Ez’s first emergency room visit!

We knew having two boys we would be visiting the emergency room sometime. Last thursday was the first time for Ez. He and his buddies JJ and Joey were having a playdate at the house. I was at work. My cell phone rings, and it’s Am. Ever since the shaken kitty incident, every time she calls I expect her to call freaking out saying someone’s going to the emergency room. This time it happened. She was actually calmer than I would expect, but still pretty shaken up. She said JJ and Joey had “ripped” Ez’s ear, and Lara was going to take them to the emergency room in cottonwood to get stitched.

I called my boss and told him I had to go, and he said don’t bother closing, just lock the door and go. So driving to cottonwood, the whole time I’m thinking “how could they ‘rip’ his ear? Were the wrestling and pulling on it?”

I get to the emergency room, and there’s no parking. Apparently everyone’s getting hurt tonight. Once i get in, Am leads me into the nurse’s station, where Ez is sitting very calmly. He says “I got some blood on my ear, but the doctor’s gonna make it better” He takes off the washcloth and icecube, and I see it’s not “ripped” along the seam like I expected, it’s “cut” right in the middle through the cartilage. It looks like he was in a knife fight.

From what we could piece together in his story, JJ pushed him over, and he fell and hit his ear against the changing table. He must have hit it just right against the corner, because it was a really smooth clean cut.

After waiting 2 hours in the waiting room, we finally got sent back to the doctor. She was pretty cute, in her mid to late 20’s. Ez really liked her. He said “You gonna make me all better?” “You’re a very nice doctor, I like you” He kept flirting with her the whole time. He didn’t cry once, I couldn’t believe how big he was.

She decided he didn’t need any stitches, they would just use Dermabond, which is fancy doctor-talk for superglue. She used an entire pen/tube of glue on it, I guess she really didn’t want it coming apart.
Ezra\'s ear after being glued together
It’s now a week later, and the glue has come off and his ear is splitting a little. Am wanted to go back to the doctor, but I said why don’t we just put some more glue on there. She said no way, absolutely not. Then when I got home, she said “why don’t we just glue it ourselves?” I reminded her that I had suggested that only a few hours earlier, and she had nearly bit my head off. But now her friend’s sister who used to work in a doctor’s office suggested it, and it was ok. So we’re going to get some glue today, lets see if she actually lets me do it.

Halloween

Ok, so I’m really lazy and didn’t write my halloween post for almost a month. But I’m going to back date it and pretend I wrote it the next morning like I wanted to.

Halloween was a hit. I wasn’t feeling very into it this year, so I decided to re-use the Satyr/Fairy costumes from Ez’s first halloween. I had to make a whole new suit for Ez, and I made improvements all the rest.

First we went to the mall, and every shop wanted to talk to us about where we got the costumes, and Am was always proud to tell them I made them. The mall was really dead this year, there were only like 10 other groups while we were there.

Then we went to uptown. It was much busier than the mall but still not as busy as it usually is. People kept stoppping us to take pictures. Ez really liked all the attention. Every shop owner said we got the prize for best costumes of the night. Some even gave Ez extra candy because of it.

There’s a picture and more story on the halloween page. More pictures if I ever feel up to working on it.

New Computer!

After 3 1/2 years I finally saved up enough money to buy a new computer. My old computer was an Athlon XP 1700+ with 512megs of slow ram (pc2100 I think) The new beast is a dual core Athlon64 x2 4200+ with 1gig of OCZ overclocking ram. (pc3200 aka ddr400)
Windows boots a little faster, but not much, and internet browsing doesn’t seem any different. But ripping dvd’s is way faster. It used to take me over 2 hours to rip and recompress a dvd with dvd shrink. It only took me 23 minutes to rip and re-encode the Dark Crystal with this thing. I was also able to watch 9 videos at the same time without slowdown, whereas the old system could barely handle 2.
I installed Ubuntu x64 on a spare 10 gig hard drive because I didn’t have any room on my 250gig primary drive to re-partition. If I can save up any more money, I think I’ll buy a 300 gig SATA II drive. 3.0 GB/s.
I wish software vendors would get with the program and start offering 64 bit linux versions of their programs (mainly adobe/macromedia with flash) Who am I kidding, just regular 32bit linux programs would be nice, but it won’t happen. At least not til linux has a larger user base. Which won’t happen until there is more software support. Damn paradoxes. At least flash 9 is supposed to be out for linux early next year. Only 6 months behind the windows version. Until then I’m just running windows firefox under wine for sites that require flash. (Like Ezzie’s favorite: newgrounds) It seems to work fine. I wish someone would come up with an open-source format like flash, and then market the hell out of it until it became the standard. Then no-one would have to worry that a viewer wasn’t available for their operating system. They could just build it themselves. Or leech off of others who actually know how to program.

