I love you Tyla! This Valentine’s Day will be quite a bit different than our previous ones, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Throwback Thursday: Learning To Walk
Elijah seems very eager to walk. As I hold his hands and walk him around the house, I think about how I learned to walk. I obviously don’t remember it, but Dad and Mom tell me that Grandpa Martens came to visit and spent most of his visit helping me learn how to walk. I wish he was here to see Elijah learning!
Sweet And Sour Slow Cooker Chicken
We heard about this one from MandyE on Facebook and really enjoyed it! You can find the original recipe from Kraft or use our slightly modified version below.
Use at least a 2 quart slow cooker
Ingredients
- 1 onion, sliced
- 1 carrot, sliced
- 1 stalk celery, sliced
- 1-1/2lb. boneless skinless chicken thighs, cut into bite-size pieces
- 1/3 cup packed brown sugar
- 1/3 cup KRAFT Classic CATALINA Dressing
- 1/4 cup lite soy sauce
- 1 tsp. grated gingerroot
- 1 Tbsp. cornstarch
- 1 can (8 oz.) pineapple chunks, drained, liquid reserved
- 1 bell pepper, cut into strips
- 3 cups hot cooked rice
Directions
- PLACE onions, carrots and celery in slow cooker; top with chicken.
- MIX sugar, dressing, soy sauce and ginger; pour over chicken. Cover with lid.
- COOK on LOW 4 to 5 hours, increasing heat to HIGH for the last 30 min.
- STIR cornstarch into reserved pineapple liquid. Add to slow cooker with pineapple and peppers after it has started boiling on high heat in the previous step; stir. Cook, covered, 30 min. or until sauce is thickened. Serve over rice.
Can be made ahead the night before and placed in fridge
GoPro FT Flyer
Now that I’m an expert RC pilot (translation: I flew about 10 minutes without crashing), I decided to strap a GoPro onto my plane and take some video. GoPros and RC planes are a very popular combination. You can even set them up to feed the video live straight into goggles on your head so you can fly the plane as if you’re sitting in the cockpit. For this first test, I simply zip tied the camera to the bottom of the fuselage, right at the center of gravity. The camera was pointing straight down so the video is nothing wonderful, but I was thrilled that it worked. As I build bigger planes I’m looking forward to doing a lot more with this type of thing.
That day of flying also had a couple other firsts:
- I got to go flying twice. (I need more than two batteries so that I can just have one longer trip!)
- As I was flying, I saw something float down to the ground. A quick flyby showed me that one of my wheels had fallen off. That made for an interesting landing.
- I hand-launched the plane a couple times since the landing gear needed some attention.
- I completed my first loops.
I’ve included the video below, but like I said, it’s not that amazing. I did fly overhead a few times though. I’m standing right next to a picnic table along the edge of the field. You can spot me for the first time around the 20 second mark in the video. This plane only has three channels (throttle, elevator and rudder) so the turns end up sliding the plane around strangely. I have a couple more three-channel planes waiting to be built but then I’m looking forward to getting/building a four channel model.
Bike Trailer
Last year, Tyla got a bike for her birthday, and we’ve been hoping to do some family bike rides this summer. Elijah probably won’t be riding a bike yet so we decided to get him a bike trailer. When I hopped online to do some research I was amazed at what you can buy for a bike trailer! We opted for the lower end of the spectrum until we prove that we actually need something fancier and settled on this very well reviewed model from InStep.
Assembly was quick and easy. Elijah fits into the straps just fine so we decided to give it a shot. He did ok on a very quick ride around the cul-de-sac. He’s a very curious kid and his curiosity was definitely winning though he wasn’t laughing or smiling. We decided to go for a ride around the neighborhood but after about a quarter mile, he decided he was done.
It’s generally too cold and/or wet for this kind of activity right now anyway. I’m guessing that by the time spring rolls around, he’ll be loving this!
MailStore
I don’t know about you, but I’m an email packrat. Steve Gibson, the security genius behind grc.com, recommended mailstore.com and I’ve been really impressed with it so far. It runs locally, sucks in mail basically any source you might have (online mail, local Outlook, Exchange, etc), removes duplicates and then indexes it all for crazy fast searches. I love having everything in this nice clean searchable format across all my various accounts through the years. It’s so much cleaner than my old mess of saved PST files and multiple web mail accounts. This also lets me delete all my old email from GMail and Hotmail. There’s no longer a compelling reason for me to let them see all my old data.
I’m still dusting off some old email archives and finding more lost messages, but right now I have 110,000 messages in this database and it only takes up 3.6GB (and that includes attachments.) Searches return results almost instantly, and if for some reason I don’t want to keep using this program, there are easy options for exporting to a wide variety of locations and formats. The only complaint I have is that it can’t detect duplicates that are loaded from the same source. So if I have a piece of mail that gets loaded from GMail and also from my Outlook cache, it will show up twice.
They have a paid corporate version but there is also a version that is free for personal use. There are probably other solutions out there, but I’m loving this one and I give it two thumbs up!
Throwback Thursday: Mowing in 1986
This was one of my favorite jobs! Dad and Mom bought this tractor the year I was born and they’re still using it today. The keen observer will notice in the background that the area between our property and the golf course hadn’t been cleared away when this photo was taken. The trees are a lot bigger now too!
New CEO
Microsoft has a new CEO! I’m sure it’s a bit intimidating to be on a list of three CEOs with the other two being Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, but I’m really happy with the choice of Satya. He’s probably not a household name (yet) outside of the company, but internally he has been doing a fantastic job.
I’ve been in his org for quite a while, and I’m particularly happy that they picked someone who is so familiar with our cloud and enterprise offerings. When you hear analysts talking about Microsoft and they only mention Xbox, Windows Phone, Bing, etc, you can mostly dismiss them because they’re missing the biggest moneymakers for the company. Satya’s org was one of the three main pillars of Microsoft’s revenue (Windows, Office and he ran cloud/enterprise offerings.) It might not be a flashy org, but we crank out around $20 BILLION a year. That’s about 25% of the entire company’s revenue and this org has seen double digit year over year growth for more quarters than I can count.
So while it would be fun to have a flashy, public figure as CEO, I’m happy that we have Satya who intimately understands the core businesses of our company. (And it doesn’t hurt that he loves the product I’m working on too!)
RC Flight Attempt #2 (And #3)
I waited all week for the weekend to arrive so I could attempt another flight. On Saturday I headed to a bigger park, checked over the plane, connected the battery and took off. My flight couldn’t have lasted longer than a second. Checking over the plane, I discovered that one of the set screws that holds the prop in place was missing. There was no way that I was ever going to find that tiny little screw in the grass so I headed to the hobby store down the road. After admitting my complete newbie status, they were able to point me to a new pack of screws and a couple other spare parts that I’ll probably need too.
The plane repair went quickly and I was ready to take off again. This time it worked! No mistakes! Eventually my heart stopped racing and I was actually able to get it trimmed out and enjoy the flight! I flew through the first battery (about 6 minutes), popped in the second one and flew through that too. The plane doesn’t fly beautifully. It’s only has throttle, elevator and rudder, but it’s still a lot of fun. I can’t wait to get it up in the air again! I might pick up a couple more batteries so that I can fly for a bit longer on each trip.
Printer Tech