Birthday Girl

We were able to celebrate Emma’s second birthday recently. With that shining event comes a slew of new photos for me to unleash on an unsuspecting populace. Look upon the light of my life and be sent into diabetic shock by her sweetness and cuteness. And as if that weren’t enough, I have video, yes, video clips for you to ogle as well. Look all ye who visit here and behold the wonder of the Internets to deliver my daughter’s cuteness into your own computer.

Click each link once to view, or right click on the link and choose "Save As" to save to your computer.
Video Clip 1: Emma checks herself out in the video camera. (5 mb download)
Video Clip 2: Emma and Mommy at playtime. Cheryl will kill me for posting this online. Oh and turn your speakers down. (2.3 mb download)
Video Clip 3: Emma settles in to watch Blue’s Clues and have a drink.  (5.4 mb download)

My Little Girl is Growing Up

It seems like only yesterday that we were up with Emma every three
hours, giving her bottles, and encouraging her to crawl hither and yon.
Now she is nearly two years old and running around the house like a
little whirlwind. It’s mind boggling. I’ve pulled together some photos
over the past month or so that show that my little girl is growing up.
From flying a kite to running through a sprinkler to getting ready for
church, these photos show that she is slowly becoming a little lady.

Six Months and Counting

For those of you who have been patiently waiting, your patience is now being rewarded. I’ve published a new photo album for your viewing enjoyment. Appropriately enough, it’s titled Six Months and Counting.

I’m still working on getting the video I’ve leeched off my camcorder edited and ready. Hopefully I’ll be able to post them here. Oh well. We’ll see what happens.

Thanks,
-C-

Houston, the Eagle Has Landed

Emma has officially achieved crawling status.

As a result, the house is in the process of being child-proofed. Our coffee table now resides in a spare bedroom, and I am contemplating TIG welding several pieces of furniture to the wall as I have nightmarish visions of my daughter pulling down bookshelves, entertainment centers and insert your favorite heavy piece of furniture here down on top of herself.

It’s with a bit of a misty-eyed nostalgia that I write this. As many photos and video clips of Emma as I have taken, I have found that I haven’t taken enough. Little moments like how she smiles, or how she used to have such a petite little sneeze that barely would have disturbed a blade of grass, but now manages to splatter my glasses with unmentionable goo.

I am watching my little girl grow up, and it is filling me with both a sense of pride and a sense of longing at the same time. Pride in that my little girl can now comfortably roll over and sit up on her own, then crawl across the floor and get her latest toy so she can start playing with it. The sense of longing leaves me uncertain though. What am I longing for? My own childhood? To understand somewhat how she views the world from down there? I am left wanting for an explanation.

So, the other night I sat on the couch and caught some video of Emma crawling across the floor towards her books and her rice bowl. (A cheap substitue for a toy which she finds infinitely entertaining.)

On a side note, we went to Wal-Mart the other night and picked up two Sesame Street toys for Emma. The first is pretty swag, even from an adult’s standpoint. It’s called an Activity Atom and it makes me wish I was a baby again so I could have such cool toys to play with. It’s motion activated with tons of lights and sound effects. There are lots of knobby things for the baby to touch and set off sounds. It lights up and rotates like an atom. Pretty sweet. Further cementing the fact that Emma is my daughter by genetics and birthright, not the postman’s or the milkman’s, she loves all things technological. If she sees our phone in the living room, she goes nuts and scrambles for it. If she sees my or Cheryl’s cell phones, she goes nuts and scrambles for them. If she sees my computer she lunges for it.

Detour:
One night I let her bang away on my keyboard. She successfully managed to enable StickyKeys and nearly did a shut down and restart of my system.

Seeing that she likes phones so well, we snagged an Elmo cell phone for her as well. She likes it pretty well, but not as well as the nearly ten-year old broken keyboard that I cut the cord off of to let her play with.

Yes, you heard me right, a ten year old broken computer keyboard.

Man, is this kid my daughter or what?

It was hilarious. I sawed the cord off of it with a steak knife, then sat it down on the floor to see what she would do. Forget the activity atom. Forget the cell phone. She took one look at it and you could almost hear her thinking “God bless America and get out of my way there’s a keyboard on the floor for me to play with. “

So needless to say, Cheryl and I shared a good laugh over that one.

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In a surprising turn of events, I have managed to obtain a new rig.

