Webb Family Blog

As 2009 is coming to a close, I am reflecting on what has transpired through the year. The first thing of significance is that Kellie and I finally completed our Baccalaureate of Science in Nursing from the University of Phoenix. It is kind of frustrating that in and of itself, the degree is not worth much, but Kellie and I have both considered going on and a BS degree is an important stepping stone.

After completing school, I dropped to part-time with American Medical Response but picked up a part-time position with Sutter Auburn Faith Hospital and VeriHealth/REACH Training Institute (VRTI) as a contract instructor. Unfortunately, things did not go smoothly at Sutter Auburn Faith and I did not get much time teaching with VRTI. This was all taking place near the end of June, coinciding with a planned family vacation. For vacation, I was in a state of mixed emotions… it felt a relief to get away and take a week-long cruise to Alaska with my brother, in-laws, and my sister Vicki’s family, but I was haunted with the fact that work seemed to be self-destructing. Upon return from the cruise and another family gathering at our family favorite Fish Camp, I started teaching for National College of Technical Instruction (NCTI), a subsidiary of American Medical Response. NCTI took over the contract (from VRTI) to teach Kaiser Permanente employees on-going medical certification courses like Basic Life Support (CPR), Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS) and Pediatric Advanced Life Support (PALS). NCTI kept me busy and had me travelling ALL OVER Northern California, including Fresno and Watsonville on numerous occasions; I racked up a ton of miles on my car with all this teaching. Teaching and the occasional shift on the ambulance allowed for flexibility, but overall income was less than when on the ambulance full-time. In November, I returned to full-time on the ambulance. I still try to teach classes with NCTI when I can, which is the best of both worlds.

As the 2009 is quickly coming to an end, I am remembering that it is the fifth anniversary of my first kiss with Kellie. Unfortunately, as fate would have it, we will not be together exactly at midnight, as I’m currently at work until midnight and Kellie has to be up around 4 AM. This schedule mismatch kind of sucks, but it makes the time we have together, that much more special.

Here’s to a good 2010 and the hope for a family expansion.

Five years ago, in the Fall of 2005, I was looking for a special person on eHarmony. After playing the online games they have for matching people, I had it narrowed down to two people, both nurses. The first lived in the Richmond, CA area and the other lived in a town I had not heard of at the time, Antelope, CA. I made a date with the girl from Richmond and I thought it went well. Not wanting to drag the other girl along and feel like a two-timer, I tried my best to be nice by telling her the situation. As fate would have it, my second date with the first girl was canceled because she had found someone else. I sent a message to the second girl, revising my earlier mention that I had a date with someone else. I thought I had blown it with both of these prospects and felt a bit depressed that I may have “hit into a double play.” I did not hear back from her. It was nearing Christmas and I drove up to Reno, NV the weekend of December 17-19 for a family get together. I was feeling dejected until this second girl called my cellphone on December 18. Her name was Kellie Weifert. At the time, I was at my little sister Terri’s apartment. I excused myself from family and went out and talked with Kellie. Thankfully my cellphone was well charged because we talked for quite a while. I don’t remember what was said during the phone call… it has been five years, but it was the best phone call to date. This was the first of many phone calls we’ve made.

Keeping with the baseball metaphor, Kellie was the game winning hit. I thank God everyday that she came into my life. Life has been so much better having Kellie to share it with. I just wanted to acknowledge my love for Kellie on this, our 5-year anniversary of our first phone call.

A few months ago, I bought an Asus EEEpc 900 for $150 from a Woot! one-day sale. I have tried several operating systems on it so far. I did not like the flavor of Linux that came on the machine, so I changed it over to Easy Peasy 1.5. I probably did not give Easy Peasy a fair evaluation before changing to Jolicloud. I have been using Jolicloud now the majority of the time.

Now, just a little bit on a netbook for those that don’t know. A netbook is a small laptop computer that is limited in size and does not include a CD or DVD drive. The key advantage is that it is small and portable. This particular netbook has a slightly smaller than standard keyboard and a 8.9″ screen… much smaller than my 17″ widescreen laptop I take with me nearly everywhere I go. Why did I get the netbook in the first place? Well, there have been many times Kellie or I wish to look something up online while in bed or sitting on the sofa watching television. It is much more convenient to pull out a computer the size and weight of a small novel. Now, this netbook does not have a traditional hard drive, but a 4GB solid-state drive; pretty darn small. I boosted the RAM from 512 MB to 2 GB (almost as much as its storage memory). As it has limited storage, I setup the netbook to mount my network shared drives from my FreeNAS system, giving it the equivalent of about 3TB of storage, which is like infinite storage to a netbook.

