I know I'm doing my part to head off this recession, I just purchased a big tent from sportsmanguide.com, we set it up in our front yard and it barely fit, it should be quite comfortable for four people and a dog. It's also been bookmarked for various school camping trips for both six year old and eleven year old.

In other stimulating the economy news, I will be buying a new tire this afternoon. On this morning's commute, I hit something that bounced up and gouged a hole in my sidewall, and had to put on my dinky doughnut. The Toyota jack was not fun to use next to a curb, it didn't like to work at an angle.

All this stimulating, and I don't even have my rebate check yet.

It was a pretty productive weekend, despite a late Friday night with too many kids.

As I droned on about before, the eleven year old's sixth grade class is giving a gift to the school, and is raising money by holding babysitting nights. The second one was Friday night, during the John McCutcheon concert at the school, and it ended up being a late night, it was 10:30 by the time we got home, and close to 1 before I went to bed, as I needed a few hours with no kids around.

The babysitting movie was Alvin and the Chipmunks, in which three chipmunks are taken from a forest when their tree is cut down, and make their way to a struggling songwriter and turn his life around, before nearly succumbing to the pressures of life on the road as big pop stars. I'm looking forward to the sequel where they find the man that cut down their tree and get their revenge.

They're doing another babysitting on Saturday night, this time I'll skip it, drop the kids off, and take Mrs. Ha out to dinner to celebrate her new job, yes, she's going back into the ophthalmic tech field for a very small office.

Despite dragging Saturday, I got a bit done. We ordered a deco type sconce with outlet for eleven year old, she has the top bunk bed, and likes to read in bed while charging her DS. Currently we run extension cords across the room to the DS's, leading to the occasional garroting and other accidents.

The kids were upset that I had to turn off the house mains, they were afraid of TV/internet withdrawal. In about an hour I replace the existing sconce with the new one, did a smidgen of work on the second story hall ceiling light, and turned everything back on, only to find that the outlet didn't work, and didn't fit the DS charger, either. I'm think I'll just swap for the one in my closet. First I'll buy a circuit tracker.

It then started to rain, so I put off the bike until Sunday.

That wasn't the end of the motorcycle content, we started watching Diarios de Motocicleta Saturday night, a road movie about two loveable ethnic type scoundrels touring some foreign country with subtitles, kind of like Harold and Kumar, except they're not Asian, and NPH doesn't show up. It was a long movie, taking two nights to get through, and the scenery was gorgeous. The title was misleading, too, the motocicleta is a 1939 Norton that gets scrapped halfway through the movie.

Sunday was even more productive, we moved one balloon shade to a better fitting window and put the second one up, and I worked on the bike, torquing the starter clutch bolt to 20 foot pounds (I found out Tuesday night that it should have been tighter). The bunk bed room is slowly coming together.

In beer news, I tapped my keg of honey lager last night, and ordered some extract ales from Northern Brewers.