·:[ David and Claire’s Blog ]:·
• • • • •

We cooked an interesting meal tonight – salt roasted pork. You basically take 6 cups of rosemary infused salt and cover a pork tenderloin, then roast in the oven for 20 mins at a high temperature. It turned out really well – the meat was at a temperature that would usually make a tenderloin very dry but it was incredibly moist – tender to the point of being able to pull apart with a fork. Salty, yes! But you brush off most of it and the real flavor was the rosemary. Anyway, it was definitely the best pork meal we have ever made so if you’ve ever been treated to one of Dave’s tenderloins, expect this version next time!

We’re enjoying a long weekend here and looking for things to do over the next two days. We are going to try to make it into the city if it warms up a little. Maybe go to a museum or check out Toys R Us with the kids. I’m not sure Evan has ever been to the city, so this would be his first time.

The children are well. Evan is crawling all over the place, at a rapidly increasing pace. His little knees are all red from the new activity. Apparently he got so quick at daycare that he escaped the room before they realized what happened. The next day he got moved up to the mobile baby room. He’s the smallest one there but it’s a bigger, and more contained space so he can crawl after the big kids to his heart’s content.

Brynn is funny. Every time I use a word to describe her (even a nice one), she shrieks “don’t call people that!”. Dave was buckling her into her car seat today and she kept saying “Daddy, you are freaking me out of here”, which was so nonsensical that it was cracking us up. I told her she was adorable and she got mad and of course said “don’t call people that!”. She also hates it if we laugh when she says something cute – “don’t laugh at me!!”. She’s a 13 year old, trapped in a 2 year old body. Her favorite show is Futurama which is cool because it’s at least fun for us to watch, (the other alternative being a princess movie) but the downside is that she uses words like “crap” every now and then. Well, you win some and you lose some.

My new baby has been around more than a month now, but only recently has it started behaving. I’ve been hiding out in my house slaving away on my first new computer in three years, and it just kept on giving me the dreaded BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) at seemingly random moments, but pretty much every 5-10 minutes. This isn’t the first time I’ve had this problem when building my own computer. Last time the problem turned out to be the motherboard. This time it was the CPU. I suppose that’s what I get for buying a brand new chip design right after it’s released. My AMD Phenom 9600 quad-core CPU is currently on it’s way to California where AMD will analyze it and hopefully send me back a new chip that behaves better. I don’t know if it’s just bad luck or an indication of the quality of these parts that every time I build a new computer at least one part is bad. Also, this time it took me a while to figure out what the problem was. First I thought it was the memory, so I bought some more, but still had the same problem. Then I decided it was the videocard and again I bought a new one and had the same problem. Then finally I bought a new CPU, an AMD Athlon X2 dual Core 6400+. At this point I realized I was halfway there to another computer, and decided to buy a new motherboard too. I popped in the new chip and presto! – I now have a fast, powerful, and most importantly rock solid, stable rig to play with. I’m halfway away from the components to build another rig now as well. It was time for a new Linux box anyway.
So I decided to give liquid cooling a try with this new computer. After all what is more geeky and cool then what is essentially a radiator in your computer? It’s anti-freeze circulating around, potentially ready to spurt everywhere at any moment (which btw is not as bad as it sounds since the liquid you use is non-conductive and would not destroy the computer). The AMD Phenom is also the first quad-core chip design where each it’s a true quad-core instead of just two dual-cores.
I’ll publish the detailed specs of my computer later!

Already February, where is the year going?

Kids are doing well. As mentioned last time, Evan crawls and has teeth. He’s a champion eater also and we can pretty much just take our own meals and break them into small pieces and he eats whatever we give him. He definitely prefers real food to baby food although it’s such a time consuming process that he’d probably have to be in his high chair all day to get enough calories that way. He’s a very sweet little guy and really quite cute too – he has the same big blue eyes and long dark eyelashes that Brynn does. His hair is growing and it’s still very fair but it’s not the baby fuzz that it was before. He likes to grab whatever Brynn is playing with and he drives her crazy. She also drives him crazy by being overly affectionate and wanting to hug and kiss him constantly and he hates it and pushes her away. I wish I could say he was sleeping better, and actually he kind of is. He goes to sleep relatively easily – a few minutes of crying but then he drifts off. He usually wakes around 2 or 3am and ends up in our bed, which is cool with me because he’s a sweetie, but then he likes to wake up at 5am and play for two hours and that’s very annoying because, oddly enough, we would prefer to continue sleeping.

Brynn is pretty awesome again. She’s in her new room (below) and has her big-girl bed that she loves. She’s completely potty trained (even overnight) and she’s a lot of fun to talk to. She has a pretty impressive vocabulary and springs new, unexpected words on me all the time, like “wonderful”, or “amazing”. Of course, her ability to pick up new words has it’s down side as well. I need to start watching what I say in the car because apparently I call a lot of other drivers “idiots”. Also, today she was playing and I’m not sure what happened but she exclaimed “what the hell!?”, which cracked me up but, you know, not good if she starts saying that at school. She no longer naps on weekends which is a sad state of affairs, particularly as she gets pretty tired by mid-afternoon.

Not much is going on. It’s been a mild winter which is nice. We went to see Nemo on Iceskates or something the other week which Brynn was only mildly interested in. She asked to leave at intermission. We’ve been visiting great-Grandma Ruth which she enjoys a lot although on a recent visit she told David, as we were leaving, “thank you so much for visiting. I just wish I knew who the hell you all are.” And that’s about all we’ve been doing. We have to make Valentine’s Day cards tomorrow for Brynn’s class. Or, as she calls it, “Brynn Valentine’s Day”.