Cannonball!!!!!huuuFOOMP......repeat

What used to be the Football Bean Bag is now the Special Edition Herniated Bean Bag

Winter Fun

Around New Years we took some time to go up to McCall and play in the snow. It was very fluffy, very deep, and very hot.....we swam at Gold Fork hot springs as well! Mia, Cooper and classmate Savannha got wet and cold sledding down a logging road bank and then we walked over to the hot springs, changed in a little yurt and then jumped right in. Had a great time - wish we could do it every weekend!

- and my all-time-favorite-picture of the love of my life -

Baby Colton

Here are the aforementioned pictures of one half of our two new cousins!

The New Deal

Wow! - I just noticed that there was like 40 some-odd days between my last two posts. Time flies when you get old I'm tellin you what.
Ok whatever, so I built up a new computer. Took me forever since I attempted to only buy one or two parts per paycheck but it was worth it. Not really sure why I decided to build again instead of just buying one of them nice Dell XPS gamers. Contrary to popular belief, it's not cheaper and if you're an idiot it could be slower than an refurb'd Packard Bell. Luckily I'm not an idoit and I am totally stoked on this particular combo.

Details details:

Case - Antec P182 Graphite, qty3 120mm fans

Power - PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750 Quad
Motherboard - EVGA nForce 680i SLi, Passive cooling, Dual gigabit ethernet, HD Audio
CPU - Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 2.33Ghz , 4mb L2 cache, 1333Mhz FSB
CPU Cooler - Tuniq Tower 120
RAM - Crucial Ballistix 2GB DDR2 800Mhz
Video - Gigabyte Geforce 8600GTS Silent Cooler, 256MB PCIExpress x16
Display - Gateway HD2200 22" Wide LCD
HDD - Qty 2 SATA Western Digital Caviar 320GB, RAID1 Mirrored, 7200rpm, 16mb cache

DVD Burners - Qty 2 SATA Asus 20X DVD+/-RW with Lightscribe

And finally Windows Vista Home Premium. The goals for this build were:

-A quieter, cooler pc for downstairs. I tried to find a case, power supply, cpu cooler, and video card that had either passive cooling or big slow adjustable fans. In the case are qty3 three speed 120mm fans, qty1 externally adjustable 120mm inside the Tuniq, and qty1 80mm thermal sensing fan in the power supply. Even with all that, this is one of the quietest homebuilts I've heard. And none of those chintzy little minifans on the motherboard or video card that start making a racket after 6 months.

-Fast enough to run Vista and Madden NFL 08. Superb results with both. I didn't spend the extra $200 on a high end 8800GTX because 1) it's loud 2) I'm not a big gamer and 3) I'll add another GTS in SLi someday. Madden runs at 1680x1050 with all the options turned on and looks great. The speed with general computing and browsing is fantastic, mostly due to the minimum 2gig of fast ram that Vista so desperately needs but also assisted by the cool running (only 88 deg f right now!) Core 2 Duo.

-SLi capable. When the time comes that I can't run Madden 2010 or whatever, I'll just pony up another $140 and add a 2nd 8600GTS. No noise impact, plenty of spare wattage, and double the framerates. That's the plan anyway.

-Room and wattage for future megastorage. With 1TB drives becoming normal, there's no reason why a person given the proper time and budget couldn't amass 3 or 4 of those in a RAID5 config. There are a lot of digital photos and HD video in our future so I wanted plenty of space for a couple more drives. If it had not been for this and the SLi, it would have been fun to build a tiny miniATX solution instead.

Anybody wants any more info, send me a shout. For a large premium I'll build YOU an even better one.

Hasta La Vista, you old hag

The good news is that I finally built a new chumputer. The bad news is that I haven't transferred all the files over yet, so I have no pictures to share.....but at least we're making progress here. I moved the old horse upstairs for the kids to beat, so I could just post from up there - but now that it sits out in the open, I've discovered that it sounds like a mini-jet-engine, which probably wouldn't sit real well with The Sleeping Princess right now.

However, I guess I could link over to a few things here and there to give the SpamBanana faithful(s?) something to chew on.

We got a new little cousin/nephew thingy. His name is Paxton (named after a sweet supercharger), and though I've not seen him yet, I'm confident that he's cute and small and 'just soooo precious'. Gramma Linda will give me the full report on Wednesday.

We got another new cousin/nephew thingy. His name is Colton (named after the one-time residence of the Earps). Must be an epidemic, because sure enough - I saw it with my own eyes - he's cute and small and 'just soooo precious' too! Pics to follow at some point.

Well, I do feel bad for not posting for so long. I am hoping that since I've got the bathroom floor done (future post), all the appliances replaced (another future post), xmas over with (good riddance), a new computer built (another future post), and now that I'm outta detox (spare the details), I'll be a little more regular......I crack me up. For better or for worse, it's all true.

Moving on to The New PC, which is the only other thing I can post without pics.