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First of all, dear internet, get ready for a flurry of posts. We have so much to tell you! It’s time for some catching up. To start off, about 3 weeks ago, we had a heck of a weekend.

1. On Friday, I was running an errand for work with Joshua. I stopped near Burnet and 183 for an ambulance, but the guy behind me didn’t stop in time. Here was the result:

Our poor 1997 Honda Civic was totaled. It’s a real shame — I would have gladly driven that car for another 10 years. But we did get a nice settlement from the insurance co., and it’s all working out well. No one was hurt, so it could have been worse.

2. One of our servers for work is located in a facility downtown Austin. Since we got set up there, I have only had to go down to the facility a handful of times; if something goes wrong with that server, I can just connect to it remotely and fix the problem. But Friday night (the night of the car wreck), it just stopped working, and I couldn’t connect to it. I called the facility, and they rebooted the machine for me, but even that did not fix it. It was now 11:00 at night, and I had to drive to work, pick up the keycard needed to access the building, then drive downtown. At that hour, it’s a little spooky, but I didn’t have any trouble — I was able to fix the problem and be back in my car about 10 minutes later. It could have been worse.

3. The next day, Karianne gave a wedding shower for her friend Michelle, and it went very well. I got to hang out with Michelle’s fiance (now husband) Cody, which was fun (for me, at least; we pretty much just ran errands that I needed to do). So Saturday was going well, but that evening I ran a quick errand, and when I was pulling up in the driveway, Karianne called my cell phone.

“Water,” she said. “Water there’s water everywhere so much water.”

I asked where, she said the upstairs bathroom, and I bolted up the stairs. I ran into the bathroom, which (naturally) was covered in an inch of water, so (naturally) I slipped and my foot went into the bathroom cabinet at full speed. That hurt bad, but there was no time to think about it, so I clawed my crippled way over to the toilet and turned the water off.

Except it wouldn’t turn all the way off. There was still a slow trickle, and I was worried that if I tried to force the knob it would break off, and water would once again spew all over the place. I rigged up a way to divert the water into the bathtub, then went downstairs and called a couple of plumbers.

It was about 10 at night, so I got an answering service. While I was waiting for a call back, I took a measuring cup into the bathroom and timed the water coming out: 1 cup/30 seconds. That’s 1 gallon every 8 minutes, which sounded like a lot to me, until I checked my water bill. I’m paying something like $4/1000 gallons. So if the problem persisted for 48 hours at that rate, well, that’s an extra $1.44 on my water bill. Given that, it wasn’t worth calling out an after-hours plumber.

All in all, the plumber’s bill was $131 and the carpet by that bathroom smells a little musty (still working on that). It could have been worse.

It is a matter of public record that I am addicted to sunflower seeds, particularly Planter's.  Which explains why I was searching for a way to buy them in bulk and found this:

The unit price is printed RIGHT ON THE BAG, people.  Sheesh.  Just 'cause I (so desperately) need my seed fix doesn't mean I'm going to renounce capitalism and join a seed cult under Mr. Peanut's charismatic leadership.  Although I am mesmerized by his monocle.

Hey, It’s the Kurths!, Episode 2 is here:

Download 3:09 mp3 (3MB)

In this episode, we discuss: (1) The movie The Fox and the Hound, and (2) whether anyone will ever eat Daddy.

We have been embarrassingly remiss in posting lately, especially photos. I’d like to do some catching up, so here’s a stream of unrelated things:

1. Wedding. We went to Mark Meiller’s wedding (a sign of the Apocalypse? Just kidding, congrats, Mark :-), and Kaeta got down and boogied on the dance floor! Her version of dancing is basically spinning around until she falls over… same as mine.

2. Marty. Kaeta enjoys wrestling with Marty (how long has it been since we posted a Marty picture? Seriously, we’re just bad people, ya’ll. We still have a dog. He is fine.).

I’m not sure he’s enjoying this:

3. Sing us a song, you’re the ukulele man. I’m amazed by how musical Jonah seems. It’s hard to tell much at 7 months (he turned 7 months old 2 days ago), but he really perks up whenever I play the guitar, sing, etc. Anyway, he’s learning the ukulele:

4. Midnight Madness. On a non-kid-related note, I competed in Midnight Madness again this year (this is an “every-so-often” city-wide scavenger hunt puzzle-solving game thingy). Here’s a photo of my team (not pictured: Karianne, at home, googling for us):

That’s Colin and me in the back, Gottfried and Sara in front. The man in the background behind Colin was not affiliated with us.

Midnight Madness probably deserves its own post, but let’s get real here, when am I ever going to do that? So I’ll post a few photos from that night. Here are Colin and Sara exiting a canoe after snagging the first clue (it was written in chalk underneath the Lamar bridge):

We had to fill these Ozarka jugs with water using only Dixie cups and a sprinkler (couldn’t move the jugs). Colin was a trouper and used his hat to scoop huge amounts of water at a time, so we finished the challenge pretty fast:

Around 11:30 PM, one of the clues required us to play a video game. Colin kicked significant booty at it:

In this one, you can barely see part of my special Wifi-detecting shirt. It’s the only clothing I own that requires 3 AAA batteries. The center of the shirt lights up to tell you when you are in a Wifi hotspot. Having a light-up shirt, I found out later that night, could make you quite popular at the bars along 4th street. I got a lot of compliments from random people (I don’t think they were appreciating the nerdiness of it, though; I think they were just like, “wow, it lights up!”).

Here’s a Lamborghini Diablo we drove behind downtown:

5. Kid Update: Still cute. So much more I could say about MM, but let’s get back to some cute kid pics, right? Here’s Joel pushing Kaeta on a little car at the Tallents’ house. Amelia is in the background.

6. Dollhouse. Kaeta LOVES to play with this dollhouse, built by her Grandpa for Karianne back when she was a little girl.