OK, back to the new machine. Super Fast. Great for video editing. Gotta start making movies…

first post

what to write?
fuzzy set this up for me, both of us hoping it will help jog my fight with writers block.
Have you ever wondered what could cause insparation?
I have found that the simplest things do but mostly its taking a drive, well having someone else drive as I do not have a license (eeck 26 and does not have a drivers license!)Ive been trying to think as to what I should write here, and as I stare at the screen I have no idea, It has to be quick as both the boys are down for a nap and any minute one could wake and chaos could ensue, but as to what I want to say or express who can tell, any hands? no well then.
Should I talk about me? Sure why not.
I am fuzzy wife of 8 years,mother of his two children. Ezra three, and Sebastian(also known as Mr.chubbersons)who is nine weeks old.
I am eccletic witch, which means I chose to believe and practice what ever I please, defenitly goddessism and that anything is possible, even that ezzie can take dragon rides or that there are a band of fairies living in the back yard (and maybe a gnome who likes house work?)I have been a witch since I was thirteen and the goddess saved my life, and I am in search for a coven in the area, but right now I’m a solitary practitioner(which means i do nothing!)
I work full time in a upscale women’s clothing store, and on most occasions I like my job.
I have obsession with vampires and were creatures and anything that goes bump in the night,I love the idea of them,the lust they inspire, the fear, and the pain as they rip out you’re throat.
also weirdly enough I love trashy romance, I have hundreds of Ideas for them, and I hope that some day I will have time to write all my books and have someone publish them.
well I guess that’s good enough of a first entry
ta ta for now
motherwitch

I’m lazy…

I’ve been meaning to post on here for a while, but I’m just too damn lazy. Ez got some funny toys for christmas I wanted to post about. Sebs is getting huge, I think he’ll pass his brother by the time he’s 1. Work is going crazy. I set up a blog for Am, though she has yet to post in it. Click the link at the top of the page to see if she ever does.

Dave gave me his old laptop, and after some soldering and re-wiring, I got it working again. Then I imediately formatted and installed Ubuntu. Took me a couple of days to get all the hardware working, but it’s good now. Then I found out that you couldn’t adjust the shared video memory without the windows tool that comes with it. Stupid Insyde bios. Never buy a computer that doesn’t have an Award bios. even Phoenix and AMI are better than this Insyde one though. The ONLY think it lets you change is the boot order. So I had to use the recovery disk to install XP again, just to adjust the video memory. Unfortunately the recovery disk only has the option to wipe all partitions from the hard drive and restore their disk image. No nice “install XP to selected partition” option. And I couldn’t get the video utility off of the disk because everything is in an unknown archive format. So I wiped Ubuntu, restored xp, changed the video ram to Max, and then reinstalled Ubuntu. I decided to keep the XP partition, and just resize it to the smallest I could get it, so that if there were any other utilities that only work in windows, I wouldn’t lose my Ubuntu again.

Wow, this was just going to be a teaser post about all of the things I haven’t posted. But you get me onto the subject of computers, and I just can’t stop talking. Ok, I guess this is enough for now.

He’s late, he’s late, he’s late

For a very important date. Jan 22nd to be exact. Sebastian was due yesterday, but still isn’t here. According to the Doctor that did the sonogram, he was due Mon the 16th. That’s a week ago…. AM is pretty tired of carying him around and says it’s my turn. We’re going to the midwife in a little bit, and going to have her “Rim” Am’s cervix. She says it’s just as much fun as it sounds. After that we’re going to walk the Prescott Gateway mall. If all that fails, I’m getting a plunger… This kid better be born tonight or tomorrow morning…

His brother was late too, I don’t know what’s up with them. They must get this procrastination from their mother.

Hopefully I’ll have some new pics tomorrow.

He’s Here!!!!

He’s finally here!!! Sebastian Osiris Fox was born on Jan 26th 2006 at 11:49pm. He weighed 8lbs 14oz, and was 21″ long. It was a long tiring labor. Amber decided to try incucing by taking 2oz of castor oil mixed with orange juice. But one sip and she threw up. Luckily that started her contractions. Neither of us could get back to sleep after that.

It took 21.5 hours of irregular contactions for this kid to come out. The contractions never did get regular. The midwife had to break Am’s water to help speed things up. My mom, her mom, and my brother Kevin’s girlfriend Tina were all there to help out. Kevin stayed in the computer room with Ezra the whole time.

I’m sure everyone wants to see pics of the new little guy, so we put some up on his brother’s site. http://www.just2ez.com/sebastian/ Let us know what you think of our new little pudge-ball.

Halloween Was a Hit

After sewing like crazy for the last few weeks, the big day finally arrived. Ezzie looked so cute in his little Yoda costume. Everyone wanted to know where we bought it, and they were amazed when I told them I sewed it.

We went to the mall first, and Klara (who works with AM) was very impressed. She sews, so she knew how much work it took to make the costumes. Ezzie had a little hood with Yoda ears, 3 fingered gloved, 3 toed feet, and the Jedi outfit I made for him back when Ep III came out. Technically the tunic and pants were the wrong color, since they were made in the Obi-Wan style, and Yoda’s tunic is very dark, but no one seemed to notice.

