Books & Tuition: $260.00
Mask & Snorkel: $80.00
Fins & Booties: $200.00
Seeing a school bus, yacht, row boat, ginormous bass, motorcycle, outhouse, and RV… underwater… priceless!

Yup, I am now open water certified, time to plan a luxurious vacation to the Caribbean… hah, I wish! I had a lot of fun on my last dive this past Saturday. I didn’t have any issues with my ears clearing like I did on my first set of dives. 🙂

All though this is pretty exciting news, probably more for me than you, we do have some sad news to report. The Jeske clan on Bradbury Rd. in Adams, TN is one less after Scout passed away last week. She was not doing well for quite awhile and didn’t get any better. We took her in to see the vet a few different times and they couldn’t figure out what was wrong with her… poor Scoutster…

Things are quite busy in the Jeske household as of late. Susan found out
about a job opportunity, with Corning, in Clarksville, TN. So, my job hunt
focus will now be going south (quite literally). I’ve applied for a dozen
or so jobs and have had two phone interviews already! Hopefully, I’ll hear
something back this week. Once I land a job down there, it’s two weeks at
DICE and I’ll be heading to Tennessee. Susan still has a few more months
left to finish her MBA and will probably move at the end of this year…

Scout’s become more adventurous towards Waldo, although she doesn’t
really care for him much. She will come down stairs nowadays, usually
begging for food. Most of her time is locked away in the dark on her
“throne”. We decided to scrape the toilet training, Scout seems set in her
ways and things weren’t progressing well. Waldo has gotten a lot bigger
(probably close to 50 lbs) and has lost a lot of fur… We took him in for
a haircut and he got shaved down… he actually doesn’t look quite so bad
anymore, maybe I’ll get a picture of him up soon.

We’ve had a couple races since the last time I posted… Susan’s still
doing good, finishing in the top of her age division. I managed to improve
my time a little bit in May, but for some reason the race earlier this
month was a tough one. The Pinconning CheeseTown challenge is coming this
weekend and I’m hoping to improve my pace time (even though it is a 5 mile
race 🙂 ). I’ve officially started my triathlon training last week… I’ve
already paid, so it’s too late to back out now! If you head over to the
gym page you can see my goals for each week in the three different sports,
so far, so bad… I didn’t quite make my goals last week… by the end,
there should be a lot of green on that table! 😀

Wanting to get the most out of my bike, we went to the bike store last
Thursday to pick up some clip-less pedals. For those not familiar clip-less
pedals are actually pedals you clip into (makes sense, doesn’t it?) You
wear these really spiffy looking shoes, that aren’t very much fun to walk
in, and become one with the bike. After installing the pedals, I tested
clipping in and out in the driveway and in front of the house… I was
ready, or so I thought… We hit the trails and the first stop we come to
I un-clip the right side and somehow started leaning to the left. Luckily,
I was able to get my left foot out in time before I hit the pavement… I
wasn’t so lucky last night. We were just about done with our ride and one
of the last stops, I really was one with the bike, all the way down to the
ground. I caught myself and didn’t really scrape my knee too bad… I
guess I must not have hurt myself that bad, as when Susan asked if I was
ok, she just kept going… I got back on my bike, only thing that really
was hurt was my pride. 😉

I hit the two year mark at DICE a couple weeks ago, things are going
pretty good. I’m still working on my video application that is really
starting to take off. I guess it helps when the only other company that
produces a similar product is going out of business… Although, I did
take a personal day last Wednesday to take a trip down to Detroit. It
wasn’t a sight-seeing kind of day, although I went to parts I hadn’t seen
before. I was at the federal building for a few hours taking the FBI Phase
I exam. I found out recently I failed that exam, but I can take it again
in six months if I want. I’m not sure if I’m going to take it again, IF I
do pass I need to pass the physical fitness test with at least a 16 (12 is
the FBI minimum, but the Detroit office requires a 16) in order to go to
the next phase. I’ll probably take it if I’m able to pass the PFT by then
(it’s pretty tough… you can check out the requirements on the FBI’s
website…)

Waldo’s been home for a few weeks now, he seems to be getting bigger and
bigger every day. As of lately he hasn’t been having a lot of accidents in
the house (which is a good thing 🙂 ). Scout and Waldo are pretty much
mortal enemies. We ended up moving all of Scout’s stuff to the upstairs
bathroom (she wouldn’t use the litter box because that would require going
past the dog…) She pretty much spends all her time in there now, which
she seems happy… maybe they will get along some day. We are training her
to use the toilet instead of a litter box, it started off pretty rocky,
but since the upstairs move, she is actually starting to do a lot
better… We bought a Litter Kwitter, which basically is a litter box that
sits on the toilet. As the cat gets more used to the idea, you can put
different trays in with bigger and bigger holes. Right now, Scout is at
the no-hole phase and actually using the Litter Kwitter while it’s on the
toilet (something she wouldn’t do before).

