The musings of David and Claire…
Everyone has different events or actions in their life that they define as moments when they transitioned from children into adults. Well I’m 35 and have clearly been an adult for quite a while now, but I had one of those events tonight. I cooked my own Lobster. I bought two 1.5 pounders for dirt cheap at Shoprite ($3.99 / lb), sliced their brains in two, and then steamed them for 10 minutes. Delicious!
We had a reasonably warm afternoon today for trick or treating which was pleasant as most other days this week would have required the kids to wear coats, negating the whole point of the costumes. Luckily we were able to walk about without extra layers so our neighbors were ‘treated’ to Evan as a little pirate and Brynn as a “scary butterfly” which was her costume idea and something we actually managed to accommodate to her satisfaction. I was just pleased that she didn’t insist on going as a princess.
The morning started with the daycare parade and that went reasonably well. Last year Brynn was in the two year old group which means they all walk outside, see their parents and burst into tears. No good photos from those kids! The one year olds are hit and miss; some are oblivious and others flip out. Evan looked absolutely adorable in his costume but when he saw us he got a little upset that he couldn’t stay with us. He was ok at first, but after seeing us again he had a bit of a meltdown and went into limp mode which is just the worst. Seriously, how do kids all know that going limp is so effective?? The best trick is what I think of as the ‘wet noodle’ which is when you hold them and they reach their arms straight up, go limp and then flop back and forth in an effort to slide out of your grasp. It is almost impossible to hold them if you don’t have two hands free. With their arms raised there is nothing to grab onto. Anyway back on track, Evan wasn’t at that point but I did watch him go limp repeatedly while holding his teacher’s hand and she had to keep yanking him to his feet.
Brynn’s Pre-K group are the big kids and they were all totally fine this year, having lots of fun and goofing around together. It was nice to see her enjoying the parade. What a difference a year makes!
When the first trick-or-treaters rang our doorbell, Brynn flipped out trying to find her candy basket and then had a huge tantrum when they left without her. Never mind that they were complete strangers! She doesn’t really understand how this works but she was so excited to get the whole thing underway that we were essentially forced to head out trick-or-treating immediately thereafter and it was actually was quite fun at first. Both kids would walk up to the door, Brynn would ring the doorbell, Evan would wander off and kick the garage or poke pumpkins or chase squirrels or run on to the road, and then someone would answer the door and Brynn would say “Trick or Treat!!!” and the occupant would marvel at their adorableness and hand over candy and Brynn would say thank you and then turn to us and make some delightful comment like “This is so much fun! I love Halloween!!” and the occupant would swoon and we would move on to the next house and repeat.
But then Ev got cranky and wouldn’t wear his hat and then he wouldn’t walk and he demanded huge quantities of lollipops and the sugar rush set him off on a mad spiral of “I must push the stroller whilst crawling on my knees down the sidewalk” (seriously), followed by I must chase every dog I see, I must grab all the candy I can, I must be held, I must walk, I must be pushed. You get the point. Sorry for the run-on sentences but I hope I’m capturing the spirit of a rambunctious 18 month old who can’t speak a word and yet has all the opinions and outlandish demands of a toddler, so it all went a bit downhill after the first block. But then we bumped into some neighbors who have a 4 year old girl and she and Brynn get along well so they upped the cute factor considerably with all the giggling and the holding of hands and running through the piles of carefully raked leaves etc. Sadly our pictures from today are pretty pathetic so I am putting up an album in the gallery but it’s not going to effectively showcase the cuteness of the day. And I just have to say that Brynn is so awesome now that I really can’t believe she’s still only three. She was at the point today that she had no interest in going to the houses that just leave the candy bowl out. She only wanted to go to the places with people who were home because what fun is Halloween if you can’t talk to people. It turns out that it’s actually not at all about the candy.
Check out my awesome pumpkin carving effort this year. It’s my version of the Obama/Biden lawn sign. Looks pretty good, right!
We were on TV last night! How very exciting. Ok, not really – it was just a five second sound bite from David as I loaded groceries into our car at Costco, but still – we were on TV!
Behold the awesome voice of David.
Nope, I don’t have any. Just because I work for a bank doesn’t mean I know any better where we’re going from here. I can tell you what I’m doing about it, and what I’ve read. Basically I see this as a buying opportunity. Eventually it will all come back. I am a very patient investor. It may take years, but some day I’ll be glad I bought stock now while everything is insanely cheap.
