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Well, I’m back from vacation. Most of you probably didn’t even know I was gone, but I was. I went with Lori and my mother to south Texas (near Corpus Christi) to help my sister Lisa and her husband Eric move into their new house.

It was a lot of fun, if you ask me. I don’t get to hang out with Lisa and Eric much anymore because we live 15 hours apart, so this was a welcome opportunity. We made several trips between their old condo and the house, filling up both our SUV’s to the brim. (Aside: what is a brim, really? I hope it didn’t add much to the cost of my car, because I could probably do without one). It was a lot of work, but we also had a lot of fun eating seafood, shopping, and doing a few other tourist things.

Last Wednesday we drove the comparatively short trip to Oklahoma after boarding the animals. Once in Oklahoma, we visited Lori’s parents for about an hour and then we crashed at my mom’s house. We woke up super early and drove the 12-hour drive from there to Lisa’s place. We slept at my mom’s house again on the way back Monday night and left for Arkansas at 7am on Tuesday. I wish we could have stayed in Oklahoma longer and been awake, because it sounds like Heathe was upset that we didn’t get to hang out with him. If our schedules hadn’t been so tight I would have jumped on the opportunity to hand out with my friends, but I can’t be everywhere at once. We’ll plan another trip soon just to see our friends, once we recover from the costs of this trip.

If you find yourself in Texas, I highly recommend stopping at Tomatillo’s in San Antonio (down the street from the Alamo; get the sour cream chicken enchiladas), The Duck Inn in Rockport (awesome seafood near Key Allegro and the mythical summer house of George Strait), and the Rockfish restaurant in Fort Worth (it’s a chain restaurant full of good seafood items). All good places, if you ask me.
I am glad to be home, however. I missed my cats and dogs, and I am just plain exhausted. We came home to find out that Chloe is in heat so we’ll have to watch her and make sure she doesn’t make a mess all over the place. Normally I wouldn’t worry too much about the situation because we have a nice stockade fence in the back yard, but this morning as I went to fill up the dog’s food dish I noticed Butter absent and the fence standing wide open.

I don’t know if the dogs or someone else did it, but last night as we slept or early this morning the fence board to which the latch connects was on the ground instead of firmly screwed into the rest of the fence. Maybe it got tired, or maybe it was forced into submission, I really don’t know. Thankfully Butter was a smart enough dog to stay right where she was instead of running down the street like previously, and Chloe remained in the backyard. Perhaps they are learning. I don’t think anything bad happened or otherwise the dogs would have made a comotion that would have alerted us. The board is now back in its correct position on the fence with the rest of the boards, and I wasn’t able to open the gate even throwing my body weight into it.

As I write this, I am probably an uncle. I say probably because I don’t know if it has happened yet, but my sister Lisa is having her baby today. The doctor said the baby is ready to go and they scheduled an induced labor for early today. Kaylee Grace Cox will be born today and I’ll be a proud uncle/godfather. How exciting!! I’ll write more as soon as I know any details. Hopefully Lisa will be quick to upload some pictures of her new child.

That’s all for now!

This weekend I spent a lot of time programming in Java, working on a cool program to view a webcam on my cellphone. I’ll post more about that later on dev dot slaggle. I got a lot of computer time in because Lori had to work a lot. She had the pager this weekend, and had to work some pretty major issues. On Sunday she got two hours of sleep and was working for about 13 hours. I feel bad that she had to work so long.

Sunday afternoon we decided to train the dogs a bit. I’ve been working with them in the backyard trying to get them to follow me and heel on command, and that has been going fairly well. So I decided it was time to take them out on their leashes and see how they performed in the park next to our house. Apparently their collars weren’t tight enough because we ended up playing chase more than walking. After our little excursion outside I felt pretty beat and I realized just how much I’ve been slacking off on my exercise.

