We’ve had our first mis-hap of our Yellowstone Road Trip and we haven’t even left the driveway yet!

Last night a big downpour came through and I left the windows open in the RV. I woke up and was worried things would be soaked inside. But, that really wasn’t a problem. The side windows didn’t let in any rain, they just slant out and don’t really open up. However, some rain did come in through the top vents which I had left open. But not a lot, and a quick paper towel was able to wipe it all up.

The bigger issue was last night I asked Mazie to turn the lights off. Which she did, I saw them go off. However, I didn’t consider that how she turned them off was to turned the main power for the RV off! So everything was off, including the refrigerator, which we had loaded just a couple of hours earlier.

So, this morning when I couldn’t get anything to turn on I thought it was maybe a tripped breaker. But then I looked at the main power switch and noticed the red light was off. Uh oh…

We are adding a quick trip to the grocery store before we hit the road… 🛒😬

Osmo was running a sale recently and I decided to fill out our collection. We got the Hot Wheels™ MindRacers which I didn’t think was going to be that fun, but surprised me by being super fun to play together. I also ordered Coding Duo, in part because we already had Coding Awbie and Coding Jam, so Coding Duo was just another $15 to get two pieces to put it all together. Tyler fired up Coding Duo and has been having a lot of fun with it, and I am very impressed with what a learning experience this is.

Coding Duo uses all of the control pieces of both Coding Awbie and Coding Jam, and introduces the idea of having two characters that you write sequences of code for independently. To play the game, you have to write a distinct sequence of actions for each character, and to make it even more interesting each character has unique capabilities. To complete the levels, Tyler learned a bunch about debugging, getting the programs to interact with each other, and building complex sequences that interact with each other. You can also have two people play together by each writing a program of their own.

It is a very impressive learning environment. I would highly recommend it for any kids that want to explore logic and coding concepts.

On Friday evening we had to say goodbye to our dog Chase. We adopted Chase into our family in 2007. The adoption agency had given him the horrible temporary name of Lurch. When we met him, the couple that had been fostering him had named him Chase. I had the fancy idea that a somewhat geeky name like Comet would be better. After a day of trying that out, we realized that he was Chase. It just fit. Chase was a Black Lab / Border Collie mix. Smart, loyal, and full of energy.

We don’t know exactly when he was born, but he was in full puppy mode when he came to us. If Mazie left any wooden toy on the floor, he would chew it to nothing. We learned the hard way that he shouldn’t be allowed on the couch, after the couch upholstery was so trashed it had to be redone.

He was always looking to please. He never ran off, not once. He liked the snow. The Border Collie in him wanted the family always together. He listened well and only barked when he needed something. Almost always a single bark. Our neighbor called him the “One Bark Dog” because he would just give a single bark, after waiting a couple of minutes at the door to come in. He even stood in for photos once.

I had grown up around dogs but had never had one. Chase was my first dog and he and I had our rituals. I always fed him in the morning. On the weekends I get up early, and he’d hang out with me while I did whatever. At the cabin we would go down to the dock in the morning with a cup of coffee and look at the water and the occasional bird or fish jumping.

Of course Chase wasn’t just my dog. Mazie loved Chase and would play with him a lot. Tyler declared Chase his best friend in Kindergarten and was hoping to take him to school for show and tell. Tammy liked Chase being around, going on walks and his friendly personality, although his shedding she could have skipped.

I didn’t realize that Labs live to about 12, more or less. I hoped we had more time. I knew Chase was getting older. He was slowing down and enjoyed long afternoon naps at the lake. He would find a spot in the grass and have a good day of it.

Sadly he wasn’t just getting old. We took him in because his teeth looked bad and his breath was beyond bad. We figured he just needed a dental cleaning. They found a growth in his mouth. Melanoma. They cut it out and asked us if we wanted to do cancer treatment. We declined, that seems to me like a hard thing for a dog, especially at his age. He also developed a number of other growths on his chest and stomach. To add to the challenges, he tore both his CCLs and for over a week he couldn’t walk up the stairs in the house. His whole life he also got rashes and sores on his skin. An allergic reaction of some kind. Medication usually helped, but with the cancer the meds didn’t do anything for that. For the last month we’ve had to help him out quite a bit.

On Friday we had a vet come to visit the house. We all went out on the deck. It was a cool evening, just gorgeous. We all sat with Chase petting and soothing him as the vet put him to sleep.

It was tough. I expected it to be difficult, but it was even harder. He was part of our family. Chase was everyone’s dog and we all felt the loss. 😢

I didn’t realize how much he was always there with us, and particularly with me. The mornings have been lonely without him there to do whatever was the plan. When we come home from doing something, there is no welcoming tail wagging at the door with eager eyes.

I miss my buddy.

Tyler and I went to see the Jungle Book. It was the first time him and I went to a movie by ourselves. It was a fun movie, very well done. Tyler liked it a lot, didn’t find it scary at all.

Nice feel good movie for the whole family. Even Tyler watched the whole thing and I thought he might get bored.

Tyler got Finding Winnie for Christmas this year and it’s a really awesome book. If your kid has any affinity to Winnie-the-Pooh they will love this book. Even if they don’t, it’s still a great book. Really well done and one of the better books for a bedtime story. Recommended!

I finally got Tyler to try a fruit smoothie and he decided he liked it.

Tyler with one of his favorite bands t-shirts.

Don & Kaye and the six grandkids. (Left to right: Tyler, Mazie, Lucas, Elsa, Nora, Levi)

Tyler caught his very first fish this weekend with the help of Grandpa Don! He was so proud and excited. He even threw it back in all on his own.

Mazie had a homework assignment for fall poetry that involved having your parents write a poem and copying it in her notebook. Here is my poem.

The leaves had all gone from the trees.

In the air there was a gentle breeze.

My nose could smell the freshness in the air.

The air is chilly and the weather is fair.

The days are getting shorter the harvest moon is tall.

This is my favorite season I love the fall.

For years Mazie has been using this word that she made up. She decided that it meant “everything”. Quite specifically, everything. Any question she asked, if you answered with “shingadooties” it would be right. This wonderful word has no representation on the Internet so Mazie and I decided to fix that by defining it here. So a shingadooties this shingadooties post about shingadooties.

Shingadooties,

Jamie & Mazie

Pronunciation

shing-a-doo-ties

Etymology

Mazie made it up.

Verb

1. Every verb possible. I shingadooties all the way to school. The dog shingadooties around the backyard.

Noun

1. Every noun possible. _One time I got shingadooties for my birthday and it was awesome.

I love my shingadooties!_

Having fun teaching Mazie and Tyler how to use a YoYo on vacation. Got myself a nice heavy one with low resistance and tons of spin.

This year The New Standards did one of their great shows at The Dakota right on Mazie’s birthday! At first we figured we would just not go see them, but we asked Mazie if she would want to go out for a grown-up night and she was all for it! We got one of the great U-shaped tables along the edge and Mazie got to sit right in the middle and enjoy a Shirley Temple and cheeseburger while listening to great music.

I sent an email to the band letting them know a 9 year old was celebrating her birthday with them and Chan gave a nice call out to her. It was a super fun evening.

We’ve crossed a big milestone this year. As of this birthday Mazie now has her very own iPad. No more sharing. It is also setup with her own accounts for email and calendaring. She’s a digital equal in the house now.

Mazie was ecstatic about it and has been having fun using it for a variety of things. I’m really hoping that she uses email and messages. She’s been playing a couple of games. She even was reviewing her calendar to see what was coming up this week. Nice!

Of course the immediate reaction from Tyler was to wonder where his is. Wait a couple years there.

We have been trying to get a good family bike ride in each day on the weekends. It was a great day today and Tyler got to get his first ride on his new Weehoo.  Tammy discovered the Weehoo really liked it. I’ve pulled the kids in the Chariot (now owned by Thule) as well as the Novara trailer bike. The Weehoo is heads and shoulders over both of them. The trailer bikes always feel like they are pulling my bike to one side. The Chariot was fine but the kids didn’t have a lot of fun.

The Weehoo is a wonderful mix:

1. It is a recumbent design so the kid is safe, has a nice seat and a three-point harness.

2. Because the kid rides low, the center of gravity is pretty low and it doesn’t tug on the bike.

3. The way it attaches to the seat post is well done. It rotates easily and cannot come off.

Tyler loved it. About the only thing that I’m not very impressed with on the Weehoo are the pedal straps. They seem poorly designed and are a pain to get strapped together.

If your looking to go riding with your kid, even when they are still pretty little, give the Weehoo a serious look.

Mazie was super excited to be done with school for the summer. We have a 4th grader in the house now! The whole neighborhood celebrated as kids ran all over to start the summer off right!

I’m starting to introduce Mazie to email. I also showed her how to use emoji characters. One of her first emails to me celebrating her favorite emoji!

Our neighbor Nicole organized the Kids Running for Kid’s team to raise money for the Save the Children World Marathon Challenge. Mazie and Tyler joined 50 other kids running segments of a marathon around the block and raised $1,526 for a great cause.

Mazie and I went to the Minnesota Wild game last night along with Alone and Dylan. It was Mazie’s first hockey game and although she thought it was too loud at times she had a great time. Of course chocolate ice cream helps! And we got these weird looking hats.

