The Clarke Family News

7 December 2007 [Friday] Worked. Went out to lunch with the guys as we usually do. Nothing unusual. Amanda found out her speeding ticket that we thought would only be $75 is going to be $170 when court costs,etc. are added in. What a scam, and it is so aggravating! 6 December 2007 [Thursday] Worked as usual. At night after the kids went to bed, I worked on getting Ubuntu 7.10 ready to install on the new HP laptop we have. Windows Vista is just too much of a pig and I can see I will easily get irritated with it quickly waiting for the hard drive to stop running as it swaps stuff in and out and I don't want to spend another $100 now on another 1 GB of memory. I just need to get a restore disk from HP first before I wipe the laptop off - just in case. :) 5 December 2007 [Wednesday] Worked from home as I always do on Wednesday's now. Work went good and the kids did good. It was easier than Monday as Keegan's first day back at school was today. He did great as w...

9 November 2007 [Friday] Going on my lunch hour to see if I can meet up with Keegan down at the museum as I did last year. It's his last day before track out and they are going on a field trip again to the same place as he went in Kindergarten. Wish they would go to a different museum, like the art museum perhaps. 8 November 2007 [Thursday] Nothing unusual. Worked. Met Trey for lunch with Joanne and Laine. Nice to hang out with some different people for lunch. Went to Moe's in Cameron Village. Expensive for lunch, but again something different. 7 November 2007 [Wednesday] Worked from home. Amanda worked 1/2 day. Helped Jim at night go and get the ping-pong table for Steven's birthday - it was big and heavy! Funny part came when the garage door started to close on us when we were trying to carry it in, because Jim had the opener in his pocket. :) Helped Keegan at night really tackle his reading with all the books Mrs.. Martin sent home after telling us he w...

-- 19 October 2007 [Friday] Carson came in this morning, hot and saying his throat hurt. Amanda kept him home from school. I spent most of today at work, trying to get a Coca Cola ticket to work. Even got on a conference call with their people and Amy Tanner trying to resolve this. ugh. Went to Mexican for lunch. I'm really going to stop going there as I don't like it anymore. I used to love it, but it just doesn't sit well with me anymore, and they raised their prices on everything it seems. Tomorrow Keegan has a birthday party at 3pm. And we are thinking of hitting the fair in the morning before that. Then at 6pm we have the 'Trunk or Treat' at the YMCA which I hope is fun. Sunday brings Dr's Dunsmoor's baby shower for Amanda at 1pm, so I'll be alone with the kids. If Carson feels OK, I'm going to bring them swimming since we haven't been in about two months I think it is. Jim and Gina left for Tampa, FL for a few days today, so ...

4 - 7 September 2008 [Tuesday - Friday] Worked as normal. I'm working on a huge Motorola Import with Cheryl and Laura Harris. It's no fun at all and is very complicated. Taking all of my time. I need to be done by Tuesday and will be thankful to get this pushed out. Hopefully I have caught all the bugs at this point. Worked from home on Wednesday as normal, nothing else out of the ordinary. Amanada has been working extra hours at Dr. Dunsmoors since the front desk lady was fired so she has been really tired. On Wednesday night, I took the kids to see Alex and TJ at football practice at Bond Park. They were interested for about 10 minutes then went and played in the baseball diamond dirt! They were a total mess from head to toe. I had to strip them to their undies before getting in the car and try to dust off as much as possible, then in the bath and shower they went. It was like a sand pit at the bottom of the bathtub when I drained it! :) Boys will be boys I s...

