My daughter is just over 20 months old and she's got to be one of most clever kids I've been around. About a month ago she started holding a pen just like any grownup does, between her thumb and first two fingers. She knows almost every letter in the alaphabet, knows numbers 1-10, sings the first part of the alaphabet song....

To top it all off....she's very sneaky.

Also, I swear she points at things that she clearly knows what they are just to ask me "Whats that?" so I have to answer her. She knows what a whale is, she loves this ocean book we have for her and she says "whale" and points to the picture. Then later she smiles at me, points at the whale and asks, "Whats that?". I swear she's toying me just to be toying with me.

Kids are wonderful. They're a great form of entertainment when they're little. She kept the whole family entertained over Christmas with her singing (though we couldn't understand most of what she said) and all her dancing.

Also the other night, my wife gave our daughter her very first drink of pop - 7Up. Her eyes got really wide and she made a goofy face from the carbination and a moment later she was asking for "Sum more?"

Oh well, back to work now that my lunch is over.

My 17 month old daughter was up last night from about 1:00am thru 5:00am. I don't know what her deal was, she wasn't running a temp and she wasn't thirsty or hungry - she just kept crying about every 15-20 minutes. I think I got in about 2-3 hours of sleep.

Kids are great...

Aion is going! Just another way for me to waste my time...:)

I was gone most of last week and the start of this week, the wife and I went out of town with our daughter to visit family in Madison, WI.

Last Sunday we went out tothe Henry Vilas Zoo (it's a small free zoo in Madison) and I'm so mad we forgot our camera. My daughter is 17 months old and she loves watching animals on TV programs and such and she's got a few Baby Einstein DVDs she loves to watch...

Well, she got to have her first up close experience to seeing a tiger. The tiger paces along the 20some foot long window in it's cage and the the glass is about 2inches thick. People stand there and get to watch tiger up close and personal. So I stood her on the little ledge by the window and she was looking around and all of a sudden this large cat comes walking into her field of vision - her eyes got large and she smiled and pointed up at the tiger and was saying "kitty". She stood there in awe and watched for about 5 minutes.

She's very smart for her age. I took her into the reptile house (wife is deathly scared of snakes) and while inside she picked up on the word "snake", she's point them out in their enclosure and then above the enclosure are pictures of the reptiles and she'd point out the one she saw in the cage.

It was fun.

This Sunday coming up, Aion starts! Yeah! I've been itching for the game to finally get going - I was growing tired of playing around in the betas due to the fact that your character gets wiped when the betas ended. Now I can finally play the game without fear of this happening.

Hopefully things run smooth.

Less then a day away. Hopefully all my lag issues from the last couple of closed betas have been cleared up on NCSoft's end.

That is all!

As the title states, I've just beaten "The Witcher: Enhanced Edition".

I think I could have done without the EE part of the game. The fighting became dull and boring after about halfway through the game. Especially at the end of the game when it didn't seem to matter how much I was pounded upon by the enemy, I hardly took any damage - this was on the hard setting, too.

The story was pretty good and told well, but the gameplay was too....not linear....repetitive (that's the word I was looking for). Click on bad guy, click when the sword flames, repeat, repeat, repeat....then if you're really board, toss out a spell.

For any mediocre to hardcore RPG fan, I'd suggest they play the game. The story keeps you wanting to see how thing progress and your choices throughout the game tell of how the story plays out. In retrospec, if you can endure playing through the game and spending another 20+ hours on it, you can get a different story built up by the time you make to the end.

I don't have that kind of patients. It was hard enough playing through and spending over 30 hours. I probably only completed 1/2 of the side quests and probably only about 2/3 - 3/4 of the main quests (not all main quests are required to move the story).

I can honestly say that I got my money's worth out of this game (only spent $15 on it) and it was nice to finally play an RPG that wasn't toned down for the children.

I haven't posted in a long while and figured I'd put something remotely useful in my blog - though I'm not sure how many folk will actually find this useful.

