Today is West Virginia Day (celebrating West Virginia becoming the 35th state of the United States), and bloggers in West Virginia have been challenged by local blogger Jason Keeling to help define new stereotypes for West Virginia. I'm sure we have all heard some jokes about West Virginians marrying cousins, or our lack of intelligence, or lack of running water, our extreme poverty, or a myriad of other things, but what is West Virginia really like?



I'll start by saying that I am not a native West Virginian. I was born in Eastern Kentucky. I'll have to start another day for Kentucky bloggers to address the stereotypes for Kentucky, many that are shared with West Virginia. I have lived in West Virginia since the end of 1985, so I consider myself a West Virginian. We moved to West Virginia when I was in sixth grade, and I have lived here ever since. I did attend college out of state (I received a full ride scholarship so who can pass that up), but upon graduation I got a job here, found the love of my life, and have begun my own family.



West Virginia is a great place to raise a family. The crime rate is low. The schools are far better than our national average would have you believe. (Did I mention my scholarship was for academics?) We are patriotic. We have strong family connections. We take pride in who we are and our accomplishments.



Most of West Virginia is rural, and so our way of life here is typically more relaxed than those who live in areas of higher population. Some see this as a detriment. It's true that we don't have everything right within our reach at any time of day or night. However, I see this as a great benefit to family. You are forced to spend more time with your family. You are forced to be creative in finding things to do. You can take time to enjoy the more important things in life. You can take time to smell the gardenias.



West Virginia is a great place to work. Often times, I complain about my commute to work in the morning, but compared to many places across the USA, my drive to work is a walk in the park. There are a lot of interesting places to work, and a lot of interesting jobs to be had here in West Virginia. You could get a job doing anything from river guide to a software engineer working with cutting edge technology, and everything in between.



And who could write about West Virginia and not talk about the majestic beauty that can be seen almost everywhere across this state. West Virginia is home to some wonderful parks. We have one of the oldest rivers in the world that provides some of the best white water rafting anywhere. We have an abundance of wildlife in our state. Our mountains are by no means the largest in the world, but they do provide some great skiing in the winter, and help to promote a feeling of coziness as towns are nestled among the many valleys. We have many lakes and rivers, and ponds that provide great fishing, boating, and a host of other outdoor activities.



West Virginia has so much to offer. It amazes me that such negative stereptypes still prevail. Hopefully through this small, but concerted effort we can open everyone's eyes to this wonderful place.



Happy West Virginia Day everyone!

We've begun to do some repairs around the house. First up, we began with the privacy fence. When we bought the house about eight years ago, one of the first things we did was to redwood stain the privacy fence. Apparently, the lady who owned the house before us didn't think that a privacy fence needed to be stained to maintain it. Well, here's a newsflash for her and anyone else out there. If it is wood, you better stain it to protect it. Well, we did, and that helped a lot, but it had already suffered a lot of weathering, along with many vines and trees and whatnot that had grown up behind it, it was not in the best shape. But after some basic work on it, it shaped up alright. The only thing that we didn't do that we should have done in hind sight was to take it down completely and stain the back side of it. Hence the repairs we started today.

One of the posts had completely rotted at the bottom and so we removed that post and put it in a new one. Somehow we managed to remove the piece that was left when the top part broke off and kept the basic hole intact. That really helped to reseat the new freshly stained and pre-treated 4x4 post. We had two 8 foot panels to replace. There will be more in the near future, but we are starting with the two worst cases. Well, after all of those weathered years, the fence has sagged some, and has moved some, so fitting the new panels proved to be more of a chore than we had originally anticipated. But perserverence paid off, and the new panels are now in place.

All that we have left to do is to restain the rest of the fence. We'll get that done during the rest of this week. After that, we have some ew gutters to install around the back porch. We also need to do some repair work to the back porch as a result of not having gutters, and then we'll be on to some work inside. It's going to be one busy summer.

No, its not some expensive new toy. It's not a new car. It's nothing fancy. But it's the best Fathers' Day gift ever, if you ask me. It's the simple things that mean the most. Happy Fathers' Day everyone!