Here’s some stuff I read:
Today we headed out to Ort’s farm for our mostly annual pumpkin picking adventure. Last year we left it too late and ended up rummaging through the deformed, left over pumpkins at a local garden center the day before Halloween, but most years we have been going to Ort’s and every year the farm has expanded it’s range of activities for kids. As we were driving there today we realized that we first went there four years ago because it was also an election year and we were horrified to see almost every house had a Bush/Cheney sign on the lawn. Having just left New York for the burbs, we were a little stunned to realize that only 45 minutes from where we were living was an area so infested with conservatives. This year we saw just the one McCain/Palin sign which probably isn’t as encouraging as it might seem (to a Democrat!). I’m guessing more signs will go up in the next couple of weeks and maybe the campaign activists haven’t canvassed that neighborhood yet. The Republicans obviously hit up our area recently as a bunch of McCain signs went up last week. I counted six on one nearby street and no Obama signs. Kind of depressing. Actually, mega depressing. I recently read this article about McCain and my skin is still crawling. The thought of him as President… ugh. I’m also trying to forget that Palin actually exists. I think we really would have to leave this country if those two made it to the White House.
Anyway, back on track. The pumpkin patch used to just be a wagon ride out to the patch and a little fruit/veggie stand with some seasonal goodies. Now it’s got this whole field full of stuff for the kids to climb on and run through. There are farm animals that you can feed and pet. There were also Clydesdales that Brynn rode. She had a blast! What else… a train ride, food, lots of things with faces cut out for cute kid photo opportunities. A hay bale maze that had Evan running around in circles for a while until I went in to rescue him.
Lately we have noticed that Evan’s fearlessness actually seems to be rubbing off on Brynn. It’s like she sees him doing things that she is too nervous to do and it’s encouraging her to be more adventurous. Which mainly takes the form of the both of them runnning out of sight in opposite directions whenever we let them roam free. Brynn is usually very reluctant to touch animals but when she saw Evan doing so today without hesitation, she did the same. Of course Evan touching an animal usually involved him going up to it’s face and grabbing on as hard as he could. It’s a wonder he wasn’t bitten. Seriously, he had a vice like grip on a goat’s face until we managed to pry him off. On top of all the awesome Tina Fey skits on Saturday Night Live, there was one last week that had me cracking up. Mark Whalberg talks to animals. “Hey Donkey, what’s going on”. I just had it running through my head the whole time. “Say hi to your mother for me, ok.”
So we had a really good time there today. The best bit was that they both fell asleep in the car on the way home and we were able to put them both straight to bed upon arriving home. 7pm!! That’s two hours before Brynn’s usual bedtime. Of course they skipped dinner so they’ll probably be awake and starving at 5am. (Update – they were both up around 6.30am – much earlier than usual. Yawn)
I’ll put some pictures up in the gallery.
Greetings from floor 33 of a high rise apartment building in Singapore. I’m currently sitting on Bron’s couch looking out into the South China Sea where I can see 1 million shipping crates and a lot of container ships. Bron and I just got back from a cruise where we visited Malaysia and Thailand. Very nice times indeed! I’m going to try and get a few pictures up in the gallery if at all possible. We managed to fit quite a lot of excitement into so few days. We visited Penang, Malaysia where we wandered around Georgetown and visited a temple. We found a giant crazy mall and did a little shopping (DVDs!) then wandered some more and found an Indian section of town where we found a few shiny trinkets.
Next we went to Phuket where we went on a sea cave canoeing adventure. We drove to a bay with many islands then took a boat out to a couple. We hopped into canoes and were paddled out to some caves which led into the middle of the island where there were beautiful lagoons. Later we had a seafood lunch on the boat and then were able to jump off and swim around for a while. It was a very nice trip.
We made the most of all the eating and drinking establishments on board, including the buffet, Indian restaurant, sit down fancy restaurant, bars, karaoke, pool bar etc. Our last day was a case of wake up, eat breakfast, back to bed, wake up, eat lunch, pedicures, pool, pool bar, dinner, karaoke, drinks and finally sitting on our balcony watching the stars before bed. Oh yes, the balcony! I forgot about the best part. We had a balcony in our room!! So, so good. Nothing like opening a bottle of champagne and sitting outside on the balcony in the warm, tropical night while a storm rages right next to you. The winds must have been blowing away from us as we did not get wet! So good times were had by all and I now have a couple of days in Singapore to do a little sightseeing or whatnot before I fly home.
