Halloween

Now that October is coming to a close it's time for Halloween. We went out last week to purchase our pumpkins for the holiday.

I love this time of the year - the weather is great during the day and cool at night - the leaves are turning color and......

The SNOW will be here before you know it.

First we had to pick out our pumpkins - so many to choose from.

Then we cleaned the dirt off of them

Eoin thought the inside of the pumpkins were yucky to start with then he wanted us to make Pumpkin Juice.

Digging out the pumpkins was so much fun.

Carving was even more fun

It took a while to carve out the pumpkins.

My pumpkin, the tall skinny one, almost fell over and onto the floor at the end of the clip.

ATT U-Verse

Back on Fathers Day I received a wii game, Transformers, and I was getting pretty good at it but then after having it for only a few days, the game dissappeared and I could not find it anywhere.

Yesterday ATT came buy to install my new cable and internet - we are lowering our phone and cable bill by switching to ATT. In order for the installer to hook up my house for the new system, I had to dismantle my entertainment center so I could move some of it out of the way.

This meant moving my tv and placing it on the ground so I could slide the cabinet the tv sits on out of the way.

After moving the tv I found my game - it somehow slid under the tv stand. I don't know how the game got under the tv but since fathers day I have moved the tv at least 6 times and never saw the game there before. This is the first time I actually pulled the tv off of the cabinet that it sits on.

Now I have to figure out if there is a way to repair the disk since it has some scratches on it and it will no longer play.

Now that the new cable is installed and I have had a chance to use it for a little while there are a few things that I am not crazy about but I should be able to live with them.

The nice things are:

I can schedule a recording from the internet - this can be a one time recording or a series recording.

I am getting more channels but the entire package will save me money.

The picture seems clearer than the Dish and I should not loose my cable when it rains or snows. Although with the Dish we only lost reception a few times.

I now have the boys tv hooked up in the loft so they can watch cartoons up there.

I can configure each tv and block out different content on each one of them. That way when the boys are upstairs I know exactly what they are watching.

I can record up to 3 things on the DVR and watch something else - this has a price though.

Now for the items that I'm not 100% crazy about:

I can not pause live tv on the tv in the loft or my bedroom.

I have to set up all of my DVR's again.

I can watch up to 4 items on the different tv's in the house but if I am recording one item I can only watch 3 channels on the different tv's. If I am recording 2 items then only 2 tv's can watch something. The ATT tech said that they are working on providing 8 streams but they were not there yet. Right now this is not an a major issue since when we were recording something on the Dish I either had to watch a DVR or watch what I was recording.

The DVR controller is a little slow and you have to point the controller in the right direction or it does not work.

I'm sure most of these items will take some getting used to and eventually ATT should be able to enhance some of these functions but for now we will see how well it works.

The Doorbell

My house can sometimes be a zoo - if it's not the doorbell ringing for Eoin, it's Liam acting like a 3 year old. Now that he is in school I hope he will get better but if Eoin is any indication it will still be a few years before that happens.

Take today for instance - I get up from my nap and the boys are watching Zathura, quietly, for the 2nd time in 2 days. That lasts all of about 5 minutes then they start making noise, running around and playing.

Next thing I know the door bell is ringing and it's one of Eoin's friends asking if he can go out and play - before Di can get out the full 'yes' he is getting his shoes on and running out the door. It's really amazing how fast he can move when he wants to. Ask him to clean his room and you would think I was asking him to dig a tunnel to China or write a novel.

Maybe 10 minutes later the door bell is ringing again - I think to myself "Who is it now, Eoin's outside". I open the door and it's one on Eoin's friends sister - she has a habit of ringing the door bell and running to the sidewalk, This is her normal routine.

When I answer the door she mentions Eoin's name and tells me someone got hurt - she said that "she fell and got hurt". When I try to decipher the clues she has given me, I ask her if it is Eoin that got hurt and she said no that he was playing with 2 boys and she got hurt. More confused than ever at this point I ask if it was one of E's female friends that got hurt and she said 'No". I said where is Eoin and she said that he was in the next alley. I said let's go find him and see what's wrong.

I go over to where Eoin is and find out that one of the boys that came over to get Eoin fell down and hit his mouth on the ground and broke one tooth and lost another tooth. Luckily it's a baby tooth that broke and got knocked out. I send Eoin to help look for the missing tooth but they could not find it. While this is going on the mother of the boy that got hurt is on the phone with a dentist to see if she needs to bring him in right away - the dentist said that she could bring him in the next day as long as the bleeding stopped.

I check with the boys to see what happened and Bennett said that he was walking or riding his bike and went off the sidewalk and fell down. I'm just glad that Eoin was not the cause of it - he can play a little rough at times.

So I come home and a minute or so later the door bell rings. I say to myself "Now what?" as Eoin is still outside. This time it's a different friend looking for Eoin - I tell her he is in by his other friends - she says ok and goes to look for him.

Two minutes later Eoin is back asking if his friend Piper can go to the pizza party with him at school. I said that that is up to her mother. She comes back and lets me know that he mom will call us later.

30 more seconds of quiet and the mother of the girl Di baby sits for shows up and Liam and Elaine start to make a bunch of noise.

Now Di goes out to get Eoin because we are going out for a while - he will probably come in kicking and screaming but who knows.

I keep thinking about going to Home Depot or Lowes and seeing if they sell a doorbell that plays a different melody. I was thinking about one that plays a sound like Dum Dum Dum Dummmmmm or one that has a woman's voice screaming in a high pitch.

Maybe they have one I can upload a wave file to so I can change it every once in a while.