I always seem to start blogging more around this time of year.

Maybe because it’s the season of reflection. Maybe it’s because I get some time off (although that surely isn’t it right now). Maybe it’s because I just feel like sharing with the world the Joys of things around me.

Who know’s.

Today’s obveservation… Christmas lists.

For the last 26 (ok, well so probably only 25 of those years), Christmas lists have been about things I want. As I got older, they transitioned away from toys, to bigger toys (video games), to things that were somewhat more practical. They were, as it were, always for me.

This year though, things seemed to have changed. Sure, there are a handful of items that you would expect to see (namely 2 3ds games that should last me awhile), but for the most part, I think the things I’m going to be asking for this year are things I want for Lincoln or my family.

I’m not sure what’s causing it… If it’s love, or if it’s because those are now the things I want to make my life better (If Link and Mommy are happy, Daddy is happy). All I know, is that it is a different attitude towards things.

So when you see my Christmas list this year, and it seemingly contains items from my Christmas list when I was a 1-year old… Don’t be surprised… It’s not that I’ve developed a fetish for collecting children’s clothes (oh that’s just wrong)… It’s that I plan on re-gifting them (in a good way).

I always find it interesting when my family changes our entertainment habits. So here goes the latest round.

About 9 months after Amber and I got married, we made the decision to get rid of Comcast Cable Tv. There were a few reasons for it including:

• They had just double our cable bill when the “triple play” went away.
• I told Amber we could get the purple charger if we got rid of cable tv
• (I felt) The amount of TV watching was affecting our marriage in a mostly negative way.

So we canceled our TV service and went to a hybrid solution of buying 1 or 2 TV on DVD’s a month and Hulu for everything else.

For the most part that worked great. Over-The-Air TV covered most of the live things we would want to watch, and TV on DVD was a great way to avoid all those commercials, and to do them at the pace we wanted.

Things changed with the birth of Link.

Amber is home more now, and has a lot of extra time while feeding him that seems to go by faster if she can watch something. Someone recommended to her that she get Netflix streaming for our Wii. I said, sure why not, and lets throw in the the 1-DVD package as well for a total of about $15.00 a month.

A few minutes later, we’ve got a few TV series queued on up the streaming (Way easier to do with the wii than it was with the laptop and hulu). We also put a few other TV series that were DVD only on our DVD list, and sure enough it was here almost the next day.

So far, I’m pretty sure we’ve gotten our monies worth out of it… Numerous episodes of American Pickers, Psych, Wizards of Waverly Place, Hannah-Montana, Jag… as well as some movies, etc. have already been watched…

Had we bought everything that’s been watched, it’d probably be in the 100′s of dollars…

Amber still says she’s going to buy the TV series that she watches over and over again (I think she’s on her 4th viewing of Grey’s Anatomy)… but I can say this for sure… Netflix has become the new staple around here, at least for now. If you have a device that supports it and makes it easy to use, I’d recommend at least trying it for a month (maybe cancel the Comcast TV for a month so you can get the triple play again the next month) and seeing how you like it.

Tonight we celebrated my Grandma’s 80 birthday. It was actually yesterday, but she had been traveling to the great state of North Dakota.

It was a great dinner. We talked about the impending baby. Grandma’s trip. The government. My cousin’s upcoming wedding. All sorts of wonderful conversation. Outback served us some great food.. But where they really surprised us was they picked up the tab. A party of 11, we had appetizers, dinner, etc… And at the end of the night, our server came over and said it was on the house. It was quite the surprise.

So consider this my giant endorsement of Woodbury’s Outback Steakhouse for all your dining pleasure. They really do make you feel like your family…

Also took a few pictures of the night.  Diane probably got some better ones .

Well, just a few more days till our little one arrives!

Well we gave the kid a deadline. He has until July 20th to figure his way out of Amber, or we’ll take him out by force.

I love deadlines.

Especially the whooshing sound they make as they fly by (Thanks Douglas Adams for the quote).

This means that I pretty much have until next week (unless the kid decides to come early) to complete some final projects around here before everything goes crazy.

I was thinking today that I should probably call a lawyer sometime soon and get things like my will, etc. in order. Afterall, a parent has to be responsible. Maybe it’s time to start putting those skills I’ve been picking up by osmosis on at work that talk about things like “The Family Bank”.

