Marco has been begging for a fish. His class has a fish that they take care of and he wanted one for the house. So today I took Marco go Aquarium Outfitters here in Wake Forest. We bought a 2.5 gallon fish tank kit, some blue gravel, fish food, and 3 guppies (2 males & 1 female).
I filmed the fish swimming around.
Last week, Adán mentioned that some of his classmates go to work with their parents while they are tracked out from school. I ask him “so would you like to do that?” He replied excitedly “YEAH!”
Today, Adán, my 6 year old son, went to work with me for the entire day. First thing he realized was “it takes a long time to get to your work”, as my commute is about 35-45 minutes each way depending on time and traffic. When we got to work, we promptly got him a visitor’s badge, made a breakfast pitstop to pick up a bagel and a rice krispies treat (his choice). He ate about 3/4 of it, and half a bagel. Oh and he got orange juice, his favorite juice. He spent the morning playing on nickjr.com, drawing & coloring.
For lunch, we walked over to Rockola but it was closed when we got there. Closed as in no one works there anymore, not as in come back later. So we settled for Burger King which was a hit with Adán because he got crown shaped chicken nuggets and a toy. The best part was when we crossed the road which is a 4 lane with a turn lane. We crossed the first 2 lanes and stopped in the middle turn lane to allow the other 4 cars to pass us, before continuing crossing. When we got across Adán said “you almost killed me. I’m going to tell mommy you almost killed me.” I burst out laughing because he was serious.
After lunch, Adán continued to draw, color, and play on the computer. We took a walk at 3:00 pm down to Lake Raleigh where we saw some folks fishing. We then returned back to the office to finish up our day. Needless to say, he was wore out.
It was one of the best days at work I’ve ever had EVER!
Adan, my six year old son, is making a trap…
for a Leprechaun!
He said “it is going to be St. Patrick’s Day and he has never caught one before, so he wants to try”
It has been a really rough week. Last weekend, Adan got sick with flu-like symptoms: fever and coughing. Liz took him to the doctor’s on Monday where they did every kind of test and determined it was viral. So Adan was out of school Monday & Tuesday. Then Tuesday night I had a fever and felt under the weather too. Wednesday night, Liz had a fever and was knocked off her feet all day Thursday. Then last night, Marco woke up twice and was burning up with fever. :( Iliana has had a runny nose the entire time as well.
I feel better today, but still rather, shall I say, phlegmy :) But should be back in the office on Monday. Thankfully I was able to work from home to avoid contaminating my co-workers, and being able to take care of the family.
On a happier note, Liz & I celebrated our 8th wedding anniversary on Tuesday. Happy Anniversary!
I’m stuck on Quicken 2002 and have thus neglected using it for almost 2 years. We’ve been managing the household finances the old fashioned way by hand and with the help of online banking.
But I wanted to have a bit more control and a better “view” of where the money goes. So I tried using Quicken 2002 in a virtual instance of Windows XP running on VirtualBox. But Quicken 2002 is just a few years out of date! 
And the thought of upgrading it just pains me. So I set out to find financial software for Linux.
I started with GnuCash but I was just completely confused with how it treats categories as accounts. The whole double entry accounting just made my eyes water.
Next up I tried Moneydance. I’ve tried it before when I was using OS/2 but it was too “java-y”. Looked out of place. Well, it still looks way out of place with the ugly Metal look and feel of swing. It was easier to get started than GnuCash as it felt more Quicken-like. But I couldn’t get over how ugly the UI was. I know it shouldn’t be about looks, but it was: rm -rf /opt/moneydance.
I thought, “maybe there’s a webapp out there that does this” which led me to CheckItOut a Ruby on Rails application. CheckItOut uses Mysql to store the data and runs using Webrick. But it was a royal pain in the butt to setup. Ruby, Rails, mysql all installed great. CheckItOut even started with a small change to database.yml. But once it was running creating a new account would cause it an error. I started to try to debug it then realized, screw this if I have to debug the app I can’t trust it to keep track of my finances. So out it went.
Next up? Grisbi. It looked promising. Nice GTK look and feel, pretty decent features as well. But I had a hard time using it. I kept tripping over things. So I moved on, though I left it installed just in case.