OK, so after the background on a netbook, I’ve been using Jolicloud. The netbook seems to have gotten slower and slower over the past month, to the point it was getting too slow to use. Something had to change. I’ve been hearing quite a bit of talk about Google coming out with its own operating system that they are calling Google Chrome… the same name as their Internet browser. Google has said it won’t be releasing their operating system until sometime later next year, but as it is primarily an open-source operating system, they have a development version of the operating system that they call Chromium. While Chromium is based on the Linux operating system, calling Chromium a distribution of Linux is like calling Apple MacIntosh’s OS X a distribution of BSD; once you are using the operating system, there is no evidence of the system it is based on.

From the Chromium development website, they do not offer a built operating system, but rather the source files for every person wishing to do so, to build their own operating system from a collection of thousands of source files. Despite following the directions for building the operating system from source files, I kept getting build errors when I tried to build it myself. After wasting several hours in pursuit of building the operating system, I searched to see if anyone was distributing a built version. Thankfully, I did find someone was distributing a built version… calling it ChromeOS Cherry. After much trial and error, I finally was able to write an image of the operating system to a USB thumbdrive. When you boot up the netbook to the USB thumbdrive, it does not make it obvious how to actually install the operating system. Initially, it just runs the OS from the thumbdrive… nice for those wanting to try it out, but the thumbdrive is much slower than running off internal storage. I found that if I press <Control>-<Alt>-<T>, it opens up a terminal window. I was then able to type in “/usr/sbin/chromeos-install” and it will install. Once it was installed, it would take less than 10 seconds to boot-up.

I now have Chromium installed on the netbook… how well does it work? Well, I have mixed reactions. Because the operating system is so lean, the responsiveness is great. I have only had a couple hours to play on it so far, but I am finding that it is severely limited in function. The browser IS the operating system. The “applications” are not really applications, but rather bookmarks that open in a new tab. I don’t currently see a way to add any applications. Being that it is based on a Linux OS, I was hoping that I may be able to add programs from the command line, but I don’t know the administrative password, nor how I would access the added applications via the GUI (graphical user interface). There is also no visible method for adding a network printer, nor how to access anything that is downloaded. If all I want to do is LOOK at the Internet, this is a nice easy operating system. As the Chrome (Chromium) browser is still relatively in its infancy, there are not many extensions available yet… such as my favorite Firefox extensions… Xmarks and LastPass (Xmarks is in development for Chrome, but I don’t know how to add it to this version).

While it is interesting to try, I think I’m going to give Easy Peasy a better look for now.

Today, Kellie and I got up around 7AM. We packed up all of our stuff and checked out. We traveled northbound on Highway 1. We ate at a Denny’s in Pacifica before continuing into San Francisco. In San Francisco, we travelled along the western side of the city to the Golden Gate National Recreation area and Fort Miley. We pulled off at Fort Miley to take photos. We then proceeded to San Francisco’s Lincoln Park,  home of the Legion of Honor and many memorials, including a Holocaust memorial. Despite wasting $15 for The Mystery Spot and $10 at Año Nuevo State Park, I didn’t feel like spending $20 to visit the museum at the Legion of Honor, so we continued on. After driving though a nice neighborhood near China Beach, we progressed across the Golden Gate Bridge.

In the town of Dixon, we pulled off at Milk Farm Road to visit the Cool Patch Pumpkin for their Guinness Book of World Records Largest Corn Maze. We spent the $20 I could have spent at the museum here to do the maze. Thankfully, they gave us a good map of the maze with coordinates and the occasional flags marking coordinates. I think I found at least one flaw in the map, but I was able to find an alternate route. If I were to do this again, I think I would take a pencil or other marking device. I found it difficult to solve the maze on paper and translate that to which route to take. I think it took about two hours to get through.

All-in-all, our mini-vacation was a lot of fun and I’m glad we did it.

