Windshield Woes

It has been a number of weeks since my windshield got a big old crack on it. Finally I scheduled some time tomorrow for the repair guy to come replace it.

Momoko got a crack in her car windshield too. She immediately got it replaced. I blame the bad weather. My crack started with a pebble. Then the thing opened up wide.

Today I was unable to talk Kit Kat into doing any driving. She is still recovering from yesterday's highway drive. We will have to get back on that road tomorrow. And I am trying to get her to drive home from school on Friday. Come on Kit Kat. I know you can do it.

Trip to Yokohama

My mechanic tried to rotate my tires. However one of the tires was bald. He advised me to get new tires as soon as possible.

I have always wanted some tires made by Pirelli. That is the manufacturer who makes tires for sports cars. However a set of four would set me back $480. That's too much bread for just tires.

Then the great deal came in. Mister Tire had a buy 3 get 1 free offer on Yokohama tires. I had some Yokohamas on my last car. They were pretty good. And 3 of these tiers costs me $300.

With the new tires, Kit Kat drove me and Little Kat to the library. We stopped by a grocery store to get some chips. Then I made Kit Kat drive us home on the highway.

I though the highway would be an easy ride. Then we saw a police officer on the on ramp. And the one lane I thought we could coast in was closed off. Kit Kat had to do a lot of merging. We made it though. I am looking forward to more highway driving with Kit Kat.

More Birthday News

I stayed up until around 5 or 6 am Sunday morning chaperoning the boys at Kit Kat's birthday sleep over. However I got hungry a couple hours later. I got up and heated me up a burger. Of course I was the first one awake.

After watching TV for a while, I figured it was time to start my Sunday chores. I did some laundry and in the process woke up Momoko. Most of the kids then proceeded to slowly wake up.

Parents came to pick up their children from the party. We cleaned up the house. Kit Kat drove me to Walmart. An emergency vehicle came by causing Kit Kat to have to pull the car over. At Walmart I bought new neck ties with the $$$ Grannie Kat sent me for by B-day.

I drove Kit Kat and myself home from Walmart. After that Kit Kat was knocked out in her room. The poor cat slept for hours with her light on. She ended up sleeping the rest of the afternoon and all night. This morning she was sick and stayed home. I hope she gets well and back to school soon.

Birthday Weekend

On Saturday I figured it was time to get serious about eradicating these dandelions. I went back to pulling up the roots. When I finished the latest batch that had popped up, I started filling the holes with fertilizer and dirt. Then I spread out some grass seed.

I got done with about a third of the lawn. It was some backbreaking work. During my lawn labor, Kit Kat's guests started arriving for her overnight birthday party. My yard work took over 6 hours on Saturday. So when I got inside, I just wanted to rest. Kit Kat told me they had an emergency. One of her friends lost his ride. He needed somebody to go pick him up.

Now Momoko was busy greeting the parents of guests that showed up. Kit Kat was also required to stay to greet her guests. That meant Little Kat and I took a road trip. Luckily I had dropped Kit Kat's friend off from school a number of times. I knew exactly where he lived - the other side of town. We got him and headed back to the party.

The highlight of Kit Kat's party was opening her presents. She got some card from Momoko that referenced "Twinkies". Kit Kat thought that meant she was supposed to go to Momoko's car. However the envelope directed her to look under our bed. Kit Kat's friends thought the gift might be a gigantic Twinkie suit, or maybe a little dog named Twinkie. It turns out Momoko got Kit Kat a new laptop for her birthday. Kit Kat was so happy she was crying.

An Intense Little Kat

I bought a texting phone for Little Kat on eBay. It was the Samsung Intensity, which has a nice slide out keyboard. The thing came in the mail yesterday. Today I picked Little Kat up from school. We went to the cell phone store. They transferred Little Kat's info to the new phone.