Soon… very soon. Advice on the subject is appreciated and welcomed. I’ll probably start soliciting it outside my blog soon.

Well that is all in the world of Justin today.

This past somewhat-3-day weekend was filled with basically friends, family, and what is pretty much final prep work for the arrival of the child.

We’ve been prepping so long that you would think that we were ready months ago, and for the most part we were… Just had some home projects that we’ve been meaning to get done before he arrives. The biggest project of which was to reorganize our storage, and unpack all the remaining boxes that we had since we moved in (3 years ago now… sheesh).  We bought all sorts of bins from target, generated a ton of waste (sorry Earth), and basically made it so everything is easy to find. We also made room for about 6 more storage boxes of junk (I’m guessing we’ll need it for baby clothes as the baby gets older).  So we aren’t *quite* at the point of needing a bigger house (hehe).

The weekend wrapped up with watching fireworks at Amber’s parents house. Normally I’m in Nebraska for the 4th, but because of the chance the baby might come, we decided it was best to stay here. We had a great time, and I played around a little with the camera… Nothing special, just a few shots of the fireworks which I seem to take every year. Hope everyone had a great 4th of July!

The 4th of July has come and gone, and as usual, I found myself with my family in Nebraska. To document this 4 day trip to Nebraska, I thought I would share it with you all using some photos:

Like all good visits to the farm, we started our weekend being greeted by some *wild* cats… One this year however seems to have gotten itself into a bind:

Yes, that’s a broken glass jar around it’s head. As best we can figure, it must have put it’s head in a jar, then smashed the jar into something causing it to break… Many ideas were shared over the weekend on how to get the glass off the cats head… Most of which involved a gun of some sort… However, we decided that at least for now, the best course of action was to let the cat enjoy it’s new collar.

The other big highlight of the weekend was Sophie, my cousin’s soon to be 1 year old daughter:

Sophie was almost always smiling… And she provided plenty of great photos for me over the weekend… “Sophie for President”:

“Sophie, how do you feel about Kim?”:

“I’m telling you, it went like this… No matter what he Trevor says.”:

“I’m cooler than you”:

“Ewwww… What’s that smell…”:

and my personal favorite… “I’m sorry Sophie, but you can’t go in the kitchen”:

We also did the the farm work that we do every year at the fourth, aka laying irrigation pipe. It was a pretty decent year, and if you want to know more about it, just read some of my other posts from around July 4th of previous years… As you can tell though, it is a dirty job… But hey someone’s got to do it:

And of course, we watched some fireworks… Happy 4th of July everyone! I hope you all enjoyed it!  Hey Rich and Eliz… Recognize the chair?

Last night we celebrated Makenna’s first birthday.

Makenna is one of my cousins daughters, and the “first” great grandchild of my grandma. She turned 1 on the 1st of June, and so last night we went to Chuck E Cheese’s to celebrate.

I can remember celebrating many birthdays and accomplishments in this building… I say building because I hadn’t been in this particular place since it used to be Circus Pizza. Ah…. Circus Pizza. Now there is some memories for you. There are always the highlighted stories… Things like winning enough tickets to take home a 19″ color tv (A tv which surprisingly still works well), or Richard getting his Gameboy color AND Gameboy Camera due to a mistake.

There was also a birthday party I remember having there once… Richard got me Wario Blast as a gift (a gameboy game). Price range for birthday parties was always an issue for people, but he used funcoland to his advantage (knowing that I wouldn’t care if the game was used), and got me what was remembered as my favorite gift that year (nobody else got me a gameboy game). I do remember getting Jenga that year as well… DD Yang gave it to me I believe… good game all around.

Of course there was Bumper the clown… He was always a thrill.

And who could forget the day we made Kavin cry… John and I unscrewed the lid to the pepper jar, and knowing that he would copy us when we put peppers on our pizza, he picked up the jar, shook it on the pizza as proud and as hard as he could… To which resulted in a plate full of peppers. It was priceless… even if Kavin was to young to see the humor in it .

In any case, who knows what Makenna’s first memories will be of… But even if she can’t remember, we took enough photos in the evening to tell the simple tale of her first birthday: