Sometimes the boys like to take chairs and line them up to make trains and cars.

Here's one of them in a car with their backpacks driving to grandmas house (Ethan is putting the keys in the ignition):

Here is an older one of a train they made. I think it was a night train and every seat was taken:

a dorky eye-fi demo:

As a follow up to my last post: last night the boys and I were throwing balls at each other (it started out as "catch" but turned into dodge ball). At one point Jacob threw a couple at me and when I returned fire I was just a little to the left with my aim. Rachel and Makaylin happened to be on the couch, which was a little to the left of Jacob, so Rachel had to deflect the incoming missiles. She then said something like "boys!" and Ethan ran over to her and said "sorry mommy." I guess he's the official apologizer for me!

I was just reading D&C 67 (http://scriptures.lds.org/en/dc/67) and was again impressed at how often people (including Joseph Smith) are chastened in the D&C. Although, now that I say that, I'm reminded of the clearest revelation I've ever received, and it too was a strong reminder of what I already knew I should be doing.

A few minutes ago Rachel was downstairs chatting with me. Jacob came down and I asked him if we was all done picking up the cereal (he spilt a bunch on the floor). He said yes, but in a way that made us feel like we needed to go and check. So we all started up the stairs but Rachel was kind of blocking the way and going slow so that I'd push her up the stairs. But instead, I went between her legs and lifted her up on my shoulders. She started freaking out, grabbing onto the railing and saying that I needed to put her down right now. So I didn't, and took her up the stairs, which calmed her a little once we were off the stairs, but she continued to insist that I put her down. So I started spinning around (like I do with the kids) and she started freaking out again. It was great. Then I let her down and Ethan said: "sorry mommy." We really need to get a bunch of cameras in our house so that we can relive some of these moments!

I might try something for a while. I usually read a chapter in the mornings, so maybe I'll try and say something I noticed. So in Isaiah 5:25 (http://scriptures.lds.org/en/isa/5/25#25), we read

"25 Therefore is the ^aanger of the Lord kindled against his people, and he hath ^bstretched forth his hand against them, and hath smitten them: and the hills did tremble, and their carcases were torn in the midst of the streets. For all this his anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still."

Which I always read the last part ("but his hand is stretched out still") as saying that His mercy is extended, if they will reach for it. But is it saying that His hand is still stretched out in anger? The "but" could go either way, it could be "and yet He is ready to redeem" or it could be "even though He's smitten them, He'll continue to do so." A quick search reveals that newer translations point to the latter, not that I don't believe that He'd redeem them (or us) when they turn to Him.

Jacob made it to 4 ;P

I already talked about Ethan this morning, so I might as well talk about him tonight. I just put him in bed and I said:

"night night, I love you"

"yeah"

"did you see grandma and papa today?"

"yeah"

"did you have fun at Chuck e Cheeses?"

"yeah"

"your such a good boy"

"yeah"

"I love you"

"yeah... I, I, I, I pick, my nose"

I was just talking to Ethan:

"do you want some cereal?"

"um, yeah"

"what kind?"

"um, the dinosaur said"

"oh, what kind did the dinosaur say?"

"rahh"

About a week ago a few nerds from school sent out an email saying something about a starcraft (the computer game) tournament. Then I read the email a little closer and it said that they were going to get together to watch a match (online) in a starcraft tournament. When I got home I told Rachel that these guys have way too much time on their hands, and that if I had some time to burn, I'd much rather play than watch.

As I was working last Saturday I heard some noise down the hall, upon investigating, I discovered a few students watching a commontarried game of starcraft on the large projection screen. So I watched a bit and thought that they were big dorks. After writing a few lines of code, I found myself saying, "I really need... some water! yes I do, boy am I thirsty" and out the door I went to go and get some water (from the same room that had the starcraft game going). So I watched a bit more and the game ended. What dorks I thought, as I went back to work.

When I got home I some how talked Rachel into watching a commontarried game of starcraft as we ate dinner (we almost always have a laptop hooked up to the tv)....

Now I find myself sympathizing with sports fans. I've never been a big follower myself, but I can see why someone would want to spend all their time watching. I think I've watched at least an hour a day since Saturday and it's really starting to cut into my sleep time...

While I was at school today, Rachel had a power outage. I guess the lights kind of flickered, then went out, then back on, then off. She thought it was really weird. Then she thought she heard some clicking sounds, so she peeked her head into the garage and found two little boys on a table switching the breakers on and off.

When we were talking on the phone she told me that the stove and fireplace (electric fireplace) wouldn't turn on. I asked her if all the breakers had been switched on, and that the on position is usually towards the center of the breaker box. She said that there were some bigger ones (the dual ones) that probably weren't on. I told her just to switch them on and she told me "no way."