When Tyler came down from his room this morning I gave him a big hug and wished him a very, very happy birthday. He replied to me that “I’m a boy and I’m three.” Indeed Tyler, indeed. Tyler had a great day today. He had preschool and got to bring cupcakes for the other kids. He loves preschool. I ducked out of work early and we all met for a dinner of his choosing at Yum!. Tyler picked a big bowl of mac-n-cheese as always, and an even bigger cookie to celebrate his birthday.

We finished the day with presents at home and the whole family watching Misty Island Rescue, his favorite Thomas movie.

I asked him before bed if he had a great birthday he he said “Yes Dad.” How great to be three!

Lately Tyler has taken to sitting down at the iMac, logging in on the guest account, starting a Safari which takes him to Apple’s website. He then watches video after promotional video.

It’s now totally common to hear Jony Ives saying “aluminium” at random intervals.

Today I got to take Tyler to Berry Patch for pre-school to attend Dads and Donuts day! Tyler was super excited for Dad to come to school with him. We played with Play-Doh while everyone arrived. We then went in and talked to Fireman Tom from the Edina Fire Department. Tyler was sitting up front and volunteered to come up front and try on a fire fighter suit! He was so excited!

He got to stand in fireman boots:

Put on a fireman jacket!

And a real fireman helmet!

After our talk with Fireman Tom we went out front and got to see a ladder truck up close! Tyler posed with Ms. Anita for a picture in front of the truck.

He even got to drive it!

We finished with a delicious donut with another fire truck on the table!

While in Wabasha for the weekend we spent the morning at the National Eagle Center.

Mazie and I also attended one of their workshops and learned a lot about the Bald Eagles and got to see one of them have lunch.

Definitely a fun place to stop in Wabasha on your next trip!

They were out of the small kids chocolate chip cookies at Yum! tonight. Tyler didn’t seem to mind! I’m pretty sure it was bigger than his head.

And to answer the obvious question? He ate it all, minus a couple of bites he shared with Dad!

Tyler and I visited Choo Choo Bob’s today and somehow this happened.

This weekend we were at Tammy’s folks and Tyler disappeared upstairs on his own. I went up to find him and this is what he was up to. Like Father like Son? :-)

This morning Tyler and I made a donut run for the family. He was digging his green hat.

Tyler turned two today! We had a festive birthday party with family over last weekend so that Hector and Michelle could join in the fun from New York. Today was his actual birthday and we had a nice day together to celebrate the big day!

Tyler got a fun mobile from Mazie for his room, and a cool race car toy from Tammy and I. Tyler and I made a trip to A Baker’s Wife’s donuts in the morning, Tyler is a big fan of their sprinkled donuts. They gave him an extra one for free for his birthday! We had a fun morning playing, jumping, sliding and wrestling on the floor.

For lunch Tyler got one of his favorites, the Mac and Cheese at Yum! Mazie had a friend birthday party today that worked perfectly with Tyler’s nap and afterwards we went to Edinborough Park in Edina for more playing.

Tyler at two is constantly moving, playful, funny, opinionated, kinetic. Not much of a talker, but I think the words are coming very soon. He’s a complete monkey and will climb anything you put in front of him. Tyler gives me an awesome gift every day when I come home from work. He runs to the door screaming “DAD!” and hugs my legs to pick him up.

Tyler’s domain name came up for renewal, tylerthing.com. I didn’t even realize this the registration date is the same day as his birthday.

Domain Name    : tylerthing.com
Registered on  : 2/12/2010

Nice. :-)

This morning Mazie, Tyler and I built a super fort in the living room! Here is the view from inside!

It was awesome!

We anchored it on the couch and then built support structures with OGOBILD Kit Pod sets.  For Christmas Mazie got one of these sets from Grandma and Grandpa Olson. These things were as much a toy for me as them it seemed. The only problem with the kit? There was only 30 poles and 10 connectors. We couldn’t build big enough.

So, on my 40th birthday I decided the kids each needed a present from me. Two OGOBILD Kit Pods later (Amazon) and we were ready to build! We made some pretty big structures but always wanted to turn them into forts. Sheets weren’t big enough, and they weighed too much. What to do?

Parachute!

Not just any parachute. A 20 foot parachute! I thought about getting the 12 foot one but it seemed like it could be too small. A few days later and we got to build some huge stuff and wrap it in an awesome parachute. More fun than you can shake a stick at!

Honestly the parachute is too big for inside use, but it has plenty of room to make forts out of. Plus it is pretty light so it hangs way better than a sheet. It’s still plenty durable for the kids and even Chase the dog. We had a great morning hanging out in the Super Fort.

Now we just need even more OGOBILD’s to make bigger stuff! Just kidding!

I participated in the SOPA blackout on January 18th. All of my personal websites went dark at 8:00am CT and returned at 8:00pm CT. I served 6,235  STOP SOPA notices. My handful of sites were just a drop in the big ocean of over 115,000 sites that went dark. It really felt historic. I took notice of the first time that so much of the Internet banded together to make something happen, and did it happen. Just two days after the blackout the bills have lost major supporters and are going back to committee.

It felt like something momentous. A punctuation mark in the big timeline of the Internet. I decided to grab some screenshots and make a little scrapbook of the day.

My Sites

Here is what thingelstad.com looked like on SOPA blackout day.

Tammy also participated, blacking out Smaller Than A Redwood.

And so did Mazie. I explained to her that we were blacking out our websites in protest of a proposed law. She asked what protest meant and I explained it to her. She didn’t have a strong opinion about SOPA, but felt it was right to go along with her Mom and Dad.

Same Template

The awesome template I used to black my sites out was developed by Zach Johnson. He had an amazing SOPA blackout story with so many websites using his template. Here is what his website looked like. He increased the font size slightly on his site.

His template got picked up by a lot of sites, including Greenpeace.

Net.Freedom {#netfreedom}

I was happy to see sites and services that I care about, and in some cases donate to, supporting the blackout. Wikipedia was the largest site on the Internet to go completely dark. I thought it was a great touch that you could still get to the Wikipedia page for the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) though.

I’m a big fan of Semantic MediaWiki, which is a suite of extensions for MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia. The team behind that project followed the lead of Wikipedia and also went dark. I liked their message and display.

WordPress is a strong supporter of an open and free Internet and they made WordPress.org completely dark.

It was cool that Automattic also took action with WordPress.com and did a very creative blackout of just content.

I’m a supporter of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and they censored their logo and used their site to share information on their opposition to SOPA.

I’m also a supporter of Creative Commons and they put a black banner on top of their site.

Publishers

A variety of publishers took part on the blackout. Ars Technica had a good banner with content regarding SOPA. Although I thought the banner ad on top was tacky and a bit tone deaf to the point of the protest.

O’Reilly did a very nice job with it’s blackout and a strong message an simple design.

Wired did a very cool blackout using the censoring of words and then changing it as you moved around on the page.

One of the best web comics did an awesome blackout. This is what xkcd did.

And The Oatmeal also did an amazing blackout. This one had an animated GIF that went on for a while about why he took issue with SOPA and involved Oprah on a jet ski in only the way the Oatmeal could.

I Can Has Cheezburger had a nicely done call to action.

Disappointing but predictably, my former colleagues at the Wall Street Journal came out in favor of SOPA.

Big Sites

I was curious what Google would do. The censored logo was striking, and to many folks that weren’t plugged into what was going on I think it was a strong message.

Flickr did a very creative blackout allowing people on Flickr to blackout any photos on Flickr they wanted to. I blacked out one of my photos.

Mozilla, the organization behind the open source Firefox web browser, participated in the blackout.

Reddit was one of the first big websites to say they would participate in the blackout. They had a great mix of content and call to action.

Criagslist participated in the most boring HTML display possible, totally fitting Craigslist.

BoingBoing did a nice blackout and I thought it was cool that they actually showed the HTTP status code.

Minecraft, a game played by 4.7 million people, went dark for the day.

Facebook didn’t do anything that impressive, which was a bit disappointing. They could have blacked out their logo like Google. However, Mark Zuckerberg did at least post a comment on Facebook regarding SOPA.

More Protests

I’m a customer of Pinboard, a paid bookmarking utility. He didn’t blackout, and I was happy they didn’t since I pay for the service and use it daily. There was a call to action on the top of the site.

I was happy to see my congressman Keith Ellison participating in the blackout.

Dave Winer blogs at Scripting.com and had really debated if he was going to black out. He did, and in fact just totally blacked out with nothing on his site.

Archive.org went dark as well.

Going White

TheDailyWTF decided to be different and go white.

FARK also went white. I don’t know much about FARK other than they “fark’d“ Road Sign Math once.

ZanHabits also went white, in a very zen way.

Tin Ear

Sadly, not all Internet leaders participated. Even though Bing has this big image format on their website that would have easily led to something interesting, even just a black image. But instead it just looked as it always does.

Yahoo was even worse, sporting football news and advertisements. Completely ignoring such a historic event.

Two weeks ago I turned 40. I’ve been wanting to write a “Forty” blog post but each time I think to do it I find myself with little to say. I figure it is time for me to just start writing and see what happens.