We went to the Jones Reunion today. We are related to the Jones on my father-in-law's side of the family. They can be traced back to some royalty in France, I believe, through Jeremiah Jones' wife, Susanna Agee. It's always a good time. We get to socialize and reminisce. We had a big group this year too. It was nice to see lots of new faces, and get reacquainted with old ones too. There's lots of good food. We'll have some great entertainment. This year, we had the Blues Brothers. They had a great show!

We went camping this past weekend. Not typical camping though. Yes, we set up a tent, and all that, but our day was not spent a campground, but rather next door at Kings Dominion. Not everyone got to enjoy it, though. Austin's arm is still in a cast, and with the weather forecast predicting record hit, and the fact that we didn't want to re-injure it, we decided to let him stay with Grandma and Grandpa.

The weather prediction was right. It was hot! I mean HOT! Heat index of 105 to 107 for the weekend.The heat apparently kept many people away as the park was not very crowded, and the lines were not very long. Most everything was more-or-less walk on, and that made for a lot of coaster riding. We rode every coaster there, except for Volcano. By we I mean that I rode every coaster, and Hannah rode all of the ones that she was tall enough for (including Rebel Yell, and Anaconda). I was able to ride in the front of the new coaster, Dominator. It was a great ride. Kings Dominion acquired the old Batman ride from Geauga Lakes, re-themed it, and renamed it to Dominator. Very smooth ride. I highly recommend it.

We are planning on going back later this month when Austin finally has his cast removed, and are going to try to meet Elliot Sadler when he is there. Some other planned trips for the summer including Dorney Park (for the first time), Carowinds (for a second time), Kings Island (despite the fact that Austin broke his arm there), and Cedar Point. As always, we'll post lots of photos for everyone to enjoy.

Ride On!

Our ice cream maker arrived at Wal-Mart today via the site-to-store shipping. This is not your run-of-the-mill-crank-forever-until-you-have-ice-cream ice cream maker. Oh no! This is a ball that you roll around all over the place to make ice cream. So while it is no faster, it is a lot more fun, especially for the little ones. After mixing the ingredients, putting them in the metal cylinder inside of the ball, and filling the rest of the ball with ice and rock salt, the fun began. And after about a half-hour, we had homemade ice cream. And it was pretty good too!

Less than a week, and here I am posting again. Miracles never cease.

We got a croquet set this weekend, and have been playing that some. For what is touted as a simple game, it sure does have a lot of rules that can get very complicated, very fast. I found a nice variation on it though, called Poison, that seems like more fun than the traditional way where you keep points. The only downside to all of this is that I have yet to win. Kim has won every game so far. Its pretty fun though, and if you have never played, I highly recommend giving it a try. It is worth it.

I have decided to keep my blog look the same for now. I started to make some changes, but decided that I still like it for the most part, so Simpsonized it stays. At least for now. I have put the links back to my original games (for Mac only). I do have a re-vamped version of Kaboom that I have posted as well. I'll post the Windows version sometime in the near future.

Lots of new photos are going to be added in the coming days. There has been a lot going on since I last posted any photos, and so I have a lot to post.

Well, I have really neglected this site for a long time. It's not that I have not had anything to say. It's not that I haven't wanted to say anything or post new stuff. It's simple the fact that I have been lazy. I am going to try and start to post to this thing on a more regular basis. I plan on redoing the design as well, and since I use RapidWeaver it should be a simple matter of just picking a new theme. The current theme I created from scratch, and while cool, it was more work than I really want to do again, so simple it will be. But, hopefully, there will be more content. Till next time whenever that is.

We went to the Amish Country (Sugarcreek, Ohio area) this past weekend with a group from my sister-in-law's church. We had a great time. Awesome food as always, and Kim picked up a few things that she wanetd to get for decorating the house. We saw quite a few Amish folk out and about doing business and such while we were there. They have such an interesting lifestyle. I think it would be quite interesting to learn more about theur lifestyle. I would like to try it sometime, but definitely could never do that full-time now having known all the luxuries we enjoy. But they seem quite content, and they definitely know how to enjoy the simple things. Hannah really liked seeing all the horses all over the place. She loves horses, so it was like a dream come true for her to be around so many. She got to pet one of the ones pulling an Amish buggy. I thought that was really nice of hte gentleman to answer such a simple request from a little girl. I took a few photos while we were there, and I have posted those in the photo albums area.