Now Little Kat is a text monster. On the ride to the library, he texted daddy 10 times already. Little Kat is more impressed with all the features the Samsung Intensity phone has. He already has the thing reading his phone text messages aloud. And he is now setting up instant messaging via the phone.

Little Kat now plans to train the phone to only obey his verbal commands. I guess it can learn his phone, and only operate if it is him speaking. Hmm. I think I can do a Little Kat impression. And I wonder whether the phone can tell the difference. If you have a cell phone plan with unlimited texting, get ready for a lot of texts from Little Kat.

The Pokemon Effect

Some time ago, Little Kat and I went to Walmart to price Pokemon Soul Silver for the Nintendo DS. The salesman told us it costs $40. Little Kat said that was a good deal for the game. It came with some extras.

Little Kat worked hard at some chores to save up cash for the game. He did not mind that buying the game meant he had no money for me or Kit Kat's birthday gifts. Doh!

This week Little Kat acquired his game. He has been distracted to say the least. I picked up Little Kat from school today. As soon as he got into my car, he was playing with his Pokeball. I tried to strike up some conversation with him. He got quiet when he pulled out his DS and played Pokemon.

Not all the Pokemon action is bad. Little Kat and his little friend (a gurl) across the street play Pokemon together all the time. Momoko likes to watch them sit on the driveway and do the Pokemon thing. Little Kat has this big book of Pokemon characters memorized. If he could apply this to school work, he would have straight A's.

Gangster at the Door

I spent the whole afternoon digging up dandelion roots. At the end, I tried some Weed-B-Gone on the rest of the lawn. I figured I would give it a try, and compare the result to the side of the lawn where I dug up the roots.

Then I hear some gangster rap music. I figure it is somebody just driving by. But the music persists. The driver stops at my next door neighbor's house. The rap music continues so I take a look. It is coming from a white minivan. Hello? A minivan does not give you any street credit.

Out pops a tall dude. He pulls out a stack of pizza boxes. I figure he must have the wrong address. There is nobody home. I know because I have been here all afternoon weeding, and the neighbors are still at work. Then the tall dude walks towards me. What?

I ask the dude whether he is coming to our house. He replies Yup. Aha. I instruct him to ring the front doorbell. Momoko was tired. And she did not go grocery shopping. So the only thing available for dinner is pizza delivery. As the tall dude leaves, I notice some huge black objects stuffed in his ear lobes. No. They are not in his ear holes. They appear to be over sized earrings that are actually in his ear lobe. Nice. That makes up for driving mommy's minivan.

Driving and More Driving

I tried to wake Momoko up at 10:00am this morning. No luck. Then I tried again at 10:30am. Still no pulse. At 11:00am I decided to try waking Kit Kat. She usually responds to me. It took a while but Kit Kat came out of her room.

Little Kat loves Saturday mornings. He gets up early while the family is asleep. Then he watches TV and whole knows what else downstairs. Kit Kat and I went driving and left Little Kat alone. At least we got him to start some laundry.

Kit Kat drove me to Home Depot. The weather is nice. Everybody was at the store. We parked, switched positions, and decided to go home without going into the store. Kit Kat can drive in traffic now.

Once home I planned to battle the dandelions in the yard. However Kit Kat needed to study with her friends. So I let her drive my car over to her friend's house. Then I drove back home alone. By then it was too late to pull dandelions. I had company over this afternoon. Before company came, I got eBay to restore my account. Then I placed a bid for a texting cell phone. Little Kat are you reading this???

EBay Trouble

I finally got my new PayPal account set up. So I thought I could finally buy Little Kat a texting cell phone on Ebay. Nope. For some reason my Ebay account got put on hold. Life is hard.

Got off work early enough. Started digging out dandelion roots. Ouch that hurts the body. Got a long way to go before the yard is rid of the yellow things.

My buddy took me out for my birthday tonight. We went to an old restaurant we used to visit. The wait was an hour to get seated. No thank you. We went to a gourmet hamburger joint instead.