I miss my family but I am having a very nice vacation!!
While there are many, many, many good things about quitting a god-awful job and staying home for a few months, one of the nicest advantages would have to be the use of weekends for fun stuff instead of errands. We managed to do almost nothing summer-specific while I was working and instead we spent our weekends dragging the kids out grocery shopping, dropping off drycleaning or roaming the streets looking for notaries. But now I can get that crap done during the week and we don’t have to do anything on the weekend except come up with a fun activity which is actually harder than I would have thought because we have no idea what kinds of things we would like to do. We went to the Jersey Shore for a daytrip which was pretty good. We had no clue about where to go so we picked randomly based on a “family-friendly Jersey Shore” google search and ended up at Point Pleasant Beach which was actually not too bad. This is only the second shore town I’ve visited but I find the actual beaches disappointing because the water is just too rough to go in, so it’s really just a case of hanging out on the sand. Maybe I need to keep looking for a better town, or maybe the whole shore is that way but it would be nice to take the kids into the water. As it was, Brynn and I were standing well back so most waves weren’t even reaching us, but every now and then a bigger one would come up to our ankles and then we’d get a really big one that would come up to her knees knock her off her feet and scare the heck out of all of us. She was 10 yards from the water line but it seemed entirely possible that she could be dragged out to sea by one of them.
The whole sand thing is a problem with little kids of course. Neither of them really like the texture on their feet but Brynn doesn’t like sand in her shoes so there was a lot of shoe off, shake out sand, shoe on. Evan managed to get it in his eyes within 30 seconds and then started rubbing his sandy hands in his eyes to make it feel better which, obviously, it did not. Thankfully the issue seemed to resolve itself somehow. The other bad thing about the water being so rough is that you can’t really hang out near the water and make sandcastles. The sand near our towels was too dry so that was a bit disappointing. But there’s lots of other things to do instead of just sit on the sand. We walked along the boardwalk, ate some boardwalk food, checked out the aquarium and then called it a day.
Today we went to a church festival near out house. They had a lot of carnival rides set up and Brynn is crazy about carousels so we had no choice once she spotted it as we drove by. She went on the carousel, the ferris wheel, a car ride and then a little mini roller coaster (all by herself!). I think this dinky little fair was pretty much the highlight of her life to date. She was so excited about the rides that she would almost start crying waiting for the previous riders to disembark. Evan also went on a couple of rides and I could safely say that the car ride was also the highlight of his life. I have never seen him more excited about anything. As soon as he was buckled in he had a huge grin plastered over his face and he kept doing his crazy little squeal/laugh the whole time. He threw a fit when it ended.
Apart from that we’ve been having picnics, going to the zoo and of course there was our trip to California last month. What a nice week that was! I put up a Bruinwoods album in the gallery and it is also my intention to get some other albums up there but I have pretty much a year’s worth of disorganized photos to try and work my way through so it will be quite the project.
I have finally gotten around to moving the gallery I maintain over to my new Linux box. You know, the one with 5 hard drives and 2 TB of storage, and the dual AMD 64 bit CPU. Needless to say the site should run faster now. I have also resurrected the gallery random image. Enjoy!
P.S. for all zero users that used the forum in the last year, it’s toast now. But I am experimenting with a WIKI
My grandmother Ruth passed away this week. She was 97 years old, and will be missed. Here’s some pictures of her with Evan and Brynn…
Everyone in the family, with the exception of Brynn, has been suffering from viral conjunctivitis, more affectionately known as “pink eye“. For Evan and Claire it’s barely noticeable. But I turned into a zombie. Not only were my eyes bright red, streaked with veins, streaming tears and frightening everyone on sight- Oh no. I was also running a fever, sore throat, and absolutely exhausted. My back hurt a lot too. So imagine me slowly rising from the couch and lumbering across the room while moaning in pain from my eyes and back, with blood red eyes- pure zombie.
I’ve been holed up at home waiting for my eyes to return to normal, and not be so contagious. Good thing the VPN capabilities at Citi are so good, I can work at home quite effectively. I can still control my computer at work from home without any noticeable lag….
May is the Valentine birthday month.
