Parentheticals

These past few weeks have been fairly difficult. We all ended up sick we discovered bad news about our house and Gideon stepped on a goat head. As you all know we have been out of our house for about 4 months now because we have been having a home addition put on. We recently discovered that the contractors that we hired are involved in government investigations because they seem to be ripping people off and not completing their houses. Once we discovered this we immediately stopped paying them and also told them that they need to finish our house before we pay them anymore. We got a lawyer also.  We discovered that they never got a permit for construction, so everything that they have been doing has been illegal. We are currently giving them one last chance to get a permit and finish the job without us paying them and if they fail to do that we're going to have to find a new construction crew to finish the house. This has been very stressful and annoying to us. Grandpa Mike also g...

This last week was pretty eventful - especially Thursday. The beginning of the week was pretty normal - killer hot, but otherwise not particularly remarkable. On Thursday morning Alison's phone stopped working, and upon opening it up, Mike discovered that the battery was bulging. Apparently we accidentally bought the exploding kind of phone for her, but it was a dud. Mike has lent her his phone, and with her sim card in his phone, we have tried to make things work out for the remainder of the week. We bought a new battery for the phone, but it will take a few days to get here, so until mid next week Mike will be without a phone. Later on in the day when she took the kids to the Dalyias house, Alison noticed that a bunch of lights on the car dash had all started lighting up at the same time. She drove the car home, and told Mike about it.She determined that it might be the alternator through google, and Mike called the mechanic Friday morning to see if we could bring it in right awa...

Alison and the kids went outside a lot this week, and almost every day the kids got to play with the Dalyais. That made it one of the best weeks for the kids. It's nice to have good homeschooling friends. It also gave Alison time to work on rewriting the science curriculum she loves into a more usable form. Alison has also been working about two hours every night this week (one time she had 5 back to back English classes). She made almost $200 last week, which is pretty good considering all that she does is teach on the computer from 5:00 - 7:00 (before the kids get up). On Tuesday Mike went to his design guild meeting, and presented his witch hunt game. He made a 9 card version of it, which was very well received. Mike also got back a rejection from a publisher for "The Citadel of Madness" this week, so he is going to shop it around a bit more, as he thinks that it is a great game. While he was at the BGDG, Alison and the kids went to their martial arts class. It h...

My new job is going well. I am working writing code to load test the web sites and writing code to ensure that the QA engineers know if bugs crop back up. They gave me a cell phone with unlimited texting, so I can receive texts now. SaltCon went really well. I was there for about 12 hours, and played about 8 games of Polynesia (among other games that were brought by other people). I gave away two copies of the game to someone that won a tournament and someone that won a raffle which I held. We came up with a few possible minor rule changes which I have to evaluate to see if they will fix some small problems that cropped up during the game. The math trade went well. I got Small World and Ninja Vs Ninja, and I also sold 5 D&D books that I got from the library book sale for enough money to buy Dominion Dark Ages. Rea, Mom, and Dad played Ninja vs Ninja. Rea mostly moved the pieces around and made it hard for the adults to remember where they were supposed to be. Today Rea ha...