MichaelandChrissy.com

Chrissy took a year off from work so that she could stay home with Aiden. She had planned to go back to work next August after this next summer vacation. However, the substitute who took over her class for the year also got pregnant, so Chrissy will be returning early in order to cover her sub’s maternity leave. This sort of works out for us, since she’ll get an extra six weeks of pay and also be eligible for summer committee work, which she normally enjoys.

Chrissy is excited to be teaching again, but she’s also a little hesitant to leave Aiden. She has been with him every day for the last eight months, so there will be some separation anxiety. And Aiden is just starting to do many things for the first time — he’s starting to crawl more efficiently (move those knees!) and he babbles in monosyllables all the time. She doesn’t want to miss that first word or the first time he pulls himself up onto the furniture, and I don’t blame her.

It was a really nice day outside, so we took a naked Aiden to the local Dairy Queen in Highland. He wasn’t entirely naked; he was wearing a diaper. But that is about as naked as he has ever been outside of the bath tub. Normally, he’s all dressed up in a cute little Pooh Bear outfit when he leaves the house. Then again, we don’t normally expect him to coat himself with melted ice cream.

The girl behind the register gave us a weird look when Chrissy plopped our near-naked boy on the counter. It was only apparent to us that he was not wearing any clothes because we didn’t want melted ice cream all over his clothes. It’s easier to wash him than his Pooh Bear overalls. We ordered a small vanilla cone for Aiden and two small chocolate-covered chocolate cones for us.

It turns out that Aiden likes ice cream, but can only eat it by planting his face directly into it. This led to a tremendous mess that kept us from eating our own ice cream, which quickly melted in the hot sun. Chrissy wanted to eat outside on the park benches, so the people driving down Kennedy could see our naked baby, covered in melted ice cream. Lots of people smiled or waved. It was a little embarrassing, but I really wish that we had brought the camera.

I have been anxiously anticipating the release of the Shivering Isles, the new expansion pack for Oblivion from Bethesda Softworks. It took a few weeks to find a copy, but I snatched one up as soon as I could. The problem is that it’s difficult to find time to play you’re working full time and then updating the kitchen or feeding the baby. I have to wait until after Chrissy goes to bed to play the new expansion pack, but it’s worth it.

Bethesda has been releasing small updates over the internet, but these are just additional buildings or objects without much new content. The expansion pack adds on a whole new plane of existence named the Shivering Isles, which is supposed to be about the quarter of the size of the original game. The gameplay is the same (I was a bit rusty at first), but there are new monsters, new terrain, and plenty of new NPCs (and they’re all insane, which is kinda cool).

Bethesda has done a lot of things with the game that could not be previously done. For example, when you first enter the Shivering Isles, you meet a new character named Haskill in a small, dark room. Once you agree to enter the Isles, Haskill walks out of the room, and then the walls turn into butterflies that surround you and fly away, revealing the surrounding landscape. Very cool.

Chrissy and Karen hammered out a plan for the seven of us to head out to the Museum of Science and Industry. We like to get the babies together every so often, and it was a real nice day for an outing. Chip and I drove our baby strollers in the most dangerous fashion (with babies on board), nearly running over several bystanders in the process. Museum trips can be fun.

This was the final week for the Body Worlds 2 exhibit, where they display plasticined cadavers in various poses. It was a little crowded at first, which caused Trip to bail prematurely, but it opened up by the second display room. Dead bodies are kinda neat when they’re dissected for your visual pleasure.

We were hoping to have dinner together as a group, but the museum was closing and there were no microwaves to warm up baby food, so we split up after the exhibit. Aiden has no problem with room temperature baby food, so we just fed him in the food court. The security guard tried to run us off, but Chrissy would have none of that. Having eaten already, Aiden slept soundly on the way home. It was a good trip.

My Uranium stock picks had been doing very well. Overall, my portfolio was creeping up on a 50% profit. I was seriously thinking about selling some stock and taking my profits off the table. Jim Cramer, from Mad Money on CNBC, recommends taking profits in equal relation to the rise in percentage, since you never know how long the stock will be up. In retrospect, that would have been a very good idea.

The first Uranium stock consolidation hit and took my profits back down to 25% over the course of two days. I was expecting a slight pullback, but not a 25% drop. Now I’m kinda aggravated that I didn’t take some of that money back, since I knew full well that a consolidation was expected. However, I am in it for the long term, so I guess the best course of action now is to ride it out (and keep this in mind so that I pull out my profits before the next consolidation next April).

Aiden’s main mode of transportation up until now was to roll around on the floor. He was also able to “Curly Shuffle” to a new angle and then roll off in a different direction. This was enough to get him to any point in his little universe, the living room floor. It was at this point that Chrissy and I decided to install a baby gate at the top of the stairs (complete with motion-sensing night light, which has come in handy many times already).

