Nick ‘n’ Heather

For those that our interested here is the listing for our new house.

http://www.realestatehomepages.com/mlssearch/details.asp?i=14019&p=72418&typ=res&sid=53EE8BCEA0CE4B248562DCFC4290402B&sb=LP&page=1&ln=3840052

You can view the online tour here

http://homesite.obeo.com/viewer/unbranded.aspx?tourid=564020&refURL=realestatehomepages.com&locale=en-US

Here’s a little note from today’s school bulletin in Ada.

Aaron Olson competed on Sunday in the 2009 Barnesville weightlifting competition.  Some of the schools represented were:  A-B, Barnesville, DGF, LPA, U-H, Melrose , Fargo  and Shanley.   He placed 1st in his weight class for high total weight lifted (bench + squat + clean) and also took 1st in Pound-Per-Pound in his weight class.   Congratulations.

Carley also is kicking some sports butt, she hit a home run in her softball game the other day with a few extra RBI’s the way it sounds.

We had a busy weekend this time around.  After I wrapped up work on Friday we headed out to Hutchinson for the tournament Saturday.  We crashed at Tim’s place Friday night after meeting Master Roy & Teresa for supper. 

We got up early Saturday and headed to the tournament.  Started off with patterns, then it turns out there was nobody in my division for me to compete against.  So I got myself all worked up for nothing.  Oh well, maybe next time.  After refereeing and judging for a while they did the black belt breaking.  I ended up taking first in my division for that at least.  After that I ended up running a ring for the rest of the day.  It was a lot of fun, but really tiring. 

I had one little girl smoke a boy in the head a little too hard for the controlled contact rules.  I feel bad for penalizing a kid for kicking hard, but the rules are the rules.

After the tournament was wrapped up, we headed out for a quick bite and then there was a short team practice.

We went back to Tim’s and cleaned up a bit and headed over to the hotel where a lot of the people were staying.  I ended up tossing a couple of kids in the pool as a joke and it quickly turned into a full-out carnival ride and I had like 8 kids in a constant line waiting to be tossed.  I really should have been charging for it because I would have easily made over a $100. 

Sunday morning we got up again early for a black belt class.  It was a pretty easy day because everybody was so beat up.  We did some timing drills, worked on forms and I showed a couple of wrist locks to everyone.

We finally made it home today around 5 and immediately took a nap.  Got up a bit later and started the process of unpacking/cleaning/getting ready for the week.

In sadder news, though, after I got up from my nap I found that my beloved betta fish, Edward, had died.  He was looking pretty rough a couple weeks ago, but seemed to recover just fine, but I guess it just went south over the weekend.  It’s too bad because he really was entertaining to watch eat.  Still haven’t decided if we’ll get a new fish or not.  We’ll have to see.

Well, we’re both still alive and relatively unhurt.  Heather popped a blood vessel in her right ring finger from a board break and I’ve got a nice heel bruise from one too.  Other than that though we were a bit sore and tired and that was about it.

The test went really well and we both passed, along with the other two testing.  It was a lot of fun and although Heather was really nervous beforehand she kicked some butt during it.  We’ll get some video up of it eventually, until then, here is some pictures.

So normally I don’t post a lot about what I do at work, because most people probably don’t care or wouldn’t understand a lot of the details.  But I thought I’d share with you about my new project.  I start on Monday for a company that builds RFID tags that they put in animals like pets, cattle, and wildlife.  They inject the little chips and then you can scan them to figure out what that animal is.

They are expanding their manufacturing plants and because they need to have each number for each chip be unique, we are writing a program that will verify that each chip they build has a number that has not been used in any of their other plants.  That way you can’t give your dog a chip with ID 12 when someone’s pet ferret already has that ID number.

Because of this, I got some presents for my cube for the next few weeks.  A touch screen monitor like the ones in their plant, a RFID reader and a barcode reader.  Not to mention a bunch of syringes with RFID chips to test with.

For those that know me, I’m not a fan of needles, so I freaked when I saw one of these bad boys staring at me:

Death Stick

They are absolutely huge, obviously we aren’t stabbing anybody with them, but if you catch me on a bad day I might make an exception and give you a jab.

