Well it’s been a whirlwind first half of the year. I’ve been commuting to Houston to work for TD Williamson redesigning some pipeline tools for their Offshore Services Division since the third week in January. It’s good to be busy, but being away from the family for half the week hasn’t been a lot of fun.
The sprucing up of the house continues. We decided to replace the original Formica counter tops with granite. We contracted this out to a local stone dealer and now we have a kitchen full of Ubatuba granite. It looks good and will definitely improve the saleability of the house. We haven’t yet put the house up for sale because of my working in Houston.
Melanie has been running back and forth across the lake to help her Dad a couple of times a week. Since Jourdan’s out of school, she is staying the night to minimize the mileage on the car. They have been organizing all the paperwork that’s been collected over the years and getting all the affairs in order. It’s been quite a challenge for her, but I can’t imagine anyone else with the fortitude to see it through like Melanie. She’s something. Once she set’s her mind on something, it’s going to happen. No and’s if’s or but’s. She’s quite a woman and I love her dearly.
Meghan’s switching her major to Criminal Justice has paid off in a rapid escalation of the quality of her grades. She came home with a 3.875 and was ever so proud of herself. We were too. Congratulations darling. She’s catching up on some English courses this summer at SLU in Hammond, LA. Other than that, she is bored to tears in Slidell because all her “homies” have stayed at school this summer to take more courses.
Jourdan finished fourth grade at Lake Castle Elementary, being fourth highest in his class. We are extremely proud of him for all his accomplishments. He’s becoming quite the young man. The other day, he and Melanie were at my grandmother’s house. My grandmother had just gotten her computer back from service (in which they did nothing) and Jourdan got it out of the car and hooked everything up for her. She was some proud of her smart great-grandson.
I acquired a demo Nikon CoolPix 5400 digital camera to accompany my Nikon D70. I’ve been wanting a smaller camera and I got a deal on this one. The plus is I can use the Speedlight and CF memory from the D70. I can carry it with me to Houston to catch anything photogenic (Houston, photogenic?) that I might come across. There hasn’t been much yet… It’s definitely time to update the photos, as I’ve acquired many more since the last update. Hopefully soon….
My existing laptop (a HP Pavilion XH-365) had really gotten problematic, so I decided it was time for a replacement. Initially, I ordered a D-800 with a Nvidia Quaddro video off the refurbish list at Dell. Unfortunately, when I fire it up, the video is a Geforce, which is definitely not what I ordered. Many hours later after dealing with Dell’s Customer “Support”, they wouldn’t rectify the problem. All they were willing to do was refund the purchase price. So it went back. A week or so later, I was perusing e-bay and came across a a deal for a Dell M70. It was a brand new in box machine and I saved about $600 over buying it directly from Dell. It’s got a Nvidia Quaddro video so it’s ideally suited for running SolidWorks. It’s an awesome machine, but it’s definitely heavier than the XH-365.
I’ve done some minor editing of typo’s and stuff here, but nothing else has been added.