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So far, 2010 has not been a great year . . .

In January:

• Kimberlie’s mother died

In February:

• Mackenzie gets kid-mono.  Between the two of us, we spent almost two weeks away from work, doing nothing but this:

  

In March:

• We went through a tough eating-out hiatus.
• T-ball.  Need I say more?

In April:

• Tristan learns to stick things where they don’t belong.
• Tristan has a major accident during a day trip.
• I went to the doctor (for the first time in 20 years).

In May:

• A house catastrophe.
• No raises at work.

In June:

• I ended up in 2 graduate classes during a 4-week summer semester.  Of course, I ended up with A’s, but it was a tough month.
• Mackenzie ended up sick (and very irritable) for half of our trip to Philadelphia.

And now, July:

• The cat chewed up my Macbook power cord.
• We lost our “free” cable and I my iPhone and digital camera went for a swim . . . in the same week.
• Ants seem to invade a different room of our house everyday.

Of course, there are things that have been happening (or not) all year:

• The stock market has really sucked for the last few months.
• I’m 31 and still not rich enough to retire.
• Publisher’s Clearinghouse still hasn’t knocked on my door.

Don’t get me wrong.  I still love my life.  But even number years just never work out for us.  2008 was equally as bad.  2007 and 2009 were fabulous.  Let’s hope I can make it through the next five months alive!

I told you I still had those 25-year-old Tinkertoys!

With Toy Story 3 taking over the theatres, I’ve been thinking a lot about some of the toys from my own childhood.  We recently visited the Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia and found that they had many of the toys from my childhood in mint condition.  Please forgive the photo quality.  All of these toys were photographed from behind a glass case with horrible lighting conditions.

These Fisher Price blocks popped up around 1976 and I popped out three years later, so naturally I had a set:

I also had one of these, although it remained at my grandparents house:

I miss my Construx set.  It was like an erector set for kids:

The Spirograph was awesome:

I have this exact set of Tinkertoys (on the right) in my attic:

My favorite toy growing up were Legos.  I still have thousands of Legos in my parent’s basement.  I wish I had room for them at my house.

I also had this Snoopy Sno-Cone machine.  It looks like this one is missing a piece — the red shovel.  The Snoopy on top served two functions.  You pressed it down to push the ice through and you turned it upside down to squeeze the syrup through.

I had this Popoids before I got into Legos:

I still remember the jingle “Pogo Ball is what you call it”.  And I had one:

I also had this exact Tonka truck.  Tristan has something similar, but it’s bigger and the quality is much less.

SuperSoakers were the watergun that every kid wanted.  I remember the SuperSoaker 50, SuperSoaker 100, and SuperSoaker 250:

My sister and I had lots of Little People sets.   Little People are still around, though they’ve evolved over the years.  She had the nursery set, seen below:

My sister was also very much into Barbies.  She had the McDonald set seen in the next two photos.  I’m trying to do whatever possible to steer my daughter away from Barbies.

So what does a museum do with surplus toys? Build sculptures of course! This is a real size sculpture of the arm/torch from the Statue of Liberty, constructed of old toys:

This is an life-sized elephant, also constructed from toys:

Who know’s what the next popular toy is going to be?  Right now, “Silly Bandz” are all the rage.  If you’ve looked closely at photos of my kids recently on this blog, you’ll see that they have an arm full.  The museum even had some on display, and they’ve only been around a few short months!

Of course, this is not my complete “Toy Story”.  I had tons of cool toys.  But visiting the museum and watching Toy Story definitely brought back memories!

So this is what I was doing seven years ago . . .

(Sorry for the low quality picture. This was before we were 100% digital!)

This video is over 8 years old, but I recently converted it from VHS to digital (apologies in advance for the low-quality).  My sister and I went skydiving with a friend from college in 2001.  I had to go with Vimeo because YouTube sucks.  First, there were length issues and then they didn’t like the licensed music.   Enjoy this flashback!

Skydiving from Jonathan Davis on Vimeo.

Every Easter morning as a child, my mother made my sister and I stand in front of the house in our fancy clothes for a picture. I used to hate it. Eventually I refused and I always swore that I would never subject my kids to such foolishness. But then, apparently, I got old.

Easter 2010

Easter 2009

Easter 2008

My kids, unlike their parents, love to get dressed up.  Maybe it’s because we don’t force it on them like it was forced on us.  This year, we didn’t even buy “Easter clothes”.  In 2008 and 2009 Tristan wore the same pair of shoes and in 2009 and 2010 Mackenzie wore the same pair.  No rosy background this year.  We pruned them to promote new growth.  And look in those pictures at how much weight Monk has lost in the last two years. (I’ll save a Monk update for a later post when I’m in more of a creative zone.)

Now I see why my mother did this to me!

I hope you had a Happy Easter as well!

Here are some of my accomplishments and favorite memories for 2009:

I completed my first half-marathon and marathon, as well as sliced 4 minutes off of my best 5K time.

We visited Walt Disney World SEVEN times in 2009, compared to once in 2008.  (You won’t see this on next year’s list!)  We celebrated both my 30th birthday and Tristan’s 6th birthday in the most magical place on earth.

I visited for the first time: Colorado, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

I began working on another masters degree.

I fell in love . . . with my new iPhone. Ha!

I cut two years worth of hair off.

Tristan learned to ride his bicycle without training wheels, and then later got a new bike.

My kids got to see their first Georgia snowfall, and then later  got to play in six feet of real snow for the first time.  I had never even seen that much snow before!

I went on field trips with both Tristan and Mackenzie.  So much fun!

