Saturday, July 23, 2011

Ready for school and other summer activities.

This has been an interesting summer.  Kat is accepted into the History and Education programs at Southwest Minnesota State University.  So now we get to go through the whole game of financial aid, setting up her dorm, getting books, and the most scary... moving her out of the house.

You see, I have this very ODD sense of humor.  For the past 20 years, Kat has been the one that "gets it".
It's going to be quiet around here, but I guess they all grow up some day.

We got notification this week that all the loans and aid stuff is final and we have her year covered.  Now it's just getting her all the other things.

Started planning for building JD's next computer.  Dad's going to have fun with this.  He does a lot of first person action stuff so I'm planning the build with that in mind.  Here's what I'm planning so far.  We are trying as much as possible to use PCGold as our source for materials.  They are a bunch of good folks down there.  It's where I do most of my DIY stuff.


  • Case - Found one with a 450W power supply and tool-less drive bays for $55.  Looks cool and JD liked it.
  • Motherboard - ASUS M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 (It's an AMD AM3 board with SATA 3 6Gb/s and USB3 on board.  It's $168, but it has better on-board graphics than the $110 unit with the same I/O specs.
  • Looking at a 6 core AMD AM3 for the processor with 8GB of DDR3 RAM.
  • PCGold sells WD 1TB SATA III 6Gb/s drives for $W
We're doing this piece by piece, so it may take a few months. I may have to start a topic line to follow this project.

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

I'm horrible at this...

Got invited to Google+ today.  Saw the link auto loaded on the side of my profile.  I really stink at blogging.  I need to be more consistent and definitely more frequent in posting to this.  I really don't expect any followers.  But, if I'm going to journal stuff, I need to start writing.

Since my last post:
  1. Diabetes:  My system has settled down... mostly.  Stress still knocks my glucose levels around, but I'm dealing with that.  I'm actually doing pretty well on this.  A1C is down, got the diet thing mostly figured out.  Working on the weight/work out stuff.
  2. Kids:
    1. Kat graduated and is now starting college in the fall.  She's going to study history and secondary education.  She is really excited about that.  I'm excited too, but it's tempered by knowing the house will be a lot quieter this fall.
    2. Felicia moved into the mountains of West Virginia.  She and her clan are doing well and adjusting to life in the country.  Kae is really growing.  She's 4 now.  Seems like just yesterday we were at the hospital in Norfolk seeing her for the first time.  Time flies too fast.
    3. Tabitha is doing well at Langly AFB and enjoying her job and coworkers.
    4. JD starts his senior year this fall.
  3. Work,  is work.  Things keep moving forward, life goes on.
Not much else to say now.  Maybe I'll think of something profound to post later.