Tomorrow I got to wake up early and fight the good fight against the dandelions.

Dandelion Revenge

Today I picked up Little Kat from school. We went to Petco and bought some gerbil food. By the time we got home, we saw Kit Kat walking in the house. I picked up Kit Kat. Then I told her to drive me to Home Depot.

As usual Kit Kat tried to resist. But we got to push her. She drove through some heavy traffic. She says the cars we on all four sides of her. And they were.

At Home Depot, I purchased some products to improve our lawn. I got 2 tools to pull up dandelions. Then I got some Weed B Gone to keep them away. Also got Kit Kat some purple work gloves. Finally I got some Turf Builder to keep the grass green.

Now I have started pulling up those darn dandelions. Too bad I got company coming over tomorrow and this weekend. They are going to see a lot of lawn work in progress.

Baby Steps

Today Kit Kat told me she needed to go to the library. We also needed to do some practice driving. I put these two together and suggested that Kit Kat drive us to the library. She resisted.

There are times when I let Kit Kat opt out of work. Today was not one of those times. So Kit Kat braved the drive to the library. We hit two tough stop signs. One has oncoming traffic having the right of way. The other way a 4 way stop with a lot of traffic.

Kit Kat made it to the library without incident. She got a couple manga books. I drove us home. When Little Kat came home from school, he wanted to go to the library too. I suggested that Kit Kat drive us. She of course resisted the idea. This time I let her skip the drive. Little Kat and I ended up going to the library ourselves.

Late For School

Early this morning, I heard Kit Kat talking on her phone upstairs. This was disturbing as I was still asleep. But the phone conversation woke me a bit. Then Kit Kat knocked on my bedroom door. She overslept and needed a ride to school.

What happened was that Kit Kat's friend noticed Kit Kat missed the bus and called her up. Good thing the friend did this. That call was the wake up call for Kit Kat. She either forgot to set her alarm, or slept through it.

I got ready as soon as I could. We hit a little traffic on the ride to school. However Kit Kat was still a few minutes late to first period. I on the other hand was very early for work. It is good to keep the coworkers guessing about my arrival time.

Intense Texting

The quest to get Little Kat a texting phone continues. I tried to go to eBay to get a Nokia Twist on the cheap. Found a good one. However the bids quickly went up above $150. That is just too much.

My backup plan is to get Little Kat's 2nd best choice for a texting phone. This is the Samsung Intensity. I found one on eBay for $110. That is still a bit steep. However I pay a lot every month for the family to get unlimited texting. We need more than just Kit Kat texting to make use of this expensive service.

Just when I thought we were in the clear, I found that I forgot the password for my PayPal account. I had PayPal send me my password via email. Just one problem. I no longer have access to my old email account. Nothing is easy. I have since called up PayPal, closed out the old account, and opened a new one. Now I just have to verify my checking account with them and I can buy Little Kat a texting phone. We will overcome.

Home Shopping Weekend

Momoko's real estate agent came back from vacation today. So we went out to look for houses. The first one was in our current city. It was only two levels. The master bedroom had just a shower. I want a nice bath in there. So that, combined with the fact that it was small meant that it was out.

Next we visited a house close to Momoko's school. I liked the separate tub and shower in the master bedroom. The tub was shallow but big big big. There was a sign on the stairs inside saying we had to take our shoes off to go upstairs. Weird. The basement did not flow well. And the back yard was sloped down toward the house. Although the back yard was fenced, the fence was wobbly and even falling down at points. This house was also out.

Finally we returned to an older house that we had seen before. It still had a tree blocking the entrance. The agent initially forgot the code to unlock the key. However Little Kat tried the front door and found it open! This house was huge. The basement had a great sized room with huge built in bookshelves. The kitchen was large. There was a deck over top of a big garage. The top level had massive bedrooms. The only thing I hated was the steep hills on all sides of the house. I don't want to mow that grass. Momoko found a lot of work required on the inside as well. This house is still a maybe.