After getting the dogs back inside I literally collapsed on the floor and had to fight to catch my breath. I haven’t had to gasp for air like that since I was little and was on several different inhalers and a breathing machine for bad spells. So I need to get into shape, end of story. It’s for my own good. If I’m not careful I’ll end up with diabetes or I could seriously screw up my heart.

The good news is that I’ve already cut down my caffeine consumption to the point that I’m not dependent on it, and I don’t eat a lot of sugary foods. That’s thanks to the warning from my eye doctor. But I *have* slacked off on my exercise and that’s what’s doing me in. I need to step it back up and start going to the gym every other day like I was doing and watch my diet even closer. Eating fast food and fried items isn’t exactly the best way to shed the pounds.

I think I’ll try to post some of my progress here for posterity. Last night I exercised for 30 minutes on my gazelle while listening to some music. I think tonight I’d like to try going on the elliptical at the gym and burn some serious calories.

I decided to ditch the cookie-cutter template provided by Blogger and use one of my own creations. This new design represents a new marker for my standards of web design: It is fully compliant to the standards of the World Wide Web Consortium for XHTML 1.0/Transitional, as well as being compliant under the government’s Section 508 standard for web accessibility. I’m using pure CSS and no tables so this is really a clean and elegant design.

So yeah, in other words it doesn’t mean much to anyone except the geeks.

That brings me to my next topic. I’ve decided that my personal blog needs to be readable by my target audience: my friends and family. None of you guys care about neat programming tricks or computer stuff (well, a couple of you do). So I decided to move all that content to a new weblog: dev dot slaggle. There you will find all the neat little programming tricks, tips, and articles, and here you will find the juicy bits of my personal life.

So there.

To satiate the people who have been waiting for the latest update, here it is: Nothing new really. Yep, I’m pretty boring for now. It’s been the same work, work, work! The only thing cool was this past weekend when Lori and I went to Eureka Springs and met Heathe and his family. They were there for a wedding, and we grabbed Heathe and his cousin and ate some really crappy food and went caving. The cave was neat, but the restaurant we picked was about the worst I’ve ever been to. I could write an entire blog entry about that, but I think I’ll save that for another day.

Yeah… That’s about it. Maybe I’ll be more motivated later to write something with more substance.

This weekend started out nice. Friday evening Lori and I were playing on the computers, listening to some tunes pretty loud. We were only in the computer room for about an hour, and then we decided to go in the front room and watch some television before bed.

As soon as I stopped my Rhapsody playlist, we noticed the sound of a faucet running. Following the sound, we were led to the intake vent by the garage door, where the air conditioner is. Our first thought was, “Crap! Not the air conditioner again!!” I went into the garage and looked at the unit. The air conditioner sits on an elevated ledge in the garage right next to the hot water heater.

Water was pooling around the hot water heater, and had spilled out into the floor of our garage. This pretty much sucks because we’re currently using the garage as a storage room for boxes of stuff we’ve never got around to unpacking.

I went back inside and Lori had removed the intake vent cover and was looking inside with our maglite. There was about 3 inches of standing water and it was dripping like a hungry dog eying a piece of uncooked steak.

So that convinced us both that the problem was the hot water heater and NOT the air conditioner. So I went back into the garage and found the cold water intake pipe. There was a shut-off valve right there at the top and I quickly turned it off. Then I turned the pilot light off and went around to every sink and tub in the house and turned on the hot water in order to drain the tank properly instead of allowing 40 gallons of water to flood the house.

As I did this Lori grabbed our shop vac and started sucking up the mess with that. Crisis averted! It was kind of freaky because when the hot water heater got near the end of the tank, the water flowing out of the faucets in the house was a bright red, reminding me of blood. Ewww..

So all weekend we haven’t had hot water in the house. Yesterday we went to Lowe’s and purchased a new water heater, but I’m going to let them install it. I don’t know about you, but when it comes to an appliance that could explode and take the entire house with it, I’d rather leave the installation to professionals. The installer will be here either Monday or Tuesday so until then I get to stink it up a little bit. Fun stuff!