Liloia.com

Cacti

The other day while we were hanging out at Tara's parents house, Trevor was playing at (as always) being a ninja or something. After some seriously heavy kicking, jumping and rolling he tumbled across the floor on his socks and slipped into the living room.

From the other room we heard the howls of a boy in distress and jumped up to see what was the matter. Trevor had bowled himself right into a cactus that was placed on the floor alongside the sliding doors to their living room.

All along his right upper leg were miniature cactus thorns stuck into his pajama pants in little bunches. I made him take off the pants and then inspected his leg to see how many had pushed all the way through.

Luckily only a few had mad it that far, but many were lodged in his hands, arms, feet, toes, etc. etc. It took more than a few minutes to clean him up. In the process I was lucky enough to grab a few for myself and was picking thorns out of my arms and hands for the next few hours.

Last night, in our living room in Vermont I found another one stuck in my pinky. It had survived more than 24 hours and almost 400 miles from New Jersey to Vermont. I don't think that I will be getting any cactus plants in the near future. :)

Long Ride

We just got back from our trip to NJ and spending some time with our families. The ride back was almost 8 hours and I am not interested in taking any long trips anytime soon. It was nice to see everyone and we had a great time visiting.

Check out the moblog for some pics of family from over the vacation.

We have a few more days at home and then unfortunately I have to head back to Boston for a few days. Grr.

Nothing But Mountains

You know you're a geek when you find yourself on a highway in rural Vermont, on your Treo, googling, then mapquesting the closest Starbucks. (Then blogging it.)

There isn't one until we hit MA... must... find... caffeine...

Camera

Some commentary on the Treo so far. I am noticing that the quality of pictures on the camera are of a much higher resolution than my old camera phone.

Take a look at the moblog (upper left corner of main page) and click into it. Aside from the text listed on some pics touting the new phone, you can also tell the difference due to the higher quality images.

Not to mention...being able to watch Cinemax on the couch while posting is awesome.

Almost Christmas

We are two days away from Christmas and I am looking forward to the time off with the family. Yes, both Tara and I will probably be working even a little bit each day next week even though we are off, but it will be fun nonetheless.

Right after we finish up opening our presents we will be heading down to NJ to spend some well deserved time hanging out with the family. Unfortunately we will only get two days with each family, but we will make the best of it.

Regarding Christmas I am going to leak one of Trevor's presents here. We were able to snag one of the new Nintendo DS systems for him. All of the stores around here (and probably all over) are sold out of them and we only got it because Trev has the greatest Uncle (pseudo, but uncle nonetheless) in the world. Clay let us have the one he snagged so Trev could have it for Christmas and didn't charge us 5k for the thing. Thanks for being a good friend.

Can't let Tara..

...have all the fun.

Ok, so I'm not on the new Treo but I can't let her get the only shout out to it. This thing is awesome! I have never seen anything this bad-ass (sorry mom) since Terminator 2 showed us that cyborgs can be liquid metal.

I am slowly working my way through transferring my contacts over to the Treo (because even though we are in the year 2004, they still can't transfer information between two of THEIR OWN DEVICES) as well as reading the manual (349 freaking pages!) so that I can understand the thing and make the best use of it.

So what does it do?

- Camera
- Camcorder
- Calendar
- Address Book
- Web Browsing
- AOL IM
- Text messaging
- Downloadable games
- MP3 Player

oh, and I can make calls with it too. heh.

Tara rocks.

From I-93

My Christmas present to Dave this year was a Treo 650, but guess who got to post to Liloia.com with it first? Mobile web access is just about a requirement for me at work. (In fact, I posted to Blog for America with the Treo just a minute ago.) I think I'm hitting someone up for one of these tomorrow...

We spent the weekend in Boston, since we ended up with a paid hotel room in MA. Yesterday we had a festive family dinner at PF Chang's, then saw House of Flying Daggers at Boston Commons and finished the evening with decadent desserts and ice wine at Finale. Even Trevor had a fantastic time.

Working At Home

The other day, Tara decided to work at home with me in the afternoon. She lasted all of an hour before she needed to "grab something from the office and do some errands"

Before she left, she apparently said this to her friend on IM

"You know, I thought working from home with Dave would be fun. Chatting, working, and just being together."

"It turns out it's a lot of Dave talking loudly into the phone with people about scienc-y stuff and making angry faces at me from his side of the table."

Welcome to my world. :)

Harvard Sucks

Is there anything better than duping a bunch of stuffed shirt Harvard Alumni's into degrading their own institution? I think not.

Fun Sunday

Today ended up being a solid Sunday, with a little bit of something for everyone.

We started out the day by heading over to Shalimar for our standing appointment with their Indian brunch. The place was packed with little room to even move between the tables. Trevor was very glad to see his friend Tutu there (the son of the owners) so that they could play outside while Mom and Dad ate lunch.

Then we hit the local Mega-Lo Barnes and Noble store to grab some coffee. You would think that an area that boasts less than 50k people in the area wouldn't need a monster store like that. You would also think that it would be empty in there. Not the case.

Trevor and I read some books about Japan, since he is learning about it in school and Tara did some shopping. I was able to hold his attention until one of the books mentioned that the majority of robots in the world are in Japan. After that the conversation was overwhelmed by how much he wanted a robot of his own.

Next we ran a few errands and stopped off at the Vermont Gift Barn to do a little Christmas shopping. We had intended to stop there for quite some time and finally turned into the parking lot. They don't only have the normal kitchy souvenier stuff, but also sell a wide variety of products from local artists. Plenty of artwork, pottery, glassware, etc. We ended up chatting with the owner of the store about some of the pottery which ended up being his own work. All in all it was a pretty cool place and the maple syrup candy rocks.

Our last stop of the day was to nab a Christmas Tree. The place we picked is a local lot that is run by a family next to their own home. We got a very nice 7 foot Frasier fir (which I love) and put in into our living room in front of the sliding doors.

Fun fun.

Out of the Loop

Over the last month or so we have been having a problem with Liloia.com that has prevented us from being able to post entries. Tara and I have intermittently attempted to fix the issue, but with our schedules and the fact that we are work-a-holics makes it tough.

Tonight I tested the issue and it seems to be working. We didn't change anything, but the problem has resolved itself. So I have to say to myself, should I just be glad that it is working again or concerned that the problem just "magically" went away?

Anyway - Stuff has been happening. Maybe we will start posting again more.