Birthday Craziness

You'll have to wait for the last paragraph to hear about the picture.

Okay, now I'm 38. Last year, for some unknown reason, I thought I was turning 38. When it occured to me that I was actually turning 37 I was quite pleased. I got to redo 37! Well, my redo of 37 is over and now I am officially 38. Honestly, I don't care. It doesn't feel a lot different than 28, except that now I wake up to simultaneous crying and barking and back then I used an alarm clock.

The whole day yesterday was kind of nuts. Normally I take all the kids to Sarah's ballet lesson on Tuesdays. Lily has a little friend there with whom she plays, and Jay just toddles around being cute (or being two, which is less than cute.) Yesterday, however, Stef wanted to take the kids there early and have me meet them there, I suppose as some sort of birthday gesture. We ended up arriving almost an hour early and just waiting around in the car or walking around the parking lot. Since Sarah's ballet recital is Sunday there was a lot of last minute preparation commotion at the lesson, and we didn't end up leaving the place until about quarter to eight.

The one thing Stef wanted to do for my birthday was to get a new computer for me. Mine was more than six years old and was pretty much dead, since the video card would fuzz out after about a half hour of use. We have been terribly happy with the eMachines box we got for Stef, so we decided to get another one. So we rushed (since ballet got out roughly an hour before they close) to Best Buy and snapped up a machine. We hadn't gotten dinner for the kids yet (remember, we were an hour early for ballet) so I drove through to get happy meals. The kids scarf down their food at home while I start assembling the computer and Stef gets ready for the iced brownie that was cake. Scarf-light-sing-extinguish-clap-scarf-good night kids. The whole thing happened so fast, and I was starting to feel overwhelmed with it about 10 minutes into ballet.

I ended up trying to get XP home set up with two users adequately until 3am. There was this crazy dialog that appears on Windows start on the kids account that I just couldn't get rid of. Is says, I kid you not, "fAIL" and has an OK box. That's it. I dinked around with msconfig for a while trying to find the startup program that generates it, but no luck.

The painting competition ended yesterday and I got 2nd place. The 1st place mini and I were neck-and-neck for much of the competition, but in the last day he pulled ahead by two votes. What troubles me is the the photos miss some of the detail that I put so much time into. I think focus may be the issue. No matter, I'm happy with the way the mini turned out, and 2nd place ain't so shabby. All the entries are here, and #3 won. It is an impressive piece.