Had a bad day...

Ok, it wasn't really that bad, but I'm not happy about what happened today.  I went out to my workshop this morning to carve an apple box for Lexie's teacher.  It went well, but just as it was finishing the final cut-out it had a z-axis stall.  I checked the z-axis and it wasn't stuck so I removed the work piece and checked to see if there were any self tests that I could run on my system.  As I was navigating the menu, the machine shut off.  It wouldn't turn back on.  It did the same thing to me last night, but I unplugged it for a minute, then it turned back on.  It wasn't coming back on today.  I looked closely at the machine and right on the corner by the switch was a telltale sign.  There were carbon deposits.  I had let out the smoke.  You know the magical smoke that makes every electronic device work.  I called the customer support line and they are sending me a new power supply.  I have to pay a $40 core charge, but I get it back when I send the defective part back, so I guess it works out ok.  However, my machine will be out of commission for three to five days.  So sad.  I probably needed a break anyway, I have been a garage dwelling hermit for the past week and a half.  It will give me a chance to finally mount my TV and fix my tin house.

Bella and Lexie had a dentist appointment today.  It went well, no cavities.  After the appointment we went to the Bangor Forest to go biking.  Otto is getting really good at biking.  He rode Lexie's old bike today.  It goes faster and he doesn't have to pedal at such a feverish pace to keep up, but it was harder to pedal up hills.  Since I didn't have to pull the trailer with Otto in it I had a chance to play on some of the sand and rock piles that are along the sides of the trails.  I had a good time and Otto thought it was fun to watch me jump off the piles on my bike.  On the way back to the car I noticed a big pile of dirt right in the middle of one of the trails.  I rode over it and it was a nice smooth camel hump, I got some pretty good air over it.  We went back to the car, but Otto was not done riding.  We had brought his bike along in case he wasn't capable of riding Lexie's old bike, and he wanted to take his bike for a ride.  We rode back to the camel hump and took turns riding over it.  Rachel rode over it once and declared it to be a little too scary.  Otto needed help getting up the first part, but he loved riding down.  Lexie went right for it, but had a little trouble getting up.  Bella didn't dare to at first, but after I helped her get into the right gear she got pretty good at it.  Even Ken went over several times.  I tried to clear the middle dip, but I never managed to.  One time I caught my tire right at the rise of the second hump and almost went over.  Luckily my suspension absorbed the blow.

Last weekend we found Otto a new power wheels truck at the dump.  The switches were burned up, but the motors were still good.  I had to do a little rewiring and replace a wheel to get it going.  The truck still doesn't have reverse, but Otto has been having a lot of fun with it.  His old power wheels truck died last year, so he was happy to have another one.  His first day driving it he ran over his tonka dump truck and flipped the truck over with he and Lexie riding in it.  He didn't get hurt, he just thought it was very funny.

Carving and carving some more

Well, Rachel says I have been spending too much time in my workshop lately, so I better take a break!

I have been learning the carvewright designer program and I can finally get it to do exactly what I want it to do without having to yell at it. I have been making some carvings just playing around with scrap wood and they have been coming out really well.

The first real project made was a maple cross. It took about 40 minutes to carve out and then another half hour to clean it up by hand, but I am really happy with how it came out.



One of the first designs that I thought of was a wood case for my Mac Mini. I don't feel up to that challenge yet, so I made a new faceplate for my workshop PC. I carved my logo into it, and it looks really neat!



I have a new apprentice in my workshop. He sweeps up the sawdust and brushes the sawdust out of the carvings. He is doing a very good job so far. Good thing he's cheap though!

The Marble Game (Wii Fit)

Augusta

Today, daddy drove me and Lexie to school. After that daddy came to my school for a field trip to Augusta! On the field trip we had a scavenger hunt and we did petraglyphs. We saw a train and we saw other things. We also saw the governor's office. 

Only 6 kids total got to go into the governor's office.  Daddy took our pictures in there and we even sat at the governor's desk in his chair. After that we had to go back to school.  Daddy drove me home from school!  I got to leave school 15 minutes early.  I beat Lexie home by an hour!  She had to take the bus!

When I got home I got to play Wii Fit!  I am in first place on the hula hoop.  I had 307 spins.  I also did some of the yoga poses.  The tree pose is my favorite yoga pose to do.  I did the running but I kept running faster than my trainer. 

This blog has been written by:

Is-a-bell-a Press-ey

The Wii Fit Has Arrived!

