As much as I like cats, for the past few weeks, this very vocal, possibly horny, tomcat walks around our neighborhood and yowls for a long while. I dunno, maybe he’s lonely, or Timmy is stuck in a well, or maybe he’s very proud of his sexual prowess in his cat bed, I couldn’t tell you. All I know is that it’s really friggin’ annoying night after night.

The weekend was pretty quiet. I worked late Friday, and Num’s mother came over for dinner. My parents came over to visit Saturday afternoon, and came bearing food, which is always appreciated. After church on Sunday, we went to finalize the menu for dinner after Lily’s baptism in August. The rest of Sunday was mundane taskwork and resting.

I started both the About Me and Videos page. I’m trying out Vimeo at the moment, and we’ll see how it works out. The challenge is still to find free time to get the videos converted, but at least I’ve found an interesting service to post them to.

For your viewing pleasure, my first attempt at video on Vimeo: Josh reading one of his favorite books to Lily.

Goodnight Moon from Joel Ipe on Vimeo.

Ah, the weekend has finally arrived.

I don’t know if anyone noticed, but I converted the April and May 2008 galleries. You know, I haven’t really heard from anyone about the redesign. If I stay up working on this site, and no one checks it anymore, does it really matter? Maybe I shooed everyone off after months of little activity or life. I know what would attract everyone back — Pictures of old men playing basketball with monkeys in dresses. Not just any types of monkeys, mind you. The skanky ones.

Thank goodness for DVRs. Whenever one of us is feeding Lily, we’ll hit the Tivo and find something to watch with one hand while we use the other to hold the bottle upright for her. There’s nothing new to watch these days, so we’re recording new-to-us stuff, or shows we haven’t watched in a long while — Friends, The Practice, etc. I’ve been watching old reruns of Quantum Leap, various Star Trek series episodes, Stargate SG-1. I’m personally looking forward the return of summer shows like Burn Notice and Stargate Atlantis.

Burn Notice

We’re thinking of getting an aquarium. My friend Doug got some deals on tanks, gravel, etc, from a pet store going out of business in his area. The big debate was freshwater vs. saltwater. I like saltwater fish, but I’ve been warned they’re very difficult to maintain. Freshwater fish are easier, but they aren’t too exciting. Hmmm, unless I get salmon. Or, seahorses. Lots of smart seahorses. Which have the ability to merge into Mega-Seahorse when the world is threatened by the evil…. geez, that would be the worst children’s animated tv show ever.

The good news is that the audit is drawing to a close. I see the light at the end of the tunnel. BTW, I’m in Pennsylvania next week, but at least it’s a short week, being that Friday is July 4th. I’m also looking forward to our annual July 4th “Yo, we’re classy. Check out our classy picnic spread.” picnic. Burgers? Hot dogs? Puh-leaze. This is the one time a year we get hoity-toity with our…. picnic cuisine.

Ready for the big news? Josh has moved up to Preschool. More big news, and I’ll credit my wife. Josh is nearly potty-trained. It’s been nearly 2 weeks, but he’s wearing “big boy underwear”, and he hasn’t required a diaper during the day or night. It’s fairly amazing, and yes, I’ll credit my wife for consistency. I want credit too for participating. I felt validated after she gave me a gold star for effort.

I can’t believe George Carlin died. That’s sad. I used to watch his comedy routines on HBO after I got introduced to his comedy via recordings on cassette tapes that my friend Doug gave me. He will be missed. In honor of George becoming a footnote in American legal history — Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television.

I’ve fixed up the Photos page, but I will have to find the free time to slowly convert all the galleries from April 2008 and earlier. I’m not particularly in a rush, as I have enough complexity in my life right now. The only reason I’m redesigning this website is because I could a little mindless distraction in the evenings to help me unwind. Also, it’s teaching me something different.

Has it really been nearly 6 years since I started joelipe.com? Really? Six years? No wonder I’m so tired. I have some good, better, and best news.

