Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Spring Fun



This is somewhat of an experiment. I'm in the process of transitioning the infrastructure I use to manage this blog and related photo albums. I still have a lot of work to do to transfer all the existing content, but I can't keep you waiting forever for new photos! But the image link in this post may or may not work the way I hope.

The new photo album system (Picasa Web Albums) has several advantages. The main ones are the nice slideshow, and the fact that it scales the photos to whatever screen resolution you are using to view them. I know some of you use smaller screen resolutions - with the new albums you will never need to scroll to see an entire photo.

In family news, everybody is doing fine. Audrey is talkative as ever. She can entertain herself for long periods making up skits for her little fairy dolls. She also makes up her own languages. Charlotte continues to communicate better all the time. She comprehends many, many words and can answer a lot of questions with vigorous head nodding or shaking. She's starting to vocalize more and sometimes even strings sounds together with something resembling sentence cadence.

Carol is in the process of creating her third annual hand-painted children's furniture for the Co-op Preschool auction. We'll be sure to post photos when it's complete. And we now realize that after she finishes she has to paint a table and chairs for our own kids! Carol's been hitting the gym more and is enjoying that.

My contract at Rosetta Inpharmatics has been extended through the end of 2007. I still hope to get hired full time by then. I'm enjoying the rich scientific environment immensely. I continue to commute to work by bike almost every day, rain or shine. A little more shine these days, thankfully. Bike season is gearing up. I did a 70-mile ride a couple of weeks ago and a 62-mile organized ride last Sunday. I'm schedule to do my first century (100-mile ride) of the season on May 12 in Richland, WA (and spend Mother's Day with Carol's parents). The goal every year now is to get in plenty of miles before July when I do the Seattle to Portland ride with a bunch of friends: 204 miles in one day. I'm well on track this year.

For the technically curious, the current blog is managed using Wordpress and the photo albums using Gallery2. Both require maintenance (by me) to keep up with security patches and new features. I learned a lot doing it that way, but now I'd rather spend my time on other things. So I'm switching to Blogger for the postings and Picasa Web Albums for the photo albums. Both are Google products and all the infrastructure is managed by them, not me.

Monday, April 16, 2007

My Mother the Car

I came home from work today to this happy scene:



If you don't see a video player above this paragraph, you'll have to follow this link.

I'm grooving on this video thing now. It's a much better way to let you see video than the ambitious super deluxe DVD project I've been planning for three years but have never worked on.

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Video Stars

My friend Alex, a younger version of myself (i.e. a real geek!), is always dragging me along into new technical frontiers. Lately he's been posting non-public videos of his daughter on the web for friends and family. I finally decided I have to keep up with him. So here, for your enjoyment, is our first (public, by nature of being linked here) video of Audrey and Charlotte.



Hope you enjoy it!

The Binkie Fairy Cometh

Audrey has a great fondness for her binkie(s). Over time we have purchased about 20 of them, growing in size as she did. Recently she has developed a few favorites, the "squeaky binkies", or as she says it, "squinky binkies." They are large binkies that have developed a leak so they squeak when she sucks on them.

Our pediatrician recommended that we get rid of pacifiers long ago, but we figured she'd give up the habit when she was ready. Lately, however, she has just seemed too old for it, and Carol was getting concerned that Audrey's teeth were being affected (alignment-wise). So, we decided it was time for a plan.

Carol had read previously about parents using the story of the "binkie fairy". We started preparing Audrey a few weeks ahead of time. Carol cut lots of photos of babies out of magazines and covered a cardboard box with them. Every once in a while, we would encourage Audrey to donate an old disfavored binkie to "the babies" by depositing it in the box. Then we told her that one day the binkie fairy would come and take all of the binkies - even the squeaky ones - and leave something under Audrey's pillow in return. Audrey decided that "thing" should be Disney fairy dolls that are connected to a new Tinkerbell movie that is coming out (her first instance of being influenced by advertising). Fair enough.

Last Friday the binkie fairy finally came. I managed to get the binkie out of Audrey's mouth in the middle of the night without disturbing her, and left the new fairy toys next to her pillow. At about 6:30am she showed up in our room with them and was very excited.

Audrey did pretty well all day. We usually keep pretty busy on weekends. Saturday night she was sad to go to bed without her binkie, but she did alright. Sunday, when she was upset about something and would normally use her binkie to calm herself, she complained, "I want the binkie fairy to come back and bring back my squinky binkie!" Poor thing.

She mentioned it a few more times over the next two days or so. But now it's been a week since we've heard a word about binkies. Carol and I always visit Audrey's room to admire her before we go to bed. We enjoy the fact that now we can see her whole face.

Another milestone passed!