Halloween

Halloween this year was fun! We enjoyed the company of family and celebrated Jared's birthday along with Halloween. The kids dressed up as: Becky - a cheetah, Jared - Lightning McQueen, and Emma - a bumblebee.
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We had fun decorating the front of our house with spiderwebs and Jack-o-Lanterns. We even made a mini-scarecrow that had Jared confused for a minute. And, of course, the kids had fun getting candy. We went to two trunk-or-treats - the second of which had games for the kids to play to earn their candy. It was a fun weekend

Trying to Catch Up, Part 3

General Conference
http://www.lds.org/conference/languages/0,6353,310-1,00.html

2008 Olympia Weekend in Las Vegas
http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/2008_olympia_main.htm

Stephen King, The Green Mile (Part 1) - "The Two Dead Girls"
http://www.stephenking.com/library/novel/green_mile:_the_two_dead_girls_the.html

1) I Am Legend
http://iamlegend.warnerbros.com/

2) Horton Hears A Who
http://www.hortonmovie.com/site/index.html

3) Fathers Day

4) Fuze Sportswater - starfruit flavor, drinkfuze.com
http://drinkfuze.com/

5) Emma baby blessing, family up for visit

Flying kites

XP SP3
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=68c48dad-bc34-40be-8d85-6bb4f56f5110&displaylang=en

Powerade Zero
http://www.astrolime.com/katie/?p=64

Balto
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balto_(film)

testament
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testament_(band)

Rocky Balboa

Dragon Tears

Book reviews - work ones

"Monkey Don't Bite"

A while back we were given the game, Super Monkey Ball II, which we have all enjoyed playing at some point. However, Jared is just learning and mastering the techniques of playing. Now that he has learned to navigate the little monkey around the screen, he has mastered many levels and tried many different games.

His favorite, though, is Monkey DogFight (which he pronounces - "Monkey Don't Bite"). He really has no idea how to play the game but loves that there is a sun, and moon, in the surrounding background of the game. He plays it just for those! Here's a shot of the sun:



Today while he was playing, I was working in the kitchen and every few minutes he would pause the game, run up to the screen, put his hands over the sun, or moon, and say "gotcha". Then he would run into the kitchen holding it in his hands, say "here you go", and drop it into mine. I now have a pocket full of suns and moons! I'm set!

Tongue

Emma has found her tongue!! Either that or she likes making faces at the camera.

Children

Jared started school last week, by himself, for the first time. He cried so hard the first day because he didn't understand why his mommy had left him. He didn't understand the concept of "Mommy comes back". When his first day of school was over and he saw me in the hall, he cried and laughed at the same time. When I dropped him off that first day I cried all the way home because I knew he didn't understand what was going on. But, the next few days were better and he is not afraid any more. This week he made a huge step and started riding the bus on his own. I am so proud of him! He is making such wonderful progress!

Emma rolls all over the place and tries so hard to crawl! She often gets high-centered on her belly and tries to swim through the air but soon realizes she's not going anywhere and puts her hands back down on the floor.



She'll be into everything in no time!

Rebecca is learning how to play the guitar and type, although she can't decide which she likes to do more! She is loving the second grade and is so ambitious! She has decided that she wants to be a lab scientist when she grows up.

Oh the joys of motherhood!

Trying to Catch Up, Part 2

On Saturday night, we went to the Boise Hawks vs. Spokane Indians baseball game in Garden City. Boise won, of course (1-0), and the kids got free baseball caps and Misti even scored a free moose in the parking lot, LOL.

We also recently attended the Twin Falls Temple open house and visited Shoshone Falls while we were there. In an interesting twist, I was able to catch up with Eric and April Brügger, whom I hadn't seen for a decade.

Becky planted some sunflowers outside a few weeks ago, and they're huge now! A couple more feet, and they'll reach the roof! Speaking of tall plants, we filled our bellies at the Ward Corn Feed last week, with not only some great ears of corn, but with classic barbeque staples such as hamburgers, potato salad, and jiggley jello concoctions.   :)

The ZooCube game we got was never a big hit like I thought it would be, but the recently acquired Flushed Away game has caught Becca's special interest.

We also caught the free outdoor movie again in Meridian at Settler's Park. This time it was "The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep" (2007) - not the greatest movie ever, but worth seeing for free, LOL.

