Chris’s Blog

It’s official, our house is up for sale. Well, it’ll really go into MLS (2 different listing services) this week, but everything is signed and there is a lockbox on the front door and a sign in the yard.  We’ve put a lot of work into it the past couple months and our realtor was pretty confident that our house will show nicely and sell, so we’ll just have to see!

So, if you know anyone looking to move to a 3 bedroom, 2 bath with a nice, finished room in the basement and 1.3 acres (woods) in Paulding County, GA, let me know.

If you have been wondering what’s become of me, waiting with baited breath and a finger on the refresh button for a new post, and/or just plain stalking me, this post is for you!

The long and short of it is that while we were on our cruise (which was totally awesome and everyone should take one sometime in their life) and after we came back, we’ve been doing a lot of talking about putting our house up on the market.  The part of Georgia we live in (northwest of Atlanta) has seen a huge boom of builders building houses in the $250k and up range–so much so that they are no longer selling and builders are selling at losses just to stay afloat.  Always one to try and improve our situation, we have hopes that our smaller, 3 bedroom, 2 bath on 1.3 acres of woods might sell fairly well if we spruce it up.  So, spruce it up we shall.

Our target is the middle of May and we have a ton to do before then.  Today, we had nearly 3 pallets of sod delivered and layed to cover our front yard where there was a huge lack of grass due to cheap contractors putting in pine straw instead of sod.  I’ll try to post some pictures tomorrow.  They had a bunch left over, so I put most of the rest of it down in another spot while the sun quickly dipped below the horizon.  Then, I spent the night cleaning out the garage with my shop-vac and rearranging stuff to make some room for packed boxes of stuff to go down there out of the way.  Prospective buyers are much more forgiving of a full, but organized garage than a cluttered house!

So, with much much more to do, you might not see as many posts from me for a few weeks.  To top it all off, things are very busy at work too!  I’ve been trying to get a small bug-fix update out for the Mac version and begin working on major feature planning for Safe Eyes 6.0 (Windows) all at the same time.  Plus, I have nearly two full weeks at the end of May and beginning of June where I’ll be in San Francisco.

Just a note to let you know that you won’t be hearing much from me over the next week.  We will be on a very large boat somewhere in the Caribbean.  I am taking a huge step (for me) and leaving home both the iPhone and the MacBook.  I will probably sneak into the “computer lounge” on the boat at least once or twice to check personal email (and maybe the Clan Elysium forum), but other than that, I am off the grid!  With my usual high level of connectivity, going “cold turkey” should be an interesting experience, but I think I can do it.

The most interesting thing about this vacation is that we will be without children.  Well, sort of.  Obviously, “Jellybean” will be with us since you can’t really leave him/her home.  This is unusual for us as we haven’t taken a vacation without Kayla since before she was born.  My mom was gracious enough to come down to stay with Kayla and Kayla is very excited about getting to play with Nana all week.  Although, I’m not sure she realizes yet that it comes at the expense of mommy and daddy being gone.

Since I will have time to read and listen to my iPod (two things that are hard to do on vacation with kids), I picked up a few new tunes.  Joe Satriani’s “The Electric Joe Satriani: An Anthology” which is basically 2 discs worth of Satriani’s best which iTunes had for $9.99.  I also grabbed Fireflight’s “The Healing of Harms” which I just found out about recently.  They’re a somewhat Evanescence-esque Christian band.

So, enjoy the week and don’t trash the place while I’m gone, ok?!

My good friend (and boss), Aaron, has been running a series on his blog about protecting your identity and credit.  I am all for that and I know I personally don’t do enough, so I thought I’d go ahead and post a link here to some good information on protecting your identity and credit.

I’ve been “translating” Safe Eyes 3.0 to Australian this week. It’s been a lot of fun learning new things about Xcode, Cocoa and Mac architecture. Our project structure is insanely complicated (projects with dependencies on other projects, projects that package the product of other projects inside them, etc). It’s been a crash course in Xcode and I’ve had a blast. It’s nearly complete now (which is good because it’s going to the Australian government for testing next week).

Today, it was 75 degrees. Between that and the time change, I decided to leave work a few minutes early so that I could get home, get Kayla some dinner (Valerie had a spa to work tonight, but still managed to bake chicken for us), and go to the park with her! We took her purple bike and helmet and she biked around the park for a while. Then, we walked and ran all around for another 30 minutes or so. Then home for bed.

I’ll leave you with a few quotes from this evening with Kayla:

[While biking on her little purple tricycle]
Me: Are you ready to hit the trails?
Kayla: Yes!…What are trails?

[Later while walking back to the car]
Kayla: Where’s God? Oh, maybe at the North Pole with Santa!

Kids are great.

This past weekend, I flew up to NJ for my sister’s birthday.  The fun thing was that she didn’t know I was coming.  Dad picked me up from the airport and brought me home and when I walked in the door Katy just sort of stood there with her mouth hanging open and said, “What?! What?”  LOL  It was fun.

