Pirates, John Grisham, Legos and Frosting.

Katrina and I finally watched the much talked about 'Pirates of the Carribean 2: Dead Man's Chest'. We watched the first Pirates movie a while ago and thought it was pretty good, nothing great but not bad. The second one, though- my goodness. It was about 7 hours long and full of horrible looking creature people, the most offensive of which was squid grill- a gnarley sicko with a squirmy tentacle face. Nasty. He was unpleasant to watch and the movie seemed to last forever. I still don't know why Davie Jones' heart was in a chest somewhere on an island and he controlled the giant sea monster... or something. Anyway. Two thumbs down from the Rasmussons.
I downloaded an audiobook last week called The Testament by John Grisham. I generally enjoy Grisham's work but I've never read any of it- just watched the movies. I guess I'm still not reading it, just listening to it, but it's quite enjoyable. It's 12 hours long and I'm about half way through. I just listen to it in the car and I'm completely drawn into it. I have a hard time getting out of the car when I get to work or get home. The book is great so far. I'm very curious to see what happens but I would already recommend this book to anyone looking for a good book to read. So far it's very clean, too.
Tonight the kids and I hung out while mom and Grandma went to the movies. They're not back yet but we had a full night. As soon as they left we started making cupcakes. While they baked we made pudding. Before that we played legos. After that we played hide and seek. Anders likes to hide under blankets and giggle. As soon as you finish counting he yells, "Here I am, Daddy!" unable to control his excitement. Kinda ruins the game but he has fun. I made a sweet airplane with the legos. I used to play with legos for hours and hours. I have to say- I still got it. My airplane was flippin' sweet. That's about it for now. I'm going to add some photos of our blessed evening now. Rock on. Nils.
PS- I'm really not thrilled with Blogger's interface so these are out of order but you get the idea.

Lost

It's terrible. Just after moving in to Katrina's mom's basement, Katrina and I lost her engagement ring in a collaborative effort. She took a nap on the bed (which was a guest bed at the time) and then got up and left the room. She placed her rings on the bed. Later I took that bed down to put up our own bed. In the process, I saw her wedding band in a pile of bedding. I didn't see the engagement ring anywhere, though. We haven't seen it since. We've torn apart the room three times, checked all the bedding various times and... nothing. I just finished looking through the bedroom again and it's depressing. It's been about a month now. I just called Tom, Katrina's brother, who said his brother in law has a really nice metal detector. We hope it will help. Katrina got matching rings for her birthday but they're just not the same. Plus the engagement band was awfully expensive. Katrina knows. She paid for most of it after we got married.

The Prodigal Blogger Returns

NILS - So I haven't posted anything to the blog in quite a while, but I have been busy enough to justify my absence, I think. It's been a great couple of months, though. My new job is going really well and I finally finished one of the company websites. I also am designing their higher end racing simulators, so they'll look like little mustangs that you sit in and race. I'm also starting to design the logos and artwork for the various gumball machines and skill games that we produce so maybe in a few years you'll see my artwork in every Wal-Mart, Old Navy and other gazillion stores that buy our machines. That would be pretty cool. I'm just about to start on the racing simulator website for work, so that should be fun. It's really cool to see how the work I do directly impacts the company for good, though. By no means am I the greatest web designer or graphics guy but they were in such need of someone with a moderate skill level that they're really liking my work. And there's plenty of it, too.

Also new in my life is my sweet new ride. I like cars- like every guy. So any new ride I get is going to be fun. My 91 Honda Accord Wagon finally earned the label of 'unsafe' recently so I had to get a new car quick. I was driving the accord home from work and slid into a curb pretty hard in the snow. It must have knocked something loose because it really drove weird after that and started making really loud noises. I tried to drive to work the next day but had to get off the freeway after the first exit because I feared for my life. Enter Katrina's car dealing brother, Tom. He doesn't sell cars for a living but he buys them more than many dealerships. In this case, his brother-in-law left for a mission and failed to sell his car. Tom ended up with the job of selling it but it was out of our $6,000 price range so I wrote it off. Tom decided to pitch in some money to help pay for it in order to get it off his hands. Long story short, I'm now driving a 2001 Acura 3.2 TL for $7,000. Nice. I realize a car is a car, as long as it gets you from point A to point B, but this car makes it a heck of a lot funner than my old Accord did. Plus it's an Acura, which is made by Honda, so it should be a trusty car for a good long time, and a safe one, too. Two words: Heated Seats. Aaaah, they're great. Now the 1.5 to 2 hours a day I've been spending commuting to and from work are so much nicer. Also, when we move into our new house, I'll still be spending 1 hour/day in the car, so the 29 mpg is nice there, too. Not to mention the 225 horsies under the hood :)

