All I can say about last month is that I’m glad I got through it… some of my highlights included:

1. My laptop computer has been on it’s last legs for a while… it’s an HP pavilion workhorse (nx9000 series) -17 inch monitor, big hard drive, fast cpu, lots of memory, and about 4 years old with a fan that was in hyper drive and enough heat generated to warm a small room to a comfortable temp.  A year ago lines started to show up in the display.  Every month a few more vertical lines would appear.  The nvidia video driver kept freezing the operating system about 6 months ago, so I had to use the generic windows video card driver – which meant no cool video games for me.  Finally, it looks like the video card has given up the ghost.  No video on the LCD, no video on the external monitor.  So this week I finally did the research and bought a new laptop computer and have spend the week restoring backups and reloading all my applications on the Windows Vista64 operating system.

2. Chickens are evil to gardens.  I wasn’t thinking about it and planted my new seedlings that I have been growing indoors.  I went to work for a day, came back with the chickens having made a tasty meal of my little plants.  I now have chicken wire hoops around the remaining plants and am trying to figure out if there is a cheap way to energize it with solar electricity to keep them away from my poor plants.  I will also be building a chicken run.  No more free range for these little chickens until my garden gets a bit more mature.

3. Installing fiberglass insulation under the kitchen.  I live in a tri-level house.  This means there is a crawlspace under the kitchen and great room.  I have always wanted to put insulation in there to keep the tile on the kitchen floor from being ice-cold in the morning.  This month I finally did it.  As it is summer, I haven’t noticed if the kitchen tiles are colder than they used to be.  I probably should have done the geek thing and taken temperature reading of before and after.

4. Dealing with a 5 month old.  This is the age of flipping around, scooting across the floor, drool like Niagara Falls, and waking up at all hours of the night – My wife has been an angel dealing with him, but where I used to sleep through anything short of a nuclear blast – I’m starting to wake up early in the morning and taking him for an hour before I go to work so she can sleep in.  To top it off, last night my 4 year old daughter got into our bed and about 2am pushed me off the mattress…All the books say just take her back to her room, which I did.  She immediately came to “full alert”, and ran back to our bedroom.  Tired as I was, I just went and slept in the guest room.  Just didn’t have the energy to fight the epic battle of “sleep in your room”

As for the fan I keep promising to install in my daughter’s bedroom…yeah, still in the box.  Maybe tonight…after I organize the garage and finish installing the insulation under the great room, assuming she doesn’t fall asleep in her room that is.