Long Beach Boardwalk Run

It's especially good nowadays to get the kids out of the house.  After a quick call to Surfer Sands in Long Beach, WA to confirm sandwich availability (they were in fact running low), we headed out.  L and AC stayed in the van and I ran the kids.  I captured the footage with my new Flip Video Ultra, which is a flash-memory-based handheld camera.  So far I really dig it and feel like it was a good investment of my American Express Costco rebate.  I am NOT digging how it works with my Windows machine.  It was halfway decent until I tried to load Adobe Premiere Elements program, which now (coincidentally?) ceases to work.  I ran the repair utility to no avail.  So, I'm a step of frustration closer to getting my Mac . . .

More Baby Photos

He's back by popular demand . . .

. . . and still sleepy and not looking very impressed by you. I'd imagine he'll strike this pose a lot on his desk in school.


Hey, he DOES have eyes! "You wanna piece of me?"


More big eyes! He's a cool little man.

It's Aliiiiiiive!

Special thanks to Barry Z, the laptop rides again with a new Western
Digital Scorpio 120 gig hard drive. $69.99 from Newegg.com with free
3-day shipping. It's like having a new (slow and pre-sticky-kid-
fingerprinted) laptop and it comes with the fun of re-installing all
the programs. Yay!

The Bri-onic Man at 33!

This will highlight how far behind I've gotten on this blog, but here are some pictures from my birthday back on Feb. 22!

E chose some presents from me, including this Spongebob balloon!


Here I'm very very excited because I'm pretty sure my sister got me a MacBook Air . . . this is the container they come in, right? :-)


Here are some things I actually received that are a lot of fun. The frame has cards representing different adventures I've had like biking and climbing mountains and stuff. Also, I got a really sweet Pedro card! I, unlike Pedro, do not have to shave my head because it's feeling too hot! Thanks everybody!


I got to choose the birthday dessert, so I chose chocolate pudding cake. YUM! You just throw a bunch of stuff in a cake pan and it looks like a big watery chocolatey puddle, you put it in the oven, and it sorts itself out. Really! It's miraculous.

My Poor Laptop

As I allude to below, my 80 gig hard drive in my laptop failed. I have tried many things (short of spraying WD-40 in there :-) like whacking it, dropping it, and freezing it, with no luck, So, I had the joy of re-doing my taxes I had just done the weekend before (and not backed up yet). I'm very good at backing up the tax files once they're done, but since I wasn't done yet I hadn't. That pretty much killed a couple Saturdays. Interestingly, my taxes worked out a little better when I re-did them. Weird.
I can't hate HP. This laptop is like 3 to 3 1/2 years old and this is the first hardware problem. It's slower than slow, but I suppose that's because it's running at 1.4 ghz Centrino.
Techno lesson learned: if a file exists in only one place, it doesn't exist.

It's Baby Time!

My apologies to all who've wanted to see this little guy sooner. I had the unfortunate occurrence of the hard drive on my laptop catastrophically failing, so I don't spend much time on the computer these days. Maybe I'll do a blog post about that . . .

Our new son, who for the purposes of this blog will be AC, came amazingly quickly. I'd just given anesthetic to a patient at work when L called and said her water had broken. So, I apologized to the patient (who was very understanding) and scurried home. After loading up, I got to use some GTI power and we hauled to Seaside Providence. Of course, we ran into road construction on the way . . .
We arrived at the hospital around 4 and he was born at 5:45. They didn't have time to get the epidural in, so L did it all-natural. We feel like he was more responsive right off the bat without all the drugs to him (via mom) and also that L is on the mend faster than she would've been also. The fact that her mom is here is also a huge help too!


Tuesday, we brought E and W to see their new baby bro. E liked to stand on a chair by him and was very careful to pat him nicely. Wonder how long that'll last. :-)

Paternity Test is Back . . .

. . . yep, he's mine. Like father, like son. ;-)


Also, his mom loves frogs, and you can see that he does a mean impersonation!