System specs are:

• Microsoft® Windows® XP Home Edition (I would have preferred Professional, but compromises had to be made. Oh well, at least I can still use Knoppix.)
• AMD Athlon™ XP processor 3000+ (2.167 GHz) with QuantiSpeed™ architecture
• VIA KM 400A2 Chipset
• 80 GB HDD (augmented with my already beefy 30 gigger)
• AOL 3 month membership included (promptly exorcised with much hissing and holy water)
• 512 MB DDR RAM (PC2700 – Augh augh augh!)
• 56K* ITU v.92 ready Fax/Modem
• Bundled with eView 17F – 17″ Flat Screen CRT 16″ Viewable, 0.25mm dot pitch
• 10/100Mbps built-in Ethernet
• 48x Max. CD-RW Drive (and it’s blistering fast…); 16x Max. DVD-ROM Drive; 3.5″ 1.44MB FDD
• Standard Multi-Media Keyboard, 2-Button Wheel Mouse, Amplified Stereo Speakers (never took them out of the package… I just plugged in my current set with the subwoofer.)
• Pre-Installed Software: Microsoft Works 7.0 (exorcised), Microsoft Money 2004 (exorcised), Encarta Online, Adobe® Acrobat® Reader, Power DVD, Microsoft Media Player, Real Player (exorcised), Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, MSN (exorcised), CompuServe (exorcised), Norton AntiVirus 2004 (90 days complimentary subscription), AOL (lather, rinse, repeat)
• 6 Channel Audio
• VIA S3 UniChrome™ 3D Graphics
• 6 USB 2.0 ports (2 on front), 1 Serial, 1 Parallel, 2 PS/2, Audio In & Out, 3 PCI slots (2 available)

Needless to say, I had this thing out of the box less than 24 hours and I already cracked open the case and started adding parts. I tossed my 32MB vid card from Bahamut into the new rig, as well as my 30GB hard drive and my Sound Blaster Audigy card.

Rock on. The new rig has been christened Neo-Bahamut. And yes, as was explained in posts past, we geeks tend to name our rigs.

All that needed to be said to say this:

Since I now have a kick butt setup, I can now take video from my camcorder and save it to hard disk, then add transitions, effects, and other such items. What does this mean for you?

You get to see video of Emma crawling, playing, or whatever the heck else I feel like posting.

Hopefully anyway. I’ve captured some video, and have played around with editing it, but I’m still in the process of learning the software. It’s my goal to have clips posted to the web for family and friends to watch. Keep your eyes peeled.

More pics soon. Promise.

-C-

A Little Bit of Magic

In my last post I offered up congratulations to Rick & Kathy on the news of the new little one soon to join us.

Sadly they informed us yesterday that Kathy lost the baby.

Mother and family are doing fine, although I feel that a little bit of magic left the world the day before yesterday.

See you someday on the other side little one.

-Uncle Chris-

Mister Ten Below

Mother Nature saw fit to grace our little village and surrounding environs with an ice storm yesterday. As such, we nearly lost power twice last night. Not a good thing when you have a four month old and you want to make sure that she stays nice and cozy warm.

Navigating the sidewalks and the streets sure was a spectacle though. It’s always cool to see lots of cars sliding. Especially the hundred or so big rigs that go right by our front door every day. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a semi jackknife in your posey beds. Git’r done!

Congratulations go out to Rick and Kathy, as they are now expecting another little one. Matthew gets to be a big brother finally I’m looking forward to another rugrat to spoil and it will be nice for Emma to have a playpal.

I like being an Uncle. It’s teh rules.

Oh well. Bedtime. More soon.

New Photos

I’m in the process of adding some new photo albums. One is updating the existing Christmas photos, and the other is a small series of photos taken around the house recently.

Enjoy!

-C-

Schools Out!

Home

Thankfully, school is out for the next couple of weeks, so I get a bit of a respite. Today is “Christmas Eve Eve” if you want to call it that, and things at work are rather slow. So slow in fact I brought in the laptop and have been watching Fellowship of the Ring and Akira.

It’s nice to be able to relax. I almost forgot what it was like.

This week is the Christmas Eve service at the church. Jenny gave me the order of service and it seems pretty straightforward. Thankfully, it shouldn’t have me doing too much in PowerPoint, just making sure some of the hymns and songs display on the screen. Last year I spent quite a bit of time putting together a special Christmas PowerPoint that worked some Mannheim Steamroller in. Getting the timing down perfectly was the trickiest part.

Christmas Day we will be home with Dad. He is going to come in and have breakfast with us (after opening our gifts of course.) Then, after that is out of the way we will be heading to the Great White North to spend the rest of the day with Cheryl’s family. The day after Christmas, commonly known as Boxing Day in Canada. We will be traveling even further to spend time with the rest of her family. This will be the first time she has seen some family members in six years. It will be the first time I have met most of them. That’s a strange bit of pressure to be under, especially since Cheryl and I have been together so long.

It will be nice to take Emma as well. There will be many firsts before the end of the week is out. I will try and catch as many photos as I can, then post them here.

Man, I’m such a geek.

