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So, since Jared has got me into watching Top Gear, I have started paying attention to cars a little bit more. With Annelise getting a new kitchen (sorta, see the previous post entitled “Welcome Home!”) and carpet and paint, I figured it was my turn. Last year’s tax return went to bills, the one before that went to Sam, so I figured I would lay claim to some this year, before it all disappears. Here is what I have been up to so far: So, some of you might think that these are just simple cars that you squeeze a trigger on and go, and that’s it. Not so. That is old-school slot cars. These are Digital! What that means is that it uses electricity AND data. This allows you to race, measure lap times, have pit stops (I have a pit lane and a fuel gauge if you look closely), CHANGE LANES, turn the car lights on and off and many more cool things. The very last photo in that slide show shows the piece of software that I am writing to manage the races and even control some of the cars itself. The second to last photo shows my custom connection from my pc to the track (where the data flows) and the one previous to that is the mini track I setup next to my computer so I can test with and debug. Fun! These are 1/32 scale cars (pretty small, but not tiny). Of course, I had to build a custom table to fit it all on, buy extra cars and a bunch of new track pieces. Oh, and Sam can beat me! When the software is done and the other customizations that I am working on, I will post more shots. That’s what our house said to us when we got back from a week long trip to CA for Christmas. I had turned the heat off to save money (like I’ve done every time we leave during winter), but apparently it was colder this year than any other year we’ve done that. One of the pipes decided that it burst, but wasn’t going to start leaking until it melted the next day. Here are the results, aftermath, destruction, construction and remodeling: We ended up paying about $1200 of our own money between deductible, tools (paint sprayer), paint, carpet, installation, and so on. Fun times! So tonight I got to say goodbye to my old friend the 1998 Saturn SL2. He has only been in my garage for 3 years. What a lazy bum right?!?! Can you tell that the dust loved him more than I? He didn’t even let me move him that whole time.
In case you were curious, back in 2006, when I was driving him to work every day, he wasn’t very nice to me. He made me replace his alternator, starter, and battery, only to find out that the problem was a batter cable the whole time. So, to punish him, I let his clutch plate go bad, bought a new one, and then set that on his hood for the next 3 years. That’ll teach him. Well, tonight I decided I wanted my garage back! Not really … my neighbor, who has been jobless for the last year (has had over 40 interviews, and like 20 second interviews), finally got a job today and told me he wanted my car. I jumped at the chance to get a parking space that keeps the snow off my working car, so say goodbye with me, for tomorrow he will be towed to get fixed. The good news is that I had like 8$ in quarters hidden inside. It was like finding food in your ear! Score! We wheeled him out to the curb, where he belonged. Oh yeah, and pray that he doesn’t cost too much to fix, otherwise the deal goes south and I get him back! So we had this room that was both poorly designed and damaged. We decided long ago that we wanted to modify it, even before the water damage to the walls. Finally, with Owen looming, I got started on it sometime in May. I tore out the walls and then decided what else to tear into that we were going to modify. Along the way, like any project, I ran into many oddities which made the job take that much longer. Add in the fact that nights were almost impossible to work, due to the proximity to Sam’s previous room, and the project dragged on and on. Almost every time I thought I had a weekend to work on it, some plans came up and it went another week without getting any closer to completion. 6 months later, the experience held many choice phrases, cuss words, sore muscles, bursitis, swine flu, colds, mold, paint, new tools, ingenuity, grit, determination, to name a few. The end result was finished 2 days after Sam turned 3. He moved in Monday night after I put his new bed together. Here is a little album for you so you can see what it entailed: So I was a latecomer to the Online Personal Finances world, relying on trusty old Microsoft Money for the last few years. I begrudgingly read and re-read the announcement from Microsoft that they were ending support for Money and that it would no longer sync with my bank’s register. When it finally went kaput a couple months ago, I didn’t know what to do. I have never been one to “balance” my checkbook, but I found it now almost impossible for me to track our money use. I guess I wasn’t technically sitting at my checkbook and adding the numbers and cross-checking the balances, but I was entering ALL my online (or otherwise) transactions into Money and letting it do all the work for me. This has allowed us to keep a good eye on our finances. During Money’s tenure on my computer, we have taken our credit card debt to zero and have made a massive dent in our medical debts. Now, three-ish months later, our savings is down to $100 (down from a wopping $1100). What is the cause? Well, we have been lazy with food, which leads to eating out too much. Add the extra expense of a new baby and diapers and supplies, etc. and it starts to add up. While all this helps add to it, I think the largest cause for me is the lack of a flippin account register so we can keep track of outstanding expenses. As soon as I knew Money was going to go away, I started looking for an alternative. They offered a $10-off coupon to