The Minton Family.com

Jackie had been wanting a new phone for awhile.  Hers wouldn’t charge it’s battery anymore, we kept having to put the battery in my phone and charge it in there (because she got it wet at some point), and she was never really in love with that phone to begin with.  Since AT&T contracts are on the phones, not the plans, we could get her a new phone, which would apply a new contract to it, but not extend the contracts of the other two phones on the plan.  Her phone was available for an upgrade, so we bit the bullet.

I’ve got one from work I’ve had for awhile, so we were familiar with them, it was just a matter of going ahead and getting her one.  Hopefully she’ll like this one better than her Sony.

Daddy:  Jada, what is Software?

Jada:  It’s like silverware….but soft!

I worked with her on halves for about 10 minutes.  She quickly figured out what half of 4 was, and what half of 6 was, but half of 5 stumped her.   Within a minute or two, she said “I don’t know any of the non-even ones”.  I worked with her on how to divide it up if we had 5 pretzels and she figured out that we’d each get 2 and half of one.  After a minute or so of her repeating that, it dawned on her…something she’s probably heard others say…”two and a half”.   From there, she got it.  She knew half of 7 and half of 3.  I didn’t go much further than that with her.  I was afraid I’d have a hard time keeping up.

I have a lot of workout equipment in the basement; weight bench, smith machine, treadmill, bowflex, curl bars, dumbells, you get the idea. The kids tend to use most of it more like it’s a jungle gym, but at least I’m not the only one using it right?

The other night Lana had been downstairs with me and had been exercising (which includes jungle gym type activity). A little while later during supper, she leaned over to me and had her arm up as if to be flexing her biseps and squeezing her fist as tightly as she could she asked “Daddy….am I torn?”. I was a little puzzled at first, then it dawned on me. “Do you mean, are you ripped?” I asked her. Yeah (still flexing). I felt her arm and said “Oh yeah, you’re torn, good workout!”.

We took the kids to get flu shots today after I got home from work.  Jada had evidently said she was going to go first, but conveniently snuck off to the bathroom right at shot time.  We tried to get Lana to go next, but believe me when I say, that wasn’t happening.  Next in line, although not volunteering, was Levi.  Jackie threw him to the wolves first, and he cried a little, but didn’t do too bad.  Jonah was next at bat, and offered up about the same…tears until a sippy cup was shoved into his mouth.   (Thank Mom for that one Jonah).

Jada returned, and sort of volunteered to go next.  She got teery eyed, but admittedly, didn’t cry.  Lana was having none of it though.  She screamed for all she was worth.  Jackie bailed with the other three and left me to be the bad guy.  After some excrutiating pain (my ears from Lana’s screaming), Lana got her shot.  She wouldn’t speak to any of us during the ride home (which was kinda nice honestly).

After we got home, we ate supper, then went for a walk to a nearby house that has a lot of halloween decorations then came home.  At snack time, Lana came up to me and said “My shot hurts worser than Levi, Jonah, and Jada’s”.  I’m not sure how she came to that conclusion, but she seemed pretty sure of it, so I’ll just have to assume she was right.

The other day, Levi was in need of some Mommy time.  He wanted me to sit down and watch TV with him.  I sat down on the couch and he curled up with my arm around him.  I asked him what he wanted to watch and he said “ET phone home”.  So, I turned it on.  It wasn’t long before he had snuggled in deeper into the crook of my arm and had pulled my arm over his face.  When I asked him what he was doing he replied “ET skeewy” (scary).  So, we turned it off and watched Cars instead!  It was nice to know that Mommy is good to hide under!  Although he never gets scared when Daddy turns on The Hulk or King Kong!  But one little alien has him taking cover!

About 30 new pictures were uploaded last night.  These were uploaded to the Family Pictures location, not to the Cell Phone Pictures location.