I had an absolutely awesome birthday, thanks to my most awesome wife Tammy. She planned a simply great day of fun! We had a great breakfast at Original Pancake House. We had a nice time at the Como Park Conservatory where Mazie took lots of pictures and Tyler was in constant surprise of everything. We came home and Mazie baked a birthday cake for me, with help from Tammy. I had suggested that I would like a vanilla cake with strawberries and whipped cream frosting but she could do what she thought would be good instead. She decided I would like a super chocolate cake with chocolate frosting. :-)

I picked dinner and we had Indian food ordered in from India Palace which was delicious. Tammy had planned that we would have a family fire that night with S’mores because I like fires but complain we don’t do them enough. After about an hour a bunch of friends showed up and the S’mores fire turned into a birthday celebration with music, fires and beer. It was awesome and I was completely surprised!

It was pretty much the best birthday, ever!

I’ve been asked many, many times “How does it feel?” and I don’t think I have any good answers. Feels the same as yesterday. So, let me see what comes to mind:

• While I’m sure physical signs of getting older have been appearing for a while, but I seem to be noticing them more. Hair is thinning. A few grey ones. But in general I still think I have my boy like look. :-)
• I’m totally smarter now that I’m 40. Or so I think…
• It’s really rare that I sleep past 7 am. I think that has more to do with kids than being 40.

See, not much interesting. Tammy had much more to say about being 40. Ask a question in the comments and I’ll see if I have anything more interesting to share about being 40!

A few weeks ago I was discussing various ways of making coffee with Ry4an at the office. He had seen this crazy looking coffee system and sent me a link for it. My instant response was… Gorgeously Finicky!

Tammy thought the one I sent her a link to was about the ugliest thing she had ever seen, but she found an acceptable looking Yama and got it for me for my birthday from Mazie and Tyler.

It takes three hours to brew 8 cups of coffee. The resulting coffee is similar to cold press coffee, but with significantly more theater to the production. My first run didn’t come out right. I tried to grind the beans myself and didn’t get the right grind consistency and the water went through far too fast.

There is much written about ice brewed coffee. CoffeeGeek has a good writeup.

For 18 weeks I wrote a weekly update on the progress of our remodel project. At the end the work was really small items, just working through a punch list and we were starting to live in the space. Now that everything is in place and we have been fully using the space for a few weeks I wanted to post a final photo walk through. The whole family is delighted with the addition and the new spaces have dramatically changed how we use our space. It’s been great.

As a comparison before looking at all these pictures, you may want to look at the pictures from the start of the project first. Or visit week 4 when it all looked like a disaster zone.

The back door of the house from the garage hasn’t changed much from the final photos at the end of the project. All the exterior work was done well before winter was (supposed to) arrive.

The new location for the grills is great. Before they were under the windows in the left hand side of the photo and were a little in the way as you approached the house. Also, having the lights there helps when you do some evening grilling in the winter.

Take note of the window on the left next to the smaller window. In the future that will likely get taken out and a door put in. The wood on top of the mudroom roof is cedar decking and it is ready for use as a walk-out deck. The railing is 36” and there is a set of outdoor speakers up there. I think a couple of chairs would work well out there and the access would be from the hallway upstairs so it could be used by the whole family.

One of the nicest changes is the spacious built-in as you enter the mudroom.

We have plenty of room for everyone’s coats, shoes and all the other items we want ready access to. I even have a compartment just for my camera so it can be safe but still easily accessed. At the end of the mudroom we put a desk and shelving and that is where I spent more focused computer time, and where I’m writing this blog post from.

I wasn’t sure about this space at first, but I’ve grown to really like it. The floor is heated in the mudroom which is nice, and I love having all the windows on the right.

The entry to the office is open, except for when Tyler closes the pocket doors.

Tammy found a small couch that works perfect in this room and is also a fold-out bed for a visitor, in a pinch.

We also have a very small corner desk in this room which is where Tammy tends to spend computer time, although she also uses the desk in the mudroom as well.

The couch was the last item to arrive but it’s already proven to be a hit. Mazie likes to read books there and it’s got a nice feel to just relax in a spot that is away from the main traffic areas of the house. The view through the doorway out to the deck is really nice and insures we are “connected” to the outdoor spaces.

In the summer I look forward to having all the windows open and being able to hear the kids as they run around and play as well as keeping a close eye on the Big Green Egg.

The stairs down to the family room work out really well and even though it is a high traffic area we rarely get jammed up there.

The cutouts into the kitchen really help it to feel bigger than it really is. It’s also nice that you can see from the kitchen all the way into the family room.

The family room was the main focus of the basement work and we love how it came out. This is as you come down the stairs.

The carpet is super soft and everything came together really nice. The couch is massive.

We figure as the kids get older you could easily have a ton of kids hanging out watching a movie, having a sleep over. We went for maximal comfort and I can say with significant experience now that this is a great spot to watch a movie. The built-in for the TV came out great as well.

The drawers on the bottom hold fun stuff for the kids and the cabinets on the left are plenty big for any gear. The three speakers above are very discrete, as are the rear channels on the window.

See the subwoofer? There is actually a pretty awesome sub hidden in the wall underneath the window there. It fires directly into the couch which insures maximum impact for loud explosions. :-)

This is where we spend most of our time in this room and we are very pleased with it all. The other side of the family room has a small table with chairs that works well for a laptop or a relatively small project.

Hidden behind that door is the electric room which houses the digital nerves for the house. One of the project objectives I wanted to achieve was to have an older house but have modern infrastructure. I now have wiring infrastructure that will serve the entire house for the foreseeable future.

That entire cabinet swings out for easy maintenance. Check out the detail on the wiring.

All coaxial and network jacks home run into that one panel. It is a delight to maintain.

Here is the view going back toward the stairs. You can see here the distinct level of the new basement floor. This side was lowered 7” in the remodel and we are really happy that we did it. Half of the family room has a lower ceiling to accommodate ventilation and lowering the floor made a huge difference. The landing to the utility and fitness rooms is the shortest height in the room at about 6’ 3”.

Turning left on the landing you head into the fitness room.

On this side we left the basement windows as they were with the glass block and the floor was not lowered. The exercise room ceiling was on the side of the basement that had no ventilation ducts so the room is still plenty tall, just short of 7’. We put a little extra lighting in this room because I like it to be bright when working out. The floor is cork and looks really nice.

Tammy did a great job (as always) getting the art right. We had a minor snafu with paint and ended up reverting back to a very neutral look which was my preference.

The view from the treadmill. The TV is mounted on the wall and there are in-wall speakers in here as well. An AppleTV provides the content and the amplifier is in the cabinet for the family room on the other side of the wall. It is all automatic, so you just turn on the TV and start playing something. That is important at 6:00 am when you are very much wishing you were in bed.

Our new fitness room has actually inspired me to get back on this spin bike and sweat a bit. It’s been really fun and there is a good vibe to the whole layout.

The basement extended out over our entryway upstairs so that little alcove was turned into very useful storage space.

It even has a fancy switch to turn the light on and off when you open the door.

I didn’t take any photos of the utility room because, well, it’s a utility room. Imagine a cramped room with a furnace, water heater, freezer, utility sink and more stuff than it should have in it. You get the idea.

Some things I didn’t cover above:

1. Since we were sealing off the basement we took the opportunity to put a doorbell in. The original, wired, doorbell had been removed some years ago and I really dislike the wireless ones. We now have a proper chime and lit doorbell buttons on the front and back doors.

2. We replaced the railings and surround on our front door and it looks really great. The old surround was rotting out, it was a bad choice of wood. It now matches the railing in the back.

We all really love the new space. I’m a little surprised how much the kids love going down there and tumbling around on the carpet. Since the rest of the house is hardwood it’s a nice option for them to goof around and tumble.

We also have nothing but good things to say about Quartersawn, the contractor we used. Jeff put together a great plan and design, exploring a lot of options with us. He worked with Tammy directly on the cabinetry and came up with things that we all loved. Mike was on the job nearly every day and stayed on top of everything with amazing detail. Weekly meetings kept things running smoothly and any changes in plans we knew about right away. I’ve heard horror stories of remodels but have none to share myself.

Looking back on the project we’ve wondered what we would change, if anything. There are a couple of things.

1. This would have been a great time for me to do some better lighting above my espresso area in the kitchen. The electrician could have easily put another can in and it would have been really helpful. Once I realized I wanted it, it was way too late.

2. Also in lighting, we don’t think we did enough lighting in the stairwell to the family room. We have really nice stair lighting that is discreet and looks very classy. But some nice lighting in the ceiling above would have made that space more interesting.

This got pretty long but I thought it would be fun to give a virtual tour of our new space. Tammy also wrote about the new space on Smaller Than a Redwood with her take on the new space.

All these photos were taken with my Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 L ultra wide so there is a little skewing in the corners, even after Lightroom applying lens corrections. I wanted to capture as much of the space as I could.

Tyler had his first visit to urgent care tonight. He was running around the house like he normally does and he fell into the kitchen door frame. He got a pretty bad laceration on his forehead. It was about an inch long. It bled a lot for about a minute and then slowed down but kept bleeding. I immediately sent some photos to my good friend and ER doc Mike (thank you Mike!) and decided to head into the urgent care at Fairview Southdale. When the blood slowed down I could see that the skin was completely open.

