Scott McLaughlin

So the other day I’m in the living room messing around on the laptop, michelles in the kitchen and the kids are doing whatever. I knew Keira was in the bathroom because she made an announcement that she was going in there to wash her hands, but I didn’t think too much of it.

After a bit we hear a loud crash from the kids bathroom, so in the usual “I have two kids been through it all” mode I waited a few moments to listen for screaming, crying, etc before getting off my ass…and after a few moments of silence its determined something not so good happened. As I’m getting up, I hear the bathroom door open and Keira come out crying. As a parent you learn quickly what every type of cry your kids have can mean just from hearing it without even seeing them. I immediately took this cry as a “oh shit I’m so dead” more than “I cracked my skull open and I’m bleeding”.

As I come around the corner, Keira is standing just outside the door crying and looking quite worried and I turn to look into the bathroom, here’s what I see.

Shower curtain rod is half way in the bathtub and half way out on the floor, shower curtain is laying on the floor, there’s water everywhere and the toilet water sounds like its running (you know the tank constantly filling) and the lid to the tank is half off.

I turn to her and I say “what happened?”. She so afraid of what happened she won’t talk to me and just keeps crying. So I take another approach. “are you okay, are you hurt?” and through her tears she says she bonked her head and it hurts. So I check her out and she seems okay, no blood, no big bump yet. “What happened?”….nothing but more tears. I immediately change my approach, “sweetie, you aren’t in trouble, it looks like an accident and I won’t get mad, but you need to tell me what happened.”

As she continues to sob and think about talking, I wander into the room to see where the water is from…I’m assuming the toilet since its running but not sure how. I suddenly realize that the entire side of the toilet tank has a huge crack down it and water is pouring from it onto the floor, so the tank continues to fill at a rate about equal to the water coming out of the crack. I reach down and smack the standard builder special shitty valve they always install, so that it shuts the incoming water off. I then grab two towels from under the sink and drop them on the water pile on the floor so it doesn’t run into the wall or subfloor.

By this time she’s decided to tell me what happened. Now being a four year old there’s some non truths. Not really lies as they haven’t really figured out that art yet, but more they remember things then recite them to you in usually a not so accurate order. After some thought and a series of patient calm questions, here’s what I pieced together.

Keira heads into the bathroom with all intentions to wash her hands as were her previous parental instructions. After washing and drying her hands, she begins the usual, while I’m here I’m going to play around in the bathroom because hey there’s water here and water is fun. I can only imagine during this time it involved, sitting on the counter, feet in the sink, standing on the toilet, messing around in the tub. At some point her fascination with the bathroom turned to the shower curtain rod…which to a four year old looks like a solid bar mounted to the wall and exactly like a monkey bar found on the preschool play ground. Holy crap, how much fun and excitment can that be, right here in my own bathroom. Proceeding to climb on the toilet bowl, then on to the tank (hence the lid being half off) she reaches up grabs the bar and begins swinging back and forth…wooohooo! I mean come on, thats serious fun.

Well not being a solid bar bolted to the wall of course the rod immediately flys out of its positon with 45 pound 4 year old still swinging to her hearts content. Considering the tank lid of the toilet was half way off, probably from her feet pushing off, I’m assuming the curtain rod (and not her head) came straight down on the edge of the tank cracking it and she landed either in the tub or on the floor, hitting her head somewhere along the way.

Now the image of all this to me is quite funny as I’m putting all this together and I can’t help but laugh at the thought process of a 4 year old in causing this entire commotion.

So needless to say we checked her for concussions and then had a conversation about how not safe shower curtain rods are and they aren’t for swinging from.

Her punishment was helping me replace the toilet, which was on my list of things to do anyway, since it was the original crappy builders special constant clog toilet. Here’s some pictures of our project we did the other weekend, she was big help!

I was gonna write up a review on my new kick ass Yamaha super quiet generator, but I haven’t used it enough to really decide what to write up. So I’m still working on that one. I used it a bunch on our last camping trip which was fun, but I haven’t “really” dug into it or used it to run my HAM radio battery setup. I did jump start the car with it on the camping trip, was great how well that worked.

I did however get a new audio deck for the Explorer ordered, its suppose to show up today. Maybe I’ll get some good pictures of the installation I hope to do this weekend. Although its suppose to be hot as hell saturday/sunday so I might be inside in the AC. This rig is cool, it has a DVD player in it as well as a microSD card reader. Since it supports DiVX and XViD formats I can stuff a bunch of kids movies on to the microSD so when we are stopped/stranded somewhere for long periods they can watch a movie on it. It does support multiple displays but since my kids puke when they watch movies in the car, that ain’t happening anytime soon. I also ordered the HD Radio add-on (why not) and it came with the iPod adapters. So i’ll probably pick up a big ass NANO and just leave it in the car after filling it to the top with music. Anyway, I’ll do a write up on all that when I get it installed and more about my choice.

