SEC fan fest

On Tuesday Coach Brookins at the kids school asked me to help with a trip to the SEC fan fest on Thursday. The Fourth and Fifth graders could go on the trip if they won an essay contest on Basketball. Carter wrote about a game he played in with the haygood hoops church league. I talked to my boss and project managers and got everything squared away to take the day off. In the morning I took the kids to school then raced home and hopped on the bike. I rode out toward stone mountain and on the way I saw the most amazing thing. I have really started looking at the trains all the time since getting interested in model trains and I saw a train carrying rail. Thats all it was carrying, car after car with loads of rail, but I was not sure if it was really rail or if it was I beams for construction. I kept looking at the rail on the cars and the rail the train was riding on and they sure looked the same. I wanted to take a picture but the train was going buy before I could get my camera out. Well, the last car solved the mystery, it was a rail unloading car. I sure wish I had gotten a picture of it. I don’t remember ever seeing that before. I had to turn around before I got to the mountain but I got almost two hours of riding in.

When I got home I didn’t have time for lunch. I rode to school and met the Coach at noon. He printed his cell number and gave it to every kids. We had the brief talk about staying together and behaving and headed out in three cars.  This was in the Georgia World Congress Center and it was in one of those huge conference rooms where they can drive stuff in on the concrete floors. In the center they had errected a basketball court with a portable hard plastic floor. Everything was typical corporate marketing but that meant lots of freebee shwag. The kids got a zillion squichy basketballs and their picture take at the chik-fil-a booth and lots of free Dr. Pepper and Gatorade. There was a series of games around the basketball court and we went from game to game and played them all. There were only a couple that the kids couldn’t play because they were for adults (like the slam dunk game. The highlight for me was the 3 on 3 Basketball games they organized on the main court. They had their refs there who helped organize the games and officiate. The kids got really worn out. Carter was red faced and sweaty so I know the day was a success. Carter wanted money to buy junk. Everything in there was high priced and a rip off. I told him to hold out and we would get a snack afterwards. I was as hungry as I can remember getting in a long time. I had not eaten since breakfast and had done a 20 mile bike ride and it was four PM.

On the way home we went to Daddy D’s. If you have never been there and like Bar-B-Q you need to check it out.  We got Carter a  huge Onion Rings and I got a pork sandwich and potato wedges and we shared wedges and rings. It was awesome.

cub scouts

I have been one of my kids cub scout leader since they were in tiger cubs. Most of the time I have followed my older son Carter up because thats the way it usually works, Once they have you leading they want you to keep doing it and the natural progression when they try to fill slots is to keep doing the class you had last year.

Carter is now a second year webelo which means he is going into scouting next year and that we are working on finishing up his “Arrow of Light” which is the highest award in cub scouting. We have 3 more activity badges to work on and the hardest one I think is craftsman. We have to build several things. Last week they made a stand for their pinewood derby cars and stained it. This week we are going to make wooden boxes. My son is using his as a box for the wooden chess pieces he got. They came in a cardboard box so this is going to be a useful project. I don’t expect it to be pretty but I want it to work. We followed a plan in the webelos book for the pinewood derby car display stand. It had the kids cutting 1/2 plywood. I figured that was doable but they had real trouble cutting that by themselves. The box is going to be 1/4 inch plywood. I am hoping they can saw that themselves.

They are only supposed to use hand tools for safety reasons but I also think its good practice for learning how to do woodwork. It seems like you should start out doing it the old fashioned way. I got this cool 3m hand sander with a little knob that rotates and takes these sponge like sanders. They were pricy but I have always had great luck with 3m stuff so I got it and 3 sets of 2 sand pads. I used them today to cut and sand blocks of wood to fill 2 holes at our roof line that we thought the squirrel/rats might be getting in. I got finished just in time for the Thrashers hockey game we were going to and pulled all my tools inside. We went to the game and the Thrashers won. It was Carters first hockey game, Hunter was at a good friends Bday party.

Well when I got home I wanted to get all ready for the meeting so I would not be running around getting everything together at the last minute. This required one more trip to Lowes to get the plywood. I got home and got everything together and couldnt find the sander. I have 5 sanding pads and everything else I need to make the box but no hand sander. Its a pretty essential part of what I am doing tomorrow because while sanding is going on cutting can be going on. We won’t be waiting with nothing to do.

I spent almost an hour looking for this thing. It probably doesn’t cost more then $10 but it was driving me crazy not finding it and I also don’t want to make another trip to Lowe’s. Losing stuff makes me crazy. There are really only a couple places it could have been and I kept looking them over and over. Then I start to that next phase where I start looking in crazy places. hmm… Maybe in the dog food container.

Lowe’s opens at 6 AM. Its better to forget about it for now and hopefully it will turn up. I can hit the store before work after dropping the kids off. If I blow off morning meeting (a ritual at the charter school that involves the whole community) I can get to work at the usual time.

Stone Mountain

I always love climbing the mountain with the kids and we have been doing it since they were tiny. I could dig up some really old pictures to post. We picked up Hunters best friend Emma and Steve and went out to eat at real authentic mexican on Memorial across from Oakland cemetary. In the past that place has been great but they were out of tamales. We got burritos and they were really plain and really expensive. The chips salsa and cheese dip were great. We got mexican cokes which I think are just coke bottles for selling in mexico. I think that was another mistake. With normal coke we would get refills. The main mistake was getting adult burritos for the kids. They later told us about the kids burritos when we were trying to figure out why we owed a fortune. Anyway, I will still go back but I will make sure they have tamales by calling ahead. They said Thursdays and Fridays they almost always do.

