How the time does go by!

Eight years ago today, I put Jill on a plane to San Diego.  She arrived eight hours after our first grandchild, Josiah, was born.  We have the indescribable privilege of being in San Diego today to celebrate his 8th birthday.

The day started with his mom treating him to doughnuts, one of his favorite foods. His special request was for a bacon maple bar.  I can tell you, it was a good choice. Auntie Tara, who got up at zero dark thirty yesterday and flew down for the occasion, was snoozing this morning, and Laura and Judah had to go out. So, Grandma and Grandpa hung out with Josiah, playing games and watching Phineas and Ferb.

When Laura got home, we spirited Josiah away for an afternoon of fun.  First we went to In 'n Out Burger for lunch. Yumm! Josiah was presented with an official In 'n Out Burger hat.  Then it was off to Toys R Us, where he got a helium balloon, a paper crown and the chance to pick out his own birthday present. 

Later in the afternoon, we were invited to Mr. Don and Ms. Char's house.  They are across-the-street neighbors who treat our Josiah and Judah like their own grandchildren. They had ice cream sundaes and presents for both Josiah and Judah, whose birthday is on the 19th, i.e., next Monday. Over the years, Jill and I have become very friendly with Char and Don. I expect we will go out for lunch or dinner with them next week.

We came home and found that Tim had come home from work a bit early to celebrate the birthday.  We had Tim's dad's recipe pot-roast for dinner, at Josiah's request. Then we had Baskin Robbins ice cream cake for dessert, complete with self-relighting candles.  Josiah got a kick out of that.

So, now it is bed time for the boys, and the adults are ready to hunker down for the evening. The best part of the day, for my money, was that Josiah was a perfect gentleman.  He was patient with his little brother and grateful for his gifts.  There was never a hint of self-importance expressed.  Thank you Tim and Laura, for giving us such wonderful grandsons.

Annual family getaway at Pacific City.

We are at Pacific City for our third annual family gathering.  We have all of our kids and grandkids with us.  It's the best time of the year. We arrived yesterday to find the funky little beach house has been renovated. We knew there was a new owner who was upgrading, but we didn't know how it would look.

Well, it looks good. It's still funky, but it is more liveable.  The floors are all new. The formerly locked hot tub room has been turned into a game room with a pirate theme. It is really cute. And wonder of wonders, we have wi-fi!  The kids who have to do work can do it, and the rest of us can post on blogs, etc.

I took Pogo out for her morning duties and met up with our dear daughter-in-law, Katie. She had taken her dog, Brillo, and all the kids out for an early morning stroll on the dunes.

After grandma Jill made breakfast for everyone, the kids had fun playing with the iPad.  Even the not quite 2 year old enjoys wi-fi.

Later, grandma and grandpa and Pogo took a walk on the beach.  It is beautiful here.

 After hiking back up the dunes, we sat on the warm sand.

After a while, the rest of the family showed up.  Of course, grandpa forgot to get pictures of that.  I'll try to do better.

Ubuntu to the rescue!

I have been toying for some time with the idea of installing Ubuntu (oo-BUNT-too, a Linux OS) on my older laptop computer. So, last week, I did just that.  So far I am impressed. It is very stable and very fast (reboots in under a minute!!).  The only problem I am having is that, to date, I have been unable to get the Ubuntu machine to "see" my  Windows OS machines on the home network. They can see the Ubuntu machine, so I am sure it is some setting on the Windows machines that needs tweaking.

At any rate, one of the things I like about Ubuntu (aside from the fact that it is FREE) is that it comes with just about everything you need on a computer.  Firefox browser is included along with an office suite called Libre Office, which is almost a duplicate of Open Office, the suite I use on my Windows computer. Both are compatible with MS Office; and both are free. There is a good music player, a DVD player, a photo viewer, an application called Ubuntu One, which is very much like iTunes. You can purchase music, and it allows you to store everything you need in the cloud and sync with mobile devices.

In addition to all of that, there is an app store with various kinds of programs that are either free or priced under $10 (most under a dollar). I will admit that there is a bit of a learning curve, although, for those of you familiar with Mac, there are a lot of similarities, since both systems are based on Unix OS. So, all in all I can't find anything about this OS to complain about. I'm sure there is a fix for my network problems; I just have to find it.

Ubuntu, like other Linux OSs, is open source software, which means that anyone can make changes to the software, without fear of copyright infringement.  It is this open source feature that makes the software so inexpensive.  The Ubuntu community as a collection of individuals is constantly developing and improving the software as a labor of love, so there are no stockholders who have to be paid to support the work (although, you can donate to the cause, if you like).

If you are a computer geek (I am a very minor geek), this OS may be just the thing for you. Even if you are not, but you would like to have one computer that can do everything you want on a stable and speedy platform, give it a try.

NOTE: I am not a sales rep for any OS, and no gigabytes were harmed in the writing of this post.