Evan – 5/3 – 1 years old
Brynn – 5/18 – 3 years old
David – 5/8 – 35 years old (ug)
And of course there is Mother’s day for Claire.
We had a big party at Unbelievabills for Brynn this year. She got to play in the jungle gym, go on stage at a “theatre show”, and sit in a big throne eating pizza. It was a lot of fun, and the nicest part is they take care of everything for you.
Evan truly is the second child. Not only does he get pretty much only hand-me-downs (with the exception of clothing), but he also is in far less photos than his sister. And many of the photos he is in also include Brynn. So what better way to fix this then buy Claire a new camera? There’s a Sony Style store in a mall near me and I was instantly intrigued by the DSC-T300. First of all this camera has a touch screen LCD on the back. So now instead of pointing the camera at what you want to focus on and moving it to get the right scene, you just point to the object on the touch screen and it automatically focuses on it. Now for those of you that are not familiar with the people recognition that the newer cameras have you will be impressed to know that this camera can tell the difference between adults and children (and inanimate objects) and you can choose which ones you want it to prioritize its focus on.
But here’s where I flipped- the T300 also has “smile recognition”. You can put it in a mode where only when you’re actually smiling does it take the photo. And it has this awesome meter that shows you the smile level you’re at while you’re pointing it at someone. Of course this had me instantly intrigued. How does it measure a smile? Is it the amount of teeth? Is it the crescent shape of your lips? Is it the twinkle in your eyes? I have tried all kinds of smiles, frowns, blank faces, etc. So far I’m still figuring it out….
It’s been almost 8 years now, and I’m finally leaving the Private Bank.
I will now cast away all my worldly possessions and go walk-about, starting in Siberia. I’ll be growing a big shaggy beard as well.
Just Kidding! I’m starting at Citibank in early May. I’ll be doing a lot of the same stuff I was doing at JPMC, but in an environment where there is full senior management support of SOA, 3 tier architectures, and other technology built in the last decade. Gotta stay current!
My mom and Andy were in town this weekend before they jet off to Italy for a few months. And we decided it was time to take Brynn and Evan to the circus for the first time. It was the typical Ringling Bros circus with one exception that annoyed me- no jugglers. What kind of circus leaves out the jugglers? Still the elephants, tigers, trapeze, and motorcyle sphere were pretty cool and we all had a good time.
So everyone knows the metal cage sphere where 7 motorcycles all zoom around together at the same time. It looks amazing that they don’t ever end up crashing into each other. My theory is that there actually is quite a lot of space inside that cage- a lot more than it seems. This is because the shape is a sphere with more surface area than any other shape, and the motorcyclists are taking advantage of the full z-axis. So it looks amazing, but it’s really a piece of cake trick. But of course you’ll never catch me doing it!
We cooked an interesting meal tonight – salt roasted pork. You basically take 6 cups of rosemary infused salt and cover a pork tenderloin, then roast in the oven for 20 mins at a high temperature. It turned out really well – the meat was at a temperature that would usually make a tenderloin very dry but it was incredibly moist – tender to the point of being able to pull apart with a fork. Salty, yes! But you brush off most of it and the real flavor was the rosemary. Anyway, it was definitely the best pork meal we have ever made so if you’ve ever been treated to one of Dave’s tenderloins, expect this version next time!
We’re enjoying a long weekend here and looking for things to do over the next two days. We are going to try to make it into the city if it warms up a little. Maybe go to a museum or check out Toys R Us with the kids. I’m not sure Evan has ever been to the city, so this would be his first time.
The children are well. Evan is crawling all over the place, at a rapidly increasing pace. His little knees are all red from the new activity. Apparently he got so quick at daycare that he escaped the room before they realized what happened. The next day he got moved up to the mobile baby room. He’s the smallest one there but it’s a bigger, and more contained space so he can crawl after the big kids to his heart’s content.
Brynn is funny. Every time I use a word to describe her (even a nice one), she shrieks “don’t call people that!”. Dave was buckling her into her car seat today and she kept saying “Daddy, you are freaking me out of here”, which was so nonsensical that it was cracking us up. I told her she was adorable and she got mad and of course said “don’t call people that!”. She also hates it if we laugh when she says something cute – “don’t laugh at me!!”. She’s a 13 year old, trapped in a 2 year old body. Her favorite show is Futurama which is cool because it’s at least fun for us to watch, (the other alternative being a princess movie) but the downside is that she uses words like “crap” every now and then. Well, you win some and you lose some.
