Ultrasound Day
We had our ultrasound today at week 20. Everything was normal and we got some good pictures and video footage. I hope to have some pictures to post soon. Tomorrow we have a doctor’s appointment. I’ve agreed to lobby for Maggie to schedule the C-section on her birthday.
Here are some ultrasound pictures
We also upgraded our home school table. With a table from Land of Nod.
This will make it easier for the students and the teachers.
Home Again
Glad to be back home again. Last week in Ontario California was a
rewarding, but very long week. I had a great day with the kiddos
today riding bikes in the mud. Anyway – wanted to test posting by
email – so here goes.
Cool a word cloud for my blog
This is a cloud made up of the most used words on my blog. Pretty cool huh?
My Journey to VoIP
I’ve had several people ask me about my switch from SBC/ATT to a new Voice Over IP company. The company I went with after doing some research was VoIPYourLife.
The information and blogs that I saw said that VoIPYourLife provided higher voice quality with minimal problems.
So here’s my story:
July 7th – I talked to customer service and placed an order. The online ordering process was relatively painless and fairly quick. I had my primary number in a couple of hours.
July 12th – I received the adapter and sent in my authorization form for porting my regular number.
August 3rd – Number is finally ported – I can finish the installation. I made a switch to my telco box on the side of my house so I could use the normal phone jacks in my house. Found I could make calls, but not receive them. Called support – was told I need to contact Linksys to find out how to unblock certain ports on my internet router. Now we’re golden – seems to be working well.
Next couple of weeks sporadically people would not be able to call – they’d get a fast busy. Seems to happen for a fairly short time each time it happened.
8-16 – Sheri unplugged everything before a storm. When we plugged it back in we didn’t have service. I spend 1.5 hours on the phone with tech support, we determined that I have a faulty device. The tech tells me he will overnight the part to me. That’s good news because Sunday night I fly out for California and won’t be home to install it. I call the next day and a tech support person tells me “oh – I don’t know what happened – it was sent out ground it will be there Monday” I call home from California Monday evening- have to call my wife on her emergency cell phone because we don’t have phone service. Device isn’t there. Call tech support – “Oh let me look it up – it says it will deliver on Tuesday (probably doesn’t take Linksys that long to make one.) Finally the device arrives on Tuesday. My wife unplugs the old device, plugs in the new device – service still doesn’t work. Meanwhile the only service she has is her emergency cell phone which doesn’t have enough minutes to be used as a replacement home phone and will probably cost me a fortune. And that’s what we’re stuck with until I arrive home from California after midnight on Friday. I’ll keep you posted on the continuing saga…
Well today is August 26th. I got home last night from California. Learned that VoIPYourLife sent me an upgraded adapter – the SPA2100-SS. This one supports two lines and has a ethernet connection to plug into a PC for configuration. I reviewed the way Sheri had set up the cables and made a couple of changes and was able to make outgoing calls. This morning, I called customer support to figure out why I couldn’t receive calls. I waited on hold for 15 minutes before giving up the first time, 30 minutes the second time, and finally got through after 15 or 20 minutes the third time. Apparently they are having some network issues. The tech wanted to just say that it wasn’t working because of their network problems, but I wasn’t quite ready to buy that. You have to open some ports on your router to be able to receive incoming calls and when you do that, it’s specific to an ip address. We were able to figure out that the new device had a different ip address than the old one. I changed the ip address on the router and it still didn’t work, but a little while later when I tried calling, it did work.
So we now have telephone service. We’ll keep you posted on how it’s working. I don’t anticipate any further problems, but you never know.
Long Run
I’m training for the Twin Cities Marathon this year which is, of course, the most beautiful urban marathon in America. It’s on October 1st. 49 days from this writing. I’ve adapted for myself a training schedule taken from various Hal Higdon plans as well as information from other books. I’ve made it fit my busy schedule. I’m definitely not in the shape that I have been when I’ve run other marathons in the past. I’m looking at this one as a warm up for a long string of marathons.
Last week I had a really rough time with my 15 miler. I ended up walking as much as I ran for the last 3 miles. Today’s 16 miler and Thursday’s 9 miler were much easier. I did walk a little toward the end today, but not a lot. The differences in my prerun actions that I can remember were:
- I wore different shoes. I bought a pair of trail running shoes to protect the soles of my feet on some of the rougher terrain I run on. (I live in Illinois – I have to drive a long way to find a hill) They are surprisingly comfortable, but I don’t think they have as much conditioning as my much too old Mizuno Wave Riders. I put the wave riders on today. (I’m on the Dave Ramsey budget.)
- I ate more breakfast. I ate a peanut butter sandwich and some peach yogurt and drank some diet Dr. Pepper.
- I also put some honey in my water that I took on the run. I wear a Fuel Belt- Revenge the motion of running kept the honey well desolved. I was thinking I’d at least get some glycogen back in my muscles.
So for whatever reason, the run was much better. I did have one issue that is kind of interesting. For some reason I’ve developed a blister on the inside of my little toe on my right foot. At about mile 13 it started hurting really bad. I took my sock off (non-runners might want to tune out here) and saw some skin hanging off. After I removed it,it hurt like crazy and I didn’t think I could go on. I took both shoes off and walked for about 5 minutes and then said to myself “It’s going to take forever to get back” Sometimes ADD is a good thing. So what I did, since I didn’t have an Active 
Strip (I work for 3M Company – they’re much better than bandaids) is I found a shiny leaf – non-poison ivyish – and wrapped it around my little toe to separate the toes and keep the flap of skin in place. Put my shoes and socks back on and away I went. It hurt for the first few steps and then I was ok.
The Illinois and Michigan Canal Trail (I & M Canal Trail) is a great trail to run on. Crushed limestone and 60 miles long not including all the other trails it connects into. Quite a few GeoCaches around it if you’re into that. I’ve linked geocaching with running many times. If you use Google Earth , here’s a kml file with my run along canal marked.Download JaysRun16Mile.kml
You can open it in Google Earth and see the run on the satellite map.
That’s it for now. I’ve got a busy rest of the weekend with the family and church.