St. Patrick’s day came and went and the Sunday after we were in Bay City
for the annual St. Patrick’s day race! I ran the 5K while Susan did the 5K
walk. I managed to beat my best time ever… Susan also did really good,
she got third place in her age division… and beat my super-competitive
boss! Susan also did a 4 mile walk the next Saturday and got second place
in her age division (beaten only by one of her sorority sisters she signed
up with).

So it’s been a couple days… er… months since I last wrote, I figured
I’d break this blog up into sections. Grab a cool beverage, put your feet
up and get reading!

The Lawn

Okay, I last left you off thinking our lawn was about to become the “It”
spot in Falcon Crest. People would come from far and wide to see how
beautiful a lawn could really be… Unfortunately things didn’t work out
this way. A day or two after my last blog entry (first week of June), a
funny thing happened… it rained… and when it rains it pours… We
ended up having a stretch of three or four days with severe thunderstorms
and showers… you can just guess what happened, all our seed washed away!
We learned two important things from this… firstly – never seed before
heavy rains and secondly – always know where your gutters downspouts
drain. Not sure exactly what the builders were thinking, but they decided
to have one of the downspouts go under the sidewalk that leads to the side
door of our garage. This is all and well, except they didn’t have any
where for the water to go. We got so much rain, it created a small hole
were water was coming up out of the ground. I’m glad to say this problem
is fixed. Our lawn guy put in what he called a “pop-up”. It’s a little
green thing in the ground that raises when the water fills up the
downspout, and settles back down once it stops raining. For a small fee,
he redid all our downspouts this way, which is really cool as I don’t have
to move them when I’m mowing the grass (once we get grass…) and we don’t
have to worry about them blowing away, which has happened in the past!

I bet right about now, you’re wondering when we’ll actually have a nice,
lush, soft, green lawn… I’m thinking the same thing myself. After the
seed washed away, we started getting a little growth. Some of it was good
grass, while most of it was weeds… Not wanting to spray over the weeds,
the lawn guy came out and killed off the lawn (for the second time now…)
A few days went by, then weeks, then finally he came out again to kill off
some more growth that had occurred (third time…). Finally, this past
weekend, he brought his tiller and broke the crust that had formed,
re-raked the yard, and sprayed it once more (four times… man weeds can
be tough =P). Right now the lawn looks really good compared to what it did
a few days ago, it’s just missing that green stuff on top… you know…
grass! Looks like rain is in the forecast, so maybe he’s putting off
spraying for a couple days. Boy, I’m glad I’m saving all this gas money
not having to run my lawnmower =/.

Running

If you haven’t heard we’ve done quite a few races already this summer.
There was the Loons Pennant Race I had mentioned in a blog earlier, the
Pinconning Cheese Fest Fun Run, the Dow Run/Walk, and the Cheasning
Riverboat run. The Dow one was really nice, it started off at the Midland
Community Center and looped through various streets of Midland. It would
have been nice if the water they handed out along the way was colder, but
it was a fun race. I signed up to do the 5K run and managed to finish just
over 37 minutes. Susan did the walk and was a little disappointed she
didn’t beat her time from the Pennant race. We also learned never to
forget your safety pins, but a quick run to Walgreen’s never hurts! The
Cheese Fest run was two miles and everyone that entered got a small block
of cheese, well almost everyone… Susan didn’t… It was a warm day and I
really wanted to run the whole thing ( well as least the first mile anyway
;)), but I was overcoming a cold and was only able to run part of it. When
I crossed the finish line, the clock said “21:25”, but to get our
“official” time we had to hand in our numbers. The only problem with this
is there was a bunch of kids that cut in front of me, I managed to get my
position back, but unfortunately Susan wasn’t able to and got a slightly
worse time then she actually finished… oh well… I ran the Cheasning
race and beat my previous time… I finished in 33:03. Susan also ran in
this race and almost got her time put down as a walker, which would have
given her a really good walk time, but she told them she signed up to run.