Getting ready to head to Idaho Falls later this month for a week. Kids are excited, it will be Keira’s first time flying so that should be an adventure. Ethan has gone the last couple years and they are both excited to go back to Bear World, LOL. How can feeding real bears donuts not just be the highlight of a little kids day!

I think this year I’m taking the good camera and lenses with me, its more work but hopefully I’ll have more time to take a lot more pictures. Guess it depends on what i end up trying to carry on to the plane…hrrmmmm

With our recent purchase of the new BMW 530i, I immediatley missed the ability to use my iPod like I could in the 328i that had the after market Alpine head unit in it.

Upon recommendation from my friend Alan Grainger I ordered up a iPod control system from DICE Electronics. These devices allow you to control your Ipod via the CD changer connections on your built in BMW audio system. Other vehicles as well, but I can only speak for the BMW system. Its relatively in expensive and quite easy to install (at least if you just want to dump it in the trunk).

Initially I just plugged the Dice and the Ipod into the trunk CD changer location and left it all there. Since the 2002 BMW doesn’t have a NAV unit it doesn’t really have a big nice display on the dashboard. While the Ipod is controllable via the changer controlls already built in to the audio system its a bit clunky. Awesome that it works at all though! So for a month or so I’ve just left the Ipod in the trunk and use it that way.

However, this weekend I decided i wanted the IPod up with me in the front of the car for faster navigation and control. This requires some work to re-route the Dice wiring up to the center console

I highly recommend the Dice, it works really well and plugs straight into the existing car wiring systems. This is a great way to get Ipod capabilities into cars that were built before the IPod, hell even before the iMac! The ability of the dice to use older existing cd changer control systems to control the Ipod is pretty ingenious.

So anyway I took lots of pictures and documented all the steps, so those of you who chose to do the same thing, will have a little bit of a resource and can see what I did. Obviously your mileage will vary with your year and model of BMW, but I’ve found in general most Beemers are the same at some basic level.

Here’s all the photos with descriptions of the steps taken.

Around August 5th we decided it was time we dumped the kids and went somewhere exciting and fun on our own. I posted this message that day, it was exciting. A few random posts between then and Novemeber when we left and then nothing for a long time. Unfortunately life has been hectic the past 9 months and because of that I never did follow up with how the vacation went and pictures and all that fun.

So here I am 8 months later posting about it…sorry to all of you who have been bugging me for so long for some pictures and data

… welcome to the Caribbean love … so the story goes

The plan was to find a relatively private island get away somewhere warm and tropical, but not including the usual worries of tainted water, mosquitos and general un-fun potential mayhem. Petit St. Vincent Resort in the Grenadines proved to be the ideal spot for what we wanted.

If you’ve never been and are looking for a nice quite get away with no phones, TV’s or electronics in general, this is definitely the place for all inclusive without the crowds. I’d be happy to sit down with you and go over details if you really want to go there.

We spent a couple days in LA on the way down hanging out with my best friend Zac Fink and his family which was a wonderful time. We had to break the travel up in order to time it correctly. The logistics took me awhile to get down before booking. Here’s how it had to work timing wise:

• Portland to LA (Alaska Air 2.5hrs)
• LA to Miami (America Air 6hrs)
• Miami to Barbados (America Air, limited flight times 6hrs)
• Barbados to Union Island (Mini local airline w/ limited flight times 1hr)
• Union Island to Petit St. Vincent (Boat ride happens once a day 25min)

One thing I did learn is that I will never fly American Airlines again. Those are some of the most uncomfortable plans I’ve ever been in. They bought the cheapest boeing packing in the most seats possible…especially for two 6+ hour flights.

While I was there I wrote notes every evening as if I was blogging but with no internet connectivity I could never upload them. I’ve gone back through these notes and loaded them back into my blog dated on their original dates in November 2009 as if if they were posted live. You can read those on the links below.

All in all the trip was a wonderful time, the staff there is amazing and the weather was perfect. We were there during the “off-season” so the cooler weather (and by cooler i mean 80′s instead of 90′s) was perfect for us and since its the “off-season” it wasn’t overly busy or expensive. I’d be happy to share expenses/costs with you if you are interested.

Some things to note from my daily blog entries now that we are well past that time frame:

1. My kindle never did show up from amazon
2. I’m still editing together all my video

Links about this trip:

• Photo Gallery
• Video Gallery (still editing)
• Daily Blog Entries (read from bottom to top, then to page 1 bottom to top)
• Petit St. Vincent Resort
• Google Map

In summary, this was a wonderful time all around and I highly recommend this resort. Would I go again? Yes, if I had no where else I wanted to go. There’s too many other wonderful places to try that unless we lived near the island I probably won’t venture back, but on to new places. If we lived within a few hours of this place via airplane, I would go once a year!