Life on Snow Hill

It is about 15 ’til 8 on Friday morning.  We’ve been here since before 7pm last night.  Some progress has been made, but it’s still slow going.  She is a lot closer than she was, though.  Everyone is tired, but anxious.

The way it’s looking, though, he will be born sometime today.  We were talking last night about how there are several in our family with a birthday on the 28th of various months, and a couple on the 18th.  Jackson should fit right in!

We arrived at Joy’s house at about 4:20pm today. We unloaded the truck and ate some supper, then headed out.

We’re sitting at the hospital now, just waiting for Jackson’s arrival. We could be in for a long wait, but it may not be too bad.

I’ll try to update as soon as there is any news.

This morning has been spent mostly running around like chickens with our heads cut off.  But we’ve just about got it under control.  We’ve been getting everything packed and ready to be loaded, which I’ll be doing shortly.

I plan on taking lots of photos while I’m there, so expect to see some on my next entry or two.  This software I’m using now will let me save drafts, so I should be able to write everything as I go, and then post it all when I get back.  So when I get back, you may be flooded with 5 days worth of entries!

Everybody stay safe, and if I’m not back before, have a happy new year!

Becky and I will be leaving out tomorrow morning to Ohio, where my sister and her husband live.  She will be having her baby really, really soon – in fact, she’ll be going tomorrow evening to induce labor.

It’s only about a 5 hour drive, so we should be able to make it there in plenty of time for all of the excitement.

You can’t tell a whole lot about the route from this picture, but it’s nearly a straight shot.  Basically we take the shortest route to I-75 from the bottom push-pin.  I-75 is the interstate route going north-south just to the right of that pushpin.  Once we get to Lexington, we take the highway that goes northeast up next to the top pushpin.  It’s just under 290 miles.

While we’re there, I’ll probably be blogging, but I doubt I’ll have access to the Internet to be able to publish anything.  So, to get any updates, you may have to wait until I return, which will probably be either December 31, or January 1.

Christmas has arrived.  We’ll be visiting 3 places today.  But first things first – Becky and I opened our stockings.  I put a stainless steel pizza cutter (Hey, she asked for one) and a DVD in hers, and she put all kinds of candy and several other trinkets in mine

Where are the real gifts you ask?  We’re into guns.  We’ve gotten Becky hers, and I’m working on the finances to secure my own fairly soon.

So the three places we’re going today.  We’ll be at my Granny’s on my Dad’s side at 12, then directly after that, we’ll be at Becky’s Grandma’s.  Tonight we’ll be going to her Dad’s.  It’ll be a packed day, but it should all be a lot of fun.

Today is Christmas Eve, and I had to go to work.  Because Jacobs is kinda cheap that way.  But I got a good ‘gift’ for going in.  We expected our new laptops to arrive in the first week of January, but FedEx brought us an early Christmas present.

I have a Dell Latitude D630.  No bluetooth, and no nifty keyboard light in the top of the screen casing.  But it’s pretty sweet otherwise.  It has a Centrino Duo in it – 1.8 GHz.  It also came with Windows Vista Business Edition, so that is cool too.  I’ve been spending most of the morning and early afternoon getting it set up just like I like it.

Oh, the sweetest part – it has 2 GB of RAM.  The most RAM I’ve ever had in a desktop or laptop.  So it’s screamin’.

So anyway, I had to brag a little.  Merry Christmas everybody!

I cut everything over to the new blog at home, but forgot to add the DNS entry for it.  I didn’t even realize it until I got to work and tried to access it.

So everything should be working just perfect now…

Today is December 23rd, 2007.  It’s Sunday.  We’ll be going to my Granny’s house on my mom’s side.  Chicken ‘n Dumplin’s, mashed potatoes, ham…Mmm…  Although spending time with your family around a good meal is a great thing, it’s not quite what Christmas is all about.

Jesus wasn’t born on December 25th, we know that.  But at the same time, we don’t now exactly when he was born.  I don’t know who picked it, but December 25th is when we celebrate His birth.

Christmas is a time to remember how our Salvation was brought to be.  It’s a time to remember how Jesus was born of a virgin.  It’s a time to remember how great a child this was – He was teaching the priests in the temple at age 12!

So while you’re eating as well as you did at Thanksgiving, and opening all your gifts and getting things you’ve always wanted, and things you never would’ve picked out for your worse enemy, remember to step back, take a breath, and remember what Christmas is really all about.

Merry Christmas!

I’ve switched again, but I have good reason.  Again.  The blog software I’ve used in Plone, my favorite content management system, is lacking.  I mean, it is good software and all, but it doesn’t allow me control where I want it.  For instance, I couldn’t control whether trackbacks were allowed.  I hate those, and they’re always spam.  It also had no way to combat spammed comments, other than deleting them when they show up.

Meet WordPress.  WordPress allows me the control where I want it.  I can force comments to be moderated, and I can totally disable trackbacks.  I should be able to combat spam pretty well now.  WordPress is also more feature-rich overall.  Plus it’s faster than Plone, so that should be a plus to you, my loyal readers.

Another cool thing is that Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer can publish directly to my blog.  In fact, I’m writing this first post in it.  Writer is a feature-rich WYSIWYG editor that can publish to several different blog packages, and it happens to support WordPress.  So now it’s easy to blog in rich content rather than having to fumble my way around in Plone to get the photos or videos in my post.

Thanks for sticking with me!  I hope to be blogging more and more now – I just hope I can find some interesting things to blog about!

Wow – Windows Live Writer even lets me download a post, edit it, then republish it!