We got into the urgent care and the Dr. confirmed stitches were needed. Putting stitches in a very active 22 month old is a bit of an adventure. I held him down while he was wrapped up and the nurse held his head. The lidocaine shot surprised him and that started the crying. The Dr. put in two stitches and I was surprised by the amount of blood from the stitches. Tyler let us all know what he thought of it with plenty of screaming. After he got cleaned up he settled down.

We go back in 5-7 days to get the stitches out. I’m hoping Tyler leaves the bandage alone and gets a good nights sleep. The Dr. didn’t think there would be any scaring.

Couple of cute Instagram photos of Mazie and Tyler from tonight.

First snow of the year just started falling. Really big flakes slowly floating down. First snow is always special. I hope it is still on the ground for Mazie in the morning.

Tammy, Mazie and I went to see Dolphin Tale tonight.

Tammy and I both agreed that this movie was about the most family friendly movie you could make. It was nice, heartwarming, had a dolphin in it. What more could you do really? Check out See Winter for more information on Winter the Dolphin.

Plus, we tried Tyler staying with one of the sitters before going to sleep. We hadn’t done that before and it worked great.

Before the movie we had dinner at Big Bowl where I had the best vegan meal I’ve enjoyed during our vegan challenge - Kung Pao Tofu with Spinach, substitute brown rice for the noodles and add heat. Plant power!

Tyler has been having a great time playing with the Magna Doodles lately. He will not just play with one. He has to have both. And he mostly enjoys carrying them all over the house. Occasionally he will stop to scribble on them. But only for a moment and then more carrying.

Mazie had a soccer game on Saturday. The field had a few puddles on it. The kids had no issues playing through.

Tyler and I played outside a bit tonight after dinner. He spent some time playing with the lock box. I think given enough time, he might get it. :-)

Mazie and her friend Gigi were playing today and decided to add some ad hoc signage to the playhouse. So awesome. I love the spelling.

The landscapers were here this week and got the yard looking a lot better. We decided to do the planting ourselves though and took advantage of 50% off sales in September at Wagners. We left with 32 plants and got them all in today. I did most of the digging and Tammy and Mazie put them in the ground. It looks great and the plants should have plenty of good weather to get established before winter.

Shortly after Tyler was born my Mom got him a pedal tractor. At my Grandparents farm there was always a metal pedal tractor that my cousins and I use to ride all the time. In comparison to new toys, it was ridiculously heavy and hard to get moving. But we had a great time with it. It was a John Deere, just like Grandpa drove.

I’ve kept the tractor in the box since Tyler was just too small, but I decided to put it together today so he can start playing with it. He is still far too small to make it go, but he thought it was pretty cool to sit on!

I had to do one of these hip retro photos too.

Mazie had to give it a try to!

Today was the 2011 So Long Summer show! Our neighbors the Miller’s host this every year for five years running now. It’s the last Sunday before school and a ton of kids in the neighborhood do performances. It’s awesome on so many levels.

This year Mazie sang a song from her now favorite movie, Annie. She sang “It’s a Hard Knock” life and knocked it out of the park!

I was so proud of her – great job! The crappy focusing is my poor performance on my camera.

Tammy had noted that Mazie and Tyler really like to play in playhouses when we visit people. Our yard is a standard city lot, so we don’t have much space but she figured out a good spot in the yard and a playhouse that would work there.

The playhouse didn’t have a floor so we made a trip to Home Depot and got the stuff to build a simple deck that would sit on the ground with cedar deck boards. Mazie helped me build the platform and Tammy prepared the ground and got the playhouse ready to assemble. It was a fun afternoon of building and assembling and the kids like the end result.

Our neighbors down the street, the Conley’s, hosted an unplanned smores evening last night. Mazie loved staying up to 11:30 pm!

Tonight we put Gypsie to sleep. Tammy took her to the vet a couple of months ago because we noticed that she didn’t seem to be urinating right. There were puddles of water in her litter box. She had also lost over half of her body weight, leaving just four pounds of mostly fur and bones. The vet did some tests and concluded quickly that her kidneys had failed. A terminal situation regardless of treatments, just a matter of time.

Gypsie sitting on a chair in my old apartment in 2001.

Gypsie got her name because she was a bit of a Gypsy originally. I got her when I moved into an apartment in college and the previous people where moving out and couldn’t take a cat with them. They had gotten her the same way, and had named her Gypsie. She ended up being my cat from then on. I never really knew exactly how old she was. We figure that she was 22 years old now, but that could be off a year. Needless to say she lived a long cat life.

Gypsie was my cat for years of college living with roommates and then a decade of living on my own. She was always a good cat and fine even when I was traveling for work a ton. She had incredibly soft calico fur. Her favorite thing was to sit on my lap or on my desk while I was relaxing or working on the computer. One of the odd things about her was she couldn’t really meow. I have no idea why, but she could just make a “kak” kind of sound. No meowing. She was also had an understated purr.

Gypsie sitting on my desk at the apartment in 2001.

Gypsie ended up being one of those challenging things from your life before being married and kids. She never liked Tammy’s cat Logan. She never really like Tammy. She was downright mad when we got a dog, and then another dog. She was mostly stoic about all of that though, and it wasn’t until our last move that her health really started to deteriorate.

Mazie and Gypsie just shortly before the vet visited.

The end for her was incredibly peaceful. She had a shot to put her to sleep, and then another shot that euthanized her. I held her while she fell asleep and it was all harder than I expected. While she had gotten progressively out of sync with the rest of the family happenings, she was after all my cat for nearly 20 years. I can’t help but feel that I could have been a better cat owner for the last year with the new house, a new son and an uncountable number of other things. But I also know that all the kids liked playing with her and she liked playing with them. She wasn’t the friendliest cat in her youth, but in the last year she was very nice to everyone.

Her kidneys had failed and she was very frail. When she fell asleep after the first shot tonight she seemed about as small as a little kitten. She faded away very calmly. Mazie was there and involved in the process. Tammy answered her questions about what was going on. It was hard, but I know it was the right thing to do.

See ya Gyps…

Tammy put up a blog post about how much Tyler loves to play with shoes. This was one of the pictures that I thought was just great.

I brought Tyler’s car seat into the house so it could be put back in the van. He then decided to spend a half-hour getting in and out of it. Great fun!

Tyler got to ride in my Mini Cooper for the first time today. His infant seat definitely would not fit, and the car seat wouldn’t fit rear facing (and how would we get him in if it did?). Now he is facing forward and while it isn’t spacious, it can be done.

Today was a big day for our project. This morning a bunch of guys showed up between 6:45 and 7:00am. Two big, blue concrete trucks showed up and parked right out front. One truck had the concrete mixing, and then it was pouring it into the pumping truck.

The concrete pumped through this hose and poured into the basement for the new floor.

Tyler was digging the big trucks. I would have stood there and watched too but I had to get to work!

Last night Mazie and I finished reading Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein. I really enjoyed reading each and every poem to Mazie, and she thought they were funny, goofy and good.

I distinctly remember reading Where the Sidewalk Ends when I was a kid. They were likely the first poems I read. I even remembered some of them. Mostly I remembered having the book and the cover of it.

We were reading the 30th Anniversary edition so I was at the youngest 9 when I read it. It was a real treat to read it to my daughter and hope that she has the same recollection when she reads it 30 years from now.

Tyler loves to climb on things, and he doesn’t give up easily. This morning I had the Tour de France streaming on one of the computers and left the room for a moment. I thought Tyler was being pretty quiet and was wondering why he wasn’t running around as usual. I came back to find him pretty excited to have climbed up in the chair and running the computer himself.

The kids a climber!

Today was the best Independence Day in memory. The day started early.

• Pancake breakfast. Mazie and Tyler both love pancakes.
• Trip to Minnesota Zoo. Tyler digs the zoo.
• Swimming at the Edina Pool. Mazie’s new favorite place.
• Mazie’s favorite dinner, Cheeseburger Pie.
• Tammy and Mazie to Mr. Popper’s Penguins.
• Mazie and I went the Minneapolis fireworks. Awesome!

To top that off we even had an impromptu visit from Grandma Rosalin that involved coloring.

Mazie said everything today was her favorite thing. :-)

Turns out that Tyler likes donuts! :-)

Mazie and I went and saw Cars 2 this weekend. We splurged and saw it in 3D! It was a ton of fun with a Daddy-Daughter movie and some Gummy Bears.

Mazie was excited to wear her special glasses!

I really like Cars. It is probably my favorite kids movie. I liked Cars 2. It was a lot of fun. It wasn’t as good as Cars, but that is a really high bar.

Tyler thought it would be fun to push the lawn mower for a while.

(Note: that is our neighbors lawn mower. I was out shooting pictures of the remodel)

My Mom came to the rescue of more plants. This week the excavation starts on the remodel and the side of the house is going to get dug up. A lot of Hostas and others had to be moved or destroyed. Mazie helped loading the rescued plants into Grandma’s car.

Last week Mazie and I had a delightful evening sitting in Garrick Van Buren’s backyard watching a puppet show. This is the 3rd year that the Van Buren’s have hosted the Open Eye Figure Theatre and we’ve made it every year. This year Garrick commented to me that he had counted over 100 people. That’s great, and I hope that Open Eye continues to do this Driveway (or in this case Backyard) Tour.