23 August 2007 [Thursday] It rained last night - was so nice to hear thunder when I work up this morning as we are in a severe drought and need about 15" of rain to get back to normal. They said it would require a tropical storm to get us back to near normal! All the grass is totally dead everywhere..brown and crunchy. We have been trying to water our bushes to keep them alive as best as we could. I most likely have to work late tonight as they are upgrading our QADB server so I volunteered to help test it. Rebecca said we could come in 1/2 day late today as we will probably have to stay late. So after dropping Carson off this morning, Amanda, Keegan, Ian and I went to the Morrisville park to meet Denise and her kids. It was so hot and humid, but we still played for about :45 minutes and then all the kids wanted to go. So I headed towards work around 11am, while everyone else went back to our house to play. Hope they had a good time. Got into work and John Littlejohn and I went to...

30 July 2007 [Monday] At work as usual. Amanda has volleyball tonight which I'll bring the kids to see as it's a 6:45pm game, so that will give us something to do which will be nice. Otherwise nothing special planned that I can tell. 29 July 2007 [Sunday] Another one of those hot humid days with us stuck inside and not sure what to do. Got all the kids and mine hair cut, and then we finally headed out to go look at minivans. Stopped at the Dodge dealer. We liked the 2007, but wanted to see the 2008. If the 2007 had side airbags and stability control we would probably make an offer on it. The 2008's arrive in about a week or so he said, but all 8 are pre-ordered already. Crazy. They are going to sell for much more money, so we have basically rulled them out but still want to see them. On the way out we drove by a new Hyundai dealer that we didn't know was back there. Amazing facility! Only been open one month. Gorgeous place. We saw their minivan, and R...

30 June 2007 [Saturday] Keegan and I are going to Max's birthday party today. Not sure what else is planned. Sometime this week we need to hit the foodstore and pick up all the stuff for our 4th of July party in the cul-de-sac. We also never made it to South Carolina to get illegal fireworks, so we'll pick up a couple of boxes of the ones they sell here. The kids still enjoy them anyway. I just get tired of all the same type 'thing' after awhile. 29 June 2007 [Friday] One day back at work today before my long vacation. Rode the motorcycle in as Keegan took the bus again this morning and allowed only me to take him! :) So glad I got to see him do it before Kindergarten was over as this is his last day of Kindergarten. As I type this today he's got only 1.5 hours left! Amazing. What a big boy he's growing up to be. I rode the motorcycle in today. Really hot and humid out. I'll be sweating tonight when I leave in all my protective gear. But ...

31 May 2007 [Thursday] Rode into work again today. On the way to work, noticed at a stoplight that I had my Guzzi crashbar still 'resting' on the front of the bike! YIKES! Pulled over at the next side street. On Wednesday I was showing Keegan were it went as I had to put it back on, and I left it there and forgot about it. The only thing holding it on, was the 2 brackets to the horn!!! So I strapped it to the back of the seat. I was going to go out and lunch and try to put it on in the parking garage, but I am not feeling well in 'certain areas' so skipped that. I'll have to strap it back on the seat on the ride home, or perhaps zip tie it to the frame and put it on this weekend. I need to spend some time this weekend doing three things (1) Put the crashbar back on, (2) Changing the gearbox oil in the Guzzi and (3) Putting the Ural back together (from the broken interupter from the Ride For Kids!) We'll see how much I actually get done with how hot...

-- 21 May 2007 [Monday] Rode the motorcycle into work today. Busy finishing up AutoRecruiter WP! Yeah! Now I just hope it works without issues. Nothing else major. Can't wait to transition back to CR team. Hope it goes quick. -- 20 May 2007 [Sunday] A very nice day. 82F and sunny today. We got a slow start, but then Amanda wanted to attempt to rent a row boat again at Bond Park. This time it went great!!!!!! I was so excited that Keegan and Carson didn't fuss about putting their life preserver on. They got right in the boat and Ian cried while we strapped it on, but I picked him up and he was fine with it. This was my first time ever in a row boat. I rowed us out with Amanda's guidance on how to turn, row, etc. :) It was fun once I got the hang of it. Windy day so I rowed out and she rowed back in with the wind. Great fun and the kids can't wait to do it again. We rented it for one hour - only $3. Next time we'll do two hours and bring our fish...