The coolest new thing to happen since I last wrote, though, was our recent ultrasound. First of all, I think ultrasounds in and of themselves are pretty darn amazing. It's like a really expensive pair of x-ray glasses. We went into the doctor and saw our little.... GIRL! She was awfully squirmy, which was pretty neat to watch. We were both completely shocked because we just knew it was a boy. Or so we thought. Needless to say, we're really excited to know that we're having a little girl- it's gonna be a lot of fun. It's also much easier to talk about our little girl rather than 'the baby'. So we're really excited. June 2007. Child Numero 3 :)

In other news, I finished Paul Chilton's website once and for all (even got paid) so that freed up some time. I also finished Jon Saline's website. That's very good. That frees up some time to start on my next website, which is a collaborative effort with my brother, Grove, who is extremely talented. We should be starting that later this week. To make life even greater, I was only able to enroll in two classes this semester- due to lack of availability mostly. I'm slightly unhappy about this but mostly relieved. Full time school and full time work and side jobs and commuting and church and family and hobbies... it's all too much some times. It's great to get a break in one area. I plan on spending a lot of my late nights working on the basement in our new house, so it's convenient to have less school right now.

Last but not least is our upcoming home remodeling project. We've decided (at least for now) that we're going to remodel the kitchen of our new home before moving in. We're also going to re-carpet, repaint and replace all fixtures and door knobs. Wow- that's a lot of work. Luckily we're with Katrina's mom right now so we don't have a big mortgage to pay for at the moment. I'll be doing a lot of the work myself, which means a lot of trips to Saratoga Springs after work and long Saturdays there, too. Honestly- I love that kind of stuff. What I don't love is being away from family, though. So we'll have to work something out to entertain the kids while we spend shifts up there. It'll be awesome to move into a virtually 'new' home. Once we're in, the work begins on the basement. I drew up a 3D layout of what we're thinking of in Google's SketchUp software. Pretty cool for free software.

I guess that's the gist of my recent days. If any of you read this whole post, good for you. I have a tendency to post huge books due to infrequency. By the way, if Dave or Holly Lesue read this- I really like your blog. You guys blog how we should. Short and frequent posts with lots of pics. Very nice. Well- it's homework time. Yippy friggin' skippy.

Peace Out. -Nils

New House!

We bought a house last week. It's very scary to me, but also exciting. We broadened our search to Saratoga Springs and found this house in the Harvest Hills development. That's the one right by Smith's and Redwood Road, so it's not 10 miles down by the lake or anything. We aren't going to put any of our townhouse earnings down, so we'll use the money to finish the basement and make some improvements to the upstairs. Two words: Brass doorknobs. They must go. Anyhoo, we're hoping the loan will go through within a month or so.

The last week was birthday mania here at the Rasmusson compound. Anders turned 4 on the 6th, Addie turned 2 on the 12th, and I turned 29 on the 14th. Geez, I'm such a geezer. My last 20's birthday...let me wipe away the tear. All take note: next year I want a surprise party for my 30th. I can't believe my kids are that old. Anders used to be in my belly, and now he says things like, "Mommy, Dear Heavenly Father made our tummies soft, because that's how he made us". He thinks the "Dear" is part of Heavenly Father's title.
Addie's coming out of her "I hate Mom" phase, which I'm enjoying. She still confuses the heck out of me about 40% of the time. I can't figure out what she wants and she screams at me. Speak, child! She's getting much better with talking, she has words for most things, but hasn't started putting words together yet. The other day she did say, "juice...eh...eh, NO!" when asked if she wanted juice. Little Addie. I love her.

The above pictures are of them at the mall on Addie's birthday, and of them playing Elefun on Anders' birthday with Dad and Uncle Greg. Just in case any of you are considering buying this game, don't. It's really so much less climactic that one might expect, and you have to refill the stupid butterflies literally every 15 seconds. LAAAAAME!

Alright, I'm done. Peace out, brothers and sisters. I mean that in an eternal sense, not a hip one.

Christmas and all that

Christmas was dandy. We started shopping Thursday night. We're good people. It really didn't feel like Christmas this year. With moving, getting sort-of settled at my mom's, finals, and cold, cold weather...it just made it difficult to get into all of it. Anyhoo, I'm sort of glad it's over so we can focus on house finding to some degree. Having said that, Anders was thrilled on Christmas and enjoyed it immensely, so at least one member of our family had the Christmas spirit. The above picture just might be my favorite of Anders EVER. He was checking out his other presents, but humoring dad by giving a nice fake smile. I love it.

Sickness wise, I'm starting to feel better. I still have a bit of nausea at night, but as long as I have a mint or mint gum I'm okay. My appetite has returned, which I'm very grateful for. I'm still not crazy about sweets and baked goods, but I suppose that's a blessing in the long run.

