Ty’s Weblog

Xander’s school had it’s International Festival today. We all went and Xander and Mira had a great time. His class was doing Norway this year. We contributed a wolf stuffed animal for the decorations in the class. Kate also made damper bread, which is a bread from Australia. Kate also took that on Monday to Xander’s class for International Snack and it was a big hit. For that, she also took some quince jelly (which we just bought) and a couple of quince fruit for the class to see.

Anyway, Xander and Mira had a great time going to the classes and doing the different projects that they had set up and looking at all the neat stuff people had brought in.

The food wasn’t as good as last year though. The school didn’t do a very good job this year of setting the expectation that everyone would bring food, and they also didn’t have things set up very well for the rain. Last year they had lots of tables set up in the great room. This year, they had a couple in the hall for the food, and you pretty much sat on the floor to eat. Not a great job.

The most imporant thing is that the kids enjoyed themselves though, and that was certainly accomplished.

Darth Vader’s Weblog starts out just before the events in The Empire Strikes Back. It’s very funny. I’m looking forward to seeing how long it goes on.

So I made a huge mistake today.

I tried out a friends PSP. Now, I really want one. It’s a sweet little hand held game machine/media player.

I mostly want it more for the game angle of course, but I’m not above encoding some movies and putting them on a 1GB memory stick and carrying them around with me.

Luckly, so far, there are no “killer games” out for it, though I am curious about several of them, there are none that I feel the need to play right away, so I’ll be able to restrain myself for a while.

Mira has surprised us.

Thursday she wanted to go sit on the potty. She’s not been able to do anything yet, but she’s shown interest in trying about once or twice a day since then. We’re, of course, letting her give it a try whenever she likes. Kate and I now have visions of a diaper free future. We know it’s actually a while off, but it’s nice to dream about.

I’m very proud of Sesame Street for updating Cookie Monster to help kids understand healthy food.

I know a lot of people are upset that the are messing with their childhood memories, but what’s really more important here, child hood memories, or the health of our children. Cookie now treats a cookie as a “sometimes food”. I’m thrilled to see him showing kids that healthy snacks are fun to eat too!

I have to remind myself that I was a beginner programmer once too.

That said, I don’t think I was ever this bad.

GameSpy already has a preview of Sly 3 up. Things are looking good. I’m really looking forward to this one.

So Apple calls me up this evening to let me know the warranty on my iPod is about to expire.

I expected that to be followed by an offer to extend the warranty for the low price of blah blah blah. Actually, all he asked was if it had been working properly for me. I told him that I’d not had any problems with it and was still very happy with it. He said he was very glad to hear that and that I should keep an eye out for the next few weeks in case any problems occured, so they could be fixed under warranty.

That was it. He said have a nice day and hung up. I was amazed. What a classy thing to do. I’m very impressed with Apple at the moment.

Xander and I will both be thrilled to see Sly 3:Honor Among Thieves come out this fall.

We had a very nice afternoon today. The weather is more Springlike around here lately, so this afternoon we took the kids out and played with the bubbles for a while. Xander loves playing with the bubbles. Mira runs hot and cold on it, but I’m sure she’ll come around after a while. We had a lot of fun.

Kate and I got back from our anniversary trip yesterday afternoon. It was great to have an extented period of time to ourselves, but it’s also good to be back with the kids.

We only went as far as Reston. We stayed at the Hyatt in Reston Town Center. The hotel was only okay. Certainly not what I expected for what it cost, but what we wanted most from it was being walking distance from all the stuff in Reston Town Center, and it did that part well.

We ate at some great places:

• The Melting Pot
• The American Taproom (which was good food, but bad service)
• Obi Sushi
• McCormick and Schmicks
• Panera
• Logan’s Roadhouse

We also had a great time just not having a schedule. Being us, we spent some amount of time in the room just being together and reading, which is something we don’t get to do very often with the kids around. We had a lot of fun walking around Reston Town Center and looking in all the shops we haven’t been to in a long time. It was just wondeful to be able to spend some time together and not have to worry about anything else for a couple of days.

By all accounts the children did very well while we were away. Xander, of course did fine, he’s spent time without us before, but this was really the first time Mira has had to deal with it. She seems to have done fine with and and we’re very proud of both of them.

Today Kate and I celebrate our 10th Anniversary. Kate’s mom is here and is going to watch the kids, and we are going to go away for the weekend. It’ll be the first extended time we’ve had together alone in years. We’ve both be looking forward to it quite a bit.

It’s been a wonderful 10 years, even if they have seem to have gone by so fast. I love my wife more today than I did then. I’m a very lucky man indeed.

It’s a rough week. Peter Jennings announced today that he has lung cancer.

Kate and I were wondering if something was wrong when he wasn’t around to cover the Pope’s death. We were very sad to hear he’s sick. When I bother to watch television news anymore (it’s mostly useless these days), Pete was always who we wanted to watch. It’ll be strange not having him in the anchor chair.

Pope John Paul II died today. It’s a sad day. He did a lot of good for the world. Even if I didn’t agree with him all the time, I never had any doubt that he had the best of intentions. We’ll all miss him.

As sad as it is to see him go, it’s also good to know that he’s not suffering any more.