Now Aiden is crawling! Well, maybe not crawling, per se, but he is able to drag himself across the floor like a paraplegic (no offense to any actual paraplegics who might be reading this). Unlike paraplegics, Aiden is terrible cute while dragging himself across the carpet. He’ll occasionally look up and smile real big and then keep crawling away. He has made it to the baby gate now, so it’s a good thing that we got it installed!

I’m starting to see a lot of Uranium news now. The spot price for Uranium hit $100 per pound, which is significant — it’s a psychological barrier that traders have been waiting for. We expect to see the price go to $125 or $140 per pound by the end of the year, but the $100 mark made the news and now more people will want to get in on the bull market.

I can tell that the general public is starting to find out about the uranium profits, since Cameco stock recently jumped up a few dollars all of a sudden. It would seem that Cameco would be a great Uranium stock, since it is the biggest Uranium producer in the world and is listed in the US markets (CCJ). However, what newbies won’t know is that Cameco’s biggest mine, Cigar Lake, is under water right now, which is what has kept the informed investor away from that company.

I’m more than happy to see the prices on my own stocks go up as demand from the general public increases. I just wish that I could invest some more before the hysteria catches on. My sandbox has grown by 25% since I started trading in early March. My hope is that it will grow to 50% by June, and then I’ll take some profits and reinvest in whatever Uranium stock is poised to jump.

Chrissy bought another ceiling fixture today, the same kind that we got before. It would have been great if the last one hadn’t crashed to the floor into a million sharp, tiny pieces. This time, however, I would be installing the new light with toggle bolts, which would insure that it would stay put for the indefinite future.

The problem here is that the type of toggle bolts that I got were not guaranteed to work. I had originally put six screws with plastic anchors into the ceiling, one for each pre-drilled hole in the fixture. Since the plastic anchors had pulled free, they left holes in the ceiling large enough to push the unopened toggle bolts through.

I now had six toggle bolts in the ceiling (three on each side), perfectly lined up with the fixture’s pre-drilled holes. I hoisted the fixture up to the ceiling and started driving screws into the toggle bolts. The first one took, the second and third didn’t. On the opposite side, the first and third took, the second pushed up though the ceiling. I was pretty aggravated by this point. So I did something drastic.

I was using the toggle bolts because I didn’t have a ceiling joist above any of the pre-drilled holes. I knew where one of the ceiling joists was, so I measured 16 inches over (to where the next one should be) and drilled right through the fixture into the joist above. Four times: twice in one joist and twice in the next one over. This ceiling fixture isn’t going anywhere.

Before the cabinets arrived for the new kitchen, Chrissy and I had decided on a new ceiling fixture. We wanted to replace the one that was already there with the same type, only with an oak casing in the Arts and Crafts style. Chrissy picked it up from Lowes and I would install it over the weekend. I decided to do it the weekend before Easter, since I wanted to get it done before we had the family over.

The old fixture was installed with only two screws (one into a ceiling joist and one supported with a plastic spreader). I wanted to put the new fixture exactly where the old one was (to cover up the dingy ceiling over it), but I couldn’t get into the ceiling joist from there. So I used six screws with plastic spreaders, easily enough to hold it up.

I was pretty proud of myself when I finally got the fixture wired and it turned on. And that’s why I was completely crushed when it fell from the ceiling at midnight on Easter Eve. There was a huge crash when it hit the floor — Chrissy and I thought that someone was breaking in! There was glass and wood bits everywhere in the kitchen. If it had fallen just six hours earlier, any number of my family could have been hurt.

Luckily, nothing was hurt except for my pride. I should have used toggle bolts to hang the stupid fixture. Chrissy and Aiden bought another one today and picked up some toggle bolts while they were out. I’ll try not to lose another ceiling fixture in the future…

We had a very nice Easter weekend. Chrissy had volunteered us to host this year’s Easter gathering for my mom’s side of the family. Chrissy went all out and cooked a turkey using Alton Brown’s “Good Eats” method. It turned out very well, so this may end up being our traditional “family recipe”. Chrissy also made Easter baskets for all of the kids.

My entire family showed up, which was a pleasant surprise since there are more babies in the family now. The downside was that my kitchen was still under construction. Nobody seemed to mind though. Entertainment was covered, since we had the Playstation 2 downstairs for the kids and the big screen upstairs for everybody else. That worked out until it was time to open the Easter baskets.

We started off with an Easter egg hunt for the kids, of which we seem to have a lot of now: Zach, Dillon, Jordan, Jerzie, Aiden and Langdon. As is tradition, Aunt Paula brought Easter baskets for everybody. I was confused during the planning and thought that Chrissy and I would be expected to provide baskets for the kids (since we were hosting), so the kids got two baskets this year.