Our weekend was sweat sweet! On Friday we called Sam and Lisa (yes, the Sam and Lisa) to see if they wanted to go to Applebee's to use the remainder of a gift certificate that we had. They graciously accepted the offer. The End. Just kidding! That's actually only the beginning.

Before beating meeting them Emilie and I stopped by Babies"R"Us to purchase a crab crib for the baby. This purchase marked the first major purchase for the baby. He now has a crib and two items of clothing.

Dinner was good and we worked off the meal with a rousing game of mini-golf at Magic Carpet. We made it halfway through the back 28 before we stopped keeping score. It was fun. I rule the mini-golf course. Not because of my incredible playing, but rather because of my implied scepter.

We stopped by Sam and Lisa's again on Saturday to drop off a birthday card and present for Lisa. I meagerly helped Sam work on the fence he is building. What should have been a quick visit ended up lasting several hours. We took a beak break and grabbed some Taco Bell and then went back for some ice cream cake, which I did not partake of. I'm not a big fan of ice cream. Emilie enjoyed it, though.

Sunday night we went to Emilie's parents house for another birthday party - this time for Emilie's dad. We made him a most excellent card and gave him a $30 gift card to Sportsman's Warehouse. By the way, the Sportman's Warehouse web page is one of the most useless web pages ever. It looks okay at first, but your mind quickly begins to boggle.

I'm shocked. Literally shocked. Mike has literally doubled the number of entries on his blog over the part few days. He has literally averaged more than a post a day (7 posts in 6 days, to be exact). This is literally more than he has ever posted before. In order to see all the posts while they're fresh I literally have to go to the page multiple times each day.

Only two days left until we get to go see Jack Johnson!

While I was building shelves last week I had the unfortunate experience of smashing my thumb with a hammer. It started turning black as blood gathered under the nail. For some strange reason, I figured I could cut a hole in my nail pain-free, since the nail was already separated from the skin.

Using a file and a knife, I cut all the way through my nail today while in a meeting at work. It was pain-free, as predicted. Whether it remains so is yet to be seen.

The good news is that I have completed my current shelf project! Although pictures would be boring, who cares?!?!

After so much dismal news, I bet you could really use some cheering up. I hereby declare this post to be 100% happy! If you happen to find any part of this entry to be displeasing, please remember that you are the one with the problem and not me. Please quit trying to bring me down.

Over the past couple of weeks we have enjoyed several incredible events. First, we had our five year anniversary recently. We never expected to make it this long, but love prevailed (and Emilie digs my hilarious jokes). The celebration was quite uneventful, though. We went to Romano's Macaroni Grill for lunch. I had a most excellent meatball lasagna and they brought us free cake to help celebrate! Emilie had plans for that evening, so we partially spent our anniversary apart. It worked out, though, because that was the day after I had stayed up all night working. After lunch I went home and slept....zzzz...

Emilie gave me a new Leatherman since I gave my last one to the Reno-Tahoe International Airport (I forgot to leave it at home and they confiscated it). My new one is awesome and now I truly feel like a leather man.

Next in our incredible journey is the exciting news that I finished reading A Soldier of the Great War! It wasn't that bad. It just wasn't really up my alley. It had quite a bit of bad language (not french), but probably not as much as other popular books. I rarely read novels, so I don't have much to compare it against. I'm done and moving on.

Perhaps the most spectacular event is Emilie's visit to the baby doctor yesterday. They checked the baby out to make sure the growth is good and that there aren't any problems. The part that Emilie was most anxious about was the discovery of the sex. Alas, it's a boy! This is significant for a couple of reasons: First, it's the first time that either side of the family has had a boy first (between my sisters and Emilie's siblings). Second, it's the first child that will carry on the Carpenter name. Very exciting indeed!

Finally, and of the least import, we discovered a great new game called Apples to Apples. I purchased it after hearing a commercial on the radio and it's been sitting in our closet, unused, for a long time. We finally tried it out last night and had a blast. Just like they advertise, it's quick and easy to learn and each round goes pretty fast. The concept seemed a little weak, but it was actually really fun. I'm hoping we can get a little game night going so we can play again.

See? Wasn't that very uplifting?

Stay tuned for tomorrow's gripping story about my thumbnail!

After a phenomenal night of Dell-frustrations, I decided to go for a little geocaching. Geocaching is usually good therapy if you need a break unless, of course, you visit a stoopid lame cache. I was on the Geocaching.com web page looking for some simple caches that I could grab quickly before it got too dark when I spied with my little eye a new cache (DOT, DOT, DARK) just up the highway. No one had found it yet and it was only a terrain 1.5. I jumped in my truck and started on my way, only to realize that I had forgotten my flashlight (a requirement for this cache). I jammed home, grabbed my flashlight and resumed my journey to the cache.

I'm not sure why, but this struck me as a stoopid cool cache. Being in the woods in the dark scares me in a way I can't explain (I'm not very tough), but I successfully located the cache without much ado. The terrain was nice and the hunt was a lot of fun. The only snag came when a certain object obstructed my view of one of the markers, causing me to spend 5 or 10 minutes searching fruitlessly.

Yippee skippy, I scored my 6th FTF.

Now, after all the joyous festivities, here I am sitting and typing on a crappy Dell. At least I'm making stoopid good use of the word "stoopid".

I want to swear.

As I sit here at work trying to finish my project, my frustration grows to unprecedented levels. Why? Because Dell computers are quite possibly the worst computers ever made. They rival Packard Bell at its worst. They are the computer equivalent of a Yugo or a Kia. Hours upon hours have been wasted just trying to get these garbage Dell computers to do what any other computer would do naturally.

I'm usually slow to anger, but I am so irritated by Dell right now that I'm on the verge of breaking computer equipment. I think I'm going to have to leave for a while to calm down. Dell is garbage. Dell is trash. Dell is stupid. Dell deserves to be smacked upside the head.

We used Dell laptops for a short while at my last job, but we quickly abandoned them because they were so horrible. They were a pain to support from the day we took them out of the box until the day they reached the end of their useful life, which was actually prior to us taking them out of the box.

Fortunately, we bought a whole bunch of Dell desktops and laptops at the new job. The reasons we quit using them at the last place are flooding my mind. AAAARRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!

I couldn't help but notice that the cop in today's Dilbert comic strip is not shooting with a gun. Ha ha.

I'm down to a pathetic 60 pages left in the book that I've been reading since roughly the time the Roman Empire fell (not really - it only seems that long!). I'm not sure why it's so painfully difficult to finish. It's not a horrible book, but I'm just not enjoying it. If anything, I should be trying to finish it as soon as possible so that I can move on to another one.

Speaking of things that I am excited to finish, I went and saw Episode III last Thursday. It was definitely the best of the whole series, but it definitely had it's plot holes and cheesy moments. I'm done and I never need to bother again.

I've been feverishly working away on the shelves that I've been building. I'm about 80% done. That reminds me, I should stop by Home Depot on the way home and get the last few things I need. I could probably finish up tonight if I tried.

Until shelves are done and I get a little more free time from work, I'm afraid my geocaching will have to be put on hold. I'm closing in on 350 caches, but it will probably be next August before I hit this next milestone.

Speaking of milestones, I notcied that the mile markers are roughly a mile apart. I'm assuming that's why they're called mile markers. If they made them out of stones then would they still be called mile markers or would they then be milestones? If they called them milestones then people might get confused because it wouldn't seem like much of a milestone.