Ahhhh... It's nice to be home after my first full week of work in Orem. And, it's nice to have a long weekend as a bonus.

A strange new lifestyle

This last week I spent my time off work on weekdays at my parents' house. If I need to do some work in the evenings, I usually go to my brother's lumber/hardware store and use my dad's computer there. It's only a dialup connection, but at least I'm not tying up my parents' one phone line.

I ordered AT&T Broadband Internet for my parents using AT&T's website... but nobody has followed up to the order. They were supposed to call to set up an installation date, but nothing's happened. It sucks.

On Thursday, I received a fax from a realtor specializing in foreclosures and bankruptcies. There were a couple homes in South Jordan that looked very interesting so my dad and I went out and took a look at them. They looked great and I set up an appointment with the realtor for Tuesday afternoon so I can see the inside of the houses.

We lowered the asking price of our house in Hyrum with hope it will speed up the sale of the house. If one of these houses is what we want, we'll need to get our house sold as soon as we can so we'll have the money to put down on a house in the Salt Lake valley.

About, the status

Things have been going well at About. I've started working with code and patched a major code library to add some features they've been wanting for some time but nobody had ever gotten around to it. I also helped with the migration to a new billing system by writing a script that fixed customer records with invalid data fields.

So... I think I'm doing well at acclimating to the products and the company. I enjoy working with the development team and I think they have found me a pleasant addition.

Maya is four years old!

Saturday (31 August) was Maya's fourth birthday and it went off very well.

Christine and I had planned for weeks to redecorate Maya's bedroom for her birthday. On Friday night, we had Maya sleep on the sofa sleeper in the family room and proceeded to redecorate her bedroom after she'd gone to sleep.

Christine got everything we redecorated with from Oriental.com and made off with a boatload of stuff for a pleasantly low cost.

We put a bead curtain in the closet entrance, oriental fans on the walls, flower leis along the corners between walls and ceiling, a flower box with lighted plastic flowers, and a quilt bedspread made from oriental handkerchiefs. It's all very colorful and thematic.

The flower box mounted on the wall	The bead curtain over the closet	Oriental fans and lei border
The bed quilt

Maya was very excited Saturday morning when she saw her redecorated room for the first time. Lucy repeatedly said, “Wow!” times as she explored Maya's new room. They dragged me out of bed to see it.

At lunchtime, we went to McDonald's for Maya's party. We had about eleven of Maya's friends there. They all had a blast and I got a headache from all the noise in the playland.

Maya at her party at McDonald's

Later, we had dinner with Christine's parents and her paternal grandparents.

Maya scored big time on birthday gifts. I remarked to Christine that I don't think I ever had as good of a birthday when I was a kid as Maya had.