Good news: I’ve started working on the last 20+ days of photos since May, including visiting the Philadelphia Zoo, and our trip to Ocean City. However, as I started editing photos, I realized this was going to take forever. If you remember from yesterday’s entry, I was now debating using a 3rd-party service to save myself some time, at the lost of some customization. I’ve selected Google’s Picasa. It seems to be the best course of action to outsource at this stage. Why do I need to spend so much time manually resizing photos, creating thumbnails, and adding to tables? Better these days to automate and save those blood, sweat, and tears for….. everything else to do around here.

Better news: I’ve already converted May 2008 photos, and I’ve put a temporary link on the Photo Gallery page until I figure out how I’m converting this all. I’ve started uploading June 2008 as well. I’m eventually planning or just considering converting all of 2008 at this stage. I’m thinking that I’ll stop breaking out all the photos by categories (Family, Friends, Trips, etc.) It became a little annoying when I had 2 photos in the Friends category, and 39 in the Family category, and keeping track of dates. Now, I’m just going to group it all by month.

Best news of all: What the hell, this site is due for an overhaul. I’m going to slowly redesign the site using css again, and dust off the old prototype template. I’m not going to touch the archives, but going-forward, time for some fun.

What a busy few weeks it has been.

I recently upgraded to Firefox 3, and it’s pretty good so far. I installed a cool extension called PicLens which lets you view photos and movies in a free-flowing wall of media, similar to Apple’s CoverFlow. You can also zoom in and out as you search, and activate movies to watch them right then and there. Check out the website. It also works on the Flickr, YouTube, etc. I think it’s neat.

Having finished Good Night, and Good Luck last week, we’re now watching Entourage Season 1 through Netflix. What a great show. We’ve finished the first four episodes, and waiting for the next four.

I have so many photos and videos to upload, I don’t even know where to begin. Maybe I should finally concede to move to a Flickr or Google Picasa or other service.

This past weekend, we made a family trip to Ocean City, Maryland for a little well-deserved (and impromptu) 3-day family vacation. We stayed at the fantastic Hilton Suites Ocean City Oceanfront right on the beach, with a great room — bedroom, full-size kitchen, living room, 2 sets of HDTV plasma TVs and upscaling DVD players, and balcony overlooking the beach. Multiple pools, and did I mention right on the beach? I didn’t particularly find the cuisine in Ocean City all that great, but it’s a resort town with lots of seafood buffets. Not quite my cup of crabcakes.  See the June 2008 photos for pictures of all the fun we had, suckers.

Yea, they’re here. The dishwasher and range hood are here and installed. The kitchen is about complete, except for the gas range/oven. We’ve selected a plumber, and we’re ready to get the work done. Hopefully we’ll be cooking with gas in early July. Then, I will fire up the gas range, and proclaim, “Now we’re cookin’ with gas, baby!”

We finally finished watching Good Night, and Good Luck starring an all-star cast — David Strathairn, George Clooney, Jeff Daniels, Robert Downey Jr, etc. It was a little slow, but a decent movie.

Did I mention that our gas stove arrived early? Yeah, it did, but the dilemma is that we don’t have a gas line in the kitchen, so we’re in the process of having plumbers come to the house to price out the work effort. We also need to submit work permits to the township to get approved for the work. From my discussions with the township, we’re looking at a couple of weeks until the permits are reviewed and potentially approved. For the moment, the new gas range is sitting ingloriously in our dining room for the forseeable future. Sigh.

Thankfully, the new dishwasher and range hood have no prerequisites, and will be installed next week.

Today we made a field trip out to Bucks County, Pennsylvania for a little BBQ. Specifically, Shady Brook Farm was running their annual Festival on the Farm. First time attendance, but I’ve been pushing for more exploration of Pennsylvania as we live so close. It was three days, but we braved the heat on only Saturday. The festival involves a strawberry festival, kiddie carnival, backyard bbq competition, but it was the BBQ that piqued my interest. It was a hot day, and we ended up camping out under a tent. Still, it was nice to get out for a while.

Now that the heat has arrived, Josh and I have been hitting the community pools in our neighborhood to keep cool. One thing that I like about our community are the facilities in close proximity — 4 pools, multiple playgrounds, two elementary schools, shops, etc. Definitely a plus.