Before the puppet show starts the puppeteers give a little introduction to the theatre and the puppets. They have a simple stage and are accompanied by an accordion player. Every year there is always some water moment where water will fly from the puppet area into the audience. It’s a lot of fun for everyone involved.

This years show was The Amazing Cow Boat

Taking a bath will never be the same for audiences after seeing the all-new The Amazing Cow Boat! Told through a giant pop-up book with puppets, songs, and surprises, the show is the story of Charlie who, while taking a bath, sails away in his imagination in search of treasure. Traveling in his boat that amazingly is also a cow, he encounters pirates, mermaids, a whale, and an orangutan.

While I was sitting there watching the puppet show with Mazie in my lap, I took a moment to look around at all the other families and their kids collected in this neighborhood enjoying the show. It all seemed so right and so good. We need more things like this.

Yesterday Tammy had a photo workshop at the Minneapolis Photo Center. This was a class that we had gotten her for her birthday. Mazie, Tyler and I had the day and I went to the tried and true plan for a Dad left alone with the kids – to the Zoo we went!

We had a spectacular time. This was Tyler’s very first trip to the Zoo and he went crazy at every animal siting. He particularly loved anything swimming and was ecstatic when the Otters came by him. Mazie had a great time as well and brought her camera along. She took a lot of pictures and posted 100 of them on her website.

Our basic plan for visit revolved around the shark feeding and dolphin show. The shark feeding was packed so we didn’t see much of that. We got great seats for the dolphin show and both Mazie and Tyler sat in awe watching the dolphins perform.

After the dolphins finished we should have headed home for Tyler’s nap, but Mazie really wanted to go on the monorail and I’m a perpetual pushover so we each grabbed a soft pretzel and headed to the monorail. Both kids loved it.

It was a huge success and we all agreed we needed to return to the zoo more often.

Tyler is still very much constantly on the move. He has started to enjoy the novelty of sitting in the kids rocking chair that my Mom got Mazie a long time ago. It lasts for about five seconds at most.

Mazie is playing soccer again this year with the Cyclones in the Fuller Soccer Club. The whole team has improved a ton and there is some improvement to ball handling this year. Mazie is having a great time too.

Tyler did his best to try and help our last place team. Doesn’t seem to have had much effect yet.

Mazie’s kindergarten class had a picnic at the Rose Garden by Lake Harriet. She decided to do a little tree climbing while we were there.

Tyler taking a (very) brief rest on a blanket while playing.

I’m on vacation this week. We went to North Dakota earlier. Today I spent the day with Tyler and it was great. Tomorrow Mazie and I are having a Daddy/Daughter day.

While Tyler tried to nap, I did get time for a wonderful Chemex coffee break. Very nice.

Note the old school Road Sign Math coffee mug. :-)

Tyler is an exceptional crawler. He passed his 1 year birthday without feeling the need to work on walking all that much. Why walk when you can crawl super fast! In the past few weeks he has worked on finding his balance and taking steps. He can now walk a good dozen or more steps without falling! He is also now sometimes choosing to walk instead of crawl. I have a feeling he’ll be running around the house in no time. vimeo.com/20998209

Tyler refused his morning nap after swim class this morning. By the time we got to lunch, he was too tired to eat.

Valentines Day dinner. This was Mazie’s special request. Of course she was so full of chocolate she hardly ate any.

Mazie made me this awesome and sweet Valentine. Happy Valentines to everyone!

We all got bundled up this afternoon, grabbed the Mountain Boy sleds and headed over to the sledding hill. Even Tyler got into the action taking a couple of runs on the toboggan with the family.

Here is a quick video from the afternoon.

We had a great time!

We took a little time this weekend and updated everyone else’s websites this weekend.

Tyler now has a landing page up on his website. No blog or anything for him, just a simple page with some links. Mazie switched to a new theme and I posted a bunch of her pictures from the last few weeks. Last but not least Tammy also put a new theme on Smaller Than a Redwood.

Everyone looks clean, fresh and nicely updated!

Mazie getting her fingernails painted to go with the butterfly face. Having a lot of fun at the Sunshine Montessori’s Sunshine on a Stick festival at Burroughs.

Tyler is working hard at learning to walk. Pushing his music table is a favorite of his.

TODO: Add video

This video was made entirely on my iPhone. :-) I’m also trying a new way of embedding video that doesn’t rely on a video service. Hopefully this works well.

I was out of town most of this week. When I got back Mazie made this great picture of her and I.

Mazie and I had a ton of fun this afternoon stacking up blocks as fast as we could and then having Tyler knock them down.

My mom was visiting today and Mazie wanted to perform a song for her. Out came the microphone!

Tyler was having a blast flinging his shoes around on the coffee table.

And then he coyly hid them under the table and gave me this great look. :-)

This weekend Tyler decided that the stairs were his. He can climb them in no time, and immediately started going down them as well. He proceeded to do this, up and down, about 30 times today.

The next year is going to be exciting! :-)

Mazie and I put on our snow shoes and went for a loop around Minnehaha Creek West Park and down Minnehaha Creek. Great day for snowshoes!

We stopped for a quick photo on our way to see the Huge Snowman!

Mazie was a pretty big fan of her snowshoes.

Some people in our neighborhood build a huge snowman in the park every winter. Mazie stood next to it for scale. The nose is a traffic cone. Awesome!

You can see this for yourself if you drive down Penn Ave at night and look east as you cross over Minnehaha Creek. They light it up at night so it stands out really well. I’m going to go and photograph it some evening.

Tyler helped Dad unload the dishwasher this morning. Chase’s lack on an opposable thumb made him much less helpful.

One of the really cool things about our new house is that we are just down the street from “the sledding hill”. When we were moving here we would describe where we were moving to and a lot of people would suddenly say “That’s right by the sledding hill right?” Not knowing the sledding hell we couldn’t confirm. With over 3 feet of snow in December we can confirm the sledding hill is just down the street.

Proper sledding options made me check our sleds. Mazie had a little kid sled as well as a slightly bigger plastic one. However, none of her sleds would fit both of us, and they weren’t steerable. In short, they didn’t live up at all to my memories as a kid of a sled.

I started to look for new sleds and that is when I realized the sorry state of sleds. Let me be clear, a flexible slab of plastic 0.5mm thick is no more a sled than a sitting on a garbage bag. All the sleds I could find locally were total junk made to be cheap, fit by the thousand in a shipping container and had nothing to do with sledding. Steering? Nope. Drag reduction? Nope. Total and complete garbage.

So I went online and there I found the small niche of real sleds still alive and kicking. I just placed an order for a Mountain Boy Sledworks kit, two in fact. I’m likely crazy, but I wanted a toboggan as well as a maneuverable rocket. And yes, I got the sled pads too!

I was going to order direct but Amazon had great prices and the shipping was totally free. I’ve got the Mountain Boy Sledworks Ultimate Flyer 52” as well as the Mountain Boy Sledworks 6’ Mountain Boggan.

I’m excited to get them and take a few runs down the hill. I’ll report back on the results.

Tammy took Mazie and Tyler for their annual trip to see Santa Claus. Mazie was super excited to see Santa and tell him what she wanted in her stocking. Tyler seemed less excited to see this strange guy in a big red suit. :-)

Tyler is getting better better at standing. We expect it will still be a while before he is walking. But he much prefers being upright. Meanwhile he has a bugger of a rash on his face from sucking his thumb.

Mazie has been taking Spanish class at Burroughs and today they had a program where all the kids showed there skills. They named fruits, shapes and colors. They had some fun games that the kids played all in Spanish. I was super impressed with how much she and and all the other kids had learned. She did an awesome job!

Mazie and I enjoy our oatmeal. It is one of our favorite breakfasts. When she was really little I would make 2 servings and she ate about ½ of a serving and I got 1½ which was just about right. Now though she wants more, and the oatmeal box only shows water amounts for 1, 2 and 6 servings. We want 3 servings!

Now I realize your probably thinking it’s simple. 1 cup of water for each ½ cup of oatmeal. Done. However, that isn’t right. Note that 6 servings, 3 cups of oatmeal, is 5 cups of water, not 6. Here is the graph.

So it seems if you want to make 3 servings of oatmeal, you need 2 2?3 cups water. 4 servings need 3 1?3 cups and 5 takes 4¼ cups. Hope this helps everyone with their oatmeal preparation.

My mom had us over for a wonderful breakfast this morning. Here is a nice shot of Tyler and Grandma.

I’ve started the process of having our name and address removed from all the junk mail that we get. We moved a few months ago and now it seems to be queueing up again. It’s mysterious to me that 8-month old Tyler is getting catalogs.

Last week Mazie had her first soccer game! She’s in the Fuller Soccer Club on the Cyclones. With no practice aside from trying on her shin guards and uniform she hit the field.

This is a league for 5-6 year olds and it was a ton of fun to watch. Little kids all chasing the ball! They play 8 periods of 5 minutes each, rotating into various positions. Her first period involved a lot of standing in place and watching, but by the 4th period she was having a ton of fun!

I ran video of the entire 8th period. Mazie was playing center forward.

We are redoing a lot of the outdoor space in the backyard of our new house. We’ve wanted to put in a swing set for Mazie but it was a real challenge to find something that would fit in our standard city lot. It took a lot of creative thinking but we finally figured out a way to make it work and Tammy found a swing set that would fit in the space.