We parked at the marta bus parking lot right outside the gate and walked in (this is the free parking trick we always use). Its a tiny bit extra walk which is always good for the kids. We got right up to the top and it was Emma’s first time. She liked it. We all got good and tired. Hunter went to Grandmas. Carter came home with a friend thats spending the night who we are taking to a Thrashers hockey game tomorrow.

Life in the big city

We live a block from Little Five Points (L5P) in Atlanta and there is a huge restaurant density there and this year my neighborhood, Candler Park, is especially hard hit with rats. I have been hearing this for a while but saw no signs of them at our house. Well we heard scratching noises above our living room and I was pretty sure it was squirrels. We have a massive nest in a tree right outside our house and I have seen them for years. My wife, Kelly ran a store in L5P for years and she knows about rats. She was worried about them from the first time we heard that noise. Well, I went to investigate in our attic storage space where the noise came from and saw what I thought was squirrel turd. I got a live squirrel trap that day and my wife got rat traps. We had a disagreement over the best course of action but in the end of course we did it her way. At first she wanted me to take the trap back but at $30 I think she saw that it might be useful some day anyway. She wanted me to just set everything we had. mouse traps we already owned, the rat traps and also the cage. We also heard that if you have squirrels and leave the lights on they will not hang out. Well for the next few days nothing happened. The only thing we heard was the scratching sound in the living room for a second and then it went away. So I was getting complacent and stopped checking the traps for a couple days. This morning I checked and all the mouse traps had gone off with nothing in them, the live trap was empty, and one rat trap was empty and the other had a dead rat!

Well, it was stiff but not smelly. I tossed the trap and the rat. My wife is pretty anxious when it comes to these little friends. She is not freaking out too bad and I admitted right away that of course once again she was right (I hate it when that happens). I am going to the store right now to get a lot more traps and set up a minefield up there. As part of this recent effort we got hinges and locks to keep little hands out of rat traps. Even though the kids are old enough to know better they might have friends over and if you have seen a rat trap you really don’t want it to snap on a hand.

Its a perfect day out. The times this occurs on a weekend in Atlanta are pretty rare. We go from freezing to blistering in the course of a couple weeks each spring and fall. I will be damned if I spend the whole day mucking with traps and doing chores. We have plans to climb Stone Mtn. What am I doing blogging? ttyl

Carter at the National Youth Action

This is Carter on the left. He is wearing the T-Shirt for the Atlanta Chess Center that won the team prize. Its hard to beat a club team in a big city. Its like the all star team and all the school are trying to compete against it. Some tournaments don’t allow them.

First picture

This is Hunter on the left at the biggest recent tournament. It was held in the Hyatt Regency in downtown Atlanta. We had alot of fun.

Chess

I started playing chess when I was around 8 years old. My dad taught me and I would always want to play with him. I remember pestering him constantly and loving to play with him but hating to loose. This was a big problem cause dad would never throw a game so I think he hated to play. Soon I had all my best friends playing and Saturdays were riding dirt bikes and playing chess. I played the same small set of people and never really got the hang of studying books though so forever my chess never really got better. Way later I discovered playing chess online and loved it. I discovered the chess servers and UNIX clients that used X and was in heaven. After a while of playing there I discovered the Asian board game “Go” and was only playing that. It is a great game and I still love it but you pretty much can only play online or people that you teach. Here in the US its still not very popular even though there is a club that meets at Georgia Tech once a week that I used to always go to.

So then what happened after not really even playing casual games for years is that I taught my kids. It is a great rainy day activity and the same problems I remember happening with wanting to win so badly were going on with my kids games. My oldest son, Carter (10), loves to play but always would get upset about losing. We would play handicap games when I was teaching him where I would just start the game missing alot of pieces (up to a queen and 2 rooks). This works pretty well to even the playing field but of course its not the same game at that point. Go works much better with this evening of the playing field, it is really common for go player to play games where one player starts off with an advantage because the two players know what it takes to even the difference in skill. So Carter was going to the Atlanta Speech School where my Mom teaches and there they had a Friday Chess class with a professional teacher Richard Benjamin. He really loved this and soon he was getting alot better. He started entering inter-school tournaments and winning. Hunter (8), my other son, was going to the Neighborhood Charter School and was way less interested in chess. I think part of this is just natural inclination and part of it was probably not having this early good instruction. Hunter likes to play but its not his first choice of things to do.

So through Carters love of the game I started to get way more into it then I ever had been. He started to going to real rated tournaments of the United States Chess Federation (USCF). We live in Atlanta and there are tournaments every weekend and during the week. The first big tournament was the Supernationals in Nashville TN. The whole family went and Carter playing in a section of kids all rated under 800. He was rated way lower then that at the time. He really used his time and concentrated and was given more time then he had ever had in a tournament and won almost all his games. His rating show way up and that was the start of a new level of seriousness about chess. We joined the ICC (the internet chess club) and we both started playing alot on there.

There is a local club “The Atlanta Chess Center. I want to write about that next but my wife is kicking me out the door and I need to get to work. More later.

first post

I have been thinking more about what I could possibly write about. I decided to start from a list of stuff I am way into and then write about things off that list and after thast just talk about day to day stuff.

So the start of my list:

Things I do with the boys:

• geocaching
• chess
• model trains
• baseball – basketball
• cycling
• travel
• German board games
• Church of the Epiphany

Things I am into

Advanced Squad Leader (WWII board game)

WWII History ( books and the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress )

wikipedia (avid reader of all kinds of subject, mostly just correct glaring errors at this point )

go (Asian board game)

stereo photography

reading and book list

I am going to make it so this stuff doesnt scroll away later and I am going to add to it as time goes on.

my company

My company is promoting blogging, both for new products and also in general to get the employees aware of this new medium and participating in it. They recommended wordpress highly but this better have spell check or I am screwed.

Howdy

first post