Gnofin lost purely because it was an older GTK app. It was just too ugly to even bother. I didn’t even get to the download point.
KMyMoney2 was pretty nice. It had one of the nicer feature sets and felt pretty natural to use. I was up and running in no time. But as you probably guessed I like the GNOME look and feel, and I couldn’t get past the ugly KDE candy toy look: yum remove kmymoney2.
Last up was Kapital was one of the better looking apps, IMO. It was the closest to Quicken out of them all. But it wasn’t open source. So it never got to the download state either.
Wow, I ran out of applications. Well, I actually went back to GnuCash. I remembered what a friend told me “learn your tools”. So I decided to sit down and actually learn GnuCash. After about an hour, I got a pretty good grasp on how it works and it is really a great replacement for Quicken. It has the GNOME look and feel which I love, is open source, handles all the accounts I have, imports from OFX and QIF formats as well.
WINNER: GnuCash!
Tonight we finished our annual Christmas newsletter. Hopefully we can get the cards in the mail this week.
This weekend we drove to Maryland, yes again. While in Maryland I lost my only set of keys for my car. It’s yet another sign that it’s time for a new car. But getting a set of new keys is $170 compared to a new car So we put off the inevitable a little longer.
But that was the only bad news from this weekend. The reason we made the trip at all was to see Frank, my father-in-law, through his surgery for prostate cancer. He had the surgery done at NIH by a surgeon formerly from John Hopkins. We felt he was in good hands with that combination as opposed to his crappy insurance: Kaiser Permanente.
Frank is doing well after surgery. He had his entire family present to make sure he was ok. Hopefully he’ll be going home tomorrow.
It’s been a while since I’ve written anything. Marco & Iliana have been sick the past week or two. Marco’s gotten better, Iliana continues to as well. Today she started CRAWLING! It was awesome to see.
Adan & I had a little spat on Tuesday night while at the family night at his school. It was over a book of all things. They had a book fair and Adan really wanted to buy a book about foam airplanes. It wasn’t a how too book though, it had 10 foam “pages” each with popout foam pieces to make foam airplanes. I felt that I had to “help” him make a better decision for buying a book. It was a book fair, not a toy fair. After my suggestions didn’t work, I went the brut force method, “No, I am *NOT* buying that book. Period.”
After sleeping on it, I realized that the real point of the book fair was to allow him to actually make a decision and get whatever book he wanted even if it was a bad one. So I told him he could get it today when his class goes back to the book fair. Turns out Elizabeth found a better book about making paper airplanes which came with several sheets of designer paper to make very cool paper airplanes. The best part of this book is you can use any paper and it will last a lot longer.
In the end, Adan gave the foam book to another boy who really really wanted it, and he made the right decision and got the paper airplane book.
On the car front, yes the saga continues. A week after I got the car back from my major repair, the A/C compressor started to squeal like a banshee when the car started or idled. I ignored it as I always do hoping it would go away. Well, yesterday morning the car wouldn’t turn over. The starter and battery were doing their best, but with a stuck pulley it’s hard to keep the engine running. I scored the alternator, power steering and A/C pulleys to see which one was stuck. And sure enough the A/C compressor was the culprit. Not much of a surprise as it hasn’t cooled the car for almost a year now, and the mechanics at Carolina Auto Masters said it was shot. But $700 - $900 isn’t worth fixing the A/C. Thankfully, the fourth gen f-body’s have a nice A/C delete pulley that can be used to replace it. I don’t get any A/C, but the car loses like 12lbs and gains more horsepower.
A friend of mine mentioned a nice mechanic shop called Ronnie White’s in Youngsville. I used these guys the last time to tow my car, so I figured I’d give them a try. They’ve been very communicative and are working on the car. I went with the A/C delete because it’s only $250 worth of work
That’s it for the going’s on in my neck of the woods. It’s time for bed, it’s been a long week.
Tonight we had our annual Halloween party for the kids at work. My boys talk about this even ALL YEAR LONG! This year they went as Jedi’s, Adan as Obi-wan and Marco as Anakin. They even posted to show off their Jedi skills. Here are some of the pictures, be sure to check out the gallery for more.