One final note: the Kaboom game is finally done, and I will be posting it to the site here really soon. Be on the lookout.

I spent most of the morning today making repairs to our gutters. The previous owners obviously no idea how to install gutters. As a result, we have been fighting various problems with our roof on our porch, as well as gutters that basically did nothing but watch the water run past them. So, we have been working on getting all of those items fixed little by little.

The first problem we had was with the roof on our porch. Since shortly after moving in to our house about 7 years ago, we have been working to resolve a leak in our porch roof. After a lot of tar, and various other attempts, we bought metal roofing, and I installed that this summer. We thought that would solve the problem. Nope, the leak returned. We knew now though that the leak was not coming from the roof on the porch though. During a heavy rain storm, my wife, her sister, and their dad found that the problem was from water coming off the main house and running behind the new metal roof, so with some aluminum, he created a flashing to divert the water away. Problem solved, right? Well, it was for a while. But it returned. We finally solved the problem though by adjusting where he had placed the flashing. He was on the right track but had not fully stopped it. It's stopped now though.

Along with fixing that, the front gutter on the house didn't do it's job eirher. When we bought the house, we stipulated that we have a new roof installed. We got that, but the roofers obviously didn't understand that you really need to have a little bit of an overhang on the shingles for the gutter to work. Add to that, the fact the previous owner didn't understand that the gutter really needs to be near the roof for it to work, and that the gutter needs to have a flashing to make it work correctly. So, while we were finally fixing the porch roof problem, I took some more aluminum and created a nice flashing that extended the flashing above the gutter down into it. No more leakes there.

But hte gutter problems are still not gone completely. Fun, isn't it? Yeah, that's the way I saw it too. Ad yes I was being sarcastic. So, now that hte gutter on the front of the house doesn't leak, and hte porch doesn't leak, a new problem arose. See, I didn't mention that the gutter that was leaking didn't run to a down spout. Oh no. It just run open onto the porch. Remember, we replaced the normal shingle roof with a metal one. Well, water flows very fast down the channels on a shingle roof, and doesn't dissipate like it does on a shingle roof. So, now we had water from almost half of the entire roof flowing down into the gutter and onto a single channel of the metal roofing, so we ended up with a real nice water fall over hte front porch. Well, when it would shoot over like that, it filled the front gutter so fast that it overlfowed, and would flow down off the gutter and backwards onto the porch, and our porch was once again soaked, but not from a leak. So I had two more problems to fix: 1) the overlfowing gutter, and 2) the drastic amount of water being sent to the porch. Well, I solved those problems today. First, I installed a new downspout so that the water that ran into the gutter on the front of the house would not end up on the porch. And then, I intalled some curved guttering and runoff boards under the gutter off the front porch. See, the previous owner thought that it was ok to run the gutter straight down and not away from the house, but directly onto a flat rock. So when we got a heavy rain it couldnt drain from the gutter fast enough, and overflowed it over hte top and onto the porch.

So, most of my gutter problems are solved. I still have a new gutter I need to install on the back porch. It doesn't even have one, and we get a lot of water on the back porch as a result, and had to replace it once, and I am going to have to do some repairs to it as well. Lesson learned. Gutters are very important to have on a house, and even more important to have them installed correctly.

Just got back from Kings Island once again. This was our third trip there this summer, and should be our last for the year. Of course, you just never can tell. We had a great time as usual. The weather was perfect. The most odd thing I had ever seen there though was that the kiddie-land was crowded and all the big rides were pretty close to walk-on rides, or had very short lines. Hannah rode the Vortex for the first time today. She really liked it. She rode Top Gun for hte first time today. She thought the ride was too short (So do I!). Kim and I rode Flight of Fear. That's the first time we have been able to ride that together in a long time. Kim's sister Brenda came with us, and she watched the kids while Kim and I rode. That was a huge help. Austin rode the pirate ship for the first time today. He really liked it. He rode the Shake,Ratte, and Roll too. It's like the Scrambler, but you go up in the air. He really likes the "air-time" type rides. I posted some new photos as well, so check those out too.