Next I am going to have my agent figure out how much I can expect to sell our house for. That might decide whether we can even afford to move and get another house.

A New Twist

Momoko got a call from the library. Some books that Little Kat requested were in. I was going to take him to the library to get them. However Momoko said we also received a letter from the library stating a book was overdue. We thought the book might be lost.

Little Kat at first responded that he thought he already returned the library book. Then his story changed into him lending the book to Kit Kat, and not returning it. Typical of him to throw Kit Kat under the bus. We did go to the library and searched the shelves. Little Kat found the book he returned. It had the exact bar code of the book he checked out. The library people said it was ok and Little Kat did not need to pay any fines or replacement costs.

The library visit was so quick that Little Kat and I decided to drop by the wireless phone store. Little Kat is the only member of the family that does not have a cell phone with a keyboard for texting. He did some research and found that he was interested in the Samsung Inensity, Nokia Twist, and Verizon Razzle. In the store he decided on the Twist. There was just one problem. It was going to cost us $279 for the phone. Now I am all for Little Kat texting. However that is just too much money. We came home and found one on eBay that has a current bid for $73. I might just try to win that auction.

Just Dancing

Somehow the family got off track on our New Year's exercise program. We were supposed to work out 30 minutes each day on our exercise equipment. First Momoko hurt her leg. Then Kit Kat got sick. The result is that we are no longer exercising.

Just yesterday we got back into working out on the exercise equipment. So today I asked Kit Kat if we were going to continue for the second day in a row. She wanted to play the new Just Dance Wii game we got. To her that is exercise. The benefit is that Momoko can dance with us, but do it from a sitting position to protect her injured leg.

This crazy dance game is hard to keep up with. Kit Kat seems to get the high score a lot. At least they got some good songs in the game. In other news, I pushed Kit Kat to take the longest practice drive ever today. Things were going fine until the final drive home. Kit Kat stopped at the stop sign, but did not see the big truck coming with the right of way. Kit Kat pulled out. We got lucky that the truck slowed down and did not ram us.

I am still lobbying for Kit Kat to go out into traffic. She still just wants to travel the back roads and secondary streets. That is fine ... for now.

Lost Without my Planner

Last night we had some scheduling business to take care of. One of the cats brought down my daytimer. This planner hold my money, as well as my life. It lists all the things I need to do each day. It also has all the work meetings I need to attend. Somehow my planner got left downstairs last night. Trouble.

I woke up tired this morning. My planner was not on my dresser. So I left without it. Ouch. The planner is my wallet which holds my driver's license. It also has all my cache. I knew I was in trouble when I could not find the call in number to my first meeting of the day.

So I gathered up all my computers and papers at work, then headed home. Sure enough the planner was downstairs where I left it last night. I was so hungry by the time I got home. But there was no time to run out and get some carry out. My next meeting was starting soon. The moral of the story is to always return the planner to either my back pocket, or the top of my dresser upstairs. Otherwise doom is near at hand.

Life of the Patrol

Momoko had to go to college class today. So I had to leave work early to get Little Kat from school. I was working as fast as I could. And I made sure I did not volunteer for any new work to be done today.

I got to Little Kat's school and waited at his safety patrol spot. The weather was very hot. I was directly under the sun. My work shoes are black. The sun heated them up so much during my wait for Little Kat that my foot hurt.

While waiting for Little Kat's patrol duty to end, I read the paper and practiced a presentation I need to give at work later this week. However I still spied on Little Kat in action.

Some kid tried to exit out the wrong door. The kid told Little Kat that somebody else told him he could exit. Little Kat informed this guy that Little Kat was telling him that he could not. Some other kid tried to cut through the line and go the wrong way. Little Kat directed him back into the line. The bus driver got out of the bus and told Little Kat that the rules made no sense.