Tammy ordered the unit from CedarWorks. They send a rendered model of the swing set when you order it. Pretty cool.

Tyler loves to giggle.

Happy Baby!

You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. — Tyler Durden

I’m 1000% jokey and your 100% jokey. — Mazie

Today we closed on our new house. It was an exciting day filled with activity and signing many, many sheets of paper. To celebrate the closing we moved a handful of things into the new house including Mazie’s play table and decided to have dinner at the new place from Broder’s Deli.

We don’t actually move in for a little bit after painting and some new carpet.

Mazie, Tammy and I all went to Ponyo today. Fun movie, great story. Mazie loved it.

We had a great time at the Minnesota State Fair this year. This year was the first year that Mazie really got into it. Highlights included the butterfly house, carousel ride, cookies, skyjump and the butter heads. Mazie had an awesome time on the skyjump.

Big day at the Minnesota State Fair today. Mazie had a blast.

Last Friday Mazie and I had a super fun “Daddy-Daughter” day filled with many fun things. Part of our fun day was a trip to a store to get a new dress (we ended up getting two) followed by a photo shoot in her new clothes. We decided to do the photo shoot in our front yard, taking advantage of all the wonderful tall grasses and native plants. Mazie had a ton of fun, and so did I behind the camera.

Tammy, Mazie and I joined my sister-in-law Angie, Mazie’s cousin Nora and Grandma Olson for lunch at Burger Jones today. We’d been meaning to try out Burger Jones since before it even opened and this was our first opportunity.

First impression was good, but unfortunately the whole experience just stayed there at just good. I got a burger because, hey, you’re at Burger Jones. I ordered the burger medium, but it came well without any pink at all. It was a pretty uninspiring burger and I would take a burger of my own off of the Big Green Egg most any day. We also tried the cheese curds as they were supposed to be very good. They were pretty good, when they had cheese in them. The way they were prepared made a lot of the cheese come out of the breading. Mazie and I decided to give the Nutella Malt a try and it was good, but how can you do a malt wrong. Lastly everyone split the stack of fries trying the regular fries, sweet potato fries (my absolute favorite) and waffle-cheese fry. The sweet potato fries seemed like they came right off of a Sysco truck and into a fryer. Another yawn.

For the cost, I would have expected something better. It was all fine, and everyone left happy, but there wasn’t anything about the food that left me wanting to return quickly.

Another contribution to the Internet for high-resolution cover art. Here are the front and back scans of the DVD’s for Peppa Pig: The Balloon Ride, Piggy in the Middle and Bubbles. Mazie loves Peppa Pig.

Cooking was definitely the action for this years Father’s Day gifts. Tammy signed me up for a couple more of the Grillmaster cooking classes at Kitchen Window. Mazie got me something I’ve wanted to play around with for a while, an ice cream maker. We gave it a go for the first time tonight with a basic vanilla ice cream recipe. Mazie put the ingredients together and I did the measuring, we then poured it into the machine and started it up.

The machine cranked away and the ice cream slowly came together. The machine has an open top so that you can add ingredients while the ice cream is still mixing, but it’s also handy to dip a spoon in and give the ice cream a test. The final product was delicious and it was a lot of fun to make.

This was a learning batch. I think I should have ran it in the machine a bit longer than I did. It was solid and held in place, but I think I could have gotten it a bit more solid. The biggest thing I learned was that in addition to freezing the ice cream makers bowl, I should also freeze the bowl I’m going to put the finished ice cream in. I placed it in a glass bowl and some of the ice cream melted right away on contact with the glass. Need to keep everything cold!

Happy birthday to not you. — Mazie

I was tweaking some layout in Tumblr today and I really wanted to take a list of tags and display them with proper grammar. For example, I wanted to have commas in the right places and to use the proper singular and plural forms as needed. My goal was something like. At 9pm with tags Mazie, Baseball and St. Paul Saints.

Or, if there was only one tag.

At 9pm with tag Mazie.

The trick is that Tumblr only provides a way to iterate through the list of tags and you can’t do any funky logic in there. This is actually a benefit, since it forced me to figure out the right way to do this with CSS. After a little searching I found a really old post from 2005 explaining comma-separated list elements that was pretty close to what I wanted. I did some tweaking on it and came up with the following CSS block to do exactly what I wanted.

/* Styling for a comma separated list of values from a ul */
ul.comma-separated { display: inline; list-style: none; margin: 0; padding: 0; }
ul.comma-separated li { display: inline; }
/* Put the correct label in front, this should be plural for multiple tags */
ul.comma-separated li:first-child:before { content:"tags "; }
/* The comma we are looking for. */
ul.comma-separated li:before { content: ", "; white-space: pre;}
/* The last element should not have a comma and should be followed with a period. */
ul.comma-separated li:last-child:before { content:" and "; white-space: pre;}
ul.comma-separated li:last-child:after { content: "."; }
/* Special case required to handle a ul with only one item. */
ul.comma-separated li:only-child:before { content:"tag "; }

This will take a block of HTML like this

• Mazie
• Baseball
• St. Paul Saints

and display it exactly how I want.

This was a great exercise. I’m not a CSS guru and I don’t tend to look to CSS to solve this type of problem. I immediately wanted to start working some magic inside of a loop in the code and handle the logic there. This is much simpler, and has the huge benefit of being able to modify the contents after page load with Javascript and have the formatting dynamically adjust as needed.

Now I just need to move this super smart CSS into my WordPress site as well.

Mazie is about to turn 4 years old and she is bubbling with excitement about it. She tells me regularly how many days until her birthday, and that she will be able to jump higher and possibly grow several inches when she turns 4.

I’ve been thinking that it would be really fun to setup the video camera and ask her some questions. Essentially an interview. My idea is to put together a set of questions that would stay pretty constant and to do a video like this on her birthday each year, until she tells me to bugger off. :-)

I love the idea of capturing this, and capturing how things change over time. It’s obvious to me that simple questions should be included, like…

• What is your favorite color?
• What is your favorite food?
• Who are your best friends?
• What is your favorite thing to do?

I’d like to get this right though and I’m positive that there are several questions that I’m not thinking of. That’s the reason for this post…

what would you ask your kid?

I would really like to get the perspective of those much wiser than me, so please chime in.

Update (June 9, 2011): I’ve started to maintain a list of questions that I ask Mazie on these videos.

Mazie was ecstatic to see Up. She was giddy running to the theater to see it. We all really enjoyed it.

Mazie decided to do a little project with all of the dog toys the other day. Pretty cool. (Don’t obsess about the door frame. This is a panorama off the iPhone that wasn’t intended to be a panorama.)

Mazie and I went out for dinner tonight at Lion’s Tap! Daddy’s little princess went in her dress-up clothes. She was adorable and brought smiles to everyone she saw.

I don’t want Daddy in our family anymore! — Mazie (mad!)

Mazie and Tammy enjoying a “sweet treat”.

Mazie had her first ever scuffle at pre-school. Seems her and her friend disagreed and a scratch on the cheek resulted.

It was the first weekend in April, but that didn’t get it warm. In fact we had snow overnight this weekend and woke up to at least an inch of wet snow in the morning. That didn’t stop us from heading outside and for Mazie to spend some more time mastering her Skuut. She is very excited to “get a bicycle and not even need stabilizers”. vimeo.com/4020956

I wanna watch a TV show! — Mazie

I was flipping through the March 14th copy of The Economist and ran across “The final reel“ story. Fisher-Price is no longer going to make the View-Master. It was an odd article. I felt rather sad. I think because I distinctly remember as a little boy looking through my own View-Master and being amazed at the images and also completely obsessed trying to figure out how it worked. The experience continued this summer as Mazie enjoyed looking at her very own View-Master.

Going forward kids will only be able to get reels of animated characters and other licensed, copyrighted characters for the View-Master.

Yesterday I took my first attempt at doing studio photography. I’ve done a variety of different shooting, but I hadn’t yet attempted to set up lighting and do studio style portrait work. I’ve accumulated the bare essentials to do this over the last few months. I’ve got a Manfrotto Background Support system, one continuous light and the wireless system for my two Canon flashes. I learned quickly that is barely enough lighting to shoot with.

I got everything set up and did photos of Mazie and her cousin Nora, followed by shots of our neighbors three kids. Free photos of your kids is a pretty easy way to practice studio portrait shooting. :-)

Lessons Learned

1. The lighting setup I had was barely adequate. I had to take every picture up 2 stops in Lightroom after importing. The room I was shooting in had plenty of ambient light, and I still was barely up to par.

2. Focus is beyond critical. I was really frustrated that many of the pictures I had didn’t have crystal clear focus. I was focusing manually of course, but right away I noticed that if the subjects eyes aren’t absolutely locked on focus the picture really suffers. They looked fine, and completely in focus, in the viewfinder. With older kids that will sit still I learned the power of the live preview mode on my camera to get perfect focus. This made a huge difference.

3. You need a big room. I was shooting with about 7-10 feet from the subject. That wasn’t really enough room to get the framing I wanted.

4. Lack of strong light forced me to keep my f-stop really low, and as a result my depth of field really small. This amplified the focus problem. Additionally, I had to keep my shutter speed pretty slow which made it hard to shoot the really little kids.

