My Brother's Family

A 5K with Mela

Mela walked a 5K on Saturday night to support the SHADE Foundation. The SHADE Foundation is a group devoted to fighting skin cancer. Mela ran as John's Daughter in memory of her dad John Warner Mattice who pasted away from melanoma.

Mela anxiously waiting the start.



No respect for the photographer!



And she's off and walkin'...



Mela at the finish in just 45:09 minutes!

Hangin' with the Ladies

Andrew is 3 years old!!

I can't believe the boy is three! Time flies...

Andrew ended up having his "party cake" a day late. Mela and I were both sick with the flu on his birthday. Andrew got a bike, a train set and a bunch of cheap-o plastic Hummers we put on his cake.



The mud bog "party cake"...

Soccer

The Boy (Andrew) is a natural with a ball in his hands. Too bad soccer is a sport where holding the ball is against the rules unless you're the goalie.

Over For Dinner

My mom and dad came over last night for dinner. It is so nice to have grandparents who love their grandchildren. Andrew and Jaedyn just love playing with my parents.

The Home Office

This last couple of weeks have been a time for computer upgrades. Believe it or not the Christiansen household was operating on very old computers. I know you'd think that Kyle the "tech slut" would always have the latest thing when it came to computers. Not so, Kyle's personal computer was a much upgraded 5 year old Dell and Mela's computer was an even older Pentium III laptop. When videos wouldn't play in iTunes and Photoshop was running slower than watching grass grow, it was time for a change.

The first problem that had to be addressed was my wife's computer. Her laptop was so slow it was causing her to start to use my computer downstairs. Often I would come home to CouponSense.com, some recipe website or, worse yet, Disney.com up and running on my computer. I don't know about you, but I am very territorial when it comes to my computer. Mela needed a new computer! I ended up buying her a Dell Latitude D520 with Windows XP. We got it and it hooked right up to our WiFi network. Very nice little laptop.

Now, having solved the problem of my wife using my computer, I was thinking I’d just stick with my desktop for the time being. I figured I’d wait until Vista got a little more stable before I would get a new computer. Upon playing with my wife’s new Core 2 Duo laptop, I knew I’d have to upgrade.

Let me interject a comment - I was thinking about getting a Macintosh. I had two factors that made me decide otherwise:

One, the Mac I would have wanted would have been the Mac Pro which would have been $5000 (way out of my price range). It’s a shame that Apple isn’t flexible in building their computers. You have very limited choices when it comes to hard drives, video cards, and RAM.

And two, iTunes is really neat but it’s kind of a pain. I’m one of those users of iTunes who has a “love/hate” relationship with iTunes. I think the iTunes service is the best. I think the iTunes application leaves much to be desired. You’d think moving an iTunes database would be easy – it’s not.

These two factors made 90% of my decision to sell my soul - again - to Dell and Microsoft.

I bought a XPS 410 desktop with a 2.4mhz Core 2 Duo and 4gb of RAM. It also has a 256mb video card and a 500gb hard drive (that’s half a terabyte baby!!). The XPS is very fast and I went with Vista. So far, it is an awesome computer. It effortlessly runs iTunes, Photoshop and encodes videos.

Sorry for the long blog!!