh on that idea.

It turned out that a nap and breaking out our new copy of Ticket To Ride was about the perfect use for the Sunday afternoon. I can’t remember if I mentioned Ticket to ride when recapping our visit to DJ’s house out in Colorado, but it has quickly become Heather’s favorite game.

On Monday, Heather and I both worked, leaving the rest of my family free to head down to Pella for some touristing. They came back with some amazing pastries so I have to assume the trip was a wild success. That evening, Heather and I met up with them and headed just outside of Des Moines to where an annual balloon festival is held.

The weather was not ideal for hot air balloons, and we didn’t get to see the kind of numbers featured in the postcards I have seen of the event. That being said, it was really cool. I really don’t understand how they pilot the balloons, except to say they appeared to have more control than I would have expected.

After the balloons, we stopped and got pizza. This is noteworthy only because the local Cub Scout pack was busing tables as a fundraiser. It wasn’t the best table service we have ever had, but it was some of the best mealtime entertainment we have had… perhaps ever.

My family headed home the next day, leaving Heather and I finally home with no impending dates on the calendar. We haven’t been as productive this week as the past few. Today we finally got back into painting and may have a dresser ready to instal soon.

In hindsight, I don’t know if we would have really planned the past few weeks differently, as there were events outside our control driving each visit. All the same, I know we would have been better hosts had there been a few weeks between each event listed above.

On the other hand, we have proven that we can comfortably host three to four guests, and are always happy to have people visit!

… Just give us a week to wrap up this furniture painting 🙂

-Jordan

Kicking Off A New Chapter

Posted on by Jordan

I wasn’t actually going for the dumb pun when I wrote that title, but I seem to have made one.  The new chapter, if you will, for Heather and I is doing a fitness challenge with a cardio-kickboxing class.

Heather and I saw amazing success when doing the “Body For Life” program, but we have found that we were only able to stay dedicated to going to the gym every morning when we were meeting each other there. The Atlantic drive, sucked all our free time and energy out of fall, and the cold snowy winter really made working out hard. Both of those have left us feeling lethargic and unmotivated to jump into spring and summer.

We have decided to counter that aggressively! Today, and every day but Sundays, over the next nine weeks, we are planning to be at the gym doing some ridiculously intense workouts… starting at 5:15AM. The early mornings may kill me, but we have too many after-work activities to reliably use any other time-slot.

So, if my posting slows down a little, you will know why 🙂

-Jordan

Chicago!

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I went to Chicago last weekend!

We took Friday off, and drove up after work Thursday night. Having three days off was a really nice break! Unfortunately it also meant we didn’t have a weekend at home so we are still trying to catch up on laundry and cleaning around here. I have no idea how two people in a two-bedroom apartment can make so much of a mess so quickly! Maybe we just have high standards.

So, back to Chicago… We had a great time despite the weather being cold and rainy for the majority of the trip. We took a few pictures, and shot some video. Heather and I really had fun with the video, and I have grand plans of cutting the segments into something worth posting. The problem is we are gone again this weekend, and I haven’t ever tried to do that kind of a thing before, so I should probably get a few traditional blog posts up before I forget all the details on the trip.

That isn’t going to happen tonight though… midnight is closing in, and I should wrap this up.

-Jordan

Its Midnight, Three Days Before The Wedding…

Posted on by Jordan

And what are we doing!!?

(Alert readers will no doubt notice this is posted after the fact, however the pictures were taken late at night last night)

Well, we aren’t wrapping gifts! Those are done! See:

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We finished wrapping gifts but Heather is still hard at work on the centerpiece construction:

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Because I am not writing this in real time, I can go ahead and tell you that we stuck it out and finished this project. Heather was back to Blair shortly before 1:00AM, just another short night in a rather long string of short nights.

This is, I am sure, the last post I will make here before the wedding… its still a ways off, but I think the excitement of it finally being here is going to carry Heather and I the rest of the way, despite our sleep deprived state.

Hope to see you all soon! 🙂

-Jordan

P.S. Almost forgot to mention, but as you can’t really see in the pictures, the apartment is very clean. Practically every goal we had for Wednesday night got completed!

Less Than Two Weeks Left!

Posted on by Jordan

The wedding is really getting close now, and I feel like my head is spinning. People ask “are you ready” meaning both personally and planning-wise, and I always say yes. I am ready personally, and I always think we are on top of the planning.

However, personally, I don’t really know if I have grasped the changes that are coming… I am pretty sure some of the best parts of being married I don’t even understand well enough to look forward to them. I am also sure the biggest adjustments are going to be much harder than I imagine, and center around issues I didn’t even know it was possible to consider issues. All that said, I can’t wait.

From a planning details perspective, we are ready… Except that there is a never-ending stream of little things that keep popping up. I can’t even begin to enumerate, or quantify everything. All I can say is that it feels like time is screaming by every time I try and sit down and take care of a few of these “quick” last-minute details. As best as I can tell, Heather and I are still managing to stay fairly normal, although we are both running on about half as much sleep as we should be getting. I can tell you we still love each other, although we may find each other much more lovable in about 3 weeks.

I feel compelled to try and write out some of the details I keep eluding too, but I really want to go lay down instead, and writing about them just makes them seem that much more of a big deal. They don’t need to be made into any more of a big deal 🙂

-Jordan

Back from Moab

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I had an amazing trip over the weekend + Friday, out to see DJ, Vanessa, and Josh, and go camping in Moab.

First off I should say that Heather did really well camping! I am really proud of her for just jumping in and having fun on her first camping trip.

I hope to get a full recap of the trip, and maybe some pictures up soon… For now all I can say is that it was an amazingly fun trip, but today has been one of the roughest Mondays in a long time. Somehow sleeping on the ground for 2 nights, and then getting to bed after 1 last night was more than my body wanted to do.

-Jordan