I'm Stoked

So on Monday I leave for the JavaOne Conference in San Francisco. I got online today to find out if the Giants were playing to maybe catch a game. The Giants for those of you who don't know are the Major League baseball team in San Francisco. It just so happens that they are playing the Mets. Which is my favorite team. I don't keep up with baseball all that much, but I really like the Mets and I keep tabs on them. So I'm going to go watch the game on Monday or Tuesday and I'm taking my Mets hat and maybe my ball glove if it will fit. Anyway, just wanted to blog and say I'm excited for that. Ok, laters.

Only 8 More Shopping Months 'Til Christmas

Pretty catchy title aye. I thought so. It's there to reflect how quickly this year is going. I can't believe that in less than a week, 4 months of 2007 will be gone. Crazy days I tell you. I don't know if it is the kids that make things move faster or if it is the busy days at work. Either way, the days are flying by.

My world, well nothing is happening right now in the McGee household. We just planted two trees, a ash tree in the front yard, and a peach tree in the back yard. It's cool. we also have a nice little garden going, radishes and peas are growing well. It's exciting. I have a little bit of work to go on the garden to get the other stuff planted that we want to plan.

Well that's all for today...I'll write again eventually.

New Post

It has been over a month since the last post. How much our lives are either too busy to post or too boring to tell anyone.

Anyway, just wanted to blog about how cool life will get soon. It is now spring and moving into the summer months. Lagoon is open again and is working on a new and exciting ride. Plans are being made for camping, hunting, fishing, geocaching, etc. Lots of fun things going on.

That's pretty much it. That's basically the excitement of my news. Hopefully life will get more entertaining than that. At least enough to give details but until that time, I guess this will have to do.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End Countdown

Flickr Fun

It's time to start posting some of my pictures where everyone can see them. I'm using flickr for the moment to do my pictures. Here are the URL's...
Photos
People

I don't know why there are two, but they gave me two url's. Enjoy...

White stuff.... again.

After reading the post from Tracy, I wanted to chime in with my 2 cents. I'm sure we need the snow. I'm sure Utah, especially the SL Valley will benefit from the snow. Do you know how hard it is to geocache in the snow? It really does suck, for a few reasons.

1. It's cold. Snow is actually frozen water which makes it cold. I hate cold.
2. It's wet. You climb out in the snow, you bring some heat with you. It is enough to melt the snow and therefor is wet. Add that to cold and you are wet and cold.
3. Geocaches are not to be burried. Since they are not originally, now you have snow burying them. It is a lot harder to look for a cache if it is under 2 feet of snow.
4. Tracks. If you search around for a cache in the snow, you leave tracks. For the curious observer, their thoughts are "Why are their all those footprints around that tree?" They either think we are complete idiots for circling a tree, that we are sniffing around for a place to pee or that there is something of interest. Even if the cache is hidden as it should be for other cachers, the curious observer may find and, not knowing about geocaching, take the cache.

Anyway, not trying to complain but spring better get here quickly. According to the forecast, it is supposed to snow off and on for the next couple of days. Basically a series of storms are lining up to dump and run. How crappy is that. Hope to get to geocaching before to long.

One More Storm...

Ugh...there is one more storm coming on Thursday. Please STOP!!! I know we can use the water, I guess, but I'm ready for the winter to be done. I'm ready to get outside and do some walking around, playing with the kids, whatever else can be done. Especially geocaching. I am looking forward to the warmer weather and being able to get out and find some caches around work and home. I'm excited. One of these weekends I am going to take my father-in-law and brothers-in-law out geocaching. Anyway, I know I am a nerd but these things are fun. That's all I have today...

How to handle telemarketers

Give this a listen. If you can do this and keep from laughing and letting on, you are doing better than I would.

http://howtoprankatelemarketer.ytmnd.com/

Great Weekend, Minus the Drive

So me and the fam spent the weekend in St. George snapping pictures and hiking and Geocaching. It was a load of fun. We stayed with my Mom and took her on all of our outdoor experiences. It was fun. Saturday we went to Zions had lunch and did the Riverside Walk, which takes you back to where the Narrows start. Then we did the Canyon Overlook hike, which was fun with the kids since there are some major drop offs. Then on Sunday we went and did the Emerald pools, Lower, Middle and Upper. It was fun, long but fun. On our way home we stopped at a small ghost town called Grafton, they filmed some of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid there. We did a couple caches in that area as well. Monday we got up and packed up the car then went out and found a couple of caches in my mom's area. There are some amazing sites there where caches have been hidden, forgot my camera though. Bummer!

