Not Going To Paris
I’m pretty glad today to not be booking travel for Paris. Things are happening at one of our customer sites and my coworker is being sent off to Paris to investigate. He is Canadian so he isn’t missing a holiday weekend. I was worried I might get sent so I’m very happy it wasn’t me.. not this week. It is possible that I could get sent some time in the next few months but who knows.
Server Hell
Lately I’m in email hell. My web host (ehostpros.com) upgraded the server that hosts several of my websites. It was needed because the server was ancient, very slow and running out of disk space. They did the upgrade and after everything “seemed” fine. In fact, they had some problem that prevented ftp upload (download worked). This meant that I couldn’t update my website to reflect that we ran our of inventory for some products. Customers could order products that we can’t ship so we would have to cancel orders and contact the customers to explain the problem. The contact forms on all of my websites stopped working. Site visitors could not contact me about site problems, updates, customer questions, etc. All of the email forwarders that I had setup to forward to yahoo mail accounts stopped working because yahoo decided that mail coming from my domain is spam (my wife gets a TON of spam). This meant that my wife, mom, dad, and my email addresses stopped working. Ugh.
I got the host to fix the ftp problem.
I created pop accounts instead of forwarders (pop accounts we can check from yahoo). I encountered a failure creating the pop accounts and had to have the web host fix my quota after the upgrade.
I fixed my web forms to send mail to the new pop account so that the mail would make it there.
For now, things seem to be working.
Gymnastics
Yesterday Z’s gymnastics coach told him that he should move up to the next class. D noticed that the coach was starting to work extra with Z during class. He is super strong for his age.. can do pull ups on the bar where most kids can’t even lift themselves up a little. He was pretty happy about it 
. D is planning on talking to him to make sure it is a good move and then he might be doing class with kids that are a few years older than him. The next Blaine Wilson maybe.. 
Basketball
Last night was M’s first game at school. They played 6 periods (each 6 min long). The kids played 4 kids at a time with the rest on the bench. M got to play the first, third and fifth periods. I thought the organization was crazy. I can see having fewer kids on the floor (basketball usually has 5 players from each team on the floor) to reduce congestion and confusion (there was plenty of that). But having 6 periods is crazy. Basketball always has 4 quarters. M seemed to get tired near the end. He kept wandering over to us in the stands to ask for a drink or because he was hungry or to say something. We kept sending him back to the bench to sit with his teammates while he waited for the next period so he could play again. He had a lot of opportunities to score but only shot one time (gun shy it seems). He was upset after the game that he didn’t get to play point guard (the guy who dribbles the ball up the court as you start on offense). We had a little talk about that and all was fine. He will have 2 games a week and no more practices I think. So far so good. As a parent it was much more fun to watch than Tball was last year.
Another Open House
This weekend we had another open house. Four people came and one of them was a repeat from the last open house. Our realtor tried to get some information about her. She is getting divorced and looking for a smaller house. She likes ours but wishes the kitchen had some more cabinets. She was not put off by the farm/natural gas well road at the edge of our back yard because she did some research and decided that it was likely to help keep the land as a farm or at least as residential property. So, we have one interested person. Our realtor told us that she was probably not going to do anything until the spring (fine by me) so we’ll see if anything ever happens. The housing market is so slow right now. There are no new homes coming on the market and very few leaving the market. I think people are just not buying homes right now.
Family Photos
Today we got our family photos taken and some pictures of the kids taken for our Christmas cards. They turned out pretty good. I drove up and met the family at the photo place so I could miss less work. Then I drove back while D and the kids stayed to wait for the cards and photos to be ready to bring home. The kids looked good in their dress shirts and ties. Good stuff.
D and I have recently been sucked into facebook. She got sucked in by her girlfriend. I re-joined because of her. Now we keep finding old friends from high school. I got into a political argument. She found her previous choir friends. I found some work friends. It is OK but it produces a lot of email noise. I need to just turn off email notifications. You can check it out at: http://www.facebook.com
Weekend House Hunting
Today we looked at a couple homes in Hudson. We didn’t love either of them. The first house was very big but the kitchen was closed off to the rest of the house. The basement was great but the kitchen was probably a deal breaker. The second house was older so D was turned off by all the old dark wood trim and such. I was OK with it but not in love. The yard wasn’t great. Good thing we don’t have any offers on our house
Voted
We went and voted this afternoon around 1:30. I waited about 10 min and then voted. D didn’t have to wait at all. She went about 15 min after me. They were out of stickers that say “I voted today” so I guess could mean that a lot of people voted.. or maybe they didn’t have many stickers to start with.
I had to stay away from home for a bit while someone was looking at it with their realtor. I went to Starbucks but the wifi connection kept dropping me. I eventually gave up and went home. They had come and gone so who knows what they thought.
Another Taker
Today we have another visitor to look at our house. They called last night and asked if to come at the same time we already had a few things planned. I will have to pack up and go work at Starbucks after I go vote. D will have to take the cat and kids to the park or something after she votes. Lets hope this one wants to buy!
