Ticket Outcome

I took the day off yesterday to fight my ticket in Litchfield. When I got there the clerk had me fill out some forms. I asked how it worked and she said:

a. You can plead not guilty and we'll set up a court date.
b. Pay your ticket.
c. Talk to the Prosecuting attorney and try to negotiate a better deal.

Although I think I could've won the case I choose to talk to the Prosecuting attorney cuz I didn't want to take another day off from work and drive the 1.5 hours it takes to get there.

First the Procecuter said he'd drop the ticket after six months if I didn't get another ticket and I pay the fine. I asked if he could lower the fine, which was $140. He asked what happened and I told him my version of the story and he kind of shrugged and said he'd dismiss the ticket if I didn't get a ticket within 6 months and pay a $100 court fee. Even though the $100 still hurts I settled for it.

No I just need to not get a ticket for six months.

10" of Snow

Now that we got our first big storm out of the way. I'm going to need to fire up the snow blower. Keep in mind this is a very old snow blower with only a pull start. I'm thinking it isn't going to start. It hasn't run in two years. So I'm going to be stuck shoveling. You know there's no shoveling snow in FL. Which reminds me of a professor I had in my undergrad. He used to live down south somewhere. His wife wanted to move to MN to be closer to her family. He made a deal with her. If they move to MN then she'd have to take care of the snow removal. I think this is a good idea. Since Jen wants to live in MN so bad she should be put in charge of removing the snow. She'll definitly want to move back to FL then.

And in other news I got an 85% on my final last night. I was thinking that it wasn't to shabby until I saw the class average of 92.5%. Crap, maybe I should've studied. I guess I'll have to settle for a B in the class. Dam those "All of the Above" trick questions.

Final Today

I have a final today in my Information Retrieval class (The class was basically the nuts and bolts of how Google works). Of which I did absolutely no studying for. I don't know why, I guess time just flew by so fast that I didn't get a chance to study. I'm teetering on an A so I'm thinking after this test I'll be at a B. Which sucks cuz I created a web search engine from scratch for my class project. When I told my professor what I was doing for my project he was like "Do you want to try and continue what another student started last semester" cuz he thought it would be too difficult to implement. Well I finished the project in a weekend.

I found out what some of the other projects were and this project totally kicks arse over these other projects. One girl was touting her spider, (A spider is an automated means of collecting links on a page). It took me all of five minutes to include a spider on the indexer portion of my search engine.

But whatever, I'm just against tests that one can study for and forget everything the next day. I think my project should count for 75% of my grade and not 25%. The experience I gained from my project far outweighs the knowledge I'd gain from trying to study for a test.

Did I mention that I hate tests. I'm also a whinner.

Sleep is inconsistent

Hayley slept almost 12 hours yesterday. Last night she slept about 6 hours. No biggy though since Jen has overnight duties. I get a chuckle out of it cuz Hayley will start cooing but once in a while she'll fall back asleep, but for the most part the cooing is a warning that someone should come get her before she starts crying. I can feel a huge uuhhhhh if Hayley starts crying instead of falling back asleep. Then Jen is stumbling around trying to find her glasses and then trying to find her way around. But it's not to funny cuz I generally have overnight duties on the weekends.

I'm Junk

Now and then I send myself emails from my home email to my work email. Well I just realized for some reason I haven't been getting them. So I was checking out my junk email and all my emails from home were in there. I guess I'm considered junk.

Below Zero Today

I believe today was our first below zero temperature of the season. My Exploder almost didn't want to start today and when I put it into drive it took a while before the transmission to engage. But the Exploder is still holding out. Hopefully it will last until I become rich. Which will probably be never.

This reminds me. Norm took us to lunch in his new mini van. It's loaded, dvd player built in, auto opening doors, quick configuration changing and we can't forget OnStar. It was a pretty awesome ride. However, fitting 7 fatties was still a little tight.

Back to my weather whine. I checked Clearwaters weather and it's in the 70's. Man I could really go for roller-blading on the causeway to Honeymoon island.

And then there was one or two

Congrates to Ryan who proposed to Kris this weekend. Judging from all the activity around my cube neighbors I think she said yes. I'm thinking her productivity today will be between 0 and well 0. It's kind of funny to see the difference in reaction between the two. Ryan sent out a one like email "the waiting is over" and Kris is running around spreading the news. Of the gang here at Eagan there were two left to get married. Now there's just one. That would be Matt. Well if you consider Ben maybe that's two. If Ben gets married it may be the shocker of a lifetime. What would happen if he had to spend his money on a wedding and kids instead of electronics? That could get ugly.

Weekend Happenings

Finally we have a dishwasher. After contemplating getting a portable and then remodeling our kitchen we decided to install the dishwasher we had in the middle of our kitchen and just build and enclosure around it. Green-O is handling the labor so I got to give him a big thanks for getting this done. I don't think he expected the inlaws to be there critiquing his every last move. But it turned out OK. The wife and I are so happy that we don't have to manually wash dishes.

After working on the dishwasher we had some Turkey for Thanksgiving with the inlaws. Then it was off to the Monster Truck Show. Jens dad, who recently stopped milking cows, was able to go so that was pretty cool.

Sunday we just hung out with family. I TiVo'd the Vikings so the inlaws wouldn't have to watch them. When I finally got around to watching them I think it took less then an hour after skipping all the commercials and half-time show.

And that was pretty much my weekend.

Three Months Old Today

Hayley is three months old today. Time is flying by so fast. She's grown to the point where she doesn't fit on my chest anymore. Nor does she like to sleep face down so that fun is over. But she's so much more alert and she giggle a lot now. I gave her a bath this morning and she was splashing like crazy, it was so entertaining to watch. We have a video camera and our first tape is just about full. We try to take a couple minutes of video a day. I'm planning on making a dvd of the moments and send it out as a christmas card. We'll see though if I'm not to lazy between now and then.