Got on the road and hit some nasty weather between St. George and Cedar City, but we made it home finally. We had a movie on for the kids to distract them and keep them quite and it worked. It wasn't until the movie was over that Bree realized that it was snowing. It was kind of funny, guess the distraction worked.

Gotta Have Your Music....

or the monsters will get you. I don't know why, but it has been an exceptionally bad day. Just my mood, nothing anyone did, just feeling depressed. Maybe it's all the damn snow we've had. ;) Anyway, I decided that I needed something to boost me up today and nothing does it better when I'm at work then my music. Just turn it up as loud as my ears will handle, find some good songs and just rock out. It's some of the best medicine out there for chasing those monsters away. The nice part is I have music to battle almost any monster. I have Mo Tab to bring in the spirit when it's needed. Some good upbeat music for the general times. Today I started with My Chemical Romance's Welcome to the Black Parade. Good upbeat song. Went from there to Rodney Atkins, If You're Going Through Hell, then Bowling for Soup, Almost. Then one of my favorites for digging out of crappy days. Will Smith's Lost and Found album. The whole album is one of the best for chasing away monsters. Now the monsters are gone and I'm going to be headed home in about 10 minutes, cross my fingers, when my ride gets here.

New Camera Fun

So the new toy that I talked about the other day was a new camera. I got myself a Canon Rebel XT. It is one of the SLR type cameras and has been a lot of fun. It gives me a lot to work with as I start into this new hobby of mine. Here is a cute picture of Keighlee that I took tonight.


She is such a cute little girl. She was attacking me I think. That or she just wants to eat the camera. I'm sure that I am going to post more pictures as time goes on. Anyway, look at that cute little almost 8 month old. Well have a good night.

Good Morning!!!

Well it is finally Friday. This has been one of those up-down weeks where life takes you and throws you around a little. Being Friday things should go smoothly. Even though it is 7:15am and I'm already at work. Just means I'm leaving early today.

I found out this week that I got the position of team lead over my team. It is funny how the wheel turns. I work on a team, leave it, come back to another team and then apply and get the lead position for the team I started on. It is kind of funny. It should be a lot of fun and we are a month or so out from releasing a pretty big application. Other than that life at work is life at work.

Life at home is going well. I'm doing a diet thing, which has helped me drop a few pounds and start exercising a little bit more. I've had 1 hamburger all year, which for me is amazing. I have had chicken sandwiches from Wendy's but only one hamburger. It was an Apollo burger from Apollo Burger. It was a good hamburger. The kids are all doing really well. Keighlee is starting to get around a little, though backwards is her favorite direction. It's cute. She's also trying to pull herself up on things now and that's not always working. She's going to be an early walker. Other than that, life is going about as normal as it can. I did get a new toy yesterday, which I will blog about another day.

Testing

Moving to heynerd.us.

The Christmas Box House

Tonight I had the opportunity to do some service at the Christmas Box House. It was a lot of fun. I played Yahtzee and Hangman with one of the kids there. I came home and was sad though. It is awesome that there is a place like the Christmas Box House, but at the same time it is really sad. I came home and my oldest daughter was crying because her cousin left without giving her a hug. Minor issue to me but a big deal to her. All she needed was a big hug from her daddy and to cry a little bit on my shoulder. I gave her a big hug and let her know it was ok, and that we'd see her cousin again. Then Bree came up and gave me a big hug and I started to cry. There were kids in the Christmas Box House that were pretty young. There was one that if you looked at her just right she looked almost exactly like Bree. It made me sad. It was a great opportunity as I said before and I decided that I will have a hard time doing it again because it tugs the heart strings. Well Keighlee is being a little snot about going to sleep so I think I'm going to go steal her from Chels and put her to sleep. Thanks for reading.

Time to Post for the Day

I'm sitting here at work and working on an application that is being somewhat of a pain. I'm working with Spring, Java, and Tomcat and when you change a Java class file, you have to restart the Tomcat instance on the machine. It takes a couple minutes for it to restart and populate all the information that we have it populating for the app. So I just restarted the server and decided I'd write something. Just for the heck of it. Well I'm done rambling now.

