I Never Promised You an Organic Garden

Introducing the newest member of the McKimmy family, Garrett McKimmy:

He is quite a handful. Very vocal and curious, but we love him. For more photos of our new kitty, check out my new photo album

After a weekend chock full of graduation festivities Matt and I are now in Virginia taking a well-deserved vacation before Nathan’s wedding.  We are having a wonderful time.  We had a bonfire Monday night to celebrate Matt’s graduation with our Virginia friends, and Tuesday we went camping.  We headed north to Cave Mountain Lake in the Jefferson National Forest, and basically had the campground to ourselves. It was a gorgeous campground with very nice campsites.

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This past Friday night (April 4, 2008) Matt had his pre-ordination interview and was approved for ordination in the Church of the Brethren pending completion of his degree at Bethany and a call (or job offer) from a church (You’ll be able to read more about his side of the story in his soon to be launched blog). In the Church of the Brethren, (I can’t speak for other denominations) the candidate’s spouse is also expected to attend this interview, along with any interviews at prospective churches. Therefore, as a good wife, I went with him to his interview. (more…)

Matt and I are trying a new experiment. We are starting “unplugged” Monday evenings. We are going to leave the computers, TV, and Wii turned off all evening. Instead, we are going to do things like read, knit, play racquetball, work in the garden, or go for walks. It should be interesting. Especially seeing as we are both quite addicted to our computers. Giving up the TV for one night a week, especially with Tivo, will be no hardship, but not checking our email, Facebook, RSS feeds, instant messengers, etc. is going to require quite a bit more self control.

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Matt and I had a great trip back to Virginia for my mom’s and sister’s birthdays. We had a wonderful time, including some hilarious Wii antics with my mom and sister. (Check out the pictures) Neither of them had ever played before, and it turned into a full contact video game pretty quickly.

We were quite glad to miss out on all the snow here in Richmond and enjoy the 50 degree weather in Virginia. I have to say though, as we were driving home I realized this was one of the first times in my life that I did not dread leaving the comfort of my parents’ house.

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Well, after two false alarms it seems we might actually be getting a “real” snow storm. It has been snowing all evening, and it is supposed to continue for most of the night. Of course, the last time the meteorologist said we were supposed to get a big snow we got 1/2 an inch.

Oddly enough I am actually looking forward to some snow. Normally it just annoys me, but this year I am longing for a good snow that I can play and sled in. It seems to snow more often here in the mid-west, but we got bigger, more substantial snow storms back home in Virginia.

I remember getting at least one big snow storm almost every winter growing up in Virginia. My sister and I would put on layer after layer of warm clothes, boots, gloves, and itchy wool hats and spend the whole day outside sledding, making snowmen, and eating snow. Then we would come in and set our wet clothes and boots in front of the wood stove to dry for round two.

Living here in the city, where the closest “sledding hill” is a 10 minute car trip away and the snowplow wipes the streets clean before any really accumulation can build, I am missing my country winters in Virginia.

1) Our Wii came

2) We stayed on top of our dirty dishes for one whole week

3) The days are getting longer

4) I have the most wonderful friends here in Richmond and back home in VA

5) I learned new shoulder exercises

6) Racquetball makes the gym entertaining

7) I am doing well on my new year’s resolutions

It is official… we bought a Wii. After three weeks of desperate searching, the McKimmy household finally found a reasonably priced Wii and accessories on eBay and won the auction.

It was quite an interesting experience. Instead of standing in crazy lines every weekend and making innumerable impromptu visits to stores that might sell them, Matt and I employed our technology-know-how to find our Wii. We used rss feeds to craigslist searches for Dayton, Indy, and Cincinnati that emailed us when a new Wii became available, and for a short time even sent me text messages. We also signed up for services like wiialert.com and itrackr.com, which sent us text messages when a wii became available in either brick and mortar or online stores. The technique that finally paid off was an rss feed to a honed search string Matt created that alerted us every minute to any new “buy it now” Wiis that appeared on eBay in our price range.

I am very excited to play with it and hopefully it will be worth all the trouble we went through to get it.

I had to bring back my “Happy Thoughts” post to mention a new version release of Picasa for Linux. (Thanks to Life Hacker and Matthew for showing me this information.) Google has finally released (in beta for now) a new version for Linux that is not only much more stable, but also allows you to upload photos to your Picasa web album quickly and easily from within Picasa.  For me this is great because I have family members who do not use Facebook or any of the other social networking sites, and this is an easy way for them to see my photos online.

I also love Picasa’s photo organization features.  I know a lot of people swear by Flickr, but I love the unified local and remote experience of Picasa.

With a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend just finished, I thought I would post some of the things I am thankful for:

• A great family (mine and Matt’s), who came all the way from Virginia to spend Thanksgiving with Matt and I
• A dog who doesn’t bark at my cat non-stop
• A job I love
• A husband who is a whiz in the kitchen among other things
• Two working vehicles
• An amazing group of friends