It has been a very long time since I last posted. Not really that long but too long for my liking. In an ideal world I would post every three days or so, maybe even everyday if I did more exciting things to write about.

Jamie and I have just been very busy lately with school and work, barely finding time to do anything. Besides the boring yard work and soccer that I already wrote about too much, there isn’t anything that I really can write about that anyone (including myself) would want to read. Oh yeah big highlight, cleaned the fish tank the other day; fun, fun. See what I mean, not quite a compelling story. I have been able to accomplish a few more websites and I am in the works to sell some domain names at serious prices. One domain can literally erase half my debt which would be awesome.

Thanksgiving is coming up and I believe we are traveling out to Long Island to our relatives on our father’s side. We haven’t seem them in awhile so it will be nice. Can’t wait for the food! This nice long weekend gives me some time to catch up on things and get squared away before I am bombarded with end of the semester tests over the following two weeks.

I will try and video the next indoor soccer game and see how it comes out, would be fun to watch it online. Now I just need some kind reader to send me a camcorder for Christmas so I can really video tape stuff and play it on the blog.

©2008 Joe and Jamie's Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Although the season is coming towards its end, I love this half of the fall season. Tymor Park out in Lagrangeville/Union Vale/Amenia (whichever it is) has wonderful scenery from the field. You can hear the sounds of people hunting in the forest in the near distance, bike riders come out of the trails in the woods and the trees are just a great site. If you don’t mind the occasional frost on the bleachers in the morning its a good day. The indoor season has started up, I need to get a camcorder so I can video one of the games in there, pictures through the netting are horrible.

I thought I would just share of the park’s surrounding area with everyone that may not have ever come here before. I need to explore this area some more. I like how its only fifteen minutes from my house now but you feel very far from the city life. Nothing but cows and horses out here.

Go Orange Team, Go!

©2008 Joe and Jamie's Blog. All Rights Reserved.

You can see here we filled up a good amount of leaf bags even though all the trees still look like they are full. By the time we were done, there were two more barrels  added and another leaf bag.

I just really love the way everything looks when I go outside now. I have a great time enjoying the cool weather and like to be outside as much as possible. Jamie and I were a little tired so we didn’t go on our walk, but we’ll do that next weekend.

For some reason I thought this was the coolest shot I have taken all season. I know I’m weird but looks, its half empty, and not from the top down like most other trees.

And here is that one pain in the butt tree. See how its barely yellow on top? Yeah, that tree waits until it snows to fall, making the last cleanup impossible and really annoying.

Here is a shot of Tymor Park in Lagrangeville where Jamie plays soccer. I am just glad I don’t have to rake all those! See the white thing towards the left? Everyone out here owns horses apparently so they always take them out and practice jumps and stuff. Fun watching the dogs run around with the horses too.

©2008 Joe and Jamie's Blog. All Rights Reserved.

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.

©2008 Joe and Jamie's Blog. All Rights Reserved.

There is only one thing that bugs me about this blog, its the fact that the link is www.josephhannigan.com/blog2. 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.

©2008 Joe and Jamie's Blog. All Rights Reserved.

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.

©2008 Joe and Jamie's Blog. All Rights Reserved.

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.

©2008 Joe and Jamie's Blog. All Rights Reserved.

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.

©2008 Joe and Jamie's Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Any-who, I broke down and purchased a Transcend TS-RDM5W USB 2.0 Multi-Card Reader reader for my computer last week from Newegg.com. Price was about $18 straight to the door. It accepts every kind of digital media there is out there today, even those little itsy-bitsy micro-SD chips, which Jamie’s phone uses coincidentally. I read all the reviews and based my pick on what other people thought. I don’t typically do that, but I have never had to buy a card reader before. It has been pretty good so far. The only annoying thing is that it uses four drive letters for the slots and I needed to play the guessing game as to which slot was which drive letter. As soon as I found out I labeled each one and changed the drives letters to my liking. I transferred pictures from a SD and xD card at the same time and it is working just as fast as USB flash drives and a bazillion times faster than that stupid cable!

Card reader in action, lookout now!

Crappy photo, but vioala anyway. This is what happens when you open and throw away the case before you look at the pictures to see if it came out.

©2008 Joe and Jamie's Blog. All Rights Reserved.

©2008 Joe and Jamie's Blog. All Rights Reserved.

When I woke up this morning Doodle was acting very strange. He was near the top of the tank barely moving, just floating with the current. I went near him, but he swam to the bottom so I figured it couldn’t be that bad. I started to research this while at work today and found several reasons why this could be happening.

1. Overfeeding or bad diet can cause digestive problems. - I rule this out because Doodle was new and he didn’t eat much at all. Bubbles comes to the top to eat and would eat all the flakes before Doodle got them. I also hand fed Doodle because of this, so I know he only ate a flake or two since Saturday.
2. Swim Bladder issues - I rule this out because he had no problem swimming around until this morning. So unless he developed it overnight (which now I think he actually did) then it wasn’t this.
3. Dirty water conditions - I still think this is why. Bubbles was in that water for two weeks before Doodle, so Bubbles was used to the conditions, Doodle was not. With just Bubbles all I did was change the water once a month which was fine, but now that there was two I should take out at least 15% of the water each week.

I had Jamie run to the store and get two gallons of water and change it out because of #3. Doodle responded better for a bit, but didn’t recover. Jamie went to the store to get test kits for the water when my mother found Doodle behind the filter on his side.

So farewell Doodle, we barely knew ye. You were the best looking Telescope goldfish Petco had, sorry you had to go.

Off to Petco to get some test kits now, possibly a Doodle2 later tonight….maybe Doddle Jr or Doodler, not sure how the sequel name will go yet.

[UPDATE]

Jamie and I went back to Petco last night and grab a test kit and then headed home. We tested the water and the pH, hardness and nitrate leves were just fine. Nitrite was a bit high and the ammonia levels were a bit more on the stress than safe side.  We plan to change out two additional gallons of water this weekend before purchasing another fish. I talked with the people at Petco for a long time last night, going over everything. I learned that we did pretty much everything correctly and that it could have been anything that killed the fish. They said that it could have just been the fish itself and that it probably wasn’t anything serious that would affect the other fish. I tend to agree with them now, especially after Jamie read that Telescope Goldfish are the hardest goldfish to care for. They are not recommended for beginners (that’s what we are obviously) and that they are prone to disease and die more often than others.

So we think we may hold off on the Telescope Goldfish again, unless we use our second smaller tank for it by itself. We now have our eye on a Black Moor or Calico Fantail. We’ll see this weekend which one wins I guess.

©2008 Joe and Jamie's Blog. All Rights Reserved.

©2008 Joe and Jamie's Blog. All Rights Reserved.