This morning, Kellie and I woke early. We hit the road for Santa Cruz around 7 AM. When we first arrived into Santa Cruz, I was thinking of where to eat breakfast. After parking near the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, we walked up to the Beach Street Cafe. The door was open and the lights were on, so Kellie and I walked inside. Upon walking in, a man told us “We’re not open yet. We open at 8.” It was 7:52, so 8 minutes early. We decided not to even return for business, as his attitude left a lot to be desired. We decided to walk down the Santa Cruz Municipal Wharf. We enjoyed watching the California sea lions making a racket under the wharf and watching the turf war amongst the biggest, presumably male sea lions. We saw a couple places open for breakfast on the wharf, but we waited until we got to the base of the wharf and ate at the Ideal Bar & Grill. I had an avocado and mushroom omelet and Kellie had huevos rancheros. It was very delicious. We walked all around the Beach Boardwalk which was closed, but we were able to walk around all the closed attractions. Upon return to the car, we debated on what to do. After our hike through sand yesterday, the thought of walking on the sand was not as enticing. We decided to head up to a tourist trap I’ve heard about but don’t actually remember going to… The Mystery Spot.

Upon arrival at The Mystery Spot, we found that it was $5 for parking and $5/person… oh well, we are here to be a tourist, I guess that is the cost of being a tourist. We just missed the first tour of the day, so we got the second tour… the 10:50 AM tour. Our tour guide did her job, but not as convincing as I’m sure other guides are. The tour was entertaining and the illusions were believable. I’m not sure it was worth $15, but I’m glad I now know. Everyone on the tour gets a Mystery Spot bumper sticker. I guess I’ll have to find an old VW bus owner that doesn’t have one yet and give them this bumper sticker, so their bus is no longer naked.

After The Mystery Spot, we decided to head down to Downtown Santa Cruz, to the Pacific Avenue area for shopping and eating. We walked around and found a place I like to eat, Pizza My Heart. We enjoyed a Super Veggie pizza. As we walked, we came across a theater and saw a movie I’d been wanting to see, Julie and Julia. This was a cute movie about two different women who apparently never met; Julia Childs and Julie Powell. Julia Childs was the wife of an American diplomat to France and being a wife, wanted something to pass the time. She loved French food and couldn’t find any cookbooks in English on how to cook French food. She attended Le Cordon Bleu and learned to cook, then met with a couple other ladies interested in bringing French cuisine to Americans. They eventually came up with the Mastering the Art of French Cooking. In 2oo2, Julie Powell hated her job working with people suffering the tragedy of 9-11-2001 in New York and took solace in her cooking. She decided she would learn to cook like Julia Childs, but not only follow her instructions but blog about her experiences doing so. It was a very enjoyable movie. Only a couple words will need to be removed for its eventual television release.

Upon completion of the movie, we wandered about in a few stores before heading back to the car. It had been a rather enjoyable day. The weather was perfect, it was relaxing. We finally found our way back to the parking structure I parked in. Before leaving, we saw something under the windshield wiper of the car. I initially thought it was an advertisement, but unfortunately, it was a parking citation. Apparently, the City of Santa Cruz is not to keen on people shopping at the local businesses and only getting a relatively small amount of tax money each store takes in, so they initiate hidden forms of revenue generation which pays off a whole lot more than sales and business tax. Apparently, in much smaller letters than “Free Parking” on all the entrances to the parking structure, it also says three hours maximum. We were there for about four hours and I guess it will cost us $40.

We arrived to Costanoa last night around 6 PM. The check-in process was OK and we quickly found our cabin. First thing to note about Costanoa is that there are several different types of accommodation. They have the lodge, which appears to be like a hotel. They also have small individual cabins, which I have only seen from the outside. There is then the tent-cabins that we chose to get. Staying in a tent-cabin is much like camping with a few added benefits. The structures start with a wooden floor platform. There is a door, but is quite lightweight. There are windows on all four walls and a tall ceiling. Taking the majority of the floor is a bed. It is said to be a queen-size, but I believe it is actually a full-size bed. There is one power outlet in the room with lights and bed heater plugged into each outlet port. I have been intending to put a power strip in my computer case, but unfortunately I have not done that yet, so we went without lights last night (charging phones via USB connector to laptop.) They have a couple Adirondack chairs outside, but they are a bit too narrow for my wide backside for comfort. It is about a minute or two hike to the nearest comfort station or public restroom facility. Each comfort station has a men’s and women’s restroom and shower. They also have outdoor showering facilities, a fireplace and a dry sauna. When you wake from sleep to the call of nature, you’re reminded that you are CAMPING; thankfully I’m a guy and not all my trips were as far.