So people have been hassling us to update the site for some time and maybe it has been a month since we updated, but we’ve been busy.  I’ve been busy at work, Heather has an interview on Tuesday and we’ve both been training like crazy for our 2nd degree test on Sept. 19.  In addition we’ve also been working on a new design for the website at http://northwestmartialarts.com which just went up the other day so check that out.  With that done I may be revisiting my redesign of this blog, because there are some things I’d like to update here too.

In the meantime, we’ve been to a couple twins games, the state fair and we’ve been making great use of our Valleyfair season passes.  We’ve had some guests, Heather’s parents and mine have both stayed down, and given Heather a chance to show off her awesome towel folding skills.  We might be going to the Renaissance fair sometime in the next couple weeks too.

We’re relaxing over labor day weekend right now, but I’m sure we’ll have more to say afte the long weekend.

So we went biking at the Falls as Heather said.  I don’t have a whole lot to add, other than some photos you can check out here

Hope you enjoy them, they turned out ok.

So we got in ok as you’ve read. We had a good time in Chicago and are back in Minneapolis now.  After the landing and supper Wednesday we didn’t do a whole heck of a lot.

Thursday Heather hung out with her dad and step-mom while I got locked in a room with a bunch of the other geeks for the whole day to discuss upcoming technologies and the future of Magenic.  It was pretty interesting to hear what’s coming in the future of technology but I won’t bore you with a lot of the details.  Thursday night the company went all out to eat at a place called Zed 451 which was pretty good if a little bit fancy for my tastes.  It’s basically a neverending meat buffet where they bring cut after cut of steak, pork, lamb, ribs and you just keep eating trying to keep up.

Friday was the conference and again Heather headed off on her own while I hung out at the Microsoft building, a lot of schmoozing and presentations going on until it finally all wrapped up around 6:30.  I got back and relaxed for a few minutes until Heather’s dad and Sue picked us up for some supper.  We ate at a seafood place that was really good and even got some dessert.  After that, Heather and I relaxed in the hot tub for a little bit which was a lot of fun.

Saturday was all free.  We slept in, which was wonderful and then walked across the street to a cool outdoor mall by our hotel.  We walked around there for a while until Heather’s dad and Sue picked us up again and we headed into downtown Chicago.  We drove around a bit looking at the sites and that was pretty neat.

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After seeing the sites we headed to Lake Michigan where Heather was immediately impressed by the soft sand.  She took her shoes off and was running through it until I made her put them back on because of all the broken glass.  There was just tons of it lying around.  We walked quite aways along the beach and you can see the skyline from there.  It was pretty neat.

After the lake we headed downtown again to get some food but the place we wanted to go was closed.  We wandered around for a while and decided to go to the Sears Tower.  We were at the top for quite a while and even got to see the sun set on the longest day of the year from the top of the Sears tower, pretty cool.  (It was also my mom’s birthday.  Happy Birthday again!)  After that we made our way back down and went to some fountain Heather wanted to see.  It was a gaint fountain/light show followed by fireworks as a great way to close out the day.

We flew back in early, early Sunday morning and slept for quite a while before making our way to the beach and just unwinding.  It’s been back to the grind since.

This weekend my parents and aunt Heidi might be coming down, and it’s also Brouse and Marisa’s going away party so it should be a lot of fun.

You’ll have to click around in this album to get a view of all our photos from the trip, there’s quite a bit!

After getting up early and all packed we are officially in Chicago. Flight was smooth, things are good so far. I’ll try to get things updated a bit each day.

Tonight we got picked up at the airport by Heather’s step mom. We ate supper and hung out with them. Tomorrow we go our separate ways while I do “work” stuff and Heather hangs with the ‘rents.

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I have also been extremely busy working on my teams entry into a contest for work.  I officially turned it in today and we will see how it goes hopefully within the next week or so.

Mostly I just want to post this to point out how excited and happy I am that Heather is moving down here shortly.  Good luck on all your tests!