Oh well. On to the next game! - maybe I'll finish Drakensang (too bad the graphics glitch out on me - things artifact and the game locks up randomly. I could play for hours and nothing and then 2 minutes into the game sometimes the screen artifacts and things lock up. Only game that I own that gives me issues....though maybe it's because of SLI....) and if I don't play that game I might just finally actually look into playing Crysis or Far Cry 2. Too many games and not enough time to play them all.

I've been good at getting to beta test Aion, anyone else on here been playing the betas or getting the game when it comes out officially in the States?

I'm itching to play again this weekend, so I'll see how things go.

As of today, the wife and I have been together for 5 years in marriage....I do believe we were dating a little over 5 years before that. Man....it's been a decade :o !

That's ok, I love her.

Also, tomorrow the wife and I are going out to visit our friends that lost thier 6 day old baby when he passed away on May 6th, 2009. No definite answer was given to explain their baby's death; his heart stop beating, they're calling it a case of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrom).

It'll be good to see them. We've been trying for a long time since the funeral to get out to spend more time with them, but conflicting schedules make it hard.

That's all I've got. Everyone, enjoy their weekend!

Sadly, the wife and I forgot to bring our camera when we took our daughter to the zoo...but that's okay. She's only 14months old and she's been walking for about the past 3 weeks, so we figured she would enjoy some of the things the zoo had to offer here in MN.

She liked the fish and now has a new word for her vocabulary, as well as "otter" - though it sounds more like "odder" when she says it.

She smiled and laughed at the cows and horses. She was thrilled that she got to pet a snake - 10' long boa that weighed around 35lbs and she also got to pet a baby chick.

She loved the giraffes and she liked watching the little monkies running and playing. She had a good time, we spent about 4 hours there....probably about her max time. She had a little cat nap, slept about 10 minutes and after that she was up and going again, but was pretty cranky because she hadn't had a real nap yet that day.

Before we left the wife insisted we stop at the main shop and find a stuffed animal (she's got enough to supply a small army at home....). We walked around the store for a minute or two and she tried out a few stuffed animals (some funky looking giraffe) and pretty soon she came across a panda that she loved. She hugged it and kissed it and wouldn't give it up for anything else.

After about 5 minutes in the car ride home, she had her panda sitting in her lap and the head of it was up by her cheek - she feel asleep on her panda, it was so cute.

Here's my most recent downloaded picture of her on my PC - this was from about 4 weeks ago - just before she started walking on her own.

I found out today that one of my wife's cousins that lives fairly close to us was robbed last night. Seems they left the garage door open and they never lock their door that leads into the house....it all happened while they were sleeping :o

They've got a little Jack Russel Terrior, but they keep him in the laundry room at night so he's not sleeping in bed with them - the door is shut. Their room is on the other side of the house and up the stair and they never heard their dog barking.

They were cleaned out downstairs: TV, DVD player, movies, games, cell phones and anything else that held value. With their cell phones gone, they couldn't even call the cops, they had to utilize a neighbor's phone.

I can say that I have never been robbed. I truly do fear for the damn fool that would attempt to do so. I've got two huskies, the male is rather tame towards pretty much anything and wants to be everyones friend....the female on the other hand, if she doesn't know you and you attempt to get near our little 1 year old daughter - oh man, she'll growl deep and give you a warning to stay away, after that she'll approach you in a most unpleasant manner. I've had to restrain her a couple of times from some friends that came to visit our baby; the female husky never meet them before so she wasn't going to let them near the baby without a fight.

It also doesn't help that my older brother and I run a self protection website; he manages all the site-side stuff and I house and ship all the products. I've got more stun guns, tasers, pepper spray and batons then I would know what to do with - I keep a nice 950,000volt stun gun in my room and I've got a metal cane with a heavy steel head next to my bed, too. If I caught someone breaking into my house, by the time I got done with them, they would be so mutilated/maimed/bruised/bloodied from my torturing of them, they'd be begging me to call the cops.