They also didn’t know that I was Anakin and AM was Padme. Most people thought we were Luke and Leia. One old dude even said “Hey, I thought Leia was supposed to be a virgin!” =)

Every shopkeeper we saw said ours were the best costumes of the night and we should win a prize. Most of them did give EZ twice as much candy as they gave everyone else. One lady was even going to dump her entire basket into his “pumpkin” (KT got mad that I kept referring to it as a pumpkin, since it was actually Darth Vader’s Head. I feel that it is still a pumpkin, even if it takes a different shape).

We got stopped by at least 10 people who asked if they could take EZ’s picture. And we noticed quite a few others who took it as we went by without asking. Many with video cameras too. We should have charged a few dollars a pop.

Over all EZ thoroughly enjoyed this Halloween, not just for all of the candy he got (which I will be taking a percentage of for costume construction fees 😉 ), but also for all of the attention he got. I think he liked that even more than the candy.

Check out my halloween page for this year’s costumes as well as all of our costumes from the past few years.

Ubuntu!

Ubuntu: Linux for human beings.

Lately I’ve been very frustrated with M$ wanting me to buy a legal copy of Windows XP. They refuse to let you use Firefox to download windows updates, and if/when you use IE to do it, they scan your computer to see if you have a valid product key. Who knows what else they are scanning for. I’m sure Bush gave them a little extra to help find “terr’ists”. He don’t need no warrent, God gave him the right to do whatever the hell he wants when He made him president.

To get away from old BillG and W, I’ve been thinking about going to linux. BUt my experiences in the past have been so/so. My main concern was a lack of drivers. Every time I’ve installed some flavor of linux, my network card has not worked, and I would have to go online to download drivers (if I could find them) But to get online, I had to have my network card working! So I would boot in Windows, find the drivers, then reboot in linux, try the drivers, find out they didn’t work right, re-reboot into windows, look up why the drivers didn’t work, re-re-reboot into linux, but by that time I would be tired of all the rebooting, and just stick with windows, which pretty much works out of the box.

So somewhere I heard about Ubuntu, Linux for human beings. It was supposed to be really easy to use, and “just work”. I decided to try a “live cd” first, to see if I really like it. There are 2 flavors of Ubuntu, regular Ubuntu, and Kubuntu. The only difference is the Kubuntu uses KDE for the desktop instead of Gnome. I had heard that Gnome was a little bloated and slow, so I tried the Kubuntu version first. (This was going to be for my laptop with limited resources)

I popped the cd in, went through the language choices, and waited (linux boots a little slower than windows. the thought is that you won’t have to boot often, since the system won’t crash) It goes through the “detecting hardware” phase, and says “detecting network hardware” Yeah right, like my el cheapo Fry’s wireless card is going to be detected. I had a hard enough time getting it to work in windows. The next screen says “searching for wireless networks” What?!? It actually found that card AND installed the right driver? At this point it wasn’t able to connect to my network, because I have WEP, and it didn’t ask my for the key, but at least it was trying.

Once everything is up and running, the desktop looks pretty nice, it’s stable, but still no network. I go through and try to put in the WEP key, but it’s still not connecting (I have the same problem with windows some times) Finally I decide to turn off WEP to see if that is the problem. Sure enough, it detects the network and connects automatically.

Now I decide to go through and change some settings to personalize my desktop. The dialog box is so big that the OK button is off screen. How the hell am I supposed to click OK? I search through a bunch of forums and find out that this is a common problem with KDE at 800×600 (which is the best my laptop will do) I like (K)Ubuntu enough to keep it, but I can’t deal with not being able to hit OK. So I decided to try regular flovored Ubuntu with the Gnome desktop. I like it. Gnome doesn’t seem any slower than KDE, and most importently, all of the dialog boxes are the right size.

So now my laptop dual boots XP and Ubuntu, although I don’t think I’ll be using XP very often. I’ve got Wine if I need to run any windows programs. Try Ubuntu, I think you’ll like it.

Stumble Upon

I search the web a LOT. And sometimes I run out of things to search for. I just sit there at Google, trying to think of something to search for.

I have now found a solution. I was looking for some firefox extensions for the new firefox 1.5rc3, when I stumbled upon a cool extension called, oddly enough, Stumble Upon! It gives you a newe toolbar with a Stumble! button, and when you click it, it brings you to a random page. But it’s not really just a random page, you get to chose categories that you are interested in, and it will bring you to pages that other people who are interested in the same topics feel are worth while.

When you find a page you like, you click the thumbs up button, and it will tell other people that you like that site, and send them to it when they stumble. There’s also a button to send the page to a friend, either through email, or if they use stumble upon aswell, through their stumble upon account.

I’ve found so many great pages that I would never have even thought to look for. I’ve become addicted to stumbling. Try it, I think you’ll like it.