The 2008 Europa Super Show was held on August 15th & 16th in Dallas, Texas. I enjoyed blogging the event during the live webcast.

If you missed seeing the live webcast, you can view the webcast replays for free, available at Bodybuilding.com.

New Bodybuilding Video Search Widget

Just testing out a new video search widget that someone created for us:

I feel it's still got a ways to go until it's ready for widespread usage, but it's still pretty cool.   :)

Trying to Catch Up, Part 1

Well, it's been a long time since I've blogged here on our personal site, and I've hopelessly fallen behind, since so much as happened since May (our previous post).

It's now mid-August, and the past 3 months have been fun. Baby Emma is now quite chubby and a ton of fun. She's learned to roll over from her back to her stomach, and now does the "turtle", lifting her head up and looking around. She loves to "eat" her toes, but only on her right foot, not her left. She laughs quite frequently, especially when we're being goofy with her, and her cute dimples are simply adorable.

Here's a family photo of us from the Fourth of July this year, which we spent in Chester, CA and Reno, NV this year with family:



During the end of May and early June we watched a whole slew of Jane Austen films, including:

• Mansfield Park
• Northanger Abbey
• Persuasion
• Miss Austen Regrets

which we previously hadn't seen. Some are part of the BBC Jane Austen Collection:



We had, of course, seen all the 'popular' Jane Austen films (Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma), but hadn't found these lesser-known ones before. All were good except for Northanger Abbey, which seems dark and oddly out-of-place in her works (in my opinion).

Becky celebrated her 7th birthday party at Water Tower Park in Caldwell. She had a small party with friends from school, and it was refreshing on a nice, sunny, summer day. The party featured water balloon tossing, pin the tail on the donkey, croquet ball racing, and more! Her grammy and grandpa came up from Reno for the occasion, and everyone had a lot of fun.

I recently watched "ABC Wide World of Sports: 40 Years of Glory" on fullscreen DVD, featuring some great footage and commentary on Muhammad Ali and a tribute to recently deceased Jim McKay. I'm not normally a huge sports fan, but this particular title was only 50¢ on clearance at Wal*Mart. And for Father's day, I got a copy of "Transformers" on widescreen DVD, and it was a great film, too. Shia LaBeouf is hilarious, as usual! :)

Brazilian Earth Hair DuraPack 3

Jared has been enjoying things on the computer more and more these days, and is mesmerized by some of the looping Flash animations such as BadgerBadgerBadger and Brazil.

Incidentally, the original BadgerBadgerBadger has been redone with 3-D images and a real snake video in the new version. Compare the two, here:


BBB1 (original version)                   BBB2 (new version)    
Whilst perusing groceries recently, I spotted an Earth Day version of Campbell's tomato soup. The packaging, however, plays tricks on the mind. For instance, who wants to eat green tomato soup? Bleck! LOL



With the recent advent of Windows XP SP3 (service pack 3), I naturally have had the opportunity to upgrade a couple of computers, and sadly, I've had mixed results. On our home computer (XP Home), the install went smoothly, no problems at all. On another XP Pro machine, however, the service pack won't even download. Bizarre. I've hesitated trying the install on my main work machine until I can learn how to troubleshoot it better. Bleh.

Emma's got some wild hair, no matter what we do with it, it just sticks up all over the place, it's quite hilarious, actually. Observe:


We've all likely seen those white iPodesque earbud headphones that come free in selected packs of Duracell batteries. What many don't know, however, is that they SUCK. LOL, they're actually the worst headphones I've ever heard, no joke. I know they're free, but don't waste your money! And a quick Google search confirms that I'm not alone in this assessment!

I recently finished reading "Tom Clancy's EndWar" by David Michaels. Great book, and I'm sure it would make a great movie!

More Baby Emma Photos

Due to popular demand, here are some more updated photos of Baby Emma. Enjoy! As always, find these photos and more in my MySpace family album.











In other random stuff, we've recently seen a couple more films:

• National Security (2003; Martin Lawrence, Steve Zahn, Bill Duke, Colm Feore)
• Sense & Sensibility (2008, Hattie Morahan, David Morrissey, Charity Wakefield, Mark Williams) - BBC mini-series version on fullscreen DVD

The MuscleTech $50,000 transformation content is fully underway. Are you fat? Want to win 50 grand? Join the contest, it's not too late to enter! =)

Baby News!