5. I’m not sure why, but I shot the entire time with my Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L. It is by far the best glass I have, but at 70mm on the short end it’s still long. I should have tried a couple of other lenses, and will next time.

I did a little bit of searching and found a few studios that you can rent for a half-day. I think I might try that to see how it goes with a real lighting setup.

Mazie and I are reading and relaxing at Cafe Mozart this morning. Really great espresso.

Mazie skiing for the first time ever. She did really awesome. Ruled the bunny hill. She went down it probably 20 times.

I like 1 minute cause it’s just like an hour. — Mazie

Mazie loves it!

Mazie has always had her Lions since she was a little baby. Yesterday our neighbors gave her this great Lion sweater. She’s loving it!

Mazie getting ready for brunch at Butter.

I have all of my music in iTunes and it is my central hub for distributing nearly all content to various iPods, iPhones and Apple TV’s throughout the house and on-the-go. In my iTunes library, as of right now, I have 18,439 items totaling over 65 days of continuous music without any repeats. The only way to get the most out of a really large music collection is to leverage Smart Playlists extensively, and I do.

I have dozens of Smart Playlists to listen to all kinds of slices of my music archive. Creating these Smart Playlists involves setting the criteria of what I want in the playlist, but also, what I don’t want in the playlist. For example, unless the playlist is for Mazie’s enjoyment, I don’t want any Children’s Music in it. Similarly, unless the playlist is for the holidays, I don’t want Christmas music popping up. Sure, it’s a 5-star Christmas song, but that doesn’t mean I want to hear it in my 5-star Smart Playlist in July.

So, I started by having a lot of repeated rules in my Smart Playlists and having to update dozens of things anytime some of my criteria changed. After dealing with that, I figured out a way to be a lot smarter about my Smart Playlists. Use a Smart Playlist to remove the stuff you don’t want in other Smart Playlists.

“No Playlist” Playlist

To do this you first need to create your No Playlist Playlist. This could be called a “blacklist” of songs, but that seems more like unchecking songs. This is more a greylist of songs you only want to hear when you are specifically looking to hear them, regardless of their other qualities. Just create a Smart Playlist and make sure to change the match criteria to “any” or you will likely not have any matches. Also, it’s a good idea to uncheck the “Match only checked items” checkbox. If you don’t, and have other Smart Playlists that don’t check that, you will let some stuff through.

I have mine setup like this:

This creates my No Playlist Playlist with all Children’s Music, Radio content (archived episodes of This American Life mostly) and Holiday music. I’ve now got a good list. So, next I take my Smart Playlist of “Music from the ‘80’s”. Clearly I want all my great high school favorites, but I don’t want Mazie’s Red Grammer album showing up in there, or any other stuff from my No Playlist Playlist. So a simple rule as follows will keep it right (see the last criteria).

Now, the reason this is great is that I’ve now abstracted that rule into another set of conditions. So, if I forget one, like Comedy, that should be excluded from dozens of playlist I can simply change my No Playlist Playlist and it’s all better. I could even get funky with this and exclude tracks that were played within the last day or so, forcing rotation through other playlists without doing the work in each and every Smart Playlist.

Cool, huh?

Mazie really got into Christmas this year. It made Christmas so much more fun for me this year just to see the excitement and enthusiasm she had for the big day. She started to sing along to some of the Christmas Music we had playing and were singing to ourselves and really got into Santa Claus is Coming to Town.

Shortly after Christmas she picked up her guitar and gave her own rendition. Cutest video ever. :-)

vimeo.com/2815616

I’ve been really pleased with the newest releases of the Apple TV software. Notably, the incorporation of AirTunes has resulted in me using them a lot more for stand-alone music playback. Contrary to what I’ve said many times in the past, I started to wish that I had more content local on the Apple TV units themselves. Why? A couple of reasons.

• I have noticed that video playback, particularly pausing and fast-forwarding, works better on content that is on the local hard drive.

• As crazy as this sounds, I’ve occasionally bottle necked my iTunes ‘server’. If you are pulling multiple audio streams, multiple video streams and another device starts a large sync you can get some stutter. This is not typical, and is a by product of my large deployment. The bottleneck ends up being I/O at the iTunes Library, in my best guess of the situation.

• More local content makes me less dependent on the iTunes ‘server’ being on all the time. I’ve had a couple of situations where I’ve had it powered down or cut a network for repair and caused problems with media playback.

I decided to take the plunge and do the upgrade. I had read about the procedure and it seemed pretty simple. Certainly way easier than hacking an Xbox. No soldering required here. If you are curious about doing this yourself, I followed the Engadget article on upgrading your Apple TV hard drive. I’ll add some of my own comments on the process below.

First thing, you need some drives. I ordered three of the Western Digital Scorpio Blue 250GB 2.5” PATA drives from NewEgg.

With the drives in hand, it was time to rip open one of the Apple TV’s and give it some bigger storage. This is really the only tricky part of the upgrade, since the Apple TV is not meant to be opened by the end-user.

The process is pretty painless, but I will highlight a couple of things not found in all the How To articles.

• I found that removing the bottom rubber pad was much easier to do when the unit was hot. I highly recommend having the Apple TV on for several hours and doing the removal when the unit is still hot. I had no issues removing the bottom pad on the two I did warm, but the third I did cold and I ended up with a couple of tears in the bottom rubber. Nothing significant, but annoying.

• You’ll need two Torx screwdrivers. The case screws are T-10, which you probably have if you have any Torx sets (my set was T-10, T-15 and T-20). But the hard drives is held in with T-8’s. I had to make a trip to the hardware store for a T-8 bit.

After doing the first one, the process was really simple and didn’t take long at all. After getting the drive out you have to duplicate the image from the factory installed drive to the new drive. You do this with [dd](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)). You’ll need to be able to easily connect the drive to a computer. I had a USB adapter that can be connected to a bare drive already so this was easy. The dd step takes a while. It took 2 hours for me to read the drive and make the image, and another two hours to write the image onto the new drive.

Note, some of the write-ups suggest modifying the writing to not write the media files. I just did the entire image. Saving time here was not a priority for me, I wanted the drive exactly the same.

I wimped out and used iPartition to resize the Media partition. That turned a dozen commands into a click of the mouse and a few seconds of drive spinning. I figure I can use iPartition for other things too. After the repartition you just put it all back together and plug it in again.

Just like that I had a ton of available storage, and let iTunes spend another few hours filling it up with content.

I have noticed that iTunes synchronizes things in a specific way when you have a big drive. All of my music is stored locally on each Apple TV, I like that. But priority seems to be given to unwatched TV Shows. There seems to be a rule in the sync that always wants those local if there is space. Probably makes sense, but it does mean that after TV and Music most movies are streaming. I wish there was a way to do something between automatic and custom sync. I’d like to do an automatic sync, but be able to pin a number of things to be local all the time. This would be really great for Mazie’s stuff that she watches repeatedly.

So far everything is great. I did find a bug in the Apple TV software while testing offline use of the Apple TV related to AirTunes. I think having more local content will make the user experience all that better. Plus, I dig the idea of leaving for a trip and just yanking an Apple TV to take along and having so much content with us in a small package.

I was doing some work on my Apple TV’s today, swapping out hard drives, and at the same time we’ve had some painting going on so my 802.11n network has been offline. I got done upgrading the Apple TV and plugged it into ethernet to do an initial sync. Afterwards I put it upstairs where it normally sits on an 802.11n wireless network, but today it’s not connected to anything. That was fine since I wanted to test playing local content.

Mazie wanted to watch a quick show so I fired that up and it worked great, no issues. I decided then to play some music and hit a wall. The Apple TV refused to play any music or audiobooks. At first I thought it was something with FairPlay, even though that made no sense, but I couldn’t even play MP3 files I had ripped off of my own CD’s. Something was amiss.

It hit me then that this Apple TV typically connects to the AirTunes destination for the Living Room, and that with no network connection it wouldn’t be able to see that. Bug! I tested it out and verified that this is indeed a bug in Apple TV 2.3.

If you have your Apple TV set to play through an AirTunes destination, and you then take the Apple TV off of all networks, it will fail on playback of content that it would typically send to AirTunes (video will work fine since that never goes to AirTunes). Now, what really kills about this bug is that since there is no network the menus have no options to deselect an AirTunes destination. It seemed the only way to get rid of this issue would have been to do a reset, or get it back on a network and deselect the remote speaker destination. Ugly.

I chose to just get it online and deselect the speaker set. Resetting settings would cause me to have to change other things as well. I filed a bug report with Apple, #6484963. Hopefully they will clean this up. It’s not a likely scenario, but I could see it happening particularly if you took an Apple TV to a cabin for the weekend and then wanted to listen to music without a network connection.

Mazie’s reaction to some interesting art.

I know they are man’s best friend and all, but sometimes there is just no way around it, dogs suck. Lately this has been applying to Chase more than Izzy. For the last few months he’s been really into eating, well, anything. Mazie’s toys. Books. Stuff we cannot identify after he’s mauled it. The newest one that just amazes us is the dimmer light switch knobs. That’s right. He pulls the knob off the wall and eats it.

Yesterday, after being out of the house for a very short lunch, I was welcomed with this scene at the front door.