Ever wonder why I don’t upload them more often?  Here’s what I do everytime I take pictures off the camera:

• Copy them and the digital camera videos from the camera into folders of the dates they were taken
• Create RAR (compressed archives) of them with recovery records
• Copy them to my file server
• Open ACDSee and tag every photo with who is in it, and often, what it’s about (birthday, etc.)
• Write the ACDSee tags to the photos (inside the file) so tags are retained when uploading to Fotki
• Upload the photos to ACDSee where they retain their tags
• Upload the RAR files (includes original, unedited photos and digital camera videos) to Amazon S3
• Copy ACDSee database to Amazon S3
• Copy everything (photos, videos, RAR files) to a 2nd harddrive on my file server
• Copy ACDSee database to my file server so it’s now backed up
• An automated process copies the RAR files to an external harddrive
• An automated process copies the ACDSee files to an external harddrive

This gives me 3 local copies of all my digital camera photos and videos (kid memories, right?), two remote copies of the pictures (one at Fotki, and one at Amazon S3), and one remote copy of the digital camera videos (Amazon S3).

The idea is to never lose the digital memories.  With multiple local copies, it’s unlikely I’ll ever need to rely on my remote copies.  In the even of something locally catastrophic, everything is mirrored remotely.  In the event one of the remote companies goes out of business, they are mirrored at two.  One of the remote copies (Fotki) also doubles as a method of viewing the photos from any internet connection.

With four beautiful children, and literally over 15,000 photos (primarily of them), that’s how I go to bed feeling safe that their memories are as safe as can be reasonably expected.

I just hope they appreciate it when they’re older.

Daddy

The camping followup is a day late, but it’s here. It went pretty well. Levi didn’t last long, maybe 30 minutes or so, and he began saying “house” wanting to go inside. Mommy came out and got him, and he was in for the night. She said he kept saying “Tent” after going in, but she keep him inside for the evening.

The girls did good. It dropped down to around 60ish which, was cool, but not quite as cold as last time. Plus, we were better prepared this time. I woke up a few times during the night and had two beautiful little girls snuggled up next to me. Lana initially went to sleep without her jammies on because she was hot, but throughout the night, I ended up putting her nightgown and a pair of sweat pants on her. Jada kept her same clothes on all night, but she was the first one to cuddle up after falling asleep.

I figured this may be the last chance this year for us to camp out in the tent with the weather really starting to cool off.  It was about 84 today, but it’s supposed to get down to around 60 tonight.  The last time we camped out it dropped down into the 50′s.  That was a little chilly, but we took more blankets out this time.

We’re going to try it with just Daddy, Lana, Jada, and Levi this time.  Last time Mommy started out with us but didn’t stay out there the whole night.

There don’t seem to be any clouds, and the moon is shining bright, so hopefully we’ll have a good time.

Clear sixty degree weather, a tent, two air mattresses, plenty of blankets, and the comfort of home about 12 feet away…Survivorman has nothing on us!

The Cell Phone Pictures album (link on the left) has been getting some updates during the last couple of days.  I took the girls and Levi skating yesterday, and we carved our first pumpkin last night.  They aren’t overly high quality, but it’s a way for me to easily show what we’re up to.

I’ve also updated the site allowing users to register for posting comments.  Let me know if you try to register and have any issues.

As you can see, the website is all new.  The old website was running MyPhpNuke which hadn’t been updated in quite some time.  There were some security issues with the version I was running, and I decided it was time to update to something newer, and more fitting.  I didn’t particularly need the built-in image gallery since I started using Fotki to store all of my photos, and the built-in forums were never really utilized.  The old site also limited me to associating each story with only one topic (Jada, Lana, etc.), whereas the new one allows me to “tag” stories with as many as I’d like.

I’ll probably leave the old image gallery up for awhile yet, but all photos, old and new are at Fotki in the Family Photos folder.  If you need the password for the Family Photos, get ahold of me and I’ll give it to you.

Let me know if there’s something you’d like added to the new version of the site.  I’ve tried to provide the things I think most of us use, such as links to the photos, tags to locate pictures of people, and links to stories by month & year.