The Cook Family

Since McCain used Paris Hilton in his anti-Obama ad she has come back with her own.

It took almost three weeks but it finally happened. We went with my brother, Nic, out to Pickeral Lake. It was a nice day and we paddled around for an hour or so before going to the beach for some swimming.

Pictures

So yesterday Eli and I made a composter! The materials cost about $30 and took less then a half hour to design and build.

Ingredients:
1 trash can (~$12)
2 8' pressure treated 2x4 (~$4 each)
1 2' section of 1.5" PVC pipe (~$2-4
2 bungee cords (4 for ~$6)
some exterior grade screws

Mix it all together and you get a composter. I was really shocked at Home Depot when a 2' piece of PVC was $2 and a 10' piece was less then $4. I bought the 10' and have some left over. Instructables has some good how-to's on building composters of varying styles.

I reckon thirty bones isn't too bad considering something like this sells for about $200. Maybe I should start selling them to hippies at the Farmers' Market.

[Ed. Note] Bridgit and I had a discussion about the punctuation in Farmers' Market. According to the dictionary it is Farmers' Market though I wonder if it actually possessive.

So recently we went into paperless paystubs at work. That got me accelerating my hopes for a paperless life.

I hate keeping a file cabinet full of crap I will never use again

I have been slowly selecting paperless for most of our bills and stuff. The problem is keeping track and catching up with it all. Almost everything has the option to download PDF's which is perfect.

I have used Yep for a long time to keep track of PDF's but mainly things like manuals. I have been using the last free version, but if I am going to go into this full tilt I reckon I can spend the $34 to get the newer version(s).

I hooked up the scanner to start tackling the older stuff, now I just need to find a way to keep it out of sight.

So the plan will be to import pdf's right into Yep, and use the scanner to scan any paper stuff and then run it through Adobe Acrobat for OCR before adding it to Yep.

I think we are going to start opening mail once a week, and then once a month scanning.

A while ago I heard about a method for brewing coffee where you cold brew a pound at a time and make a concentrate that can be kept for a couple weeks. After researching it and trying it out a couple times here is what I have figured out.

1. Take 1lb of coffee and put it in a big jug or jar with 9 cups of water and give it a shake.
   
2. Let it sit for 10-12 hours on the counter.
   
3. filter it into a jar(s). It will keep for 2 weeks.
   

To drink I like a 2:1 ratio (2 parts water to 1 part java juice) for hot coffee use boiling water, or cold for iced coffee. It's that simple. The above recipe will almost fill two 1 quart jars.

Tips

• Use glass or metal containers so they don't smell like coffee forever.
  
• Grind the coffee at the store. Grinding a pound in a home grinder takes a bunch of loads and sucks.
  
• The coffee concentrate works great for cooking coffee flavored things.
  
• Cold brew has less caffeine and acidity.
  
• Because there is no heat there is no bitterness.
  

So I have had the oppurtunity to check out Hulu, and is it awesome. They have a good selection of shows, better then when I checked out Joost a while back. They have the full collection of the Highlander TV show, which I have been watching. I watched them on USA ages ago and seeing them in sequential order is really cool.

I always wondered how they were able to pull a 3-4' sword out of nowhere at a moments notice, and then put it back in a second into their coat without a scabbard. Forget immortals fighting with swords, this is the real suspension of disbelief.

Well, it has been a bit over a week now and having two isn't much different then on, just more of everything.

• man do they poop A LOT when they are little. We had to get some more diaper inserts .
  
• She is sleeping well, and only getting up twice a night to nurse, one of them with a diaper change.
  
• There are some more photos uploaded. Click the photos link above.
  
• Being off has been nice.
  

Yesterday I told Eli something that has probably never before been uttered to any child: "you have to eat some more pizza before you can have more broccoli." That was last night.

Tonight after dinner he snuck in to the kitchen and crawled on a chair to get a fresh, uncooked green bean that was left over from dinner.

