February 2006 Archives

Christina fired up the desktop yesterday and was confronted with the dreaded blue screen of death. All attempts to revive the hard drive have failed. I'm sorry, but C:\ drive didn't make it. Luckily, ole' C was a card-carrying organ donor, so tonight we're gonna try to extract anything out of the drive of value (information-wise). Hopefully, we'll be able to get some of the pics from the last month or so since we backed them up. The good news is that all of the wedding video stuff was stored on other drives, so basically, our computer has forced us to upgrade and reformat itself; something we should have done a while back. Things might be a little slow around the DFB for a while, but we'll be back and better than ever ASAP!

Myra's friend Trinity turned 5 this weekend and we celebrated by having a skating party! This was the first time that Myra has ever been skating and the first time I'd seen the inside of a skating rink since about the 7th grade. I was surprised by how much this place resembled the Skate Key back in Stroud, down to the 20 year old arcade games, large but ancient TV, and beat up foosball table. After trying out some unmodified skates and biting the dust about 5 times in 2 minutes, Myra traded her wheels in for a tightened up, slowed down model. She was basically running around out there with very slowly turning wheels on her shoes, but she LOVED it. Christina even got in on the action and strapped on a pair of skates. I thought about doing it as well, but remembered how much it hurt when I busted my butt on my icy sidewalk a couple of weeks ago. I kept myself busy watching Noah.

My favorite moment of the day was when Myra was helping her friend Carson get outfitted for the day, "They have LOTS of skates right over there and they even SHARE!!!"

I was playing around with Mommy's new toy today and I took some pics of her cooking us some grub. I don't know why, but I really like this pic. I thought I'd share it with you.

Our Canon Digital Rebel is nice and all but having to dig it out of the camera bag, attach the flash and then wait for all the "go" lights ... We missed quite a few photo ops. We don't want to miss anymore.

Enter the Nikon Coolpix P2. I had several cameras picked out. I did my research and looked at countless reviews. We even went to BestBuy to play with different cameras. I was mostly interested in size...

... and how long before it was ready to take a picture or video. Yes, I said video. Josh? Well, he was sold as soon as he saw "WiFi".

I know what you're thinking. How's the picture quality? We're happy with it.

"Where's Noah?"

"Where's Noah?"

"There he is!"

Noah has finally discovered that if you crawl through one particular door in the kitchen, you'll come out through another door in the dining room. He would crawl in one door, crawl out the other, go around to the first door and start the circle all over again. He was so proud of himself.

Of course we can't forget our favorite cheerleader posing with her good friend Zing Zing Zingbah.

We're still learning how to take video. Rest asure, we're studying hard and we'll have one posted for your viewing pleasure very soon.

That's right! We've changed names. TheSquatch.com will still redirect you here for a while, but eventually you'll have to update your bookmarks to point to www.thedavisblog.com. We have decided on the name change because the blog, which started out as a fantasy football website has evolved into so much more. Chris and I have been having a great time writing stories and posting pictures about life with Noah and Myra and we view this blog as a sort of family history book that someday our kids and grandkids will read to find out what life was like way back when their parents were kids.

Of course, the blog isn't anywhere near finished so you might see some signs of all the behind the scenes construction that is taking place. So if you see a blank page once in a while, don't panic! I'll be cleaning up that mess as soon as I can get to it. I'm very excited about the prospect of adding some new features to the blog and hopefully their installation won't be as painful as the migration to the new domain name has been. A huge thank you goes out to the guys at GeekEmpire, my webhost, for all of the excellent tech support. If you want a website, these are the guys to talk to. Their service rocks!

Doh! Looks like I messed up the stylesheet for this blog while working on the experimental one. I backed up all except one file and that happens to be the one that I needed! Oh well. We'll have to do with this default style for a little bit. At least I didn't lose any entries!

A lot of people up in Oklahoma have been hounding me about seeing some video of the little man talking it up. Since he missed out totally on the tea party because of his nap, I thought I'd string together some tape to show him off for once. I did this in a very short amount of time, so it didn't turn out as nice as Myra's Tea Party, but it's still pretty cute. I hope you like it.

