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We were put on notice today that Riley will be moving up from the infant daycare room to the toddler daycare room. I realized that while the transition for him might be tough, it may be harder on me.

For the last 12 months I have taken Riley to daycare in the morning. Every day I say good morning to Carol and chit chat about the weather. We discuss what we did for the weekend and she might mention how long Riley’s hair is, in an obvious reference to our lack of parenting. Many mornings Riley runs up to Carol to greet her and begin the morning Cheerios routine. The other morning he came in and hugged her leg. She smiled and commented on how hard it is to see kids like Riles grow up and leave the room.

For most of his time at daycare Riley has been the gentle giant of the room. He’s been a big kid all his life and his classmates have been mostly girls. He stands out in the room. He’s the tallest, biggest kid around. Now, he’ll be in a group of even bigger kids where he is just one of many “big guys”. Riles has never been a violent kid. He’s never bitten anyone but has taken his fair share of being bitten. I worry that the change in classmates will force Riley to act out in ways we aren’t used to.

It’ll be tough for the next few weeks. All of the sudden the $50-a-week savings doesn’t seem worth it. I’d rather Riley continue to stay who he is. But, I know if there’s one thing that is certain it’s that he will grow up.

Over the weekend we noticed yet another obvious change in Riley. He started mimicking our habits. In the past he’s found a rag and started wiping up the floor, a common occurrence in our house with a child and 3 dogs. But this weekend he started doing more complex tasks.

We were watching television last night when Riley picked up a dog bowl and walked to the stairs. He proceeded to bang on the gate until I opened it for him. He crawled downstairs (I carried the dog bowl for him), went into the laundry room, and pointed to the dog food containers. Riley wanted to feed the dogs. The problem was, the dogs had already eaten for the evening. Not wanting to start WWIII, I helped him fill the dog bowl and carry it back upstairs. Once upstairs he poured some of the food into Dottie’s bowl, some on the floor for Joe (Accidentally of course), and gave the rest to Sydney. It was cute and he was quite proud of himself when he finished.

Then this morning as I was shaving Riley carried one of my clean sweaters into the bathroom, pointed to the clothes chute, and threw my sweater down the chute. I bit my tongue on the clean clothes part because he was so happy to be helping.

Next up, I need to teach him to lay tile.

Looks like Courtney will be getting an iPhone shortly too.

UPDATE:  Courtney turned down the new phone offer mentioning that we’d be better off replace my lost wedding band before she gets a new phone. Sometimes her logic baffles me.

For years I’ve bought bleeding edge tech devices. In 1998 I bought the first ever MP3 playing CD player, imported all the way from a back alley in China. I bought a 6 gig Archos MP3 player which held a charge for all of 2 hours in 1999. Hell, I even had an Apple Newton 130, bought off a BBS for $480, which I connected a modem to so I could send email from it in 1995.  I’m no stranger to the not-so-perfect technical solution.

Last month our standard DVD player stopped working. It would boot up but would not read a DVD. It would just sit with a “Loading” message flashing. I used the opportunity to upgrade to an upscaling DVD player. I’m not ready to drop any serious money on any next-gen DVD technology. I’m not convinced that it’s worth the money yet. I’ve heard good things about upscaling players, which take a normal DVD and “upscale” the video resolution to that of modern HDTVs.

I ordered up the Philips DVP5982 1080p Upscaling DVD Player  from Amazon for $65. The upscaling works well. It’s a nice player, simple and nice. The video quality of my existing DVDs looks awesome through the player.

But when I got it I noticed it had a USB port on the front. I can plug something into it.  Hmmm…

I read through the manual and discovered the player was aslo capable of playing Divx movies from a USB drive. In the past I’ve tried hundreds of methods to play Divx videos on my TV. I’ve connected my laptop to the TV, transcoded the video to VCD format, streamed them to my Wii, etc…None of them had worked even the slightest bit well. I was skeptical. And if I was skeptical, imagine what Courtney thought.

So I hopped on the internet, found some interesting Divx videos, threw them on my thumb drive, and plugged it in. In an awe inspiring moment the DVD player played the movie. It did more than play it too, it played it well! It just worked! I couldn’t believe my eyes. I had finally found a technology that worked without some cumbersome, poorly implemented, feature set. Thank you Philips.

Last night we sat down to watch a show I had downloaded. Court looked at me and said, “This isn’t going to stop half way through is it?” She knows me too well. I assured her that it wouldn’t…Well, I assured her that I hoped it wouldn’t. To my delight, it played all the way through.

Chalk up a win for me. I’ve found a diamond in the rough. It took me 15 years, but I finally found one.

My life is currently being covered in other blogs. Here’s a wrap up of my last few weeks:

We have booked a trip to Cancun.

We attended the local DFL caucus.

We finished up the Sopranos (see the comments).

I deleted my Myspace account.

Courtney and I celebrated our anniversary in January. We made reservations at the Oceanaire.  We were hoping for a romantic, quiet evening with good seafood. We did get good seafood, but that was about it. Our reservations were for 9:00pm which is late for us these days. Well, 9:00pm came and went and we were still not seated. We were seated around 9:45pm. To be honest, we were too tired to really enjoy the food. Oceanaire was swamped with people. It was loud and cramped. But, the food was good. Did I mention that fact yet? Yeah, it was good.

I’ve been asked to demo some web technologies for a MCAD class in April. It sort of popped out of the blue. The ever connected Emily hooked me up with the opportunity. It’s been awhile since I’ve spoken in front of people. When I was a teenager I used to help my parents teach their respective training courses. But this is the first time I’ll be older than my audience so I’m a bit intimidated. At the very least I hope to have fun with it.

Have you seen the Macbook Air commercial? Yeah, I’m a sucker for the tune in it too.  I swear Apple ads are my primary source for new music these days.

A few years ago I paid a maintenance guy 75 bucks to come out to my house and tell me that the reason the heat wasn’t running was due to a dirty flame sensor. He took the sensor out of the furnace, whipped it on his pants, and put it back in. The problem was solved.

I came home last night to a house freezing at 55 degrees. Our dogs weren’t very happy with me. From the sounds of the furnace I knew it was the same sensor problem. I cursed.

I had two options: call the guy again to have him come out, give me a dirty look, and wipe the sensor on his pants again or just do it myself. I chose the latter.

First off, the flame sensor is not an easy thing to get to. I had to remove a security faceplate, which by definition, is not something I felt qualified to do. Once the plate was moved I had to locate the little bugger. It’s a tiny stick about 2 inches long and the width of a toothpick. It’s also located behind the pilot light (which was off BTW) in a space that was just large enough to get my hand into.  After all the futzing to find it I took a pencil and used the eraser end to “clean” the sensor. I spent 10 minutes or so erasing what I thought was dirt of the sensor. I honestly couldn’t tell if I was actually removing dirt. It was still black when I gave up and put everything back together.

To my astonishment though, when the furnace fired back up the igniting problem had been solved. The furnace now started up in under 10 seconds. At the worst, the furnace would attempt to start for a minute, finally stop, and fall into failure mode.

So by cleaning off this magic toothpick my house is back to a balmy 70 degrees.