So we try to eat pretty healthy, and we also try to feed our kids the same way. Eli refuses to eat Kraft Singles and other faux cheese. He prefers actual cheese. Apparently this has paid off.

We have slowly been adult-izing our furniture. We bought a couch shortly before we got married. The latest addition is a new bookshelf/desk combo.

The old bookshelf I had made back in college to be a huge bookshelf 4'x6'. It was pine stained "golden oak" it was functional, but not pretty. It had the metal strips to adjust the shelf height and it contained a ton of books. We decided that we didn't need most every book we own in the living room. The desk was maple top and a nice small size 2'x3' and had steel pipe legs. It was pretty beat up because it lived in my folks garage for a while while I lived there after college.

The new shelf is from Ikea (EXPEDIT) and we were able get setup with two units that pretty much fit. We still need to add another door unit in one cube and drawer unit in another.

We no longer have Abe's canoe that we had been watching for about 2 years, he finally took it with him and know that he will enjoy having it again.

So we have been down to three canoes, the problem is that only one is a tandem. If we want to go with another family/couple we weren't able to. We have been looking for a good second tandem for a while now and whenever we find one someone else gets it first. Today I got a chance to get all my news read and say a Old Town Penobscot (the ideal canoe we were hoping to find) in Ypsi. I went to look at it this afternoon and bought it. It needs a seat reapired and is ready for skid plate

Now we are back to a 1:1 people to canoe ratio. Eli is excited.

Born July 5th 2008 5:45 am
7lbs 13oz
21" log

So the plan was a homebirth, active labor started about 8pm on the 4th. After a while pushing the C-Section scar started really hurting and the decision was made that we might be close to a uterine rupture (sounds as bad as it is) so to play it safe we transfered to St. Joes around 4:30am. Baby and Mom looked like they were doing fine so she went ahead and kept pushing and the baby was born at 5:45. They are coming home today. Eli is excited to be a big brother.

Some photos are here.

There is lots of talk about gas prices these days and those with guzzlers are wanting something that gets better mileage. Edmunds has a calculator to let you find out when the fuel savings will start making the trade in cheaper. Trading in the Cavalier for a Prius would start saving us money in 879 months! Thats only a bit over 73 years!

361 months for the Vibe. If I had an 03 Suburban it would start saving me money in only 94 months.

I got home tonight and though "Apple is supposed to release new iPhones!" So I was excited to learn that the price had dropped in half to $199. Then I saw that ATT was upping the data charge from $20/month to $30/month. So your phone that is $200 cheaper all of a sudden gets $240 more over the course of the 2 year contract. Good marketing, but still more expensive. I reckon I still won't get one.

So in the past couple years RSS has exploded and brought with it things like podcasting and the like. The problem is that it is easy to have a ton of RSS feeds to keep track of. You can add them to your browser, a dedicated RSS reader, or even some mail clients. The problem I was running into was that I had almost 60 feeds that I kept track of and some of them would easily have 30 posts per day. Keeping track of them between multiple computers was getting to be a big hassle. I had to remember to add a feed to all the computers I used and then had to "read" them on all the computers and remember which ones I had already read. It was a pain.

Then I discovered Google Reader. It is web based and easy to use much like all the other google stuff out there. It also gave me one place to go to read all the RSS feeds and it remembers which ones I have already read.

So Bridgit has been complaining of an oil smell when she stops in the Caviler. I drove it today and noticed the same thing. I opened the hood expecting a leak and instead the oil fill cap was just gone, vanished. I swear I put it back when I changed the oil last. The smell has only been for a month or so....weird.

Auto Jerks has a replacement thats pretty cheap so I will pick one up tomorrow, and do oil changes.

On a side note I have been using synthetic oil in the cars because it is better for them, and I can go way longer between changes. Less changes means the oil ends up being cheaper (even though the oil is more expensive per QT) and its also better for the environment. I have been doing about 10k miles between changes instead of the standard 3k. Some say you can go up to 50k with synthetic.