You probably can't tell, but we've made some changes to the blog. It was touch and go for a little bit and there were a few choice words uttered, but in the end, theSquatch.com was upgraded to Movable Type 3.2. Its changes are mostly seen in the inner workings of the blog and will help us keep a handle on spam comments and trackbacks. This upgrade is the first step in our migration to a whole new design which should be evolving over the next month or so. Keep your eyes peeled for some (hopefully) really cool changes to the site. Part of the reason I am wanting to do this redesign is I'm getting bored with this design. The other reason is to teach myself how to use The GIMP, an open source graphics-editing program. This program has quite a learning curve to it, but I've been using a hack called GimpShop that makes it feel a lot like Adobe Photoshop. Wish me luck and if you start seeing some crappy graphics popping up, cut me some slack! :)

I was cleaning out some folders and I ran across some pictures called
"President's Day" that were a real stroll down memory lane. They must
have been taken last February when I had a day off and we spent some
quality time goofing off and hanging at the park. Sometime in the
future, when Noah and Myra are having a knock-down drag-out over who's
turn it is to use the phone, I'm sure we'll look back at these pictures
and long for these days. I kinda already do.

Ahhh, Valentines Day. It's that one holiday that makes completely no sense to me. It's like Hallmark decided that there was just too much empty space between Christmas and Easter and the only cure would be to add in a holiday that involves buying your significant other flowers, cards, and chocolates. These are three things that guys don't like doing and invariably are bad at. Not surprisingly, V-day isn't a big celebration around this household.

For Myra, today was huge! They had a party at school and everyone gave her "Ballen-tines." The whole way home she passed me card after card and implored me to "Read it! Read it! Who's it from!" I have to admit, this made Valentines Day a little more fun. I remember having those parties back when I was in elementary school. One instance that stands out in my mind is in the third grade. I filled out all my little cards--making sure the boys got ALL the cool ones--and I had just ONE left. It was the ugliest one (in my mind) of the bunch; big and red and all covered with lacy decorations. I had to give it to Caroline McManus. Back in those days, we didn't get along too well, so I wasn't taking any chances. I wrote, "Happy Valentines Day. This doesn't mean I like you." Mom got the biggest kick out of that. I remember thinking at the time that she just didn't understand how relationships worked. Now that I look back at it, it was pretty funny.

I can't believe I've finally switched. While looking for programs to put on my brand new USB thumb drive (1 GB Lexar--thank you tax return bunny!) that I picked up for 39 bucks at OfficeMax, I came across a tiny little media player called XMPlay. This thing is AWESOME. It does almost everything that musicmatch does without the enormous bloated, advertising filled crap that is wrapped around it. XMPlay is tiny, sleek, and doesn't even have to be installed. All you do is unzip the folder anywhere on a disk drive and BAM instant music! That sounded the death knell for Music Match.

As I finally bit the bullet and uninstalled Musicmatch I realized that I have been using MM Jukebox for a loooong time. I first downloaded it when I lived in Stillwater, so I've been using it nonstop for at least 6 years, upgrading to nearly every release.

Alongside XMPlay, I've been tinkering with another new app, this one an all files type of media player called VLC (Video Lan Client). This one has some major potential. The thing can play ANYTHING! If my computer took 8-track tapes, I'm sure that VLC would handle them with ease. It also is very small and sleek and has some super cool features. One of my favorites is playing a video as a wallpaper. Another super cool thing is the ability to stream video or audio nearly anywhere to another VLC client. So far, I've been able to stream video all over the house inside our wireless lan, the next step is to see if I can stream it to a computer somewhere else. Who knows, maybe one of these days a couple hundred of our friends will get to see a webcast of us and the kids LIVE from our house over the magic of the interweb. We're not there yet, but I promise, I'll let you know as soon as we get there!

So Noah has been doing a lot of talking lately and his vocabulary is expanding rapidly. He can say everyone's name (except Ricky) as well as other useful words like "look" and "truck." He loves 18 wheelers so much that I think he may grow up to be a long-haul trucker. He also says little sentences like "Where are you?!?!?" and "What's that!?!" His favorite word at the moment is pretty close to my heart, "Daddy." He says "Daddy" to EVERYTHING!

Do you need a new diaper? "Daddy."

Are you hungry? "Daddy!"

Time for bed. "Daddy!!"

Stop doing that!!!! "DADDY!!!!"

I'm telling you, my buttons are bustin' with pride.

Myra was very excited about the tea party her class had last Friday, and her enthusiasm carried over to the weekend. Chris found an old flower girl dress at Goodwill and the price was perfect so she snapped it up. Myra was so pumped about her pretty new princess dress. She wanted to have another tea party, but this time, she wanted Mommy to wear HER princess dress. Well, after a little pleading, she talked Chris into it. I just had to grab the camera. I shot the whole affair just like a wedding and it came out GREAT! I hope you all enjoy it.