move to Quicken, but that will still going to cost me $70 or so. This was not money we had. Isn’t it ironic that I needed to spend money to start saving money again?!?!?! Well, like I was saying, we didn’t have the money, so I didn’t exercise my option to opt-in to Quicken. During all this, I have been hearing about Mint.com and even talking about it at work with my boss, who uses it, and others. I decided to give it a try when all other options were out of reach. I mean, how could you say no to free, right? So, I started with the iPhone app (ps. don’t suggest ways on how I can be saving money without an iPhone; Annelise doesn’t have one, and mine is paid for by work Well, here I am, no longer a Mint.com n00b, but I am still not satisfied. I’ve checked out it’s features, and appreciate that it is free, but I can’t use it like this. So, tonight, after seeing transaction after transaction pull from my savings in yet another between-paychecks-fiasco, I decided its time to do something about it. Mint.com had to go, or I had to find out if they had this feature, but maybe I was just missing it. So, I looked …. and looked …. and looked. Nothing to be found. Okay, so I found their forum, and feature suggestion section, and started to read. Practically every other thread in there has to do with this feature, and it was suggested about 8 seconds after Mint.com opened. That was it, I knew it had to be a conspiracy at that point. Many other features suggested long ago had made it, so why not this one? I read one of Mint’s replies where they explained that it was “tricky,” which is absurd. I’ve made plenty of data-driven webpages and could code this into theirs within a day, no matter how they were designed. Unacceptable. And, to make matters worse, that reply was from 2008; so here they are almost 2 years later, and it hasn’t been done. So, I did one more search, because I had read that Quicken Online had this feature. Here is where things got weird. I couldn’t find Quicken Online anymore. I know I saw it back when I was deciding whether or not to go with Mint.com. I think Microsoft even offered it to me, back when it gave me the deadline until Money was going to go dead. But here I am tonight and the site won’t even come up. There are links to it on Quicken’s website, although they are hard to find. The problem was that it was gone. There was only links to Mint.com which were active. This is because Intuit (who own’s Quicken) bought Mint.com a month ago. I knew this, and had not heard anything yet. There has been a lot of speculation as to what would happen to Mint.com and Quicken Online, and would they stay free, etc., now that Intuit owned them both. Well, I did see one link on their page which caught my eye: Quicken Online + Mint.com = The Best of Both I took a read and finally found the answers I sought to all my questions. Quicken Online is gone, Mint.com is here to stay (and still free), and the best features from both would be merged. This includes “[t]he ability to enter and manage cash purchases or checks that haven’t yet cleared.” Finally!!!! 2 years in the making and it took Intuit to finally make Mint.com a legitimate app. Without a check register, in my opinion, Mint.com was only a fake contender. Now it really might be something I continue to use. I was even willing to pay for it if it was a “premium” feature or something. Heck, I could rattle off 20 premium features that they could still add to it and get people to pay for it, while still keeping the core app free. Anyways, it’s time to get back on track. Now I just need to wait until “early next year” until they release the new features and the new iPhone app. This is a copy of the post I wrote on Annelise’s blog: Born: Sunday, June 14, 2009 @ 10:30 am Story We arrived at the hospital at around 4:15am, and had the nurse hook up the monitors to check things out. Thankfully, we immediately were able to find the heartbeat, and he started moving as soon as we were situated. Due to him moving around a lot, it was difficult to get a good baseline, since the monitors kept showing gaps. They decided to keep us an hour, and then another hour. Finally, they decided to wait til 7am before decided to send us home, or to induce. I stayed awake the whole time, but just barely. I was concentrating on the heartbeat. Let me stop here and go back to the morning trip the the hospital. Since I was groggy, it was easy to let Annelise assume I wasn’t talkative because of the grogginess, but I was really running scenarios in my mind. I had put my ear up to her belly for a few minutes and couldn’t hear anything. Fear is an interesting thing, and it can do magical things to you if you let it. And by magical, I really mean crazy. I spent that time deciding what type of mourning parent I might be asked to become, and how I might be able to pull it off. I like to prepare myself for the worst, but never let that actually make me lose my wits. I was just logically trying to prepare my mind, so if something were to happen, and these fears were to fruit, I would at least have a leg up. Now, I mention all this because it comes into play later. You’ll just have to keep reading to find out how. 7am comes and they decide to tell us that we can stay and they will induce Annelise soon. At this point, we decided I should go back home and get the cameras, which were left from our hasty departure. We also thought it would be good if Sam did not wake up in his second floor room, only to find that nobody on floor 2 (our room) or floor 1 were around. Mormor (Mom’s Mom in Danish) was in the Basement sleeping, and we had given her the monitor before we left, but we still didn’t know how Sam would take it. We both assumed he would go searching for us in our room, and then go back into his room and cry on his bed. Luckily, we were both wrong, because