Nils' family came up Wednesday night and is staying until Saturday. They're staying with Grove and Andi in Eagle Mountain, so we went to their house last night to see everyone and to do the Rasmusson Christmas exchange. We haven't seen everyone since July, so it was a lot of fun. We left at 12:15 a.m. I don't think Anders and Addie have ever been up that late. Everyone was so tired, needless to say. It's almost 10:00 and they are still sleeping. That's nuts.

I just want to give a shout out to our fellow bloggers Dave and Holly- you two are probably two of three people that have read this thing, so thanks and welcome! By the way, yours is fabulous.

Regression

We moved out of our townhouse on Saturday. We close on it this Friday, but Nils has finals this week and wanted to move before all that. Where did we move, you ask? My mom's basement, thank you very much. We haven't had time to look for a house. We've been out a couple of times, but I've been so sick that I can't handle the process. I now associate house hunting with vomiting, and it's just not good. We're hoping that we can start looking for real next week after finals are over and our house is closed on, etc.

I went to the doctor for my first prenatal visit last week. The first thing he did that gave me joy was prescribe me anti-nausea medicine. I'm going to fill it tonight. I haven't had time with packing, moving and all that crap. I'm excited to see if it works. Since I've had pregnancy induced hypertension in the past, and my last baby weighed 4 lbs. 10 oz., I've been instructed to gain no more than 15 pounds, to exercise as much as possible, and not eat salt. Believe it or not, I was really glad to get those guidelines. The doctor was optimistic about the outcome of this pregnancy, so that made me optimistic as well. I've been a little nervous given Addie's traumatic birth and first few weeks of life. Hopefully all will go well with this one.

Anders and Addie are loving living at Grandma's house. Anders got into bed with me this morning and said, "Mommy, I like living at Grandma's house", and this afternoon he said, "Grandma's house is so nice!" Addie woke up this morning and first thing went upstairs looking for grandma. They're funny little whipper-snappers.

Katrina is faking it. She's not even pregnant.

Whoa- everything's different. I'm a bit surprised that Katrina changed the look of the blog. Go Katrina! Right now Anders is hugging me for the third time in the last two minutes.... fourth now. He's not letting go. Aaaah, my Anders. He's really happy because I told him that we could stay up and have a 'Special Night' tonight. That means that he doesn't have to go to bed at 8- instead, he and I get to hang out and stay up late. Last time we watched Cars together. This time we're gonna play a racing game (Burnout Revenge- mostly for Dad) and then we'll watch a fun movie of sorts. You know, like Saw 2 or something. Or The Ring... or Elmo.
So I've been busy. Katrina's last posts are funny. You can tell how much she's enjoying the pregnancy. I do what I can to clean up, keep the kids amused, help cook and most importantly: attend to Katrina's every last need. That mostly involves little trips downstairs or upstairs or to the store for water, medicine, salt & vinegar potato chips, cereal, a blanket or whatever else she stands (or lies) in need of. Sometimes I'm a grump about it but I really don't mind. I'm just glad men don't have to have babies. I think I would pass away. Thanks for having our babies, Katrina. I sure love 'em. Speaking of which, our little one is now 3 inches long. I'm excited. He's got a massive head and looks a bit tadpole-ish, but he's cute. Or so our Baby Center e-mails tell us.
Work is going really well. I've been really busy the last few days because my bosses have tons of crap that they're eBaying off. I mean- I'm eBaying off. I think I've got 24 items up right now, which should bring in about six thousand dollars. Mostly giant gumball machines. The make 'em. Not my bosses, but the people at the company. I've been working a lot on our new company website. Talk about a portfolio booster- check this out. Here's the current website and here's a preview of the new version. It doesn't work in Firefox because the server technology is old but that was supposed to get update today by our host. Sorry. Anyway, I really like doing web design and everyone is really glad that I'm there. They need a lot of help when it comes to design and web presence and anything aesthetic. I'm not the best but I'm alright- a lot better than what they've had in the past. I also get to work on a Mac Pro with dual 2.66ghz DuoCore Intel Processors, which is hooked up to my 30" cinema display. Oh, it's tough.
By the way, if anyone is reading this, check out my company's other site- it's for the gaming simulators that they make. This one looks ten times better but I'm gonna redo it and make it ten times better again. But the product is so cool. I'm gonna have to get one for a Christmas Bonus- or something. They're giving me a $5,000 bonus when we buy our new house but I don't think I'll be able to talk Katrina into letting me use that to buy a game simulator. Oh well. I'll have to play at work instead. Well, Anders and I have some racing to do now. Not on a $5,000 simulator, but on my sweet 27" TV, and my six and a half year old couch. Until next time.