SSX 3 has been consuming what little free time I have left. It’s one of the deepest games I have played in awhile. The gameplay is like GTA: Vice City, only without the hookers, killing, and carjacking. (Which is always good.) For those of you out of the know, it is an extreme sports game where you basically snowboard all over the place, shredding and really performing insane stunts and tricks. From what I’ve read in the reviews, you can snowboard straight down the mountain from the summit to the base once you’ve completed many of the challenges and unlocked all three peaks. I have only thus far managed to unlock peak 2 (peak 1 is given to you at the start) and have been steadily working my way up to peak 3.

To quote Martha, “It’s a good thing.”

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Work

Work has been going well. I’m still looking to move on though. I touched base with Jeremy the other day to see if he had any openings, or any coming up. “Nothing yet – soon” was the word. I sure hope so. I feel like I’m jumping right into a concrete ceiling around here.

Cheryl says I am ambitious, and that sometimes she wishes she had half my ambition to move up.

The only reason I want to keep moving up is to provide for my family. If it weren’t for that, I would be pretty happy to stay where I am. Where I am though doesn’t meet all the needs that we need met.

I am ambitious, but it is for different reasons. I’m not a career oriented person although my actions might state otherwise.

My main goal is to provide for my family. That’s not such a bad thing. I think I am keeping a semi-decent balance between work and family. Cheryl may tend to feel otherwise.

I don’t have much choice though. Given our current situation, I am the one that has to be completing school and working to keep things afloat. I’m not doing anything different than anyone else.

Oh well.

More photos of Emma soon. I promise.

No Rest For the Wicked

I find that lately my life is a series of repetitive actions. Driving to work, driving to school, doing homework, doing my job. A cog in an endless machine that ceaselessly turns yet moves nowhere. Actions have no conscious thought, just merely learned responses to external stimuli. If A, then B, otherwise C.

I am preoccupied constantly. Things that have been finished, things yet to complete, yet more things waiting to start. Life is becoming less my own, and more something else. Less action, more reaction.

In my life and my interactions with others I seem to shuttle back and forth between personas that are relevant to the situation, yet all while not knowing truly who I am. I wear masks that present the face that needs to be shown, and all the while I get this subliminal message from people that there seems to be this mystical point that I just don’t get.

Everyone has this look on their face that says to me “You just don’t seem to have gotten it yet.”

Maybe the point is I don’t need to wear a mask. Maybe the point is I just don’t have a clue. Maybe the point is I should give up and be like all the other people. Maybe it’s that I don’t know who I am.

So who am I?

Good question.

I enjoy playing video games and tearing computers apart only to put them back together again. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t.

I leave my socks on the floor which aggravates my wife to no end.

I enjoy reading, but yet I haven’t read a book in months.

I like listening to all kinds of music. Especially Bluegrass and Classical.

I like learning arcane and useless bits of knowledge and quoting movies.

I detest intolerance and cruelty.

I detest juvenile behavior and betrayal and cynicism.

I am cynical. I am sarcastic. I am juvenile.

I am a bag of inconsistencies wrapped up in a body that is doomed by genetic heritage to diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer, heart disease, and male pattern baldness.

*sigh*

Did you ever press the button on your trip odometer and watch all the numbers reset to zero? I wish I could do that sometimes. Just push the button and watch all the numbers rotate slowly up or down and go back to zero zero zero zero. I wish that I could go back to my childhood and find that frizzy haired kid who was happy and smiling and learn something from him. But most importantly, I’d like to learn where the smile went.

I’d like to examine his life and see why the smile went away. Who may have taken it, or where he may have hidden it. I’d like to take away all the responsibilities and cares for just one day. Just one. I’d like to be able to say the right thing at the right time, not suffer from l’esprit d’escalier.

When I was growing up, I had a lot of people around me telling me that I was worthless or no good. Telling me that I would never be smart enough or fast enough or strong enough. For a long time I bought into those lies. I hear those tapes playing over and over again in my mind to this day. As a result, I find that I must do everything to perfection. I must make sure every task is completed just so because if it isn’t then it won’t be good enough, and someone will say something to me.

Because of this, I am often out of balance during social gatherings. I keep to myself. When spoken to I stammer and stutter for things to say. This in turn leads to the “You keep missing the point” look from everyone, and the cycle continues. Onward I go, deeper down the spiral.

What does this have to do with my life and feeling like I’m reacting and not acting?

Because of this behavior, I have set up familiar behavior patterns that let me live my life in safe circles of responses. If I venture outside of these safe zones, I begin feeling uncomfortable, or find ways to incorporate these new behavior patterns into my lifestyle once I get “control” of them and feel safe once again.

This is why I hate going someplace new to eat, or taking a way I don’t know, or venturing outside of my comfort zone. All because I am petrified of making mistakes and drawing attention to myself. Because attention draws evaluation, then criticism or ridicule.

I need to break out of this cycle.

Christmas Angel

New photos have been published of Emma. These are her first Christmas Photos, and we hope that you enjoy them. I’ll beg for your patience up front, as some of the images are large and may take a little bit of time to load. They are worth the wait though.