Scout

Scout’s doing well, even if she hasn’t reached her recommended weight
yet (she might be gaining =/). We got her back on the old food which
probably doesn’t help things much, but we had so much left over we thought
we’d better use it. She still begs for food and gets really annoying until
we feed her… It’s been pretty warm lately and Scout’s been losing quite
a bit of fur. To help with this problem we usually brush her, but one day
we (and when I say “we” I really mean Susan) thought it would be a good
idea to give her a bath. Out came the small tub we use to bath the cat in
and the struggle began. Scout’s big enough now that should could spread all
four legs across the lip of the tub and not get wet. After quite a bit of
struggle, we (both of us now) got her feet wet. She wasn’t too happy about
this and managed to dig one of her back claws pretty deep into my palm.
I’ve never seen Scout’s tail so big… it was super-puffed out. After she
scratched me I gave up on the whole bath thing. Susan tried to get her in
the water again, but Scout was helping things and managed to avoid getting
a bath. I think if we (Susan) try this again, we’ll be getting a bigger
tub! If you haven’t seen the latest pictures of her, head on over to the
pictures of the week!

Racquetball

I played the infamous child star in the area. He’s 16 and if he doesn’t
win the Michigan championship, he’s in second! I was able to get 5 points
against him, while everyone else that tried, couldn’t get more then 2!
He’s been playing since he was 5 and is extremely talented. Even though I
got banged up the other night (took a racquet to the face, hit myself in
the leg with my racquet and got drilled just below the rib cage on a
serve that was long anyway =/), I still try to get down to the courts to
play once or twice a week. I even got to play doubles a couple times…
which at first seems like there’s a lot of people on the court, but it’s
actuallypretty fun. I’m really excited for the ladder season to start up,
sounds like Mittag will be doing it too!

Work

Work’s been going great, I’m getting a lot done and my boss says I’m
doing a good job. I’ll be a full time employee (for real this time) on
September 15th and am pretty excited for that! Susan’s job has been kind
of hectic lately… she started up a new process not too long ago and was
on call for the DeHate family camp out… She thinks she may have found a
lead on solving a problem she’s been working on for awhile now.

Once we get the data converted properly, we’ll be deploying our software to a
client for beta testing. It was suppose to happen this week, but some
issues needed to be fixed before we could go… maybe next week… The
company picnic is this weekend, it sounds like it’ll be a lot of fun!

DeHate Campout

Even though Susan couldn’t go, I went out to the camp out for the day.
Instead of a canoe trip, this year we had the DeHate Olympic Games. We all
drew from a hat to pick teams. The I’s and H’s looked pretty similar and
we had to figure who was on which team. We *cough* rigged *cough* it so my
mom and I were on the same team. We also had another team mate who was
pretty young (and pretty annoying…) There was horseshoes, mini-golf
(from hell), water balloon toss, bocche ball, cornhole, mini-basketball,
and ladder ball. Each station you met up with another team and played the
game together except for cornhole. Depending on how well you did, you got
a gold, silver, or bronze (aka pink) star. The team with the most gold and
silver stars was the winner. Our first event was the mini-golf, and man
that was tough, it was one hole at the bottom of an eight foot incline
with all kinds of roots growing out of the ground… we got the bronze
star on this one. We did pretty good on the other events, and when we got
to cornhole, we ripped it up. Not having played the game before, we
managed to get quite a few in the hole… “CORNHOLE!!!” yeah you have to
say it for it to count! 😉 The food was really good, especially Susan’s
Pizza Pasta, and pretty soon it was time to go. Next year, we’ll be
camping (hopefully… if someone isn’t on call.)

Cedar Point

We have been making good use of our season passes so far. We even got to
be chaperones for one trip. That was kind of fun, except for the annoying
bus driver. Dow Corning treated all their interns to a trip to the park
and Susan signed us up to be chaperones (even though technically I should
have been a guest 🙂 ). The plan was to leave early on a Saturday morning,
the only problem with this was sometimes plans don’t go according to the
plan… We headed over to the meeting spot for the two buses, only problem
was, there was a total of four people there… yup the buses were in the
wrong spot (or 50 interns were, you pick =P). So after getting to the
right spot, the day snacks were no where to be found (oh yeah, we got
fed!) So we waited around for the food to arrive, packed up the buses, and
were off, about an hour later then the plan. The bus driver told the same
story over a few times, but it was a good trip. We got to watch movies,
got to go to the park for free, got to eat for free, and didn’t have to
pay for gas, can’t hardly beat that!