We have just returned from our second trip to Kings Dominion. As always, I posted some new pics for you guys to enjoy. This trip was better than the last in some ways, and more exciting in some ways too. Last time, we had all the fun of a tent collapsing while we were attempting to put it up in the rain. Then we had to repair it (and thankfully Kim remembered to remind me to bring duct tape!). This time we managed to get the tent up in one piece, and didn't have to fight the rain. Near the end of the trip though, we had quite a storm, and a big branch from the tree directly above us, broke and fell, missing our tent by mere inches. The rain poured, but we only had a minor leak from when the air mattress was leaning against the edge of the tent while we were in the park. The campground did refund us a night's stay which I thought was a great gesture on their part. We weren't upset about anything, but it sure does make you feel good to know that they want you to feel a little bit of relief after going through that. Or maybe they are trying to avoid a lawsuit.. Either way, I'll take anything free!

I did make some time this trip to build some campfires, and I learned that pine needles make great fire starters (Insert clever Smokey the Bear joke here). We managed to ride some things that we left off last time around, and Austin became a bit more brave, tackling the Triple Spin, the Scooby Doo Ghoster Coaster, and the Flying Eagles and Avalanche more times than I can count. Hannah rode the Anaconda in the front with me, and I got the chance to ride Shockwave and Flight of Fear (I rode this at Kings Island as well, but at Kings Dominion you can see more of the track which makes for a better ride.)

During the rain one day while in the park, we took shelter in the loading area for the Avalanche, and we spent some time chatting with a couple of the workers. They were great, and after the rain quit, we rode the Avalanche like eight or ten times straight without ever leaving our cars. The front of that ride is awesome, and if you get the chance to ride, ride up front.

Back-tracking a little bit, while we were in line to enter the park on our second day, a gentleman came up to us, and gave us a free meal tickets to a all-you-can-eat buffet in the Picnic Grove sponsored by the DC Police. Apparently this fellow and his family couldn't make it, and had a prior appointment, and he didn't want the tickets to go to waste. We ate great, and if that fellow happens to read this blog entry, my family and I want to send a BIG THANK YOU to you. The food was great, and we ate more than we should have. I had a hamburger, a barbecue pork sandwich, roasted chicken breast, ice cream, cake, salad, and rolls. It was quite a meal. (Note to Saturn: when you have Saturn Day at Kings Island again, contact the planners of this feast.. you could take a lesson or two.)

Overall this was a great trip. I am not sure if this is our last trip of the year, but if it was, it was a great way to end the year.

We took another trip to Kings Island this weekend. There are new photos posted in the Kings Island photo album for this year. Overall, a pretty good trip. At the end of the day, we return to our van to find that I had left our portable fridge hooked up to the cigarette lighter, and our battery completely dead. Thankfully, Kings Island has a great customer service group, and within 5 minutes of talking to the customer service folks, the van was running. This makes the second time I have drained my battery using that portable fridge. This is one time I wish that the cigarette lighter plugs didn't function when the van is off. But aside from that, a good trip.

As you can see, work continues on the site refinements. I hope to have this more or less done before too long. Then, I can post on other topics. For now, I kind of want to document my thought process during this site redesign. Mainly, so if I decide to do it again, I can look back, and think, "Man, that was a lot of work.. Am I really sure I want to do THAT again?"

On a more serious note, I really like how it is shaping up. I am still working on the movies section, but the photos section is right where I want it now. I changed how you view photos. I think it's more intuitive now. I liked the fly-out postcard thing I was using, but viewing pictures wasn't very intuitive for the less technical among us. Now, I think it makes more sense having a continual running slideshow that you hover over and control, if you like.

In addition to changing the photo slideshow and viewing, I tweaked the navigation a little, so I hope everyone can find what they are looking for. Along with these changes, I added some more photos to each of the albums, so there is new stuff to look at. There will be more photos in the near future, so keep an eye out.

I have almost completed the look-n-feel for the new site. It shouldn't go through the drastic changes it has seen over the past few days, as I tried to determine just how I wanted it to look. Changes on tap for the coming days are mainly refinements to what I have in place, and adding more textual content to the pages.