"And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered." - Luke 2:6

Becky and Jared's new baby sister is finally here! Emma Marie Barnet was born on Thursday, April 9, 2008 at 2:27 a.m. She was 8 pounds, 0 ounces, and was 21½ inches long. For more photos of her, check out my MySpace family album.



This delivery went remarkably fast compared to the other kids. Becky and Jared both were over 10+ hours of labor, but Emma was a quick 4. With the other kids, there was much pacing and timing contractions to be had. Not so this time. Misti's water broke, and that was the sign. In we went. Misti dialated from a 3 to a 6 in about an hour, then from 6 to 8 in about another hour, then 8 to a 10 & 100% effaced in about another hour! After only about 20 minutes of pushing, Emma was here. =)

Becky's birth was all natural (no epidural), while Jared's was with an epidural. In hindsight, that first epidural was magical, because as soon as it was in, the pain immediately stopped, and Misti was instantly relaxed. It was shockingly hilarious, actually, and the tension level dropped to the floor in about 3 seconds.

With Emma, however, the epidural didn't immediately kill the pain. Apparently, it worked a little better on one side than the other, so when the contractions hit, she could still feel them on one side. She had to lay on her side to allow the numbing agent to filter down to that other side. About 15 minutes later, the pain finally was gone. Interesting.

Other random stuff: I've been listening to a fair amount of AM talk radio over the past few months, which is highly untypical of me, since I heretofore have not had any interest in politics.

Now, however, I've been interested in the 2008 Presidential Election coverage since about January, when all the rukus over John McCain, John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul, Fred Thompson, Rudolph Giuliani, Bill Richardson and the rest took the center stage.

The short list of talk shows I've heard on my commutes to and from work have been primarily on AM 670 KBOI in Boise:

• Lars Larson
• Dennis Miller
• Michael Savage
• Bill O'Reilly
• Sean Hannity
• Chris Walton & Paul J. Schneider (Idaho Talks Live)

We enjoyed General Conference last weekend, and are blessed to live in Idaho where it is broadcast on public television. If anyone missed the live webcasts, the webcast replays are still available. =)

I perused with interest two great websites I found today sponsored by the Idaho Statesman, Sacajawea and MP3Idaho. Lots of free music at the latter one. Cool!

Blast from the Past, and Awaiting the Near Future...

I was going through my Blogger drafts (blog posts that never got published for various reasons), and stumbled across this one from January 23, 2005 that deserves to be published, even though I never did finish researching the topic:

"Windows Autocomplete is interesting. It pulls the information from various locations. In MS Outlook (2000, 2002, 2003), it pulls it from the user's 'nickname' file (*.nk2). Deleting that file will erase all previous Outlook autocomplete data.

In Internet Explorer (5, 6), however, it's more difficult. Everyone will tell you to simply clear your history, forms, and passwords using the buttons provided in Internet Options. This partially works, but not completely. Of course, you could edit out old entries using the 3rd-party program Owtlook, but that costs money.

The Autocomplete Data Store is stored in an encrypted state in the Registry."

References:

http://www.download.com/3000-9694-10246196.html
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/217148
http://www.crazytrain.com/writing/autocomplete.html

2008 Update: Honestly, I rarely even think about Autocomplete these days, although obviously I use it everyday. I haven't wondered about IE 7's implementation of Autocomplete, although I'll bet that you can actually now clear the Autocomplete history via IE 7's built-in options. It still continues to be a lifesaver, though, and I'm glad Autocomplete is still around! =)

Baby Non-News: Okay, okay, the real reason for this post today is that, no, the baby hasn't come yet, LOL. People keep asking, but she's still not here yet. It should be any day now, however, as her due date is only a couple of days away. Stay tuned for more info in a couple of days (hopefully!) and photos!! =)

More Random Stuff from the Past Few Months

Earlier this month, I attended the largest bodybuilding show of the year, the 2008 Arnold Classic in Columbus, Ohio. Check out the hundreds of Arnold video clips for free, available at Bodybuilding.com.


