The Mallorys Online

I found this really cool calculator that shows you the odds for your baby’s eye color. It takes your parents eye color, your eye color and (optionally) the color of your current children’s eyes and gives you the % odds for each of the three colors: blue, green and brown.

According to the calculator, Jacob’s odds are:

50% Brown
29.1% Green
20.9% Blue

He has a pretty good shot at all colors!

Literally! She got a notice in the mail today that there is a warrant out for her arrest from the lovely Superior Court of Sacramento. This stems from a ticket she got about a month ago for driving without a front license plate. Never mind that VW let us drive away three years ago without mounting the bracket and plate.

Right after she got the ticket, Jennifer went through the annoying effort to get the plate mounted at the dealership and then made a trip to the CHP office to get the ticket signed off. She then mailed the docs and a check for $10 to take care of the situation well within the time specified on the ticket. Read the rest of this entry »

My buddy Grant “Big Tuna” and I are going to fish our first local tournament this year. We joined American Bass and will fish their Folsom Lake tournaments. With Jacob arriving near the end of April I may have to skip one of the tournaments, but the other dates seem fishable. I really hope they reschedule the Memorial Day tournament because Memorial Day on Folsom Lake is a free-for-all with wakeboarders, skiiers, jet skiiers and every other ignorant water sport enthusiast. Folsom Lake is a zero-etiquette lake so you fish at your own peril on holidays.

Grant and I have a lot to learn on the water and hopefully these small tournaments will be a good classroom for bigger and better events!

I have to give a quick link to a hilarious blog called “Pretty On The Outside.” The author is a very talented artist and sketches scenes/faces from various reality shows. Jennifer loves The Real Housewives of Orange County and the sketches on this blog are amazing! Check it out.

I’m usually surfing the net on the couch while Jennifer is watching the show so I get to see the ridiculous characters (people?) on this show. I have to say the sketches of Vicky on “Pretty On The Outside” are my favorite. She is one plastic surgery away from looking like a medevil orc. This show is like a car accident to me. I know I shouldn’t want to watch, but the women’s unreal lives (and faces) are fascinating!

I completely goofed on my U-verse install date and got a confirmation on Thursday evening for a Saturday installation. I thought I scheduled it for Friday and I planned on going to the Sportmen’s Expo Saturday. Oh well, go with the flow. The installation was scheduled to start between 8am and 10am and the tech arrived around 8:30am. I was surprised to see only one tech, a nice guy by the name of Josh. Josh said it was normal to only have one tech out on installs, but I’m still not so sure. I showed him the layout of the house and where we want the receivers and talked about an additional coax drop we have to do into the office. After Josh was familiar with the plans he drove off to the local “box,” which I assume is the new VRAD systems AT&T is installing. After about an hour and a half I was suspicious things aren’t going well.

Read the rest of this entry »

I want to take a moment to share our wonderful experiences with Cindy at Invision Ultrasound in Roseville. Jennifer and I knew we wanted to know the gender of our baby and we planned a revealing party for our family and friends. We heard there’s a chance the baby won’t cooperate during the basic hospital ultrasound and the staff won’t go to extra lengths just to see the gender. As a backup plan we decided to get a 2D/3D ultrasound to make sure we knew the gender by the time of the party.

After looking through listings in the area we finally decided to go to Invision Ultrasound in Roseville. Read the rest of this entry »

Jennifer and I were in the mood for some Americanized chinese food the other night. We have a couple Pickup Stix restaurants close to us and it’s easy to call ahead and pickup. We put the phone on speaker and dialed, hoping to order some chicken with vegetables and cream cheese wontons. We waited as the phone rang about ten times before a cheery gentleman answered the phone with the normal Pickup Stix opening. We asked to place an order for pickup and were greeted with, “Well, we just got the word today that all Sacramento stores are closed.” It hadn’t hit us yet so we asked why they closed early for the day. “Oh, no, we’re closed for good. Corporate decided we weren’t making money for them so they pulled out of the market.”

WHAT?!?

Granted, I could see the quality of their food and the service we received declining every time we ordered, but they’re a big chain and immune to this kind of thing, right? I guess not. Oh well, we’ll just have to find somewhere else to get our soy fix.

Jennifer talked me into getting another set of 3D pictures of our little guy, Jacob. He’s about 25 weeks old right now and my opinion is that I don’t want to see him before he wants to meet us in April. However, Jennifer has to deal with the everyday issues of pregnancy and she wins. Click over to our photo gallery to see more pictures of Jacob!

We also got a full-motion DVD of the entire experience so once I get that crunched down to web size I’ll post that, too!

I’ve been looking at the various monthly expenses the Mallory family enjoys paying and the one that jumped out at me the most is our home phone, Internet, and TV bill. We have AT&T DSL, AT&T landline, and Dish Network. The combination of these three services is more than I care to pay, especially because we don’t even need the landline, but it’s required for the slow DSL service we get.

I’ve been hearing a lot about U-Verse since AT&T seems like they’re spending billions on advertising. The features and price right now are unmatched in the television world. I’m getting more channels than my current Dish programming, HD in all rooms, a DVR, twice the Internet speed, and $100 back with the first month free. Not only that, but we can ditch the landline since U-Verse runs on a system that doesn’t require a landline! Installation is next Friday and I’ll report on my experience.

When I got my Wii one of the features my wife fell in love with is the Virtual Console. This lets you buy and download games from old systems like NES, SNES, Genesis, N64, Neo Geo, and a couple others. We first downloaded the original Mario Brothers and played that for a couple weeks before jumping head first into one of the greatest games ever developed, Super Mario 3. We spent many nights passing the classic controller back and forth as we crushed Bowser’s little minions. As our skills improved we had even more fun collecting as many lives as we could. All seemed great until the castle at World 7, which I think is impossible for 98% of society. The game was now frustrating and unenjoyable. We reset the game and played from the beginning a couple times, but ended up in World 7 again, frustrated and defeated.

I read all the glorious reviews for Super Mario Galaxy. “Perfect use of the Wii remote”; “Beautifully stunning”; “Amazing gameplay and replayability.” It was impossible to find a bad review. Read the rest of this entry »