Feeling Good

I've started playing basketball on Tuesdays and Thursdays and it's a lot of fun. Well by started, I mean that I've played two days, but it's fun so I plan on playing more often. Last Thursday was the first day and I beat myself up. We played for so long and so hard that I was in pain the rest of the day. It also gave me a headache that didn't go away really until yesterday. I went and played today, we played for a a little over an hour, I didn't run as hard and I'm not as sore today. I actually feel really good.

That's it. The end for this post.

No Pain, No Gain

Today I'm feeling pretty good. I've started a little diet and trying to do more exercise. I didn't do it as a New Year's Resolution because they don't usually last very long. The diet is going well. I'm getting into the exercise thing and I'm a little sore. I worked out on Wednesday, I'm still a little sore from that. I ran on the treadmill on Tuesday for 15 minutes. I actually ran for the 15 minutes, which is a big step for me. Yesterday, Thursday, I played basketball for an hour and a half and minus a headache, I'm feeling pretty good. After the first week of the diet I lost 8 pounds and this week I'm doing pretty good too. I think I'm around 3 pounds down, but you aren't supposed to stand on the scale except for weigh-in days. Oh well. It's my diet and I'll do what I want. Today we are planning on going to the gym to lift again and I'll probably run again either today or tomorrow. Wish me luck.

Who started this whole Christmas thing?

Got this in my e-mail today and instead of hitting the forward button, I hit the blog button. I hope you all enjoy this:


A woman was out Christmas shopping with her two children. After many hours
of looking at row after row of toys and everything else imaginable; and
after hours of hearing both her children asking for everything they saw on
those many shelves, she finally made it to the elevator with her two kids.
She was feeling what so many of us feel during the holiday season time of
the year - overwhelming pressure to go to every party, every housewarming,
taste all the holiday food and
treats, getting that perfect gift for every single person on our shopping
list, making sure we don't forget anyone on our card list, and the pressure
of making sure we respond to everyone who sent us a card. Finally the
elevator doors opened, and it was already crowded. She pushed her way in and
dragged her two kids in with her and all the bags of stuff. When the doors
closed, she couldn't take it anymore and she stated, "Whoever started this
whole Christmas thing should be found, strung up and killed."

From the back of the car, everyone heard a quiet, calm voice respond, "Don't
worry, we already crucified Him."

For the rest of the trip down in the elevator, it was so quiet you could
have heard a pin drop.

This year, don't forget to keep "the One who started this whole Christmas
thing" in your every thought, deed, purchase and words. If we all did it,
just think of how different this whole world would be.

"For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son; that
whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."
(John 3:16)

Thoughts of Sugar Plums...

I love Christmas. The time is getting closer now as we are only 5 days away from one of the most exciting days of the year. While I have watched people stress throughout this year and even more so now, I'm glad that I have been able to keep a level head and a cool demeanor.... for the most part.

I have watched Christmas shows that I haven't seen in years. I have listened to music that celebrates the season and the birth of the Savior. It has been great.

Tonight is "date-night" for Alythea and I and we are going to the Voice Male Concert at Abravanel Hall. I figured something out last night. Of all the dates Alythea and I have been on, this is the 1st concert we have ever been to together.

We have seen concerts together, sort of... There were times where we were both working at the E-Center during a concert or event. I think my stint with the E-Center and my experience with concerts have caused the lack of desire and we never had the urge to go. There have been some concerts that we wanted to see, but never enough to get tickets or schedule the time to go.

So anyway, Merry Christmas and we hope that this season bring joy, love and family to everyone.

Geocaching Bag

So when we went geocaching the Saturday after Thanksgiving, I was told that I needed a bag for it. Well I got one. Here's the story...

For Christmas every year my work does Christmas gifts. It's pretty cool. Well the last couple years I've ordered a gift that hasn't come or was shipped back for some reason. This year I ordered a DVD player, it was just a cheap on, but it was something I could have put in my car for when we go on long trips. So it didn't come in and I was sort of upset. Two years in a row I'm getting the short end of the stick. Of course I have ended up with something both years, hence the new Geocaching Bag. I got this card called a "Thanks" card. You go to this website and order your gift online and they ship it to you. I went on line and there were only a few cool things. They had a lob wedge, a box of Nike golf balls, things you'd find under 25 bucks. I found this really cool hip bag that I think will work perfectly for Geocaching. We'll have to get it filled and go from there. I'll let you know how it works.