"Why not"
"There's a sticker on it saying 'Danger, 4 inch lock shackle required' "
"4 inch lock shackle??" as I'm starting to laugh
"No, 1/4 inch"
"1/4 inch lock shackle? I don't even know what that means. Just turn it on"
"It says 'Danger' "
"It's ok, just turn it on"
"I'm not going to turn it on when it says 'Danger'- how come it says danger"
"I don't know, probably because it's a bigger fuse..."
(silence)
"Fine, if you can live with out the stove and fireplace, I'll look at it when I get home."
"ok, but don't expect a gourmet dinner"

When I got home I took a look; there is a really small, almost microscopic, sticker that says in fine print "Danger." I guess this is why men usually work with electricity, we'd never bother reading the directions or any fine print. On this same note, the control for our blender went out. How do I know it was the controller? I wired it up directly to the wall current and it worked, so we just used a surge protector as the power switch until we got a new one (a few days later). No women would be dumb enough to do such a thing (a few sparks flew during the testing phase).

Jacob went to primary for the first time today. Rachel was really excited, really really excited (I can't wait until he goes to college or on a mission). I had to take a couple of pictures (since Rachel teaches a class and couldn't be there to witness it). If you ask him if he knows something, he'll usually say yes, but when you ask him for the answer, he'll say he doesn't know. During sharing time the question was asked if anyone knew who our elder brother in the pre-mortal existence was. Jacob raised his hand, she called on him, and he said "um, I don't know" (maybe you had to be there...).

While we were at the coast a couple of weeks ago, I kept worrying about someone breaking into our house and stealing our computers. They would have been disappointed (as our newest computer is three years old), all of my stuff for work would have been ok (as it's saved on a couple of servers at the university), but all of our digital photos/videos would have been gone.

My sister had very unfortunate experience in which a hard drive partially failed, and she lost all of her photos. When that happened to her, I wrote a program that continuously backs up our documents on two computers to an extra hard drive that lives in one of them. This is ok if I'm only worried about a hard drive failure, but does nothing in the case of fire or theft (as all the data lives in the same physical space). So after worrying while on vacation, I decided that we needed to look into something else. Online backup was the solution that made the most sense to me.

I looked into a few online backup services that are not that expensive (compared to what they might save - just ask my sister...), $50 - $150 per year for 5 to 500 GB of storage. These backup services work for all types of files (documents, pictures, etc). I ended up going with a service that only does images and videos (since all my important documents are on other servers), the service: Picasa.

Picasa is google's photo service. If you have gmail, you have a picasa account. With picasa you get 1 GB of storage. Google likes to make money (some people don't know this, but you really do pay to use google/msn/yahoo/etc search), so you can upgrade your google storage (the extra storage is shared between gmail and picasa). The $20 a year upgrade would have worked for us, but since they throw in a an Eye-Fi card with the $50, we went with it (for 200 GB of storage).

One of the nice features of picasa, is that you can select folders that you want picasa to sync with. When you make a change to an image in that folder, or add or remove images, picasa is supposed to copy your changes to your "web folder." You can also set the folders to private (so that the whole world doesn't have access to you pictures).

The one feature that is really lacking, is that you can't just say "please sync up this folder, and all its sub-folders." So I had to click on over a hundred folders individually, even though they are well organized into sub-folders.

I don't know if picasa is the best service for all of this or not, but if you think that this might work for you, or you have questions, feel free to call me.

Our 8,153 images/videos have been uploading for the last 24 hours, and I think that it's almost done ;).

After only one day of classes (yesterday), and a few hours of homework (today), I can tell, it's going to be a bleak winter.

I did have fun with Jacob setting up his computer in his toy box (it's been packed up since we moved). He didn't get a high score, but he did shoot down some airplanes while getting ready for preschool this morning.

We had a great week in Redmond and Newport this last week. One of the funnest things we did was go swimming. Jacob even built up the courage to swim on his own (with a life jacket). He kept swimming to one end of the pool, ask what time it is, say, "oh, I've got a lot of things to do, I better go home," swim to the other end, then start the whole thing over again.

When we got home last night, Rachel and Ethan were cuddling on the couch and Jacob was sitting on the arm of the other end of the couch. Jacob asked Ethan to go and get something for him (I can't remember what), Rachel said that he couldn't as he was cuddling her right now. Then Jacob said "it's ok, he'll be right back" and gave Ethan a nod (indicating that it was ok for him to leave his mom and go get whatever it was), and Ethan did. It was pretty funny, but maybe you had to be there...