My birthday

I am now 36 years old.

I had my birthday on a Monday this year, so I mostly celebrated by going to work. I had decided that it was finally time to join Facebook and figured a birthday was a good time to do it, so I signed up during my lunch hour.

When I got home I opened my presents. The girls were sweet and had each gotten me a gift (an umbrella and a BB-8 kite).

I got a few random things, like new jeans shorts, a shirt, some piano music, a camp stove, and tennis shorts, but my main gift was the Lego Millennium Falcon.

The kids were very interested in this present.

Amber made some svíčková for dinner, and a delicious birthday cake. It was still Monday, so afterwards we had a quick FHE and watched an episode of The Flash. All in all, a very nice birthday.

It's interesting getting older. It's hard to imagine that I'm one of the adults I remember as a kid. I'm really enjoying this stage of our family, though. We're entering the golden age for the next 5-10 years, the time they'll always remember later as their childhood. It's nice to have them be mostly self-sufficient. Miles is almost out of diapers, and it won't be too long before Olivia can babysit for us. It makes getting older a little easier.

Fixing the PlayStation

Recently our PlayStation 3 decided it would no longer read discs. I couldn't really complain, since it is over 7 years old, and had served us faithfully the whole time, even after being disassembled to remove the pieces Damon jammed into it as a younger terror. I considered just replacing it with a PS4, but they are not backwards compatible and Amber pointed out that it would be a shame to not be able to play all the games we've accumulated through the years, right when the kids are getting old enough to enjoy them.

After a little research, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it's relatively cheap and easy to replace the Blu-ray drive. A few days later I had a replacement drive from eBay, took apart the PS3 for the 3rd time (first to diagnose/fix, second to get Blu-ray drive info), swapped out the drives (and drive circuit board), put it all back together and it is now working like a champ again.

Damon was very interested by all this, of course, and I now had a non-functioning, very cool-looking piece of electronics. I gave him a screwdriver and let him go at it.

He spent hours and hours over the next couple days disassembling and reassembling the main parts of the drive, until he finally realized there were more screws.

He eventually took enough pieces off that even I couldn't get it back together again, but we had fun looking at all the circuit boards, springs, gears, motors, and even the lenses for the lasers.

I wonder where he gets it from?