We got out of bed around 9:30 this morning and Kellie and I took showers. After showering, we drove up to Gazos Grill  Restaurant for breakfast. We ate a delicious omelet and continued on with the day. We continued north to the Pescadero Creek and drove through the Town of Pescadero to the Town of San Gregorio. This was a scenic trip along Stage Road. We stopped at an eclectic market in San Gregorio before heading back south on Highway 1. We pulled off at Pigeon Point Lighthouse. After seeing this lighthouse, it became quickly obvious that it was a shame the condition the lighthouse was in. I know that lighthouses don’t serve quite as high of a function as they once did, but it used to be quite beautiful, but now needs quite a bit of repair. With the state of finances in California, I’m afraid it will be permanently destroyed before restoration is done. We wandered around the lighthouse for a bit before heading further south.

Our next stop, after a pit stop at our camping spot, was Año Nuevo State Park. Año Nuevo is a popular place for many marine animals, particular northern elephant seals. Earlier this year, Kellie and I stopped at another popular elephant seal hang-out in Piedras Blancas Northern Elephant Seal rookery. There is a $10 parking fee at Año Nuevo. After paying our fee, we showed up to the visitor’s center where we obtained our “hiking permit.” I put that in quotations because I found it kind of funny to have to have a hiking permit that was essentially a photocopied brochure that said hiking permit on it. This permit had a map of our walkway. At one point along this walk, we came upon a sign that said it was a closed area and hiking permit was required to go further…. I’m glad we had this photocopied piece of paper to allow us passage beyond there. We continued along the trail until we came to this huge sand mountain. This sand mountain was made of powder-soft sand that was constantly being wind-blown. I recall that during my first visit to Año Nuevo as a child that I thought this sand was so soft it would be fun to fall into it; bad idea… it hurt… I did not do that this time. I did however climb over it, as it was part of the pathway to get where the elephant seals hangout. It zaps your energy walking over a mountain of powder-soft sand.  Once past that point, we continued on between hard ground and sand until we got to the viewing area. When we got to this viewing area, some marine biologists were doing some testing on several of these large beasts. Many were playing in the water and many of the juvenile male elephant seals were practicing their fighting tactics. The walk back to the car felt even longer than the hike out to the point. We arrived back to the car around 4 PM.

Upon leaving Año Nuevo, we headed back up to the town of Pescadero and had dinner at Duarte’s Tavern. Despite the name being a tavern, at least the part I walked into was a small restaurant. This place is known for it’s cream of artichoke soup and was featured on Guy Fieri’s Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.  We had chilled artichoke hearts with an aioli sauce. For desert, I had a warmed olallieberry pie ala mode. It was a very good dinner, but unfortunately it was a bit pricey. Before tip, our meal came to $68 for two vegetarian meals with soda to drink; typically this is much cheaper than meat with alcohol, so I can only imagine what someone else may pay.

I am now back in the lobby of the lodge here at Costanoa and plan to visit the hot tub before heading to bed.

Kellie and I are about to take another mini-vacation. The get-away begins tomorrow as we head to the Raiders-Broncos game in Oakland. Following the game, we are heading to a resort near Pescadero, CA called Costanoa. This is a unique location between Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay. It appears to be a cross between staying in a hotel and camping. We will be staying in a tent-cottage. The resort is about 1 mile from the ocean. If I get around to it, I’ll later add pictures and/or video of our trip.

Another bit of interesting information is what I’m typing this entry with. A couple weeks ago, Woot! had a one-day sale (all of their sales are one-day sales) on an Asus EEE PC 900 netbook computer for $150. This is a tiny little computer that is easy to carry around and use quickly. It has a surprisingly crisp 8.9″ screen and tiny little keyboard. It has a 4GB SSD drive instead of a typical spinning magnetic disc hard drive. My normal laptop computer has a 500 GB hard drive and so does my desktop. This new device is primarily for Kellie, although she seems to think it is just mine. It initially had a special version of Linux specifically for Asus, but I thought it was a garbage operating system. There are several operating systems for netbooks, with new flavors coming out frequently. I initially tried Easy Peasy 1.5. I liked it, but found a few issues, like I could not add support for mounting NFS shares. I am considering trying out Ubuntu Netbook Remix but have not done so yet. The operating system I have installed at the moment is currently in the alpha stage, Jolicloud. All three of these OS are netbook-flavors of Ubuntu Linux. Jolicloud makes it easy to add applications, similar in concept to iPhone apps. Several apps are essentially taking a website an application, for example, I have a GMail, Twitter and Facebook app installed. Each of these apps looks like the web page, but operates like a separate program. I was able to add NFS support in Jolicloud which allows me to mount my network attached storage devices easily; this makes the anaemic 4GB built-in storage more palatable. I now have nearly 1 TB available. Due to its size, this little netbook is easy to pull out in bed when I can’t sleep, or wish to look something up on Wikipedia when I wish to understand an obscure reference.