Me interviewing Jamie Eason and Barbie Barbell.
I recently sampled some of the new, limited edition Razzberry M&Ms. Not bad, but not my favorite. Becky and I also sampled some Cranberry-Lime Chill Snow beverage, and although it wasn't any good, we got a cool bottle cap out of the ordeal. LOL

We took the kids to see Disney's "Enchanted" film at the cheap theater. A pretty good flick, and Becky sure liked it. Jared was feeling a little under the weather, so he pretty much just watched it quietly without any shenanigans. LOL

In the never ending quest to find some actual quality fat-free cottage cheese at the ridiculous stores here, I've sampled the current offerings and decided that all are lacking. Some samples:

Knudsen Free = bleh.
Great Value (the Walmart generic brand) = inconsistent taste.
Meadow Gold Viva = poor taste.
Wilcox Farms = too watery.

Of the lot, however, Wilcox Farms gets my vote for overall customer satisfaction simply because they're the only brand that actually *seals* the product adequately. All the other brands typically come with the inner seal compromised, leaving you to doubt the freshness integrity. Why is finding decent cottage cheese so tough?

Also, lately it seems that there is actually a shortage on the fat-free variety, as it's becoming harder and harder to find fat-free. At one point, a particular local store (which shall remain unnamed) actually didn't have a single fat-free container left... I had to get 1%. What a letdown!

Random Stuff from the Past Few Months

Misti broke her ankle (2 bones, 3 breaks) the day after Christmas 2007, and has been suffering every day since. She's still in a walking boot now (8 weeks later), with still 2 more weeks until she can remove it for good. The past few weeks have witnessed much wheelchair & crutches action, twice daily Lovenox injections (a very expensive medicine to prevent blood clots), and lots of leg elevation and rest. She's back up walking around now, but swelling is still a painful issue, which is complicated by the normal swelling from the pregnancy (she's 7 months along). Fun times for Misti.

Yesterday was the first bodybuilding show of the year, the 2008 Iron Man Pro in Los Angeles, California. If you missed seeing the live webcast, you can view the webcast replays for free, available at Bodybuilding.com.



We ate lunch on Saturday at Fuddruckers in Boise, which was pretty tasty. It's located off of Cole Road just south of the LDS temple, in the area of the movie theaters and a ton of other restaurants. It's actually the third restaurant at which I've eaten recently, the other two being Chuck-A-Rama and Goodwood Barbecue Company. Great restaurants, all.

My website has been down for several weeks lately, as I'm in the process of switching web hosts. (I'm migrating from Sitelutions to GoDaddy.) Reconfiguring everything is oh, so much fun... LOL, not. ;)

In a few more random foodstuff-related morsels, we received some WSU Cougar Cheese from Marian Barnet at Christmastime. It was a hard, crumbly white cheese which tasted rather sharp but quite nice. The slightly disturbing part, however, is that there is no indication on the packing what it's actually made from. You're left wondering if it's actually made from the milk of an actual cougar or a cow or a goat... LOL

Becky and I sampled some new Chocolate Mix Skittles, which are comprised of various chocolate-related flavors including s'mores, vanilla, chocolate caramel, chocolate pudding, and brownie batter. Not too bad, actually. Of course, when you think of Skittles you typically think of fruity flavors, but not any more!



We also tried the new Qdoba Mexican Grill which just recently opened in the Costco shopping center in Northwestern Nampa, but honestly we weren't horribly impressed. Oh well, you can't win them all. LOL

Wow, we seemingly have been to a lost of restaurants since December, but honestly there have only been a few. Anywho, the only other one I can recall for now was the quaint little Golden Palace on Main Street in Caldwell. Jared absolutely loved the huge fish tanks in between all the booths. There isn't a ton of Chinese in Caldwell, but the Golden Palace is a great deal better than the Canton Cafe and the Golden Dragon which we've previously tried. We're happy to have found a new favorite!

Over the holidays I also sampled some Brown & Haley Honey Roasted Peanut Roca, which is a nice addition to the "Roca" family of products. I can't wait to try the Sugar-Free variety, as well.

I also recently enjoyed some Loud Energy Drinks at work. There are currently two flavors, but I greatly prefer the Sitrus Stunner over the Classic Mix. The Classic Mix is red and tastes like Hawaiian Punch, whereas the Sitrus Stunner is orange and tastes like Orange Crush. Mmmmm.