The Halls

Had a pretty good weekend.
No real pictures were taken though.

Wednesday I tested all the judo kids I thought were worthy of promotion, which was a new things for me. It was interesting, and I learned some good and bad techniques of how to test.

Friday, I hadn't played any poker all week, so I was going through withdrawl. We had no plans that nite, so I called Scott, and he and I went to the boats in Omaha for the first time in a year. I stopped going because I had something like 4 straight losing sessions there, so I had had enough.
That alone was enough to make me apprehensive about going.
But I ended up kicking butt, profiting $200 playing $4/$8 omaha hi/lo.
Then I got a $120 speeding ticket driving home.
Awesome.

Saturday we went to the Shelton's and drank and are soup. I made my black bean soup, and I haven't had it in awhile, so I've been eating a lot of it. It immediately affected me, such that I was killing people at the party later in the nite.
Then I continued to eat it, that nite and yesterday, and the farts have been non-stop. Today, I have not been able to get out of the bathroom. I think I have lost 5 pounds from the time I woke up.

This week needs to be dedicated to making serious progress on my thesis. I keep saying that, yet so many things that need immediate attention keep coming up, like poker.

Posted by Aaron at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

My brother finally posted some pictures of his daughter's first birthday party, which we went to over the weekend.
They are pretty good, except that when we got there we tried to take a picture of all of our kids, and Karsyn was done, so there were no good pics of them all.

But it was a pretty good time anyway.

If I get bored someday at work, I'll try to photoshop a better one together.

Posted by Aaron at 11:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Our next door neighbor is a widow, who has recently been dating some dude, and the other weekend told me she is getting married, and going to move in with that guy.
Makes sense.
So we talked about the current crappy house market, and she said she was pretty much ready to have it on the market for 6 months, which is the current average.
She got the for sale sign in the yard later on that week, and had her first open house this last weekend.
And we joked when it was over "guess she didn't sell the house on the first weekend"
Wrong.
There's a sold sign out there today.
Holy crap.
Hey, maybe it's a sign that the housing market/economy in general is turning around!
Probably all in anticipation of president obama!

Posted by Aaron at 11:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

So I was crazy sick 2 weeks ago, and still have a bit of a exercise-triggered cough even now. While I definitely had lots of symptoms, but Ann was sure that the severe headache I had was due to caffeine withdrawl, which I ended up believing.
Well, last Friday, I spoke with a friend I hadn't talked to in several weeks, and he started the conversation with "I've been out of touch because I was sick all last week with Influenza type-A".
"no kidding." I said. "so what exactly are the symptoms of Influenza type-A?"
"it's the flu that everyone is getting. I started out with just feeling so tired that I couldn't even drive home from my morning workout at the YMCA. I went home, and I couldn't get off the couch, and I couldn't get warm, no matter how many blankets or layers of clothes I had on. My whole body ached constantly. But by far the worst part was the headache. The headache never went away, and it was the worst headache I've ever had, it kept me from sleeping, or being able to do much of anything."
"Really....." I responded.
My mind was already loving that someone else was experiencing the same pain as me, and it turns out, at the exact same time.
So I said, "you may not believe this, but I think I had the same thing, and at the same time. I went down on tuesday morning, and I wasn't able to functio until saturday. I thought I had a bad cold, maybe a flu type thing, but Ann was convinced the headaches from caffeine withdrawl."
"Yeah, when my headache started, I thought it was caffeine withdrawl too, because I've had that kind of headache before, but this was much worse. And when I thought that was part of it, I started drinking some soda to fix it, but it did almost nothing. It helped just a little, but the headache was definitely still there, all week".
"well then, I feel better about not bothering to drink any, it doesn't sound like it would have helped."
"Didn't help me"

So the good news is that it turns out that I not addicted to caffeine, and I am now back to drinking as much of it as I like, but the reality is that the thought of being addicted to it has sort of scared me into drinking far less of it on a daily basis. But it's really not that bad for you.

Posted by Aaron at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm in the middle of my 'expensive week' of my year.
My anniversary/Valentine's day, Ann's birthday, and Aubrey's birthday are all this week.
Many things for me to spend what I don't have on.
I need a raise.
Tomorrow Ann starts watching Chad and Krista's new baby, Sarah during the week. It's helping them out, and she actually earns more than when she worked at Shopko, which was, unrewarding for her, to say the least. Watching a baby she at least likes.
We need to save, save, save for the trip to Hawaii in 6 weeks. It's coming fast, and I don't think there's anywhere else in the world you can spend it faster than there. Highest cost of living in the all the US, and we're going to be there for a week, so I can see the $$ flying out of my pocket right now.
But it should be a good time.

Posted by Aaron at 12:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I am mostly recovered from my week of being sick. I'm fairly certain I had the flu, and still have a cold on top of it, and most likely was experiencing caffeine withdrawals as well. It was a great time.

If you program at all, you need grep, the oldest command line tool on earth. Only problem is, grep is a lin/unix tool, so windows guys like me have to use an editor front end, like codewright or similar.
Grep only finds the stuff, I always wanted a find a replace, like I could do in perl. So I ended up writing a million and one perl scripts to find and replace just so.
This is also not efficient.
I want to be able to say on the command line:
find_and_replace 'fred' 'joe' *.c

Well, since I was too lazy to do it, someone else finally did.
Someone finally wrote my Find And Replace Tool, wittily called, FART.


Funny name, but wonderfully useful.

Posted by Aaron at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

sick, is a very good lagwagon song. In fact, I bet I use more lagwagon song titles than any other band, they have many good ones.

I have been stupid sick the past two days. Yesterday was far worse than today, yesterday I couldn't get out of bed for more than an hour at a time, then I would have to go lay down again, feeling like crap the whole time. I imagine it must be something close to what chemo is like.
Today was much better, but I still had a raging headache all day, and was generally tired and had all the wickedest cold symptoms I've ever had.
It's funny how when you're well, you so take for granted the ability to be ale to breathe through your nose. That is a true joy in life.

There was big snow here those same days, I was surprised they didn't cancel school yesterday, but they did today. So the kids all got sent outside to play in the snow, while Ann and I laid around inside feeling like garbage.

Posted by Aaron at 9:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, I can finally cross off one thing I've been meaning to do for the last 2 years, and that's take the kids skiing. We went to a local little hill, Mr. Crescent. It's a joke compared to anything in CO really, but the only real goal was to get the kids into some lessons so if/when we go to CO to ski, they can just hit the slopes running.
And that looks like that was a success.

Aubrey was able to get right back where he left off, and then some.
The girls started off not being able to do anything, and 3 hours later could go down the main green hill faster then I could. So it was a successful day.
I'm stupid tired right now, so that's all I got for now.

Posted by Aaron at 9:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)