ganzhorn

Tomorrow is a very odd day for me. My oldest son Zack has his first day of school. I have fleeting memories of my first school. A big building with linoleum tile floors, cinder block walls and lots of challenges . I also have a vague memory of what might be my first trip to school. Driving up in the parking lot behind Moore school with the oak trees towering above and the concrete walkway that led to the back of the institutional looking building.
So far Zack seems to be taking it in stride. Today he showed his first sign of worry. Carrie asked him if he was excited about school tomorrow. He responded “I am a little scared.”. When asked why he was scared his answer was that he was afraid he would not be able to buckle himself on the school bus . We assured him that school buses did not have seat belts. Odd isn’t it? Zack called us on that too

At 3:12pm on March 23rd of 2008 we welcomed the birth of Ziggy Douglas Ganzhorn.

We loved him immediately

7lb 1.5oz and 19″

I have posted two galleries of our new son:

I think tomorrow may be the last day that Lynn’s group works on our third floor. You really cannot call it an attic anymore.

Overall I am very happy with how it turned out. The finish could be better, but the design work is excellent! (thanks Lynn!)

I am excited about this coming weekend. We will probably have the kids moved in by then. This may be the first time in my life I have been looking forward to moving furniture.

Here are some pictures of the rooms (2 bedrooms and 1 bath) before we muck it all up with our stuff

It has been quite a while since I posted. The Christmas season is intense. Add to it a construction project in your house and it might just be too much.

We celebrated it 3 times this year. Once with the Duggers, once at home and once with the Smiths. The kids are convinced that another Christmas is just around the corner .

We bought a wii for the kids this year. So far I am sure I have logged the most hours. I played boxing for ~3 hours for each of the first 3 nights we had it. And yes I was sore!

The attic is also about done. In fact I really need to start calling it the third floor. We passed the final inspection today. The only thing keeping us from moving the kids upstairs is the HVAC. It isn’t producing any heat (mad). But the project in all has turned out really good. I will be posting some pictures of it in the coming days.

I finally got around to processing pictures. The last time I sat down to do this was Dec 18! So go check-em out.

I just processed a month full of pictures, go check-em out!

Some of my favorites:

Check-out the yellow sheen!

Yup… that is a T-bone:

I finally got my webserver reconstructed. It now runs a Celeron 430 (conroe core) and 1G of ram. With this change I now have gigabit for all machines.

A Celeron 430 is a single core conroe and runs really cool. I have it running fanless with a Gemini II heatsink. It never goes above 30C . But I still had to add a case fan to keep the 3 drives at a reasonable temperature.
I toyed around with either serving the web content from my windows box or running Zen for virtualization. In the end I could not bear the thought of not having a linux box running.

The attic is coming along. Last week they finished the insulation and we passed our inspection.

Early in this week they finished pulling all the low voltage cables (including one cat5 jack in Zoey’s new closet).

And today they started mudding the drywall they have put up. I cannot wait to get the old kids off of our floor! jk

Being a parent of 3.5 I am intrigued with what is nature and what is nurture. For example: neither Zoey nor Zack like spicy food. Zoey can take some flavor, but Zack frankly prefers relatively bland food. And neither of them can take any heat. Both Carrie and I love flavorful food. And I like food as hot as it gets. So what went wrong? Why do our kids like American cheese?!
Tonight at Torerro’s Zayda surprised me completely. She took a chip and dipped it into the salsa. Kids are copy cats and Zayda is more so then any of our other kids were, so this didn’t surprise me. But then she took the chip to her lips and gazed off into space. After a pause, she reached for the salsa again. And again, and again and was quite angry if at any time she could not reach the salsa. She was dipping chicken and quesadilla and everything else she could get her hands on. At one point she made some noises that sounded like her mouth might have been on fire but she recovered quickly.
So… is it nature? Is it nurture? I have no idea

One week later much of the attic is already framed. It is getting much easier to visualize the final product.

I took Zack and Zoey up to check it out. They know full well that these are their new bedrooms. In fact, we spent the rest of the night arguing over who gets the “big closet”. I thought for sure the issue would be the “big room”. But it turns out the “big room” has the “little closet” and the closet is more important . I guess this makes sense. Zack’s current closet is at least 6×8 and he plays in it all the time.

Oh well. I might have to resort to bribery.

On the 19th I wrote a great big check, and today I hear monsters. Or at least that is what Zack and Zoey call the workers who are finishing our attic.

With 3 kids and one on the way we ran out of bedrooms. Luckily our attic is large and has permanent stairs. We are adding two bedrooms and a bathroom. Everyone is very excited!