Recently, I have found myself using origami to give my mind a break from whatever it is that I am working on. I am able to focus on the physical task of folding the lines carefully and coming up with an immediate result.

To find some origami tutorials (without buying books), I looked to the web and found some good sites including a whole category under instructables. I have gotten to the point of collecting designs faster than I can make them, so I just post them all to del.icio.us for later reference.

The neat thing is that the girls have gotten into origami after Rebecca’s mom taught them how to make some different objects, like a house, a piano and a turtle. This could turn into a great family activity that we can do together on a rainy day (not that we get very many of those in SoCal). We could even make a project of “a thousand origami cranes”!

We have also tried combining biking with geocaching which makes both activities more enjoyable, since biking makes the transportation part of hunting easier and geocaching gives purpose to our exercise. We have even recruited cousin Toby to join us in our Biking + Geocaching events.

When we first dabbled in geocaching about five years ago, we used a big black and white GPS unit and had to print out the geocache info ahead of time, which made it difficult to be a “spur of the moment” activity. In the intervening years, GPS and data technology has advanced to the point that paperless geocaching is readily accomplished.

Now, our Windows Mobile-based phones are equipped with GPS and mapping software via Google Maps. Couple that with a nifty geocaching software called GCz, we are able to download geocache entries and even do a simple search of caches nearby our current GPS location, wherever we are.

Here’s a geocaching.com badge link of what we have found so far:

We still need to work up to hiding our own caches. That will be the next level in our geocaching adventure.

Let us know if you ever want to go hunting with us. Who knows, there might be a cache right near where you are now.

On Sunday, we were over at my parents’ house for dinner and afterwards, we let the kids ride their bikes in front of the house. It’s pretty cool to see how they are starting to feel more comfortable on two wheels.

Well, I had messed around on Micah’s little BMX bike a couple of weeks ago, and I got to try it again. It reminded me of the biggest reason that I ride bikes, all the way from when we were kids their age to now… because it’s FUN!

Thanks Micah-man for letting me experience the FUN again on your cool little ride. And thanks Moses for taking the great pics (I’m using it as my latest Facebook profile pic). Check out pics of Elijah enjoying a ride of his own.

A few months ago, we discovered the fun of Marshmallow Guns, but we could only play it occasionally as they were messy so had to be played outdoors particularly as the marshmallows got wet, sticky and yucky. A little bit after, our nephew got this insanely huge nerf gun that could launch Nerf darts clear across the room. Elijah eventually got a couple more smaller guns for himself and the boys that were easier to run and shoot around the house.

Originally, I figured that our girls wouldn’t be so interested, but boy was I wrong. I kept hinting that I was going to get a Nerf gun, and they just thought it was funny. After finally picking up a gun at Target, they wanted to try shooting it and really got into it, especially when shooting at me!

I ended up taking that first gun back and getting the gun pictured above, and I decided to get a couple for the girls (turns out Rebecca took them to Target to get some too, including one for herself). After trying a couple smaller guns for the girls, we settled on the one below which was easier for them to shoot:

After dinner, we had our very own Nerf gun war for almost an hour! Elise couldn’t load, cock and shoot as fast as the rest of us, so she decided it was more fun just running around collecting bullets for me, while I fended off Rebecca and Juliette who were ganging up on us.

We suggested to Juliette that she should secretly bring her gun to ambush Micah and Toby on Saturday, but she’s just too nice and said that I should tell them to bring their guns too. Could prove to be a lively Nerf gun war weekend.

Ever since I got my Xbox 360 last June, we’ve had the most fun while playing Lego Star Wars 2. And now there’s another way in which the 360 has been adding to our entertainment value by way of a free program published by TVersity.

The 360 has a feature in which it can stream video files from computers over the network, but this is limited to Windows Media Video files. Now, the beauty of TVersity is that it allows the 360 to stream any video files, such as AVI, XVID and DVIX (with the help of this tutorial). This has allowed us to watch a whole bunch of shows on our living room television that had been stuck on the computer.

In the past, I had tried hooking up my notebook directly to the TV, but it was a hassle to connect and reconnect the cables, and the audio was limited to the output coming from the headphone jack (the 360 has digital audio). And both of our computers are too far away from the living room to be connected permanently. I also thought about setting up a computer as a dedicated media server, but it always seemed like more work than it was worth. Now that I have been able to re-task the 360 to act as a streaming media server, it’s opened up a lot of media possibilities for both video and music.

There are still some limitations to TVersity’s solution, such as having to watch through an entire video before being able to fast forward and rewind. This could be solved by having some sort of pre-caching / pre-loading of video files on the computer side. But TVersity is still adding features and functionality, so I am sure that the software can only improve further.

For those of you that don’t recognize the symbol (and for those of you that should, but have strayed from the Jedi path), it is the insignia of the Rebel Alliance [wikipedia].