It's the end of the weekend and the end of Claire's spring vacation. Tomorrow it's back to work and school. Sniff...
We took the kids to Mass this morning. There Claire got to receive Communion without all the pressure and formality. In her words it was her "second Holy Communion". Afterwards we took the kids downstairs for a bite to eat.
With all the gorgeous weather we had today we spent a lot of time outdoors. About the only annoying thing is that gnats are starting to rear their heads again. Nonetheless the girls helped Michelle and I do some more raking of the lawn to get rid of the dead grass and thatch. I also did a quick test to make sure the control module for the sprinkler is working. For dinner Michelle made cheeseburgers on the grill. Today marked another important event for Abigail. I took the training handle off of her bicycle. Who-hoo! She's a little weak on getting started but can balance and stop pretty well. I brought the handle over to a neighbor whose daughter is about Abby's age and wants to learn two-wheeling.
It's been a while but I thought that today I would try to upload of few of my recent photo albums to dotPhoto again to order some prints by mail. I have a few hundred unused picture credits with them leftover from last year. While they now offer the ability to upload via ftp (in addition to using a browser and email) their upload capability still stinks -- big time. The web interface kept denying me a connection and the ftp server went down as well. I guess that tomorrow I should just burn a CD and take it down to Photographix as I've done in the past. Photographix isn't as cheap as dotPhoto, but they are a boatload more convenient. I can drop my CD off on my way to work and pick up the results on the way home. The detour time is a lot less than finagling with dotPhoto's "web services" (or lack thereof...).
I did some more tweaking to the birthday script after the girls went to bed. It's smaller and working better now. I also got it sorting from nearest to farthest event. I did some refresher research on scheduling periodic tasks via what's known in unix land as a user cron job. I'd like the birthday calculations to be calculated daily at some early morning hour. I also asked Michelle's help in getting together a list of birthdays and anniversaries. I'll try to wrap it up tomorrow if I get the chance.