Feeling a Little Trashy...

Most of my readers know that I use Hotmail for my personal email account. Overall, it's a great (and free) web-based email service. I've used Hotmail for over 11 years, and apparently use it often enough that they asked me to be a beta tester for their current version (called Windows Live Mail) a couple years ago. So relatively speaking, I'm in their pretty good graces.

I'm starting to wonder though...

Today I sent a quick email to a friend from church, and had the following message to confirm my email was sent. Normally, I don't look at ads, but I'm a geek and saw the phone in the ad at the bottom. Then I read the message and wasn't sure whether to be insulted or laugh. See for yourselves... [I added a red box around the main element.]



Yes, apparently, I'm a "Ho" since I use the "Homail" service. Perhaps this is a growing trend to create services around specific lifestyles, but I'm not sure why "the oldest profession" needs any special email services different from anyone else's.

The additional irony is that the ad talks about "get[ting] cozy."

My current theory is that Hotmail might have retained radio shock jock Don Imus' services during his off-the-air stint resulting from him his calling women from the Rutgers women's basketball team "Nappy headed ho's".

Certainly, we can't attribute this to a simple spell check problem... :-)

Karsten's Ant Farm

Karsten received an Ant Farm from Mema and Papa as a souvenir from all their travels this fall. It's one of those AntWorks like the ones went up in the space shuttle, and has this gel that ants can use for food and still make their tunnels.





This is a great idea for a gift, and the kids really liked seeing the ants get to work on their tunnels pretty much overnight. However, the last couple weeks the ants have just been hanging out at the bottom in a big huddle. They rarely venture out for food or exercise...so we're not sure if we have relatively lazy ants, or if they are eating some bad ant gel.





Anyway, I'll be certain to post critical updates as soon as the ants start to move again...

Ava's New Interest

As a man who has enjoyed his fair share of television in the past, I admit a little bit of pride looking at these pics. I also worry about tv turning my kids into some sort of mindless zombies if used in excess, but this isn't a problem or concern in our home. Overall, the tv isn't on that much around the house, so I can look and laugh with a clear conscience.

Kiera - newest pic

Here's a recent pic of Kiera. Her hair isn't always that curly - it looks that way since we had just let her hair down after being in bands all day.

Christmas Letter Season

At this point, it doesn't look like we'll be able to get a Christmas letter written. Lord willing, we'll at least manage to get a family photo mailed out by within the next 3 months. The picture above was taken this fall when Nikki was trying to take pics of the kids for our Christmas card, but it didn't make the cut - since there's no Ava. Hopefully this blog will suffice...

My mom informed/asked me that she put my blog on my parent's annual Christmas letter. If anyone comes here from my parent's blog, be sure to post a comment on this post so I know you visited!

Ava's 1st Birthday

Today my Littlest Princess turned 1! She wears her crown well, don't you think?

We didn't do anything too fancy...just Key's Cafe (Ava's choice, of course). Ava enjoyed eating birthday PANcakes there tonight.