Category: Family

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How big is too big?

We’ve been struggling with our washing machine for the last couple weeks. We bought it used, but it was like new.

Literally used by a little old lady to wash her clothes (Sorry Barb). I think we’ve had it for 4 years now? It was a high end front loading Kenmore, but we do a LOT of laundry. Having 4 kids will cause that.

After a couple attempts at fixing the current washer to no avail we decided to replace it.

The new machine:

A Whirlpool, 4.5 cubic foot high efficiency, blah, blah, blah.

wtw6700tw-lg-2

Yeah, 4.5 cubic feet. We can wash all of the pets and small children in this thing. It’s HUGE . Not like our best robotic vacuum for pet hair but still close enough.

It was delivered today and we bought an self cleaning fish tank for the kids too. I’ll hook it up tonight and we’ll see how it goes. It wouldn’t fit down the basement steps so we had to use the other celler ‘stairs of doom’ to get it in the basement.

It must be special because it has a glass top so you can watch all the action.

😀

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Chukar Cherries WOW

My parents recently traveled to Washington. My mom brought back a bag of Chukar Cherries just for me, the Chocolate Quartet to be exact:

These things are unbelievably tasty! So if I happen to be on your Christmas list, you could always hook me up with some of these mighty fine Chocolates.

They are extremely addictive too.

ChukarLogo

And yes, I shared them even though I didn’t have too…

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Yep, we’re havin a baby…

Claudine gave me grief the other day because apparently I hadn’t yet mentioned that we’re having a baby on the blog…

Yeah you read the right; the Disher clan is expanding again.
Taking inventory,

  • We’ve been married for 18 years.
  • We have 4 Children currently:
  • Michael who’s 16
  • Maggie, 13 12
  • Molly, 10
  • Maria, 7

And we’re about to add one more. Sex still unknown and won’t be known until he or she is born.

We’re still arguing over ‘M’ names. We didn’t mean to start this ‘M’ phenomenon, it just happened.

Michael is named after my father in law, Maggie after Claudine’s great grandmother. Molly, was just a name we liked, and by then it was too late. Maria was an easy name to follow suit. We liked the name Maria and she also carries my aunt’s middle name. Jo Ann was a very special person.

Now we’re kind of hosed.

Claudine and I both have acceptable ‘M’ names picked out. Problem is we don’t agree on any of them so we’ll have to see what happens. There’s still time to negotiate.

We’ve been very blessed, no doubt about that. We seem to be the most fertile couple on the planet. Yes, we know what makes it happen.

We always knew we’d have kids. We thought we were perfectly happy with 1, then came Maggie. Shortly thereafter Claudine informed me that we were supposed to have 4. Of course I thought she was certifiable at the time, and as fate would have it, we did end up with 4, heck even after 3 I didn’t think we’d actually have 4, but none the less, that’s the case.

This one is certainly more of a ‘surprise’… We’re not exactly young pups anymore. We are still younger than some of our friends who just recently adopted their first so we’re not alone. It’s comforting to know that we’ll never be as old as them. We certainly see plenty of older couples with younger kids. In fact there are quite a few older parents whose kids are in gymnastics with Molly. So it’s not quite as unusual as I had originally thought.
Of course as luck or Murphy would have it, we got rid of ALL of our little kids stuff about 3 months prior to the incident.

But that’s OK, baby gadgets have evolved quite a bit in the last 7 years so we get to get all new stuff for the most part.

We’re certainly veterans at this. The biggest issue so far has been getting the attic finished so we’ll have room, but other than that the pregnancy has been pretty easy.

More info as it becomes available.

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Is there no justice…

All I can say is WOW! She’s not getting charged… I previously wrote how this really bothered me here.

It was all over talk radio today.

I ‘get’ that she has to live with this the rest of her life.

But this lady… Put her 2 year old in the car, and then ‘forgot’? So this lame duck prosecutor says this doesn’t make the grade for ‘Child Endangering’, it is clearly negligent.

I *knew* as soon as I read that she drove a Mercedes that no charges would be filed. This is absolutely crazy.

“While he believes Nesselroad-Slaby’s actions were a substantial lapse of due care, White said, they didn’t rise to the level of recklessness.”

Isn’t that the grand jury’s job to decide?

You ‘forget’ where you put your keys, you don’t ‘forget’ where you put a 2 year old, when they are strapped into a car seat on a 95+ degree day.

She even went back out to the car to get donuts…

“Usually, “she dropped the child off (at 7 a.m.) before she went to school,” Croswell said. “She started to go to the baby-sitter but realized at 6:30 a.m. that she would be a half-hour early.”

Nesselroad-Slaby “turned around and went to pick up the doughnuts and focused on her school projects and became distracted and forgot she had not yet dropped the child off,” Croswell said.”

So she ‘forgot’ to drop the child off? How do you do that? I’d tell you how, but this is a family oriented blog. I would bet good money that if you checked her cell phone she probably used it on the way to work. It’s people that like this that scare the hell out of me when I ride my motorcycle.

She was focused on her donuts and school projects…

Accidents happen, I get that, but this accident killed someone.

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Web filtering with Ubuntu, and Dans Guardian

OK, I have kiddies at home, kiddies that need not be exposed to some of the stuff on the net. Really it’s just too easy for them to wander off into the bushes and see stuff that a 7, 10 and 13 year old just doesn’t need to see.

Thus after much deliberation and investigation it was decided that Dansguardian was the way to go.

I initially installed the server version of feisty on an old laptop to give this a go.  It worked out OK, but the old laptop just didn’t have enough to keep things running smoothly for more than an hour. The lack of a GUI also made things a little more difficult when looking at the logs and stuff. (I was trapped in a 640×480 console environment and it just sucked).

So today I started over, again using the standard version of Ubuntu ‘Feisty edition’. If you’re using the server edition you can use this tutorial, which given it’s age has some pitfalls. Most notably you need to edit the firehol script to replace all instances of ‘%q’ with ‘%b’.

sudo gedit /lib/firehol/firehol (replace vi with you editor of choice) and replace all %q strings with %b.
This is documented in that thread somewhere toward page 7 I think.

After fumbling through that again, I figured there had to be a better way, and there is.

I opted for the Dansguardian/Web Content Filtering Only installer from the ‘Christian Edition’.

You still need to install ‘squid’ sudo apt-get squid

But after that it’s fairly painless. It also includes a pretty handy gui for tweaking the Dansguardian files.

The base network is set up like so:

Network

Items of note:

  • Not all computers are filtered, but anyone can be by using the proxy manually by configuring the browser to do so.
  • Computers I WANT to be filtered are forced to do so by the following:
    • They have DHCP reservations for both their ethernet address and through the wireless to get an IP that I want them to have.
    • DHCP also give them bad DNS info.
    • They can access printers and what not on the local network.
    • Any traffic that tries to get outside from these addresses is dropped by an Access list in the router.
    • To surf, their browsers must be configured to use the proxy .99 on my network, else they go nowhere.
  • Yes, this isn’t perfect
    • The easy end around on this is to change your IP, and hard-code it to a valid IP.
    • But my kids can’t do that (yet) and they aren’t admins on the machines that are forced to the proxy anyway.
  • I’m sure there may be other ways around it that I haven’t thought of, but for now this is working well.