On Thursday I accepted a new position with Cars.com. I’m pretty excited about this new job for several reason. One of the reason is that I’ll be working with two friends that I use to work with back during my days at Morningstar. My first day will be June 13th.

Yesterday I received an early Father’s Day gift from my wife and son. It was a Darth Tator (See below). It’s pretty cool and my son loves it too. I can’t wait until he’s old enough to watch the Star Wars movies with me.

Last Thursday I attended the Adobe Creative Suite CS2 on Tour seminar. Needless to say, I’m now even more excited to get our CS2 upgrade at work. There are some pretty amazing new features in Photoshop CS2. Another great thing about the seminar was all the door prizes. There were a lot of vendors at the show and they all brought iPod Shuffles as giveaways. Oh… and I won one!

At first I was going to put in on Ebay and get an iRiver player I’ve been wanting for awhile. But, I just can’t justify spending the extra cash to make up for the cost of the iRiver player. Plus, I really don’t want to switch to iTunes for my music management at home. I’m happy with my WinAmp and file server setup I have. Then, while checking my news feeds this morning, I saw a story about a new WinAmp plugin that lets you put music on your iPod without even installing iTunes. It is called Mlipod and it is wonderful. I installed it a little bit ago and now have my iPod shuffle full and charging. I can’t wait for the train ride to work tomorrow so I can try out my now toy. Ah…life is good.

This past weekend my son started asking us questions about Spiderman and the robot armed bad guy he fights. Well this lead to a big talk where I filled him in on the basics of the superhero world. Things like… secret identities, super villains, special powers, vigilantes (like Batman), etc.

His favorite hero right now is Spiderman. We got him a couple Spiderman toys and it’s all he can talk about right now. It is so amazing to hear him make the toys have conversations about their super powers. Have you ever listened to two Spidermans debating about who has the better powers? He is also into asking me and mommy lots of questions about superheros. Last night, when they picked me up from the train, I got into the car and Quincy asked…

Daddy, can you talk about Superman’s super bad guys?

Well, as you can imaging, I did my best to fill him in. It is a lot of fun teaching my son about such a fun topic.

My mom has taken up a new extreme hobby. Falling down. I jest, but it has really become a serious issue with her. She is starting to fall down on a regular basis and it’s starting to really worry me. Actually it’s beyond starting to worry me…it worries me greatly. With all the health issues she has been through, over the past several years, her body just can’t handle that kind of physical abuse. Not to mention she’s no spring chicken.

This weekend, on mother’s day, I went with my parents to Menards to get flowers for her and my Grandma Betty. While mom and dad were out on the sidewalk, looking that the racks of plants, mom just walked right off the curb and took a drive straight down onto the blacktop. She claimed to be alright, but kept grabbing at your ribs on one side. Dad took her to the doctor for xrays the following day. She has three cracked ribs. Not to mention a bunch of bumps and bruises from all the other recent falls.

I wish I had the time and money to become an inventor. I’d work on some kind of gyroscope vest or airbag belt and make her wear it. Dad and I talked to her about using a cane, but she wasn’t very responsive to that. Plus I don’t really know that it would help. Now that I think about it it might just become something dangerous for her to fall on. She really just needs to slow down and pay closer attention to the ground she is walking on.