Wow… It has been quite a while since I’ve made a blog entry. It always seems like I’m busy… or maybe just overly stressed. I am currently working two part-time/per diem jobs… continuing as a critical care transport nurse for AMR and I’m teaching classes for NCTI. With NCTI, I’ve been going all over Northern California. I’m primarily teaching Advanced Cardiac Life Support, but occasionally Basic Life Support (CPR) and Pediatric Advanced Life Support. Do to the nature of these jobs, I have no routine… feast or famine. I only list this as it is part of what is going on in my life.

Now, for my main activity at the moment… it is football season again. This past Monday night, despite the disappointment with a Raider loss to the San Diego Chargers (thanks in part to a controversial reversal of a touchdown), it was a great game. This weekend, the Raiders are playing in Kansas City against the Chiefs. As I did last year, I have flown out to Kansas City to meet up with my brother Richard to see the game. I flew Southwest Airlines from Sacramento to Los Angeles, then on to Albuquerque, and finally Kansas City. While making two stops, it was the same plane.

During the flight, I enjoyed looking out the window, attempting to recognize landmarks along the way. We traveled along the base of the Sierra Nevada foothills until we reached Fresno. We then continued westward over the Lost Hills area, then over the mountain range into the Los Angeles area. It was cloudy throughout most of northern LA, but I recognized the Los Angeles Coliseum complex prior to landing. Upon landing in Los Angeles, the airline staff counted those that did not get off the plane to match the record of those continuing on. There was 30 on the list, but there was 31 of us still on the plane. Apparently, my name was absent from that list. I had to get off the plane, have someone re-print a boarding pass and get back on the plane before my seat was taken.

Upon take-off, we headed out over the ocean and over cloud cover. This is where I saw something cool… the shadow of the airplane was cast on the clouds below, completely surrounded by a full-circle rainbow. After a bit, we banked to the south and I could see Santa Catalina Island to the west. We came back over land over Laguna Beach. I could see Dana Point a little to our south. We progressed over Laguna Niguel. The next landmark I recognized was Murrieta and the southern intersection of I-15 and I-215. The next major landmark was Salton Sea, followed by Blythe and the Colorado River. I lost track of landmarks, due to cloud cover, until we passed just to the north of Phoenix, AZ… several recognizable landmarks seen. After Roosevelt Lake, I did not recognize landmarks, but I saw many odd colored rivers. Upon arriving near Albuquerque, NM, I saw more automobile junkyards than I’ve seen anywhere else… great first impression. After a short stop in Albuquerque, we continued on. Within minutes of take-off… I could still see land, but there were absolutely NO landmarks. For the most part, it was flat lands of circular fields in square spaces; peculiar but not distinguishable. The only landmark that was different was the Missouri River around Leavenworth, KS… just before arrival into Kansas City International Airport. I’m sure that those that live under our flight line are proud of where they are from, but it really lacked in physical features.

Upon landing, I met Richard at the baggage claim. He had already checked into the Fairfield Inn in Liberty, MO. Unfortunately, they had no rooms with two beds… only one with a king-sized bed. I have to sleep on an inflatable twin… THIS SUCKS! My brother used Priceline to get the room and chose 2 adults… apparently there is no distinguishing for 2 adults sleeping together or separately, major flaw in the system. It is now passed midnight local time and I can’t seem to sleep on this bed. I hope I’m not too tired for the Raider game, starting in about 11 hours.

We have been planning a “big” vacation for quite some time, and it has finally come about. Our vacation begins by a flight to Seattle, Washington. I have never been to Seattle, nor the State of Washington. The trip begins and ends in Seattle, but is primarily a cruise to Alaska; somewhere else I’ve never been. Yesterday was the beginning of our trip. Our flight was aboard Alaska Airlines from Sacramento to SeaTac International. Our flight departed at 7 am, but prior to departure, Kellie and I upgraded to First Class; my first experience with First Class. We were the first to board the plane and we sat in the first row. Prior to departure, our attendant asked us what we’d like to drink and if we wanted the standard yogurt and bear claw (breakfast pastry). In my seat, I had plenty of leg room while our two seats occupied the side-to-side space of 3 coach seats with a moderate sized divider. Once airborne, our attendant brought us our yogurt and warmed bear claw; I had never seen such a large bear claw… at least 1 foot long! He refilled my drink several times throughout the flight. We flew past several mountain peaks, such as Mt. Shasta in California, Crater Lake, Mt. Bachelor and his Three Sisters, as well as Mt. Hood in Oregon, and several peaks in Washington, such as Mt. St. Helens, which is still quite an obviously active volcano. We landed at SeaTac, picked up our luggage and took the shuttle to Enterprise Rent-A-Car.

