On this day six years ago, I met this young lady for the first time.

We met at a Royals-Twins game at Kauffman Stadium, eventually started dating, and then about 3 years ago, got married.

Additional photos can be seen here.

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Post tags: Family, Royals, Twins

© That Smith, 2008. | Permalink | 3 comments
Post tags: Home, homeowners, house, wichita

View pictures from our wedding here.

© That Smith, 2008. | Permalink | One comment
Post tags: anniversary, Wedding

If you haven’t seen it yet, a little over a month ago I decided it was too much trouble to pick up my phone and dial, so I made a Firefox addon to call whatever number I clicked. Laura said I was being lazy, but by the looks of it, tons of other people are lazy too because as of today over 5000 people have downloaded my click to call addon.

Last weekend the addon was featured on one of the most popular technology and productivity websites, and at my last count, more than 50 other sites have been talking about my addon. The feature led to more than 2000 downloads in the first 24 hours after it was posted, and since then, the number of new visitors to the addon has been around several hundred per day.

Other than work, the baby, and supporting the addon, there hasn’t been a whole lot happening with Laura and me. The baby rolled over for the first time a while back, which was awesome, and we posted several new pictures on our baby sites. About a week ago I had our domain names appraised and found out mine alone are worth over $110,000 so I plan to spend more time developing them into useful services to turn around and sell.

I did come up with a few new projects this week that I hope to begin on soon, however I promised the wife I will finish at least one before starting on the others. If I have time, I will share more of my ideas tomorrow, and hopefully will be announcing two or three new services on Monday. At work I have been doing a lot more graphic design and web security stuff writing a few things on those too.

The great news was on the domain names, however they won’t make us rich or anything unless we find someone willing to pay for them. One of the services I will be sharing Monday will hopefully make us some extra income.

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The total damage was $85 and a week of not being able to wash our towels. We did end up pulling out the floor tile in our laundry room (which is something we were eventually going to do anyway) and now have a 1m x .5m hole in our paneling.

I wasn’t very fond of the paneling either so I won’t be too upset about tearing out the rest of it.

Before:

After:

The three sections in the picture above each had about 2 inches of moldy insulation in the bottom. The washer drain pipe in the center section meets the pipe from the kitchen sink and dishwasher on the right. The cleanout valve (bottom right) had to be forced open to remove grease and other junk and I guess needs to be cut out and replaced now too.

On a positive note, the rest of our basement wasn’t affected by the flooding in the laundry room. Laura is almost done painting our basement family room as well.

This is the large wall by the bar. The rest of the room is light beige.

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We went to Overland Park for Father’s Day but first found out our washing machine leaked everywhere the night before. Last night we discovered the leak was actually coming from the drain pipe in the wall rather than the washer, so we tore out some paneling and floor tile only to discover there was also black mold growing there too.

This is the first time we’ve ever had an issue with our plumbing, but by the looks of it the previous owners did too. I removed most of the mold and am waiting for bleach to kill the rest. Tonight we bought an auger and tried to fix the clogged pipe ourselves but had no luck, so I will be calling a plumber tomorrow during my lunch break.

Luckily so far Kaden hasn’t complained any about the mold. Here’s some pictures Laura took of him Monday. We bought his nice outfit at Goodwill.

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To make a long story short, Birt (female) is now the newest member of our family. She is a chihuahua-fox terrier mix. She is about 6 months old and has pretty much reached her full adult size.

© That Smith, 2008. | Permalink | 3 comments
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Basically it can be compared to a Facebook newsfeed, but on all the company’s real time sales, estimating, and quoting activities and exact website visitors. No one knows I’ve been working on it because it combines our four large information systems that our existing IT guys and managers say are incompatible and unable to communicate with each other.

I’m sure the project will be welcomed, as it will go live at the same time everyone receives an updated report saying web site orders are up 200% since I started. I rock.

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Yesterday was Chad’s 25th birthday so Grandma Pat watched Kaden while we went out to Chili’s. It was yummy and Chad got a free chocolate shake in a super cool Chili’s kids meal cup since we asked for it to go. We ordered an awesome blossom and it was soooo good. I’ve been craving one for a long time. I haven’t been able to eat them because I’m afraid it would upset Kaden’s stomach. But I got one this time so we’ll see how that goes. I made Chad a cool picture for his birthday and sent it to him at work.

I got my lip pierced last week. It didn’t hurt at all. I was all scared that it was going to. I also decided to cut my hair. I never like how it turns out when someone else cuts it so I did it myself. It’s a lot shorter than I had planned. It just kept getting shorter and shorter so I figured I should stop. It doesn’t look bad though. Just took a little time to get used to since I chopped about half of it off.

My mom had her garage sale last weekend so Kaden and I helped out with that. Or at least I did, he slept most of it. I put some of our unwanted crap in it and made about $60. Mom didn’t get rid of much so she decided she will have another sale this weekend. That gave me a little more time to go through the house and find anything else we didn’t need. So hopefully we’ll make some more dollars. Dollars are nice.

I still haven’t finished painting the basement. Maybe stripes were a bad idea, it’s a lot of work. But it’ll look nice once it’s finished. It’s hard to paint with having to take care of Kaden and Chad working. But hopefully I’ll get myself to work on it more after the garage sale this weekend.

I think that’s about it really. Nothing much goes on. Kaden gets his 3 month pictures taken on the 21st. We’ll get those posted as soon as we get them!

© That Smith, 2008. | Permalink | One comment
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I had an ok time in Chicago, but was continuously tortured by Laura because she kept sending me pictures of her and Kaden. There is a nice picture of him with a huge smile on his face in the Baby Smith album, and these from tonight:

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