Sam, Otto and I went out to Sam's to get about 200 of our digital pictures made up.  While I was getting very angry at the photo kiosk Sam reminded me that today is the release day for the Wii Fit!  So after I spent over an hour trying to get all the pictures I wanted at Sam's we left for Toy's R Us where I had reserved a copy of Wii Fit over a month ago.  For lunch Sam, Otto and I went to Olive Garden (just to make sure we got a nice meal in before using the Wii Fit).  We came home and Sam set up the Wii for me.  I would have done it myself but on the way home from Toy's R Us we stopped by my mom's house and as I was getting out of the car my Croc violently ripped off my toenail on my little toe...OUCH!  Okay, so I recovered from my lack of toenail and started using the Wii Fit...It is WICKED fun!  My favorite is the hoola-hoop!  Even though I was categorized as FAT it was still funny to watch...my mii grew to represent my waistline!  My Wii Fit age is currently 25!  GO ME!  All of you Wii owners out there I strongly recommend buying the Wii Fit.  

Sam got up early this morning and spent 2.5 hours making a sign for Bella & Lexie's room on his new carvewright.  He also made a cross that didn't come out quite like he wanted it too.  He has been out in the garage for hours playing with it, installing a light fixture and installing a new outlet.

Tomorrow Bella's class goes on a field trip to Augusta.  Sam is going on the class trip as a chaperone.  Otto and I are going to spend the day at home making a boiled dinner for supper!  Hopefully we will make around to cleaning up the house a bit.

My CarveWright Has Arrived!!

Well, I was supposed to write this last night, but I was making designs for my CarveWright to carve out.  I found out Monday night that my CarveWright was going to be delivered on Tuesday.  I was literally dancing around the house because I was so excited.  So, Tuesday morning Fedex called at around 7:30 to make sure someone would be home at noon so they could deliver it.  After I put the kids on the bus I went into the garage to clear out a space for my new machine.  My original plan was to move my big metal desk out to the garage and use that as a workbench, but my desk weighs about 300 lbs and the monitor on top of it weighs another 300 so it's not going to get moved without some help.  I looked around the garage for something that I could set it on.  I had all the pieces to a couch that I was making a couple years ago and decided that I could use the parts to make a workbench.  It didn't take too much modification to convert from couch to workbench and I almost had finished by noon.  The Fedex truck arrived at precisely noon!  He must have been waiting around the corner because it was exactly 12:00 when he arrived.  I finished my workbench and moved the machine into the garage.

The CarveWright has a lot of built in functions that can be really useful without having to make a design on the computer.  The first thing I did was use the cross-cut function to cut a board to exactly 2 feet.  My first attempt made a 2 inch cut, but shortly later I had a 2 foot long board.  I tried to load the software onto the PC that I set up on my workbench, but the disc got damaged in shipping.  I called the company and they are going to ship me a new disc for free.  I had already downloaded the Mac version of the software on my other computer so this didn't set me back too much.  The first project that I made was a sign for Otto's room.  I chose a font and selected the option to outline the text, then I gave the text an arc.  I just wanted to try a simple project for my first try.  It took the machine about 16 minutes to carve the text onto a 10.24x24 inch board.  Pretty quick, and it looked way better than I could have done by hand.  

My second project was to carve an image onto the board.  Rachel chose a picture of Otto and I used the software to place the image on the board.  I didn't spend much time trying to make the image look perfect, I just wanted to see what the machine could do.  I was impressed at the quality of the image.  It took about 17 minutes to carve Otto's face at a depth of .25 inch in a 3x5 inch box.  

That wasn't the only thing that we did yesterday, but that's what I was most excited about :-)

Shortly after my machine arrived, we went into town to get gas and return the bottles.  Rachel has been collecting the gas coupons from Shaws.  We filled the car up and two gas cans, totaling 19.962 gallons.  The total price was around $75.  With the coupons we only spent $35 for gas.  I guess it pays off to save those coupons.

Last night we went to see Speed Racer.  The critics that have been giving this movie a bad rating must have been watching a different movie.  Speed Racer was excellent!  However, I am a huge Speed Racer fan, I do own the complete cartoon series (all five volumes).  The whole family really likes Speed Racer, so it was a good movie for us to see together.  The movie stayed very true to the cartoon.  The plot of the movie and the situations that Speed found himself in all could have happened in the series.  I had a couple of issues with some of the facts in the movie.  The GRX, the fastest car on earth, could not have been driven in a race.  The GRX is capable of speeds greater that human reflexes can handle.  Four drivers died when testing the GRX.  Just a small detail. but it bothered me.  They should have just left out the GRX from the movie.  It was still a great movie though.  We had the entire theatre to ourselves which was helpful for Otto, who didn't want to sit still during the slow parts.