After we picked up the rental, we left our luggage at our hotel, the Best Western Airport Executel, and headed up to downtown Seattle. We went to the famous Pike Place Public Market and strolled around. I used my brand new video camera to record some of the sights… I muted the audio, as it was quite distracting.

It was very busy in the market place because there were many events going on, including the Inaugural Rock & Roll Seattle Marathon. The market place is home to many famous shops, such as Beecher’s Cheese, Piroshky Piroshky Bakery, and the original Starbuck’s Cafe.

We are now about to return the rental and head back to the airport to meet up with my sister Vicki and her family, as well as my brother Richard. After leaving our luggage at the pier, we will be heading for the underground tour of Seattle before boarding the Star Princess.

I am drained and exhausted. I wouldn’t say that any of what I did today constituted hard physical labor, but I feel like I accomplished a bit and I’m now tired. They day had me waking up around 7:30 AM. Not that early, but on a day off, I wasn’t planning on getting up at this time… I’m a night person. Anyway, I had decided to make æbelskivers again for breakfast and we invited Kellie’s parents over for breakfast.

During breakfast, I found out that Kellie’s grandparents rely on an antenna for their television and they had purchased digital converters, but had a problem with one. They had a decent antenna on the roof and it was pointed in the correct direction. I found it odd that they said one worked OK while the other TV didn’t work so well. I did a digital scan on both converter boxes… one picked up 20 channels and the other picked up 12. The one with 20 channels had a nearly perfect signal on every channel, yet of the 12 being received on the other, the signal was very iffy. They told me that a neighbor had helped them with hooking up their antenna and the wiring was all new. I decided to inspect the wiring system. It all looked good, so I decided to unplug the antenna from the bad converter box… just to get a closer look; this is when I discovered the root of the problem. The antenna cable was a high-quality quad-shield RG6 wire, but as I tried to unscrew the antenna, the wire came out of the connector; great wire, terrible connection. Thankfully, I have quite a bit of experience with placing F connectors and had some of the best connectors at my house with all the tools for installing them. I made a trip home and grabbed the supplies needed and placed a compression-type F connector on the wire. When I plugged it all back in, I got the same 20 channels as the other converter box with the same nearly perfect reception. Granted, some of the channels received were Spanish channels and they were not interested in Spanish-language channels, but they now get more channels than previously. On one of the televisions, they had the converter box feeding the converted signal on channel 3, but the TV had a composite video input as well as stereo audio inputs, so I connected the converter box via composite connection. This connection removed some static from the picture, increasing the picture quality to better than the grandparents could have imagined. Granted, it is nowhere near the quality of HDTV, but for a 5+ year old CRT television, it is pretty good.

Upon completion of this job, I headed over to Kellie’s parents house. Recently, Kellie and I had purchased a Nintendo Wii gaming system with Wii Fit and several other exercise-generating games. We showed the parents the Wii Fit and they decided to buy an identical system. I was called to help install the system over there. After a bit of moving a heavy entertainment center and messing around with wires, I finally got it set up. I set up wireless Internet as well, so both of our machines could communicate with each other. I finally got it all connected, installed the latest firmware and started some play. On the Wii, you create an avitar called a Mii that you play as when gaming. You can share your Mii with other systems, so you can play yourself when you play on another system. I transferred all the Miis from our system to their system, as well as all the saved game statuses to their game. After playing a little Wii, we ate dinner and had cake, celebrating Father’s Day, Kellie’s grandfather’s birthday and her parent’s 35^th wedding anniversary.

After dinner, I watched the last few minutes of my favorite basketball team, the Los Angeles Lakers, win their 15^th NBA Championship, with Phil Jackson setting a record as coaching for 10 champion teams (6 with the Chicago Bulls with Michael Jordan and 4 with the Los Angeles Lakers and Kobe Bryant.) The Lakers beat the Orlando Magic 99-86 in Game 5 of the NBA Finals.

I’m going to bed a tired boy now.