I forgot to mention, that I uploaded new Sam pictures in the gallery. Almost everything is in Month 3.
Cheers,
AC
We were actually willing to entertain folks a little while before we left for the holidays, but I never got around to blogging it. Afternoons are best. Please email (or call) to schedule a visit, and give us a call a little before you come over to make sure we’ve not accidentally just set the house on fire. If you’re sick, or think you might be, please postpone your visit. She’ll still be an infant next week too, and we’ll all be a much happier family if she’s a well infant next week. On a similar vein, please wash your hands after arrival and before touching the baby. Other than that, please feel free to come meet Samantha. Carolyn teaches MWF, but I don’t know if that means MWF would be best because we’ll be sure to be dressed, or if T/TH would be because we’re likely to be less stressed/rushed. I’ll check with her and post an update (and may request modifications to your visit plans accordingly).
Just a quick note to say “Happy New Year.” The samtrak info that was just posted will be incomplete until we’re back in Altoona and I have my daughter, wife, cat, food, and high-speed internet access all on the same level of the same house. I can then more easily update the SamTrak data, and I’ll catch back up on all of the logged I/O. I expect posting activity will pick back up a little then too.
After YEARS of absolutely HATING when my fine dining experience was RUINED by the piercing, spine-crawling wailing of someone else’s infant, we braved being the culprits tonight. For the first time since Sam was born, we went out to eat. Not only that, we went out with the in-laws. We went to “Yang Ming” in Bryn Mawr — one of the finer Chinese restaurants in the Philadelphia area.
In the past, we’ve had a good experience there. While crowded, and a little pricey, we’ve had good service and exceptional food. Our experience there this time was sub-par. We’d made reservations specifically for their little private room in case fussin’ came around — to the point of not caring about the day or time so long as we got that room. We didn’t get that room. We ordered directly from the menu, without special orders, yet it was over an hour and a half after we arrived that our dinner did.
More accurately, what days! It all started with the ill-fated early morning upgrade. I don’t even remember what all went wrong any more.
I burned my finger (not badly, just enough to sting for a bit).
I was using the sink in the basement of the in-laws office when it pulled away from the wall. I called for help (sure lucky I had my cell phone on me!). Carolyn and John both came to help. We manged to prop it up. In looking for the valve to shut off the hot water to the basin, I managed to shower myself with I-don’t-know-how-many-year-old water and crud. It seemed like whenever I came near Sam, she cried. I definitely had AC’s “awful, horrible, very bad, no good day(s).” Fortunately, they seem to be over.
I tend to think of the server that my in-laws use for their business: http://www.fayrealestate.com/ as falling in the same category as my other “personal” machines — like the one that hosts this blog, and http://www.santaal.com/ and so forth. I need to start thinking of them as clients instead.
Yesterday, they were having some trouble. I did some investigation and found that a awstats vulnerability had been exploited. I was sure I’d password-protected the awstats pages, but when I looked through the apache configs, I found no such thing. I checked with them, and they weren’t using the stats, so I just uninstalled awstats, and deleted the stuff the crackers put in place.
We were thinking of taking our daughter to the new children’s dentist in town: Plaque-n-pay.
I don’t think he reads my blog, at least not with any regularity, but yesterday my brother-in-law IM’ed me this URL: a newsgroup I posted to in 1991, in which I discuss a variety of topics from the LPMud I was helping run at the time, to the future of VR, to teledildonics — all on a thread started by Howard Rheingold.
Does anything on the internet ever really die? Who reads a nntp://sci.virtual-worlds archive on Google from before Google ever existed? Why?
Sam had her first travel of note yesterday. We went from Altoona to the Philadelphia area to start our holiday time with Mom-mom and Grand daddy. It’s about a 4 hour drive. It took us until about 3:30 PM to finish packing up. The timing of getting an infant packed up to travel is tough because we wanted to do so much for her last minute. Change the diaper just before we leave, feed her just before we leave, etc. But that means packing up the changing and feeding stuff after we’ve fed and changed her, which makes it later than “just before”. Add to that traveling with the cat because he needs 3 different medicines delivered twice per day, Christmas stuff, and regular travel accouterments, and it felt like we were a real traveling circus.
Yesterday afternoon/evening we rocked Sam to sleep. This was a little bit of a surprise. We knew that babies liked to be rocked, but we didn’t realize that it was true for both the sway gently side to side definition AND the play or dance to rock ‘n’ roll definition.
In this case, the three of us were dancing to Apache Indian’s Boom Shack-a-lak when she konked out. A few of my dance “moves” startled her awake — they would scare most anybody — but she would drift right back to a contented sleep.