as I was headed home, Sam had woken up and went looking. Before leaving, I decided to not lock the gate at the top of the stairs, in case he wanted to go searching for Mormor or someone, and he could go down. Well, he had taken that opportunity and gone looking for us down on floor 1. Thankfully, Mormor heard him looking for us and went upstairs to meet him. When I got home, there they were sitting on the couch, watching TV (at least 30 minutes before he usually gets up, the twerp). I showered and grabbed the Cameras and had a small chat with Sam before heading back to the hospital. I reminded him that his baby brother was coming today; telling him it was Baby Owen’s birthday (Sam loves birthdays). I reminded him that he had a present to give to his new brother, and that I would be back later to come and bring him to meet his new brother. I then headed back to the hospital. Oh, and when I say on facebook that I was driving, literally, I was driving to and from, with my phone in hand typing the updates, so everyone would know! I took the opportunity to call and get a sub for my class at church (@7:45am, sorry, I had no other choice!). Annelise called a minute later and said that they had just broken her water and had started the Pitocin. I was rounding the corner to the Hospital, good timing. The whirlwind then begins. It’s about ten after 8 by the time I get upstairs. She started Pitocin at around 8, and by 8:30, she had gone from 3cm to 6cm. The Doctor wasn’t there yet, so they stopped Pitocin at this point, to make sure she’s not ready before he got there. He shows up, checks things out and decides to wait for the baby. Without Pitocin, 30 minutes go by with nothing. During this time, the epidural has come. By now its after 9am. They decide to start Pitocin again. Another 30-40 minutes go by and now she is to 9cm. I was getting pretty tired by this point, and each time they would leave the room, I’d sit and watch the monitor, starting to doze. Then, when they would come back in to check on things, or help Annelise roll over, to better situate the Baby’s heartbeat and stress, I would go back to full alert. Any who, who really cares about me in this story! By now, they had come in many times because the Baby’s heart was going all over the place. For the most part, this was normal, but it was spiking and then dropping during a contraction. The nurse explained that most likely the cord was probably wrapped around something. Lots of maneuvering later, things seemed to be steady and she was ready to go. It was close to 10am by this point. That bustle of activity starts up in the room, and the NICU crew brings in some equipment. Apparently earlier during one of the nurse’s checks, she saw a little bit of Meconium, which is not usually a good sign. She didn’t see any more later, so it was just to be safe. If the previous two paragraphs was the beginning of a whirlwind, this one is the beginning of a whirlwind and something else much faster. The doctor comes in and we are ready to go. The heart rate had dropped lower than they normally like, so it was time to get moving. The next contraction is the start of the pushing. He pulls out the vacuum suction doohickey and decides its time to help things go even faster. After the first round of pushing, I can already see the head. The next contraction and round of pushing show the ears, and by the third round, it was over. It took about 10 pushes and a matter of minutes (that you can count on two hands). The story doesn’t stop here. The baby came out pretty quiet and a little blue. The cord was indeed wrapped around his torso, but not his neck. Okay, they’ll just grab him and work their magic. That’s just what they do. The NICU crew had him for a good couple minutes before we finally heard some noises. They had to use a respirator for the first 30 seconds to help him get breathing. After that, things seemed fine. I got to go over and get some pics. After about 10 minutes, they allowed me to hold him, and I took him to see his Mom. This is when he got his name, Owen James Briggs. About a minute into Mommy time, the nurse wasn’t liking his color. She called in some of the NICU crew to come take a look and they decided his capillary action wasn’t quite fast enough. It was most likely a volume issue, not something wrong with his heart, they said. He just needed more fluids. So, a couple minutes later, Owen and I went off to the NICU. This was an interesting place. Obviously it’s not a place you want to be, but should you ever need to be there, there is no better place on Earth for a baby. (Here is where I could go off on a rant about home-birthing, but I’ll refrain). There is an amazing amount of staff in such a small place, all dedicated to helping your baby. Our mission here was to get an IV drop into Owen. Attempt 1 was in his hand; no go. Attempt 2 was in his head; strike two. Attempt 3 finally worked in his head. This is where the catheter from the pics come from. They also wanted to get some tests while he was there, and draw some blood. They pricked his heel, to no avail. Finally, after a second prick, the got almost a full tube full (those tiny pipet looking ones). This victory was short lived, however, because in the rigamarole, it clotted and was unuseable. Someone had to come back multiple more times to get more blood for a CBC and for the standard stuff. They also did a blood culture to check for infection. All of this took about 4 hours. All the while I stared at the only thing I could, the monitors that were telling me his heartrate, oxygen saturation level and his respiration rate. One of the nurses told me what levels to look for, so I spent four hours of inflicting my will upon the numbers. I couldn’t go anywhere else in my mind, I had to sit there and will the numbers to do my bidding. Small battles were