After her Sweet 16/4 year-old/Western-themed birthday party Friday night (which everyone pitched in to help with), it was pretty much just relaxing and taking it easy for the rest of the weekend.  Then, I flew back Monday afternoon/evening.  Kayla was very happy to see me and gave me a “Welcome Home” balloon which has now joined the many other cubicle decorations in my cube here at work.

Two last items of interest:

1. I have reignited my love of my Nintendo DS.  I played a bunch of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and might end up actually beating the game soon and I picked up Puzzle Quest on the cheap.  I am now thoroughly addicted to Puzzle Quest.  It sounds crazy, but it’s Bejeweled mixed with an RPG.
2. My Time Capsule is here!  It shipped on Thursday from Shanghai which is amazing to me.

This was a much busier week than I thought it was going to be when I embarked upon it! The clear evidence of that is that I haven’t posted all week. So, without further ado, here is January 19-25th…in bullet list form.

• Saturday night - InternetSafety.com holiday party. We have a tradition of having it well after the actual holidays it is designed to celebrate. Great time. We had a “Casino Night” and as one of the top 3 winners, I received a Visa Gift Card prize! It also snowed a good bit and the temperature proceeded to drop into the 20s (shut up, Northerners).
• Sunday - Due to the fear of ice, church had been canceled. I hurried out first thing in the AM to pick up a few bags of firewood (since I procrastinated at getting some real stuff delivered and am too lazy to chop the logs we have here). We kept the fire going all day and stayed pretty much in our pajamas. It was one of the best days in recent history just hanging out as a family and having a restful time!
• Monday night - band practice. We still don’t have a name, but I got to try out my new pedal a bit and play my acoustic (since Steven, our acoustic guitar player and leader wasn’t there). I think I did a fair job of leading the practice and even sang a bit.
• Monday night into Tuesday morning - After practice, we had a little impromptu HVAC class. The thermostat in the youth room had been relocated to the uninsulated attic where it was making the electric heat run constantly. Shane found it and cut it off, John and I fished the thermostat wire through the wall (including some contortionism on both our parts), and we reattached it and mounted it inside the room it is meant to control.
• Tuesday - Other than work, I don’t remember what happened. It was a blur. I know I spent a good portion of it building the first “Retail” disc master with the new Mac version of Safe Eyes. It’s an ordeal, but I scripted a lot of it, so it should be easier next time.
• Wednesday - Work. Then Sold Out (youth group) at church. Good worship time (despite the lack of our drummer), good message, good Beef O’ Brady’s afterwards.
• Thursday - Busy day at work. I was “in the zone” and ended up staying until about 7pm coding up some new and fancy disable options for Safe Eyes. I got home and began playing Burnout Paradise. Great multiplayer experience!
• Thursday night into Friday morning - Kayla woke up at about 3am having puked in her bed. Change the bed clothes and an hour later, she was back up sick again. Valerie pulled an all-nighter sleeping on the floor up in Kayla’s room and helped her get to the bathroom the remaining times she was sick. She’s feeling much better now after drinking her Pedialyte and resting all day Friday.
• Friday - More coding at work. It’s good to be straight-coding again for a bit after quite a time managing the Mac project and just general non-programming tasks.

Well, the evening’s entertainment, the Doodlebops (Kayla loves them), is nearing the end, so I should go play with Kayla a bit before it’s off to bed with her and on to more Burnout Paradise for me!

That’s right, you read that correctly. Our lawn burned down.

The other night, Valerie called just after I left work and couldn’t manage to tell me quite what was going on. Finally, I asked her straight up: What are you trying to say? “The yard is on fire,” she said.

Apparently, she had smelled a little smoke, but figured it was someone using their fireplace. About then, two neighborhood kids rang the doorbell and said, “Uhh, did you know your yard is on fire?” No. We didn’t, actually. Thanks, guys.

So, she and the two boys put out the fires (there were now multiple ones spreading across the yard) with the hose. I asked her if she needed to call the fire department, but she said she was pretty sure it was out.

I got home finally, and decided to call the fire department out anyway just to make sure everything was ok. Now, in their defense, I did say that I was pretty sure it was out, but they still just sent one guy in street clothes on the engine. He said, “I would just keep an eye on it every so often tonight.” Thanks. My voluteer firefighter dad was much more helpful and suggested I rake out any thick piles to make sure the fire hadn’t burned down into the brush (since our yard is wooded and covered with leaves in parts).

All I can guess is that one of the many kids that use our yard as a cut-through was smoking and decided just to flick his cigarette butt on the ground. With as dry as it has been here in Georgia and with the fertilizer that was on the grass from just the day before, it doesn’t take much to get a fire going.

It’s sad because I’ve spent a lot of money getting our grass into shape so we can potentially sell the house this year or next. Hopefully, it will come back. It was just a quick surface burn and in some climates they deliberately burn the bermuda grass so it comes back lusher and thicker, but it’s way earlier in the season than when they would normally burn the grass. We’ll see what happens over the next few months.