The Hampton Times

Yesterday morning Angie called me at work to tell me that the Samsung TV was spewing smoke out of the top of the unit.  She smelled a burning odor, so she unplugged it.  The picture had already gone black and the unit wouldn't power up. So... I'm finally throwing in the towel on this television set.  The Samsung FP-T5084 was top-rated when I purchased it for about $2,200 from Circuit City in March of 2008.  But after 1 1/2 years of usage it began to give us problems.  We had one repair done under warranty, and then after that I replaced the main board and numerous fuses. So long, Samsung FP-T5084.  You're getting kicked to the curb. Life's Good. Yes, we bought an LG 55" TV to replace the old Samsung.  Long live the LG!

Last night, just before dinner, Dillon accidentally knocked a wine bottle into the glass front of our 10-gallon fish tank.  Luckily, the glass held together but enough cracks appeared to cause numerous spouts of water to throw about 8 gallons of water onto the kitchen floor, countertop, and into the rec room!  We had to grab all of our bathroom towels to sop up the water as it fell onto the wood floors, but there was nothing we could do to stop the water from flowing out.  The tank was too heavy to lift with the water in it and various decorative rocks and things, so we had to wait for most of the water to drain out.  I was finally able to lift the tank without the glass breaking all the way through, and carried it out onto the back patio. After the massive clean-up effort, I took Dillon over to PetSmart so we could buy a replacement tank.  Thankfully, we saved the fish by scooping them out and dropping them into a pitcher of water.  So when we got back f...

Recent Observation: I've noticed that my kids yell "Not it!" whenever they don't want to do something.  It can be as simple as me saying, "Hey, who's going to get the first bath/shower tonight?" And inevitably they all yell, almost in unison, "Not it!"  Or maybe I'll hear Angie say, "This morning you're all going downstairs to clean up the play room."  And again, they start yelling, "Not it!" I'd like to try this at work sometime and see if it works...

Disney Photos Click the link above to see photos from our Disney World Vacation 2011. It has been three years since we were last in Disney World (October 2008), and prior to that we were last there in December 2005.  We seem to be on a three-year rotation with Disney for some reason.  (Although Angie and I made a pit stop in Disneyland, California a few years back because I was attending a convention out in Hollywood at the time.) We drove down in 2005 and stayed in a house rental with Angie's family (and we only had the twins, who were two), flew down in 2008 with my parents (along with the twins, 5, and Adrian, 1 1/2), and drove down again two weeks ago (with the twins, now 8, and Adrian, now 4 1/2).  Cameron, 1, stayed behind with Mom Mom and Pop Pop and had a great time. We left on Friday morning, Dec. 2nd, around 9am from Maple Shade, stopped in Virginia for lunch at the Virginia Welcome Center, and then stopped in Darien, Georgia around 10:30pm at a Hampton I...

Our driver's side power sliding door has been acting up over the past year or so.  When you press the button inside the van or use the remote key chain fob to open the door, it will usually only open a few inches and then quit.  When it first started happening it would open pretty far and then quit, so I squirted some WD-40 inside the tracks thinking that something was blocking it.  That actually seemed to buy us some time because it started working again after that.  Over the past few months, though, the door was basically not powered anymore.  It would occasionally open about 2 inches and then stop.  Once open, it wouldn't even attempt to close when you pressed the button.  And if you manually closed the door, you really had to slam it because the motor wasn't taking over to close it all the way (you'll know what I'm talking about if you have one of these). A side effect of this problem was that our power door locks also stopped working within the ...

If you're the kind of person that keeps 4 or 5 (or more) customer loyalty cards on your keychain, or if you've got the keychain overloaded along with credit card-sized loyalty cards in your wallet, you might want to check out this cool mobile app.  It's called Key Ring and I'm sure it's been around for a while, but I only just found out about it today.  You can check it out here: http://keyringapp.com/ You'll be able to ditch the cards altogether because the app keeps your member number in your phone and it will even display a full screen image of the UPC bar code so you can have your phone act as the card itself!  For me, it means no longer having to make sure I grab the "right" set of keys before I go to a specific store, or realizing too late that I don't have my Best Buy Reward Zone card in my wallet when I decide to take a look at some electronics.  My wife and I have lost cards over the years and the bar codes have worn off quite a few ...

I know I posted theses links on my Facebook page already, but I wanted to add them to my blog as well, so here they are: Girl Upstairs "Half as Good" - Girl Upstairs "Detour" - These are "videos" for songs on which I played drums and recorded back in 2003 with my brother (Ryan), and my friends, Don, Cyndi and Pat.  We had a blast recording and a lot of fun playing shows.  We had to, really, because it doesn't pay very well.  ;-)