The Sultan of Sultan’s Blarg

Very productive weekend…

The day began with lots of energy. I decided to surprise Carri with her mothers day gift early. She had been complaining about our existing camera, so Friday I went to best buy and purchased her a new Sony Cyber shot 7.2 MP camera, pink to boot. I think she was really wanting a iPod, but she was really happy none the less. I took the family to Collectors choice in Snohomish for breakfast. Zachary nor Helana ate much of their food, which is typical. From now on we’ll just order them one plate to share. After breakfast we went to the store, then took the kids to the park at Sultan Elementary. Spent about 40 minutes there then returned home. Now it was about 1:00 pm, so I commenced my husbandly duties and got out in the yard. I replaced rotting boards (2) on our porch with new boards. Did the same with our deck (4). Still need to replace 3-4 more then I can pressure wash it and stain it. Thanks Mel for the boards! Saturday/Sunday I rebuilt our hogan gate and added re-enforcement boards on the bottom. Looked all over the place for the striker anywhere, but alas I will have to buy a new one. Carri was invited by our neighbor to go to a Mariners game, so it was just the kids and me for the evening. I was invited over to the Easterlings for dinner so after wrapping up the gate with some assistance from Bill, our new neighbor, I took the kids over to Jim and Leanne’s for some good Sahara pizza. Hung out here for about two and half hours after enduring a half hour of Zachary pleading with me to go home. Put the kids to bed, and spent the remainder of the evening in geek mode, discovering the wonders of xml.

Sunday I woke up feeling really wiped out. I managed to get up and prepare/cook Carri’s mothers day breakfast. Served it to her in bed. Carri and I ended up watching recorded shows for the next 3-4 hours. She finally roused me out of my lazyness and I finished the gate.. Jim brought over the pressure washer, helped me mount the fence onto the bracers. Then begain hour one of 6 pressure washing the porch and our fence plus hornets nest removal. Damn it looks good though. When I finished I was very wet, cold, tired and cranky. Carri grilled up some salmon for diner, with cous-cous and veggies. She had it ready for me with a glass of merlot after I came in and took a needed shower. After dinner I bathed the kids, got Zach out, and let Helana enjoy her bathy without Zach pestering her. I layed down on the bed while Carri dumped all the clean laundery on the other side. I had good intentions of helping her fold and hand up the clothes but I closed my eyes and off to dream time I went.. It was around 8:00 pm.

Thus wraps up Mothers Day weekend.

8 oz blue cheese

1 clove minced garlic

1/3 cetoo (?sp)

3 TB Red Vinegar

1 TB Lime juice

1/2 Cup red onion

1/4 C minced parsley

pepper

Got Don’s pictures of the trip posted late last night. Now I have to browse Dylan’s pictures and post those too. The page takes some time to load due to the enormous amounts of pictures. I might have to create another page to handle Don’s and another to handle Dylan’s to cut down on the load times.

http://becauseitsthere.grizzdaddy.com/2007/alpsnow0507.php

Love that smooth gallery slideshow control.

I hope to write a some details about the trip sometime this weekend.

Carri mentioned that she didn’t like my whole picture scheme when posting pictures. She postulated some sort of slide show method of displaying our pictures. Carri is an idea generator, and this one set my thought process in motion.I did some searching around for free slide-show controls and quickly dismissed a flash based one in favor of scripting one because the majority of browsers support java script. After some searching and not being pleased with what I saw.. I finally stumbled on this gem at http://smoothgallery.jondesign.net/. Took about an hour to set up.. and took about two hour of tinkering with the image resizer to get the pictures to fit within the slide show. Looks pretty sharp. Resizer.php is a great work of code writing. I no longer have to manually resize, rename, and upload photos to get thumbnails. I just have to post one picture and resizer handles the thumbnail and the slideshow picture. Those resized pictures are cached on the web site so resizing only happens one time per photo. My concern is that all these cached pictures are going to drain my allotted disk space.. But that shouldn’t happen for some time. Anyway I would like to praise Jon for his efforts on this control.

Just overhauled my website after a year of inactivity.. Pictures of the kids galore and my mountaineering exploits are here for your enjoyment. Don’t forget to sign the guestbook.