davejenbarnes

We have decided to renew with the quote that rent will only be raised between $10 and $25 per month. This all goes down on Wednesday morning. Be praying for us!

Ideally, we would like an 11 month lease which would put our next move (into a duplex) at June 30, 2006 right around our baby’s 11.5 month mark, just in time to celebrate a first birthday in a new home with a new room! If an 11 month lease is impossible, we’ll settle for the July 31, 2006, but that will likely be after David starts up at school for the 06-07 school year. Tough that the band directors’ summers go from June 10th to July 27th… not much of a summer, huh?

David has been medling around in Illustrator and I’ve primarily been learning the ins, outs, and terminology of all the parts of Photoshop. I’ve had my own names for a lot of the things and processes, but I guess I can’t call it gimping anymore.

The plan was to originally update the whole davejenbarnes.com website this week but with the new toys in the Adobe Creative Suite, I think that update will come a little later, and be much, much cooler. I’ve also decided to re-structure the site so Dave has a place all his own for all the buttons he’s making in Illustrator and we’ll have a place for all the baby pictures to come. Ah, I can’t wait to learn more!

Tomorrow we’re headed to Houston for a day trip with my mom and her truck. IKEA, here we come!

Well, there’s no 22 week belly picture… I forgot to take one and then my dad packed our little digital camera in his stuff to take back to his house so we’ve been without it for a few days… and it’s almost 23 weeks, so we’ll just have to make do with one of those pictures!

I think we’ll be building us a crib on Wednesday or Thursday. We’ve decided to renew our lease with our apartment complex with the promise that rent will only be raised a maximum of $25 per month.

The little Barnes has been moving a lot stronger lately. Dem’ Bones must be getting more solid! I feel movements during the day now… and “grandma” Knight felt a kick on Saturday!! Pretty soon I bet we’ll be able to see from the outside what I feel on the inside.

Created using this tutorial on making an OS X aquafied icon in Photoshop while using my nifty WACOM tablet.

Today is not my official birthday, but due to the fact that my parents will be in Hawaii for my birthday, we celebrated a little early. My brother, Jerry, was in charge of the gift ideas and I must admit, he did more than perfect in his selection of gifts.

I am now the proud user of a WACOM Intuos 3 tablet with which to use my Adobe Creative Suite software. I already have Photoshop CS residing in the dock.

Needless to say, I am glad that this is the beginning of Spring Break and not the end of Spring Break!

David’s band performed at U.I.L. competition on Tuesday and recieved straight division ones on both their stage and sightreading competitions.

picture links to more photos

I can’t wait! I ordered this online at the end of last week. It’s on backorder, I mean, OF COURSE IT’S ON BACKORDER, at that price, I’d be on backorder, too. Actually, I caught the price in the $300’s so I did even better than whatever price they’re displaying now.

But, questioning the term “Factory Fresh,” I called them and, basically, they take all the accessories away and charge you a crimefully high price to get them back, so I said no thanks and surfed on over to Sterling Tek and ordered two batteries and a charger for $50 and I’m set. Well, except for a mega CF card… maybe for mah burfday I’ll get one of those. ;-) For now, we’ll use the Digital Elph’s CF card… that is, whenever I end up with the “drebel” in my hands.

UPDATE: cancelled order after reviewing A&M online… very poor customer reviews!

March, April, May, June… that’s how many months are left until we need to know if we will be moving or not… do you realize how hard it is to be motivated to set up a baby’s room that a baby may only occupy for a WEEK?! Like, OMG, we might be MOVING… why bother?! So, today, I did the first acts of emptying out the baby’s closet. We had it packed to the gills with boxes for things like computer, printer, scanner, lava lamp, soundsticks, external hard drive, you know… the stuff that came with molded styrofoam inserts which would keep the item safer than a towel wrapped around it stuffed in a generic cardboard box. I have been master-packing these boxes under the stair storage in our garage (we don’t have stairs in our garage, but the next-door-garage leads to the apartment above ours so we get the under-stair storage) — WHY WE DIDN’T DO THIS EARLER — I don’t know, but it is being done today. I’m taking a break since my tummy started aching. Not from lifting empty boxes (oh, they’re SOOOoooooo heavy… NOT!) but from reaching up high over and over again.

