Vehicle Trouble

When it rains, it pours!

We're set to move to a new house at the end of this week, and my truck gets a flat tire last Friday on my way out of town. I had to have it towed because of where the truck was; it was right on the freeway where I could get killed by cars going 60 mph. I had to wait 45 minutes, but the tow truck finally got there and towed my truck to a shop. They price out the tires that I want and started to pull the bad tire off, and they call me over to look at something. It turns out that the force of my truck going 60 mph and the rim hitting the concrete split the rim! Not only that but the bracket that holds the brake caliper was gone; the caliper was there, just not the bracket. I ended up having to find a bracket at a salvage yard to keep from having to pay quadruple for the part at a dealer.

Since I was headed to College Station where Christy was staying with her parents, Christy and her dad drove half-way (to West, TX - The Czech Stop!!!), and Christy's sister Angie and her husband Jeremy picked me up and drove to West so that I could go on to College Station.

MP3 Player Frustrations

I have a Sandisk Sansa m240 1GB MP3 player. I really enjoy listening to music or audio books on it. I think there's a BIG problem with it, but apparently Sandisk doesn't agree with me. My player doesn't always play files in track order. If I want to listen to an entire album or audio book in the order that it was published, I should be able to do that without user intervention! But I have found that when I load the files onto the player, even if the files have the proper tags the player doesn't always play them in that order! I have tried everything from making sure that the "shuffle" feature is turned off (obviously), re-tagging the files both directly on the player and on my computer (then re-copying them to the player), and even submitting a ticket with Sandisk. I can't seem to get it to work consistently.

The last response I got from Sandisk was that I needed to format the player just like I would format a floppy disk or hard drive. The reason they gave me was that the player was just like any other media in that it can get corrupted over time with copying and deleting files and that it needed regular attention (formatting) in order for it to keep working properly. So I followed their instructions to format the player (after backing up my music files), returned my backed up files to the player, and it still didn't work! I even made sure that I had the latest firmware to make sure that that wasn't the problem. I still can't get it to work properly.

Then today, I was listening to War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells that I downloaded from Librivox.org. The audio book files did not have track numbers in the tags, so I made sure that they were there before copying the files to my player. The book is split into Book 1 and Book 2 with each "book" having multiple chapters. There is 1 audio file for each chapter. Even though I re-tagged the files so that they have track numbers, starting with Book 1 Chapter 1 as Track 1 through Book 2 Chapter 10 (the last chapter) as Track 27, my Sandisk player played them in this order: Book 1 Chapter 1, Book 2 Chapter 1, Book 1 Chapter 2, Book 2 Chapter 2, etc. I couldn't believe it! After all the trouble that I went through (not really) to make sure that the track numbers were there, because the guy at Sandisk told me that the player will play in track number order, it still didn't play them in the correct order!

I'm so frustrated with this player that I'm almost ready to ditch it and go with something that will work. I don't want to get an iPod just because they cost too much and the ones that have the highest capacity have hard drives in them and are too subject to shock (skipping, failing, etc.) just like any other hard drive. If I had access to the source code for the firmware, I might have a go at trying to fix it myself. But something makes me think that Sandisk won't want to let me do that.

Thanks for letting me rant. :-)

She Cut Her Hair!!

In my last post, I said that we were just waiting to see what Paige does next. Well, on Friday I got home and Christy told me that Paige had cut off about half of her pony tail. She just pulled a pair of scissors out of a drawer and cut some of her hair.

Paige also came to Christy sticking her tongue out with something brown all over it. Christy said that at first she thought it was blood, but then Paige took her to the pantry. Then Christy thought he had gotten into leftover Halloween candy. Paige pointed to the spice rack and Christy saw one of the jars turned around backward. She pulled it out to find that Paige had eaten a bunch of ground cinnamon! I guess that Paige just didn't like the taste of that much cinnamon by itself.

Paige's Interesting Week

This past week has been very interesting for Paige. It started last Friday. We were supposed to be going to the Fort Worth Zoo for their Boo At The Zoo party. When I got home from work, I found that Paige had dumped her shampoo all over the cat, herself, and the bathroom. We quickly got as much of the shampoo off of Paige and the cat that we could before leaving for the zoo.

Then on Monday, Christy was upstairs working on something and when she came downstairs she found water all over the living room. Apparently Paige had taken Christy's water cup and poured it all over the couches, chair and coffee table. As if that wasn't enough, she also dipped the cup in the dogs' water dish and got more water to pour on the hardwood floor. So Christy soaked up the water with the sheets that she had not washed yet and sent Paige to her room. When I got home, there was still a little water that had seeped under the coffee table, so we cleaned that up as well.

On Wednesday, Paige was upstairs playing in her playroom while Christy was working downstairs. Paige comes downstairs and said, "I made a mess!" So Christy went upstairs to find that Paige had gotten into her art paint and painted a picture on her easel and on the carpet in Christy's office. It's taken a few days and lots of scrubbing, but it looks like it has all come up.

Now we're just waiting to see what Paige decides to do next.

Fun With Chalk

On Saturday, between the rainy times, we did some yard work. Paige wanted to "help", so we let her come outside with us. She ended up drawing with her sidewalk chalk on the driveway and got it in the puddles, too. As you can see from the pictures below, she had a lot of fun!

Awesome Trip

Last weekend, we went to Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. It was a short trip, but it was just awesome. I've seen pictures of these two parks in the past, but nothing compares to actually seeing them first-hand.

Kevin, Christy and Paige in front of the Hayden Valley and the Yellowstone River.

We stopped along the road going south towards the Lower Geyser Basin. This was taken from a distance.

Paige liked the geysers. She kept calling them "the stinks". This is the same geyser in the above picture on the far left.

I took several pictures of the mountains while we were there, but the ones that turned out the clearest were on Sunday just before we left. This is Grand Teton.

The Many Faces of Paige

One night while we were eating dinner, Paige decided to make faces at us. It was so funny, we couldn't eat for a while. Here are some examples of the faces she was making...