Pumpkin carving and general fun
This weekend was a ton of fun. Saturday we invited my mom and sister over for some pumpkin carving, we do this every year and we normally do a lunch, dinner, or lupper along with cake and other festive treats followed by the pumpkin carving, and general goofiness.
This has become a great tradition now that we all have kids. Even our neighbor joined in on the fun. I truly enjoy just getting some time to hang out with them and teach the young ones how to carve up a pumpkin.
Sunday we decided to skip church since my mom was willing to watch the kids and allow me and the wife to have a date afternoon. It was a great time. Me and Jess never get to spend time away from the kids and although we love them to peices, having a moment to sit and enjoy a meal with your partner in life is a precious thing. However, you’ll probably laugh, we took our date at Chili’s and then went to Sam’s club to do the weeks grocery shopping 
Enjoy the photos.
A Saturday of Sun, Sand, Strawberries, and Steak
Today was a good Saturday. When I left work on Friday I never imagined I would have a good Saturday as I thought I was going to have work all weekend. We started off the day by sleeping in until 9am and then watching some cartoons with Daniel when we had a suprise visit from my mother and father in law from Floyd, VA! They had just bought them a new car and wanted to test it coming down the mountain. We let Daniel play outside with my sisters for awhile while me and George caught up with things that had been going on.
We then went to get strawberries, a new tank for the grill, and some hamburgers. We all eat and played until about 1pm when the mountain folk had to go. Daniel was very sad afterword… Until we informed him that he would be spending the rest of the afternoon playing with his cousin Zach.
We went to my Mom’s where I had a ton of son duties to perform as Jess, my mom, and sister prepaired the house for her baby shower next weekend. We all had a great time and the boys got super nasty playing in the sand. We had steaks and salad followed by icecream. It was an awesome Saturday.
Thanks for reading
David Bates
CSUC09 Day 2 and 3
Cascade Server is a very capable CMS. when I went down to Atlanta I was under the impression that Cascade was wordpress with file management. Now I know that it is much more. Being code agnostic is pretty impressive but cascade’s real power is the ability to merry XML data definitions to XSLT stylesheets and translate that into compiled static pages. I learned a lot in my two days in Atlanta. Mostly from the other users at the conference… especially the boys from the University of Montana and the Canadian’s (University of Saskatchewan). The entire conference was a blast. The drive home was a different matter.
In my last post I mentioned going through Nantahala and how it was worth the extra time it took. well I wish I could say that it was extra time. I took the interstate on the way back and that turned out to be a huge mistake. I got stuck in traffic in Atlanta for two hours, drove across two states, and then got stuck in traffic in Charlotte for two hours. so total drive time was about 9-10 hours versus the 7 it took me to get down there. needless to say if I go back I’ll be taking the route in my previous post, down HWY 19.
Again great time meeting people and learning about higher ed web development.
David Bates