Once I have the closet relatively empty (minus the wedding dress I have NO IDEA what to do with, even after 5.25 years AND all the scrapbooking stuff I should probably just give to Kimberly since I will be “scrapbooking” via iPhoto 5’s bookmaking abilities) I plan on only storing baby things in there. So cute!

Ok, off to open the high-chair box and see what’s in there so I can park it in the baby’s closet! What fun!

Now that I, Jen, have lots of pregnant ladies I chat with on a regular basis (from Babycenter.com’s bulletin boards), who all use different instant messaging software, I decided to take my bro’s advice and install Adium X on our iMac. So far, about an hour into the inital test drive, I like, or in the words of the Millers, I likee!

Pros so far:

• I have iChat (AIM), MSN and Yahoo! all open at the same time and can see all those peeps online by looking in one little space on the monitor.
• Keep It Simple is the rule of the day. This streamlines all three programs into a very nice interface… red for away, but online, yellow for idle, and green for active!
• ALL CHATS … how can I explain this ? … it’s like Firefox or Safari with the tabbed browser window; all chats are in the same window, but separated by tabs.
• There’s this cool menu bar duck-silouette dude whose eyes glow red when there is a message waiting to be read in a window or tab that is inactive, way cool.

Cons so far:

• Not all the emoticions line up… like I think I was trying to do a blush face to Becky on MSN but I don’t think it sent the right face code
• I can’t seem to figure out how to get anybody using MSN in my “buddy” list as the category, “buddy,” comes from AIM…
• away settings? I will have to look into this… prolly in a menu somewhere

I really like it so far.

This is the last week I think I can button up the pre-pregnancy GAP jeans. I had a tough time with the zipper and button for that picture… guess I’ll have to switch to my J.CREW micro-cords for the next batch of pictures!

Skip Hop has a pretty dang cool concept going with their diaper bags. I really like the way they have the strap of their diaper bag convert to stroller-bar-straps. We have the Colorado Tote from Babies R Us (BRU) and I was wondering how we could get it up that high around the back of the stroller…

On Thursday our cable modem bit the dust. It had been cutting in and out on us for the longest time and we would never know when it would just “quit” for 2-30 minutes at time. So Thursday, Dave was sick of dealing with it and had me just “rip” the whole thing out of our computer armoire and bring it to him at work. He stopped by the Time Warner place and exchanged it for a new, smaller, snazzier, sleeker modem which has totally improved our internet connection. Faster, steadier, AMAZINGLY more dependable.

Now, if we can get voice-over-IP going, we’ll be set!

The crib was delivered March 3, 2005 to our garage, where it has remained since. We will need to find new homes or new storage spaces for the dining table and TV stand and book case that are currently occupying the baby’s room in order to make room for the crib… and we probably should figure out if we’ll even be living here in August before we decide if it will be worth the effort of putting together in the first place. So that is the first moving issue… will we be or will we not be moving?

The second moving issue is the little Barnes. On Thursday I noticed that I could feel movement stronger at night… come Friday, yesterday, I felt movement all day! And late last night, Dave spread his huge hand across my belly and felt the biggest movement so far. It was amazing. Right smack in the middle, and Dave felt it!

I have to tell you that one of my favorite times so far this pregnancy was this afternoon when Dave came in to the bedroom where I was napping and kissed my forehead, kissed Mambo (one of the cats) on the back, and then “kissed the baby” by kissing my belly. He then said Mom couldn’t kiss the baby! not yet! I’m glad that he found something he can do that I can’t do yet. It makes me smile.