Unbridled Learning

Well, sort of… we did finally get a counter offer on our first offer (the house by Waller park), but it wasn’t good enough. We put an offer on a different house, Nipomo this time – it’s bigger, newer and cheaper than the first one, and it doesn’t have a wood shake roof which makes Will happy. That offer has been accepted by the seller but it is a short sale so we have to wait for bank approval before it is official. The bank has approved the short sale at the same price with a prior buyer, so we’re hoping it won’t be too complicated a process.

Boo – no counter offer on our offer, so we’re off to look at more houses today, after the Steelers game of course.

Still no pictures – need to get them off Will’s camera. I think Brooks took some last night…

We got home from LA at about 5 or 5:30; in the morning Will went to see Connie and I watched the kids swim at the hotel. We went over to Grandpa’s house for dinner, and then over to Grandpa Roger’s house for New Years Eve.

Amy and Darren and their kids were there; Melanie, Katie and Kevan; dad and Brooks, Timmy, me, Kevan and Ben. Will, William and AJ all came for a while and then left. We played a bunch of games, ate a bunch of junk food, then counted down the new year. Woohoo!

Today I decided to start a new girl tradition since the boys go to grandpa’s to celebrate their boy-ness (Japanese tradition – boys have to come over first on New Years day or you have bad luck). Well, now I have girls around!! I picked up Melanie and Katie and we met Brooks and Amy at Starbucks; then we headed to Kohls to shop. Ok, I do not enjoy clothes shopping on a regular basis, because I’m just picky and it’s annoying and my kids also hate it. But the girls had gift cards they got for Christmas and I needed some shoes so we actually had a lot of fun. Then we came home and watched Ice Age 3. Next year I’ll have a bit more time to plan… I’ll have to figure out what to do on New Years day with the girls next year.

Omw home from Disneyland. We didn’t bring a camera cord so I’ll have to post pics later. It was sprinkling half the day but crowds weren’t too bad and all rides were open.

Between my new job, using Facebook more, and re-provisioning my server leading to all kinds of data loss and crazy recovery schemes, I have been far from faithful at keeping this up to date.  However, I have also realized how important it is for me to do so!  After three data loss stupid errors in a row, I realized I should take a little better care of my data.  I started backing up some oooolllddd not-very-well-cared-for hard drive back-ups.

I’ve always been a writer/recorder. From the ripe old age of 8 or 9 I kept a journal, and fairly religiously from about age 13 – 19.  Then I was pretty sporadic about it, but I realized I started writing on the web around the age of 22 or so… on Onelist which morphed into Yahoo groups, among other things.  So I started gathering and backing up a lot of that writing.  I realized that there are a ton of things I don’t remember from even just 5 years ago… wow! I’m getting old.

Anyway, I was so grateful to have that recorded history back and between that and spending hours one Saturday trying to recover my lost blog data, I realized how important it is to me to have that written record.  Maybe that’s why I take so many pictures too… my visual memory is the WORST.  So I’ve got lots of pictures I’m going to post but rather than doing them all at once, I’m going to have them post periodically until they are all caught up.

I decided to learn some more advanced photoshop.  Check out my first photo restoration.

From blog.indecision2008.com comments:

Only a Maverick can suspend his campaign to work on a bill, not
actually suspend his campaign, not work on the bill, declare that he
will not debate, actually debate, and never formally declaring his
campaign back on. I challenge anyone else to do that trickery and not
look like a doddering old fool.

I keep going back and forth about whether to keep this blog here or at unbridledlearning.com.  I’ve been using both most recently, but since with my own wordpress install I have more features and flexibility I’ve decided to focus my energies there.  If you are subscribed to this feed, change your subscription to http://www.unbridledlearning.com/wp/?feed\x3datom  While you’re at it, you may want to subscribe to my “Recommended Reading” feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/UL-reading.

I will continue to post links here to the Unbridled Learning blog when new content appears (one of these days).

Paul Gravett: Article – China Earthquake

I got my braces off yesterday after almost three years! Just a reminder, what my teeth looked like before (this was actually after a month or two of braces on the top; at first they couldn’t even put brackets on my incisors because they were so twisted and crowded):

And after…