Our last trip wasn’t as much fun as the others though… Someone said it
wasn’t suppose to rain, someone was wrong… We got to our camp site (same
place as last time and probably will be the last time there…) and it was
incredibly muggy out… and the bugs were out. After getting the tent set
up, I was pretty dang sweaty, and hopped in the shower, while Susan
attended to all her bug bites… The next day we went to the park, and it
was pretty cloudy. It rained a little, and a lot of the rides shutdown.
Then, near the end of the day it started to rain a little harder, we
decided to go, hoping Sunday would be clear… it wasn’t, we packed up our
went tent and came home… almost without getting lost. We were coming
back and past an exited I thought we should have taken. Well being
adventurous, I decided to stay on the road we were on – that’s the way the
bus driver did it afterall. All was good and well until we got to Toledo,
I missed another exit I should have taken… after driving around and
circling back, I managed to find that exit again and was able to get back
into Michigan, from there it was easy and all while my avigator was
sleeping… Halloween weekends start in September and you better believe
we’ll be there as much as we can!

Okay, so maybe you didn’t need a cold beverage to get through this blog,
but atleast you won’t be thirsty now!

This past weekend was kind of rough… Pepper was brought back to Animal Control due to his problematic behavior. He hissed and growled at me and marked his territory… and his hyper-aggressiveness scared Susan… On a happy note, we did get a new kitten, Scout, who is a female brownish/black calico. She’s been really good and likes to explore (she got stuck in the pull out couch when we first brought her home…)

I finally got my rejection letter from CMT, oh well… I do have an upcoming interview on Monday with Kelly IT Resources (with is a contracting company for Dow Chemical). Job hunting is starting to get old, hopefully something opens up quickly.

I don’t know how many Nintendo fans there are out there, but in New York a press conference was held yesterday to release the launch date and price of the new system, the Wii. I’m defintely gonna get one of these beasts with a price tag of $249.99 with a game included you can’t go wrong (launch date is Nov. 19th). Sony isn’t doing so good this time around, with their explosive laptop batteries and delayed launches and huge price tag (~$600) and limited quantities, I’m not sure how well they’ll compete. Besides the Wii allows for legal downloading of old school games (NES, SNES, N64, Sega Genesis) and has one heck of an innovative controller (yup they got me sold already…)

It was Susan’s birthday on Wednesday and I made her two cakes (well the first one crumbled and fell on the ground), but the second one turned out all right. It was a chocolate-cinnamon cake and tasted pretty good… I also got her some flowers and a James Bond Zip-Zap (micro RC car) that she drove under the couch once she got it together.

Well this weekend started off with a bang (literally)… We were heading up north (da UP) when we blew a tire just before we got to Clare. We gave AAA a call only to find out all the tire shops in Clare were closed, so we had them call a tow-truck company to put the donut on (the tire blown was the driver side front, the heck if we were gonna sit on the side of US-10 to change that!) After waiting an hour and a half, the guy finally showed up. After the donut was in place, we found out leaving the hazard lights on for the whole time kills your battery. So after a jump from the tow truck we were finally on our way back to Midland to get Susan’s car (at a very slow pace might I add).

This rest of the weekend went pretty smoothly, we got to see our nephew, Marcus, be baptizied and enjoyed visiting our families. All our good mojo must have run out because when we got home to see how Pepper was doing (pretty good), we found puddles in our basement… Apparently a combination of using powder detergent and old pipes with clay buildup creates massive blocks in the sewer system, and thus raw sewage in our basement, yay! Our building seems to be the only one affected, lucky us… Though one good thing did come out of this, we don’t have to pay for scratching the paint on the floor (because now they have to repaint it anyway)…

I’ve learned a couple important lessons this past weekend… When in a canoe and trying to soak someone with a water cannon, don’t lean too far over, especially if the person in front of the canoe is leaning the same way… Also, camping in the rain is not a pleasant experience (though we got our tent down just before it started to really rain). If you haven’t guessed it, me and Susan went camping this weekend. It was the 7th Annual Dehate Campout, we even got some fancy orange shirts (pictures to come possibly). If was a lot of fun, minus the whole tipping over in the canoe part, though I did find out my flash drive works after being submerged…

We recently found out our kitten, Pepper, has ringworm so he’s currently in his fortress of solitude in the basement. The vet gave us some shampoo to cure it, which by the way Pepper is not too fond of taking a bath.

As far as the Midland employment hunt goes, I’m still unemployed. Computer Management Technologies (CMT), in Saginaw, should be getting back to me soon with some good news hopefully. I’ve also been in contact with someone at EDS and could get a work-at-home programmer’s position (that would be sweet)…