Normally we teach kids such as Little Kat to obey all direction from adults. Luckily I am sure that the teacher in charge of patrols laid down the rules for kid movement after school. And that teacher's rules trump any bus driver opinions. It was interesting to see how Little Kat ignored the bus driver's commentary. Perhaps I will get Little Kat to inform the bus driver that the rules are determined by the teacher in charge of patrols, and that any complaints need to be taken up with the boss.

Driving with Kit Kat

Today I had to return to work. It was not fair because Momoko and the kids are still on Spring Break vacation. I hurried home after work to take Kit Kat driving.

We decided to take a longer drive today. On the first ride out, Kit Kat successfully hugged the right hand curb. This was good. A neighbor came around the corner and was driving in the middle of the street. Kit Kat's driving made it easy to avoid an accident.

On the second pass around the block, I told Kit Kat to signal a right hand turn out of the local school parking lot. She hit the windshield wiper lever instead of the turning signal one. The windshield wiper phased her and she lost control for a bit. We ended up going over the curb but there was no damage done.

Overall Kit Kat is gaining better control over the car. She says she is more confident. Her acceleration and braking is more smooth. I noticed she also goes above the speed limit on the open roads a bit. Got to watch that. I am hoping Kit Kat gets enough skills so that we can drive all the way to her school in the morning (which is a long 30 minute drive away).

Easter Dinner

Today we are having my family over for dinner. My uncle made a surprise visit to my folks house. So he will be coming over for dinner as well. We all slept in a little this morning. However Kit Kat was up early enough to start cooking the ham.

Little Kat and Kit Kat camped out in the back yard last night. Little Kat has been trying hard to get Kit Kat to spend the night. Earlier in the week he spent some nights in the tent alone.

Today Momoko and I were getting the room ready for a big dinner table. We spotted some ants coming into the house by our vent. Previously I dumped a bunch of Ortho Home Defense outside. Momoko and Kit Kat sprayed 409 cleaner inside to kills the ants that made it in. This continued today.

Now I am going to take one last tour of the house with Little Kat. My parents have not seen any of the new appliances or furniture (bookshelves) that we have acquired over the past year. Happy Easter to all.

The Big Drive

Now that Kit Kat has her learner's permit, she needs some practice driving. I told her we would go take a drive today. The destination was her friend's house. Kit Kat's friend lives about 3 miles from us.

To start I had Kit Kat ride in my passenger seat. We took a test drive where I was behind the wheel. At each point I described what I was doing, especially with my foot on the gas and break. Then I drove us back home.

Kit Kat and I switched positions. She did not want to do such a lengthy drive. But me and Momoko decided we would push Kit Kat a bit to help her learn to drive. I tried to schedule our ride during the time of day that is not busy. However a bunch of cars showed up anyway.

Kit Kat was able to manage the car while I gave her specific directions on when to break and turn. I had to remind her to put on her turning signals. Once we got to Kit Kat's friend's street, some other car got behind us and was impatient. We took our time and the car eventually pulled in a driveway. It was difficult for Kit Kat to drive home since there is one treacherous left turn. It is hard to see traffic there. We made it home safely. When asked whether she wanted to attempt the same trek again right away, Kit Kat was sure she needed a rest from the ordeal.

Kit Kat is Driving

During our Spring Break vacation, Kit Kat studied the driving laws of our state. Yesterday she passed the test to get a learner's permit with a 100% score. Now she can drive with an adult.

Little Kat and I spied on Kit Kat as she practiced driving Momoko's car in and out of the driveway. Late last night the family went for an ice cream run to McDonald's. I had Kit Kat back Momoko's car out of the driveway and turn it around.

Today is the big day. I am going to have Kit Kat drive me to her friend's house. Luckily Kit Kat's friend only lives about 3 miles from our house. Kit Kat is a bit nervous because we need to drive on a busy street (she calls it a highway). But I think she will do fine.