lost, but I (Owen, really) came back strong and regained the lost ground. By 3PM we had won the final battle and conquered the NICU. He sat there under a heating lamp while I worked the numbers. We were an unstoppable team, and he taught me many lessons during that short time. Now we can go back to the car ride. Because both Annelise and I had already accepted the worst possible outcome, we never once worried. What seemed like 5 minutes passing by without a peep right after he was brought into this world, but neither of us bothered to worry. We both just watched and waited. Maybe the whirlwind happened so fast we had no time to drop into despair, but it never came, not even once. I surfed the waters of the NICU like I was standing upright on a tiny canoe during the rainy season. The rapids were tough, and most sat down and held on, but I alone stood to surf it out. That’s how it felt, and those words probably make no sense, but they will be there for me to remember. I have no idea what it was like for Annelise to see here baby for 5 minutes and then not see him for hours. I do know that whatever overcame me, also overcame her. Anyone that knows her knows that anxiety is practically a constant, but not today. That special calm (known as the Spirit of God for those who know it) swept through the halls of the Hospital and helped us come through without a scratch. I have had many many experiences with less potential to cause worry and stress do far worse. We floated through on a pocket of air. It was easy as pie. I went home once we knew all was well to get Sam and introduce him to little brother. This went better than we could have expected. Sam was very quiet and gave Owen a little monkey as a gift (something Annelise had prepped him for). He was very sweet, and wispered because Owen was sleeping. He was a little uncomfortable, but warmed up through the visit. Afterwards, we celebrated with a guys night out to McDonald’s and got him some scumptious, now with white meat, chicken nuggets. He was awesome. I prepped him for bed and Mormor and autie C came back from meeting Owen to help do the rest. I returned back to the Hospital and Owen is being a champ. Now, having only got 2 hours of sleep so far this weekend, I am growing weary. The Spirit doesn’t last forever; for we are merely mortals. That being said, there is an angel sleeping in our room tonight. His name is Owen James Briggs, and he has already done things his older brother never has. What a little miracle! Time for sleep for the three of us! So now that the new webhost is up and running, I decided to check out some galleries. I have played with a number of them before, but decided to start my search from scratch again. The one that I had played with before was not super user-friendly, and wasn’t easy to integrate into the blogging software (wordpress/mu). This time I took a different approach, and I might have found something really cool called Jalbum. Now, if anyone has heard be rant about programming languages, you know I hate java. Everything about it just irks me. So, I am hessitant to share this, but so far, it has passed the first few tests. Jalbum is a program you load on your computer like picasa or the adobe or kodak album products. It allows you to mess with your photos and compile albums. What it also does, however, is to either allow you to publish it to their site, or plug in your own website (in this case http://gallery.briggsfam.com, which I had ready to go). The result is a webpage that turns into a gallery: Sample Gallery I made of some Sam pics What is also possible, however, is the ability to load skins and mess with a ton of features. Not all the skins are created equal, but so far everything has been free. I found one skin, however, that allowed me to load that gallery into my post here, as you see below: One thing you won’t notice unless you play with it is the ability to add your own mp3’s to it. I added a song if you can figure it out. (P.S. I am anti-embed auto-playing music into blogs, so I won’t break my own rule just to show you that I could do it too.) Hint, think Madagascar. All in all, it’s a powerful little album. If we (Briggsfam bloggers) decide we like it, I will create a button to put on the backend of wordpress to allow you to easily embed a Jalbum album into a post on the blog. Since it’s late, I will leave it all cool and mysterious for now. I can make a step by step video on how to do it easily enough if someone is interested. For non-Briggsfam bloggers, this can be open to you as well, so if you are interested, let me know what questions you have and I will explain them with a follow up. P.S. Annelise says “No baby yet.” This is what I do while I’m waiting for the new one to arrive …. any minute now. Here is a little taste of what I do at work. Tonight Mike and I started on this at 5 and finished at about 10:30pm. It would have been done quicker except that we had to keep track of 3 separate departments amongst all that mess. It turned out good in the end. We replaced 5 old switches with 3 new ones and rewired the entire closet. Here is the before and after:
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). I downloaded it and tried it out a bit. It was nifty to have an app on my phone which I could check and get my bank info. I even liked that it had alerts and reminders. After a little learning curve (my bank needed to ask questions every time I wanted it to sync, which I could only do on the webpage), the iPhone app finally started to work in my favor ….. to an extent. There seems to be one glaring feature with Mint.com: no way to track outstanding transactions. There is no flippin’ register!!! I mean, what??? C’mon. I figured I would endure it and see if it was coming down the pipes or something.
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