If you notice the date/time for this post, you may be thinking that my clock is not correct, but sadly, it is quite correct. I am actually up this late. Have you ever gotten into one of those moods where you were just having so much fun, the time flies by, and you don't seem to tire? Yeah, me either, but this is pretty close. I am enjoying the re-design of my site, and I have always enjoyed being creative graphically (though I am not very good at it). And then I get into this mood tonight, and I just can't seem to quit, though I am going straight to bed after this post. I know I will be more or less worthless tomorrow, so its a good thing that my schedule is not too bad right now at work (and if my boss is reading this, then my schedule is crammed tight and I couldn't possibly do any more).

It's late now, so I'll stop here. More to come.

I am using a program called RapidWeaver to maintain my site now. It's fairly flexible, and its not tied to a specific hosting setup like iWeb was. iWeb was nice. It was easy to use, but managing uploads of changes to a website was tedious unless you were using a dotMac account. RapidWeaver is more flexible in maintaining your site, and appears to have a great community effort behind it, as well as a lot of great theme creators. It handles publishing just the changes, and allows you to mark things as not changed too. So you could, for example, work on multiple parts of the site at the same time, but only publish the changes that you want. That could prove quite useful.

So, now I have my site basically setup, and I sent an e-mail to several folks I know who used to frequent it, and let them know that I finally managed to update it. Then, I find that the navigation I am using is not as intuitive as I would like it to be. For some reason, when someone clicked the photo albums link, they expected to see photo albums right there in the main content area. Well, I knew this going in, but in an effort to get the site out there more quickly, I opted to not do that. Well, I am changing that now, and I think the result will be a lot better.

For now, I don't have comments enabled on my blog. I have done this for a few reasons, but mainly, I don't want the hassle of it. If you want to send me a comment, e-mail me. Everyone can still send me comments, but they are not there for the world to see. This has two benefits. One, it saves me from having to screen comments (I don't spam comments, and I don't want comments with questionable language), and two, it gives readers who want to comment anonymity, so maybe they'll be more apt to send me a comment. I don't expect to have anything on here that will send someone into a fit of anger, but you never know. So, to maintain the dignity of my site from a potential hideous comment flame-war, I have opted to not have comments enabled.

I'm sure man of you who used to read this blog, I have all but given up on me. Probably most have given up on me. Well, I am back, and I hope to get this thing going again. It has been quite a few months since I have devoted any time to this. I think I had just lost interest in maintaining it, and I got involved in some outside activities.

I have completely re-done the site. All the old content is gone, and has been replaced. I simply want to start fresh. If I try to maintain old stuff, I'll probably get tired of converting it, and will fall back into a lazy mode, so I am opting to start fresh.

As for news and such, a lot has happened since I last posted many moons ago. We have taken a few trips, and you can check those out in the photo albums. We have been busy around our house doing maintenance and the like, and the kids have been enjoying the summer. Our church just finished up our VBS a few weeks ago, and you can see some videos from that in the home movies section. Man, that week really wore me out. I created videos for each day's activities, and had those ready to be played for the kids the following night. But since I didn't take any time off from work, and VBS didn't let out until 9:30 PM or so each evening, I was up late putting these things together. Still, it was a lot of fun, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.

I have finally got around to working on re-writes of my games. Mainly, I am doing this for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, I want to make them available to more folks, so I a re-writing with portability in mind. The new games will be provided for Mac and Windows. They will have a better game engine behind the scenes which should enable these games to run smoothly on a wide range of hardware. IN fact, I am developing them using an old 500MHz G3 iBook with 320MB RAM. For the techies among us, they will realize that this is paltry specs for a development machine. Doing this allows me to ensure the game will work for those who have not upgraded to the latest and greatest (this includes me, obviously. The first game that is being ported is my all-time-favorite, Kaboom. It is nearing completion, and should be available in the next few weeks. Maybe sooner if my schedule allows.

We are planning a couple more trips before school starts up, so I will get photos from those trips posted as well. It has been quite a summer, and I am sure fall will not disappoint. I am glad to be back, and I hope I still have a few readers left. Maybe I'll get some new ones. IN any case, readers or no, I am going to do my best to post more regular. Take care!