I volunteered at Tristan’s school — my alma mater — Heard Elementary school.

We went roller skating.  It was Tristan and Mackenzie’s first time ever and my first time in 20 years!

I saw the space shuttle launch at night from the beach — although it was from 200 miles away and not quite as I originally planned.

I’m finally learning how to make money online. My blog made $2019.94 (compared to $78.41 in 2008).  Guess I’m getting a 1099 this year.  If I could sustain those percentage gains, I wouldn’t have to work anymore!  (Of course, if I were a professional blogger I would actually have to blog more.)

I ran 497 miles in 2009 (compared to 343 in 2008).  That’s pathetic, but I’ve been dealing with pain injury pretty much all year.  I’m even wearing a brace on my left foot as I type this — trying to recover enough to run next week’s 5K, half-marathon, and marathon.

Of course, there are many things that I’ve left out.  You can read my blog to find some of them, but there have also been (many) times where I’ve been too busy or lazy to blog about it: such as our Six Flags Trip or Discover Macon, etc.

2009 was overall one of the best years and it was much much better than 2008.  Let’s hope that 2010 is even better. Happy New Year!

So I looked at the calendar yesterday . . . and it’s August? 2009?  Where does the time go?

Instead of apologizing for not posting in the last week or so, I’ll just tell you what I’m up to now:

Tuesday we are headed to Six Flags.  We only go when we have free tickets because it sort of sucks.  We scored two free tickets off of mycokerewards.com and bought a $15 ticket for Tristan off of a twitter special.  Mackenzie has been taught that being two at Six Flags and WDW saves Daddy lots of money and I think she’s OK with that.

Thursday my boy starts kindergarten.  25 years ago, that was ME starting kindergarten, but the blur between then and now called life happened so here we are.  He’s going to the same elementary school that I went to and believe it or not, there are a lot of teachers still there . . . including my 1st and 3rd grade teacher and the principal!

Work is hell. School starting back is enough, but over then summer there has been over $1,000,000 worth of construction in our building and the technology that comes with that isn’t just going to happen by itself.  On top of that we are suppose to have a new website (first time in 5 years) by September and our web developer conveniently quit in June.  That leaves me working literally 7 days a week, sometimes around the clock.  This weekend was spent getting familiar with Drupal, our chosen (but not my me) CMS.

My half-marathon training plan is on.  That’s all I’m going to say about that.

I’ve been sick pretty much all week, but I don’t have a choice except to keep going.  I went 120 hours without drinking coke, which was a major feat for me!

Also, classes start back for me in a few weeks for that stupid graduate program I put myself into.  This semester I dropped everything but one class so that I can deal with all of the above.  I’ll be taking a class that deals with artificial intelligence in game programming (fuzzy logic, probability, and a few other things I could spell out here to make myself sound smarter).

So obviously, I’m still working on “getting all of my ducks in a row”.  (That’s Rachel’s phrase.)  And when I do . . . this blog will be BACK!

This has been a beautiful weekend!

Saturday, we were up bright and early so that I could run the 5K at the Dogwood Festival in Perry.  Last year, this was one of my favorite 5Ks, so I had to do it again.  And, at $10 per person, I put Kimberlie and Tristan in it too.  I nailed a personal record, shaving 30 seconds off of a race I did 2 weeks ago.

Afterwards, the kids went to a birthday party for one of Tristan’s classmates and then Kimberlie and the kids planted flowers while I got things done around the house (that’s code talk for checked facebook 9000 times and read email and blogs).

This weekend’s pictures are courteous of the law school’s new Canon 50D.  Back in November, I wrote about the law school’s new Canon 40D.  I waited over 2 years for the law school to budget for a nice camera for our building, and as soon as I got the 40D, WMG (worthless marketing guy) stole it from us.  After my complaints reached the right people, we were given permission to order a second camera.  Of course I chose a nicer one.  I love the 50D!

Today is my and Kimberlie’s 6 year anniversary.  After church, we had a nice meal and then came home and took a long nap.  It’s rare for the entire house to take a nap at the same time.

Just now, I was looking back through my old blog (LiveJournal), which is intentionally not linked here and has been abandoned.  It’s always good to read your old blog entries.  I actually blog more for myself than others.  I always have.  Anyway, were my goals for 2005, as typed almost exactly 4 years ago:

• Lose 15lbs (I’ve gained 25 since I got married. LOL)
  Comment: didn’t reach that goal.  I’ve actually gained 14 more!
• Exercise more
  Comment: didn’t reach that one intially, but I have now.
• Watch less TV
  Comment: same as the exercise one.  There seems to be a parrallel between watching less TV and exercising more.  Who knew?
• Keep the house cleaner
  Comment: Ha Ha.  Having another kid was not the way to do it.
• Spend more time reading
  Comment: Do blogs count?
• Cut down on Coca-cola (I’m down to about 4 a day now)
  Comment: I only have 2 a day now!
• Make more money than in 2004
  Comment: I don’t think I did that in 2005, but I certainly do now.
• Be nicer to people
  Comment: Ha Ha yet again.  Now, I just avoid people who don’t deserve my nice side, and even some that do.
• Get more education/industry certifications
  Comment: Yep, got CCNAed in 2005, but it has since expired.
• Keep up with my LJ more (this has been one before)
  Comment: Actually I took a little break from blogging, until this year.
• Get life insurance (I keep putting it off)
  Comment: I have a job that has life insurance now.
• Not get a haircut, until it starts to affect my income
  Comment: Another one I didn’t accomplish in 2005, but have now.

Now I should come up with some goals/resolutions for 2009 . . .