My new baby has been around more than a month now, but only recently has it started behaving. I’ve been hiding out in my house slaving away on my first new computer in three years, and it just kept on giving me the dreaded BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) at seemingly random moments, but pretty much every 5-10 minutes. This isn’t the first time I’ve had this problem when building my own computer. Last time the problem turned out to be the motherboard. This time it was the CPU. I suppose that’s what I get for buying a brand new chip design right after it’s released. My AMD Phenom 9600 quad-core CPU is currently on it’s way to California where AMD will analyze it and hopefully send me back a new chip that behaves better. I don’t know if it’s just bad luck or an indication of the quality of these parts that every time I build a new computer at least one part is bad. Also, this time it took me a while to figure out what the problem was. First I thought it was the memory, so I bought some more, but still had the same problem. Then I decided it was the videocard and again I bought a new one and had the same problem. Then finally I bought a new CPU, an AMD Athlon X2 dual Core 6400+. At this point I realized I was halfway there to another computer, and decided to buy a new motherboard too. I popped in the new chip and presto! – I now have a fast, powerful, and most importantly rock solid, stable rig to play with. I’m halfway away from the components to build another rig now as well. It was time for a new Linux box anyway.
So I decided to give liquid cooling a try with this new computer. After all what is more geeky and cool then what is essentially a radiator in your computer? It’s anti-freeze circulating around, potentially ready to spurt everywhere at any moment (which btw is not as bad as it sounds since the liquid you use is non-conductive and would not destroy the computer). The AMD Phenom is also the first quad-core chip design where each it’s a true quad-core instead of just two dual-cores.
I’ll publish the detailed specs of my computer later!
Already February, where is the year going?
Kids are doing well. As mentioned last time, Evan crawls and has teeth. He’s a champion eater also and we can pretty much just take our own meals and break them into small pieces and he eats whatever we give him. He definitely prefers real food to baby food although it’s such a time consuming process that he’d probably have to be in his high chair all day to get enough calories that way. He’s a very sweet little guy and really quite cute too – he has the same big blue eyes and long dark eyelashes that Brynn does. His hair is growing and it’s still very fair but it’s not the baby fuzz that it was before. He likes to grab whatever Brynn is playing with and he drives her crazy. She also drives him crazy by being overly affectionate and wanting to hug and kiss him constantly and he hates it and pushes her away. I wish I could say he was sleeping better, and actually he kind of is. He goes to sleep relatively easily – a few minutes of crying but then he drifts off. He usually wakes around 2 or 3am and ends up in our bed, which is cool with me because he’s a sweetie, but then he likes to wake up at 5am and play for two hours and that’s very annoying because, oddly enough, we would prefer to continue sleeping.
Brynn is pretty awesome again. She’s in her new room (below) and has her big-girl bed that she loves. She’s completely potty trained (even overnight) and she’s a lot of fun to talk to. She has a pretty impressive vocabulary and springs new, unexpected words on me all the time, like “wonderful”, or “amazing”. Of course, her ability to pick up new words has it’s down side as well. I need to start watching what I say in the car because apparently I call a lot of other drivers “idiots”. Also, today she was playing and I’m not sure what happened but she exclaimed “what the hell!?”, which cracked me up but, you know, not good if she starts saying that at school. She no longer naps on weekends which is a sad state of affairs, particularly as she gets pretty tired by mid-afternoon.
Not much is going on. It’s been a mild winter which is nice. We went to see Nemo on Iceskates or something the other week which Brynn was only mildly interested in. She asked to leave at intermission. We’ve been visiting great-Grandma Ruth which she enjoys a lot although on a recent visit she told David, as we were leaving, “thank you so much for visiting. I just wish I knew who the hell you all are.” And that’s about all we’ve been doing. We have to make Valentine’s Day cards tomorrow for Brynn’s class. Or, as she calls it, “Brynn Valentine’s Day”.
I’m sitting here watching the little man crawling for the very first time. I’m talking real crawling too! He has been pushing himself up on to all fours and just now he actually managed to start coordinating arms and legs and moving forward.
He also got his first tooth yesterday. Here’s a video of him eating peas and corn that cracks me up every time.
