Joe and Jamie's Blog

I guess you can say that fall is officially here, and I am late in posting it. It has been pretty hectic around here lately, so I am just getting to this post now.

This shot was taken from my backyard. I love how the three trees show a progression of the season changing over. Now is the time where I take way too many landscape shots, I just cant get enough of how nice everything looks in the fall, it is my favorite time of the year.

So with fall comes the weather change. I like it when its 50-60 degrees outside; just cool enough for a light jacket and still have the car window down. That reminds me, have to take those low-profile tires off the car before the snow!

Last weekend the family went pumpkin picking at Secor Farm in Wappinger Falls. We have been going there for the past few years. It’s a nice place that lets you go out into the fields and pick your own pumpkin. After making an afternoon of picking the perfect pumpkin, we has a quick lunch at the Daily Planet and then headed home to paint the pumpkins. Check out our great art skills!

Here is the sucker we are going to carve, its 35lbs and just perfect!

Once we cut open this bad boy I’ll be sure to have more photos.

I have made a decision to finally start using www.JoeandJamie.com as an actual site and not just a forwarder we tell everyone to visit to get to this blog. What I want to do is have a nice simple page come up with two choices, our photo gallery that I am developing, or this blog. Once I get that set and finish uploading all the pictures to the gallery and organizing them, then I can work more on what I want to do with the blog.

There is only one thing that bugs me about this blog, its the fact that the link is www.joeandjamie.com/blog. I don’t know what possessed me to keep that as the live one, it was only for testing, hence the “2″ part. I really want to make it so its www.joeandjamie.com/blog which matches the blogs title. I know all my hard SEO work will somewhat die off from losing links, but I’ll make sure the mod-rewrite in the .htaccess file works right to redirect it to the correct links. At this early stage I can afford to lose a few back-links, I don’t have too many.

Now that I got that out off my chest, I should talk about the photo gallery. I don’t want to give it away yet, I’ll post the specifics when it is complete. We have always wanted a place online to store and share photos so I decided to create a gallery for them all. I’m in the process of uploading thousands of pictures and organizing them all into albums and categories so the site is nice and navigable.

So stay tuned for more stuff to come, I should have something by the end of the week.

While we picked up the African frogs, we also picked out some new playmates for Bubbles. Jamie liked the Calico Fantails and I liked the Black Moor goldfish. Splotch is the Calico Fantail and Brutis is the Black Moor. Splotch has a black spot on one side and not the other, kind of like a splotch of paint on the floor, hence the name Splotch. I named the Black Moor Brutis, after the big guy in Popeye that always beat on Popeye and went after Olive Oil, because as soon as he was let out of the store’s bag he went after Splotch and was bullying him around. Thankfully he stopped after the first few minutes and hasn’t done it since, but it gave me the idea for his name. I guess Brutis needed to show dominance, but Bubbles is almost twice his size so he calmed down when he came over.

We cleaned out their tank before we purchased them Saturday. As you can see this was the main highlight of the day. It took a long time to clean out both tanks completely. They are very happy together. What I learned from the unfortunate Doodle accident, I am pretty sure these fish will be fine. We started them all out together in clean water so they can muck it up as a family. Enjoy the pics and flick at the end.

Saturday Jamie and I went down to Petco to get some fish and frogs. During our last visit we noticed some African frogs that were in a tank with some fish. We were interested because it was odd to see frogs in with fish, mainly because we didn’t think frogs stayed in the water 100% of the time. Apparently these frogs do. The African frogs don’t grow more than 2.5 inches.

We had set up the old five gallon wish tank prior to going to the store. Just had to pick up a heater and a filter for the tank. We needed a cover as well, but they store was out of them. I had to rig a top with some leftover fiberglass mesh to replace screen windows. Essentially the same stuff without the nice plastic edge around it.

We bought three of the frogs and decided to name them Bud, Weis, and Er, after the famous three frogs from the Budweiser campaign a few years back. I know, I know, how original. Eh, whatever, I own the Budweiser frogs and you don’t

Enjoy the pictures and the video.

Apparently for a reason that has yet to be told to me my server was down for 8+ hours today. I have never been so frustrated before. I asked many times and never received and answer besides “hardware issue” which annoys me even more. I mean don’t they have a fail-over routine or and sort of BDR device. No reason why if it was going to be 8 hours and I complained as many times as I did that I couldn’t have been moved to another server temporarily. True more work for them, but that’s what I pay for.

I apologize to all my readers out there, this was beyond my control.

So after all this, as soon as my plan comes up for renewal say bu-bye to this host. This was the last straw.