Greene Family Adventures

It is time to do the technology upgrades. I decided to spring for a pair of iPad2s to replace the existing iPad that I bought for the wife awhile back. I am not overly excited about the iPad2 but it does seem to serve its purpose and do it decently. We are turning the original iPad into a family iPad that the kids can use and play with, hopefully without breaking it. I also bought mom an iPhone 4S as well as one for myself.
So far the iPads are fairly interesting in their portability and usefulness, but I don’t a ton of stuff with mine and still prefer a real keyboard and mouse.

It has been almost 6 months since we moved to Stafford and things are going decently. Though the grandmothers health has gone done hill recently making life a little harder on Mom, she seems to be handling the stress well.

The kids also have 2 small chickens as pets and we are planning to get some larger chickens that will lay eggs so that we can have organic eggs rather then the ones that are commercially sold.

Mom also bought a new minivan to replace her aging one, good thing she doesn’t do this that often.

For some reason I started feeling different before the new year was here.  I decided to have the family join Lifetime Fitness and I made the decision to drop 100 pounds by the end of 2010.  I have been going to the gym every day since the start of 2010 with the exception of one day a week.  A is taking introduction to rock climbing class and enjoying it very much. N isn’t ready to take a class but does love going to the gym just to play around in the pay area. Mom has not been making it to the gym as much.

N is also going to start taking Violin lessons which he is excited about.

A is still taking Piano lessons but now wants to take Violin lessons. She also starts golf this Friday after school.

For us it’s going to be a very busy year.

Since it this past weekend and with the impending freezing rain, Mom’s grandmother didn’t want to travel outside the house to our house for Christmas dinner. Instead we had dinner at her house with our family as well as my dad, great uncle and mother in-law. Everyone had a good time though and the kids got to open presents the day before Christmas. A received some American Girl doll items and N received some fun toys including a remote controlled truck that has a flat bed and can have Legos snap into it.

I have now posted pictures here.

It snowed last night and all of today. From the looks of it there was maybe at least a foot and a half of snow stuck on the ground, though more then that fell. At least there is more then that on the ground piled up.  I got to use my Toro snow thrower for about the second or third time in six years. That was actually fun and made moving the big piles of snow a breeze.

It was also amazing to see the number of people who buy SUVs or trucks and assume that because you have AWD or 4WD that it means you automatically can drive in the snow. I guess no one told them that you still actually have to learn to drive in the snow. Sort of like the people who bought a car with anti-lock brakes. As the phrase goes, Anti-lock brakes doesn’t mean you can drive on the ice. You still have to learn to drive on ice, it just means you don’t have to pump.

I have uploaded the images and they can be seen here.

A and her Brownie troop went to the Baltimore Aquarium today and my wife took some pictures of them and a dolphin that they got to see.  The images can be viewed here.

Update: Unfortunately since this was a Girl Scout function and there are pictures of other kids in the shots I have to not publish them until I have edited them out or fuzzed them out. So we just get pictures of dolphins.

Yes, I have been slow updating any status or images.  Mom has taken some images but hasn’t posted them.  I am also collecting some of the older digital photos and I will post them as I catalog them.

I also updated wordpress to 2.8.3.

For Memorial weekend we decided to go camping with two other families. I finally got around to posting some pictures and you can view them here.  For this camping trip we went to Gettysberg PA.  We toured around the city some and visited some of the historic points of interest.  We also did the audio tour of the battles. The kids were somewhat excited, but I think they had trouble visualizing some of the things they talked about in the audio tour.

Today was a great snow day. We received about 4.5 inches of snow on the ground. There was no school, and the kids got to have fun playing in the snow for awhile.  This was the soft white powerdery stuff, not the frozen kind, so it was good fun for them. Unfortunatly since I had to work I didn’t get to take pictures of them playing in the snow.

I added a couple of pictures of our dogs under the pets section. Unfortunatly, only Scrappy is with us anymore and I think sometimes she is sad about being the only dog left.