Jude is always ready for a dropped morsel.
I finally got around to finishing cutting down the remaining trunk of the pecan tree that grew out of the middle of our house.
Here I am refueling the chainsaws. The area is about 8×10’. We hope to enclose it for extra closet space.
I put a fan in there to hopefully blow out all the exhaust from the chainsaw. Before the fan, Janet said the whole house smelled like exhaust. Plus there was the burning lungs, blurry vision, and headaches. The fan helped with all that, but added blowing chips (hence the eye protection). Here I am going at it.
I had a very hard time keeping the chainsaws going while constantly cutting horizontally. I cut 4–6” discs– anything heavier and I couldn’t carry them out. To get them out I carried them back up the ladder, then walked to the edge of the house and dropped them.
I ended up cutting 23 discs (you can see each cut on the wall in the pic above). The tree trunk was about 13 feet high. I weighed one of the discs and it was 80 pounds! My wee computer-user body was not ready for that, but I did it.
No more treehouse!
After many battles with playing games on the Wii, homebrew has finally advanced enough so you can play games straight from a hard drive. Hurray! We use the cover flow style loader called CoverFloader.
One of the advantages of having Homebrew on your Wii is you can play games and programs written by people like you and me. A large number of those programs are emulators, which allow your Wii to emulate another system. I installed an NES emulator and we immediately started playing the original Super Mario Brothers! It was heaven, I felt 10 years old again! As I perused my youth through NES roms, I HAD to play Metroid (one of my all time favorite games). Here’s a pic of me fixing to beat it by destroying the Mother Brain:
I made a deal with Keighly and Ian. If Keighly passed (with straight A’s) and Ian passed (with A’s and B’s) I would buy them both new Nintendo DS Lites.
They both passed with the proper requirements..!
So I purchased two new Nintendo DSLs:
And an Ice-Blue one for Ian (not sold in the US!)..
Keighly gave her old, very worn and used original NDS to Emily.
We had a visit from some long-time friends Tony and Emily Lymon who brought their daughter Collette. At one point she picked up one of the many practice chanters laying around and started tooting on it. The other kids all grabbed theirs and started marching in a circle! She is a natural! (Note to Tony and Emily: it’s never too early to start bagpipe lessons!)
We went and saw Up tonight (in 3D!). It was very good, the kids really enjoyed it (above: Chandler, Ian, Emily, and Keighly). The first 20 mins were kinda sad as they set up the story for why Mr. Fredrickson has become the way he is, but after that is was very status-quo Pixar/Disney: clean and fun!
Ian gets pinched by our neighbor Roy’s chick.
The Incredibealls! 