Not a lot to do today

We didn't do much of anything today with the weather being so rainy.  Sam made about a million phone calls dealing with Verizon & the unemployment people.  He cannot collect unemployment but he still has to fill out a bunch of forms for it.  Sam also called the people that do the tuition program for Verizon to make sure they had received his last grade.  They said they had but that Sam would have to pay them back since he didn't work for Verizon anymore.  That made me very unhappy seeing how it says in the Verizon books (that they give you when you become an employee) that if the class starts while you are still an employee Verizon will cover the cost.  The guy on the phone wasn't seeming to understand that.  So Sam called the Verizon HR people and they said the guy didn't know what he was talking about.  So we will see what happens.  Then there was Sam having to call Verizon to get some papers faxed out for unemployment insurance that we have on a loan.  That guy never answered the phone so as of now we have yet another payment to make because they wouldn't get the paperwork in!  I did get out and mail Otto's birthday party invitations today.  He is having a John Deere theme for his party.  It was between that and Monster Jam but we are going to see the Monster Jam show the day before his party so he picked John Deere.  After the girls got home from school we went to Target to get some supplies for Lexie's teacher and noticed that Home Depot was now up to 50%-70% off so we checked that out.  We picked up a couple of things that we probably could have lived without but they were cheap so no harm done.

Kid update:

Otto has been playing rock, paper, scissors  for the past month or so.  Funny thing is with him rock beats both paper and scissors. When asked what Otto's favorite thing was that we do every year he responded "my birthday".

Lexie has decided that it will be okay if Sam needs to miss his volunteer time at her school on Thursday so that he can go on the field trip with Bella's class. We asked Lexie what trip (such as our annual trip to Ft. Knox, Portland, Etc.) she doesn't want to do for a while she stated that she didn't ever want to go back to the hotel that we stayed at in Woburn.

Bella is going on a field trip to the Maine State Museum in Augusta on Thursday. Sam asked Bella what trip that we haven't done that she would like to do...she immediately answered "Hawaii"...lets aim for the stars huh?

Tomorrow we are going to go see Speed Racer.  I've heard mostly bad reviews about it but we are all very big Speed Racer fans so we'll see.  Sam has already made claim to writing tomorrows blog (he has many exciting things to write about).  Wednesday the Wii Fit comes out so I'll have to write about it once I try it out!  

-R.I.P.

Bella's Entry

Today we walked the Bog walk. On the Bog walk we saw all kinds of flowers and different kinds of plants.  When we finished the Bog walk we walked some of the city forest and narrowly avoided stepping in tons of horse poop!  We drove out of the city forest behind the horses that made all that poop.  There was an Appaloosa, a Palomino and an Arabian horse.  After, we picked up invitations for Otto birthday! Then we had a fire in the fire pit. On the fire we had chicken. It was good! Next we took a short walk around the block.  We came inside and played Mario Kart on the Wii.  Now it is time for me to go to bed!

This family blog has been written by:

Bella Pressey

Our First Blog!

Well, this is our first blog.  I just wanted to bring everyone up to date on what the Pressey's have been up to.  I (Sam) have been unemployed since March 29th, 2008 and I have been enjoying it very much.  In the next couple of weeks I will be receiving my Carvewright wood carving machine, and starting my own wood carving business.  I am going to start out carving plaques and awards and clever sayings into wood, and see where inspiration takes me!  I have been having a lot of fun spending time with all the kids and working on the treehouse.  We just added a two-person swing, a new ramp and a new slide!

During April Vacation, we took a trip to Portland and Boston.  We all had a great time.  We stayed at our favorite hotel, The Merry Manor, in South Portland for two days, then we drove to Woburn, Mass. and stayed a night there.  We went to the Museum of Science, Cambridgeside Galleria and Feneiul Hall Market Place.  I went to the Apple Store and Rachel got to go to The Cheesecake Factory!

We have been Barbecuing a lot lately (almost every day), but today we went to our friends Amanda and Dave's for a BBQ.  We had a great time.  It was really nice being able to catch up with some of the people that I haven't seen much since Verizon closed.  Otto really likes going there.  We were over there the other day to help them shovel dirt into their new raised garden bed and I think Otto shoveled the most dirt out of all of us!  He loves to play with their dog Olive!