Ugh! It’s every bit as bad as it looks. What did he eat? Well, it’s the back of one of Mazie’s cool Jennifer Delong Modern Ultrasuede Chairs.

He had grabbed the seat back cushion and went to town. The most amazing thing about it is that the zipper was opened, and not damaged. It’s like he gently opened it up and removed the foam to have a big foam party with. Unfortunately he did chew a hole in one of the corners so we are hoping the seat back can be replaced.

I really hope he grows out of this chewing festival soon. We’ve got dozens of toys around for him to eat, but those generally are spared.

Comments closed December 2011:

I’ve closed comments on this post. It draws a variety of comments that range from odd to disturbing. The blog post was written tongue-in-cheek after the dogs ate some furniture. Any dog owner could relate to this. Some of the commenters seem to be filled with a lot more vitriol on the subject.

I recently was doing a review of some of our monthly expenses. With the economy in the toilet I think this is a pretty common activity. Mainly I wanted to look for things that we weren’t necessarily using, or didn’t think we needed anymore. The trick to doing this exercise is to annualize all the expenses. $50 a month doesn’t sound nearly as expensive as $600 a year.

Mostly everything was fine, but one number jumped out at me in a very big way – DirecTV satellite TV service.

$1,079.88

That is the annualized cost of our DirecTV service. When looking at that number Tammy and I didn’t feel like we got anywhere close to $1,000 of value out of the service. What to do?

What do you want?

To be clear, none of this is stuff that you really need but is instead something we want. So I started by looking at what we actually use the $1,000 of service for.

We are in essence only DVR users. We don’t really ever watch live TV, instead grabbing season passes for the shows that we have decided to watch and then skipping the commercials. This makes it really easy to explore options as our usage is pretty simple. Our TV usage could be broken down as follows:

1. Shows that we season pass and watch on our schedule.

2. Political coverage, breaking news and occasional sporting events – these are all watched in realtime.

3. European sports coverage: professional cycling and Formula 1.

4. Rarely we might watch a movie via pay-per-view.

That is really it. To be fair, that $1,000 buys more than just that, but I don’t care since I don’t use it. We use DVR extensively, but almost never to “pause live TV,” instead just to time-shift content. That is an important distinction for us as it removes a key need of DVR that some people have.

Solution: Season Pass Shows

We have three TV’s in the house, they are all Sharp LCD panels, and each one has an Apple TV on it connected to a central iTunes repository. iTunes now offers a decent variety of content so I took the shows that we had season passes for and did a comparison on iTunes. We season pass a total of 13 shows and all but 2 of them were available. The two that were not were both HGTV shows and they have very little on iTunes, and the content was really optional for us.

I then added up the season pass cost for iTunes for each of these shows, calculating it at the cost for the high definition versions of the show (interesting note, you could save even more money by opting out of HD for some shows that you may not care about the quality difference for). The total was:

$647.76

Wow! For our first need I could replace everything that we get now with the same content from iTunes and in the process I can save $432.12. Not only do I save over $400 a year, but I don’t even have to skip commercials since there are none to skip. And there is more. Once the content is in iTunes I can now time shift it like we always do, but I can easily place shift it with my iPhone or iPod. Lastly, I get a better service because the way our house is wired up now I only get HD content downstairs, and with this solution I get HD content for all of these shows.

The story doesn’t end there though. I found that this analysis totally changed the way I was looking at these shows. With DirecTV I have to pay that $1,000 to get into the buffet and then it’s all you can eat from there. Moving to an iTunes solution I was making the decisions independent of a service package or even the network it was on. I found some interesting variances. For example, one of the shows we watch occasionally is Heroes. But Heroes costs $64.99 for the season. I compared that to a show we really like to watch, Boston Legal at $24.99. I would be happy to pay even more for Boston Legal, but there is no way I would pay over $30 for a season of Heroes. Heroes gets cut out. By doing this, the cost of our programming drops another $150-$200 dollars further.

The other big change is how a show like The Daily Show weighs in. You don’t buy a season of The Daily Show, you buy a pack of episodes. The impact of this is that if you stop watching for a month you pay nothing. If they go to reruns for a week you pay nothing. So how do you calculate the cost? I just assumed the worst case of every episode, with all episodes being new every day, all year. If that happened (which it never would), it would cost $119.88 a year for the Daily Show.

On first blush that seems really high, but when I thought about it the real costs would likely be around $80 since there are many rerun periods, and we tend to watch for a while and then not watch for a while. Even then that seems high, but, if I considered what content we watch with what frequency you can justify that it should be the most expensive thing we subscribe to given its daily frequency.

Anyway, my expectation of the real world cost of getting this programming is that it would come in somewhere around

$420.00

That’s right, we would cut our cost by 50%.

Solution: Live Programming

So the next thing I needed to figure out is live programming. This is mostly an occasional football game or election coverage every couple of years. For us this programming is almost all on a major broadcast network, and they all send out wonderful HD broadcasts that I pick up with my ChannelMaster 4221 antenna. I already have that coming into the house on coax and going to the DirecTV satellite tuner.

It turns out that it is very easy for me to get this everywhere in the house. I can just reuse the coax that is already going to each TV and hook the antennae up to it and then plug it into the ATSC tuners on all the TV’s.

This solution actually proves to be superior than our current solution in a few ways:

1. The quality of the picture is amazing. DirecTV takes the 1080i signal from the broadcaster and re-encodes it typically at a lower bitrate and then sends it over the satellite. The picture quality is noticeably better using a direct OTA ATSC tuner.

2. Simpler and easier to use since you are watching TV just like watching TV. You aren’t controlling a DVR through an IR repeater that actually lives in the lower level. When people babysit Mazie and want to watch TV it’s always so complicated. Not so in this model.

Now, I don’t have any way to get CNN live for breaking news of that nature, but that is why I have a broadband connection and computers all over the house.

Solution: Cycling and Formula 1

This one is the hard one. There is no solution. Nothing. I’m willing to forego Formula 1 in its entirety, but I really want to watch the grand tours. My best option would be to subscribe to a web site and watch it over the web. You can do that, and in many ways the coverage is better and more thorough. Versus (formerly OLN) continues to have weaker coverage, although I expect with Lance racing again this year it will be better.

Solution: Pay-per-view

This is a simple swap. Instead of pay-per-view bound to time we can just rent on-demand via the Apple TV. The experience is way better than anything pay-per-view offered.

Next Steps

I’m currently battling with DirecTV to move forward with this. I’ve been a customer for about 12 years and they are trying to make the case that I just renewed my contract due to their requirement to swap in MPEG4 receivers for me and take my TiVo (MPEG2 only) boxes away.

It is very clear to me that I will save money and have a better service. I’ll save a lot of money in fact, and have a way better service. I also like that it will get rid of the occasional channel surfing that could be better spent reading a book. But with that said I’ve also felt some hesitation to pull the cord on this. I likely just need to do it and not look back, we’ll see. Saving $600 a year sounds great!

But what about DRM?

You can’t look at this option without addressing DRM. I have a couple of different thoughts on this.

First, DirecTV and its satellite based DVR system is a DRM world that is even more locked up than iTunes and Fairplay. At least with Fairplay I can use it anywhere in the iTunes ecosystem. The DirecTV environment I can’t even get something from one DVR to another, much less to my phone or media player. So, here I’m saying we already have DRM and iTunes is a “more open” DRM.

Second, this is TV content and after I’ve watched it I may not even keep it around. With DirecTV I watch an episode and delete. With the iTunes solution I own (with DRM) the content and can keep it forever (as long as Fairplay works). But I don’t really care about keeping it forever. It’s not a movie or music that I own, it’s a show I watch and then move on.

Lastly, I do think that DRM is going to fade away at some point, and when it does I would only want to be on a DRM system that the majority of “the herd” is on. I find it hard to believe that Fairplay could ever stop working. Even if Apple went out of business and died a horrid death, Fairplay would have to be addressed. There is simply too much content (#1 music reseller is iTunes?) for it to not exist, or be purchased away and made free the same way that iTunes Plus works now. So, there is a clear technical path to phase it out that could be put into effect pretty quickly.

Lately Mazie has really been into letters and trying to figure out what letter a word starts with. For example, she’s figured out that “Mazie starts with an M”, “Apple starts with an A”, etc.

Today she declared that “eyebrow starts with an I”. Tammy explained to her that while eyebrow does sound like an i, it is really an e, and that sometimes words are a little tricky. I suggested that if Apple were to describe eyebrows they may in fact start with an i.

iBrow

Mazie’s 2008 school picture just came in. Here is Daddy’s little girl. Last years scowl seems entirely gone.

Mazie and Tammy being ridiculously cute at lunch today.

Mazie greeted her 3rd Halloween with much excitement and anticipation. I think this is the first holiday that she has been really, truly excited about. She kept asking us in the weeks preceding when it was going to be Halloween. She was practicing saying “Trick or Treat” and “Thank You”. She couldn’t decide if she was going to go with her Princess outfit or the Train Conductor. In the end she decided that her love of trains would prevail.

She had an awesome night and was giddy with excitement. It was all just great.

Tammy and I have both been eating much better the last couple of weeks and we’ve been doing a lot more cooking at home. I like to cook. I find it relaxing and fun. We have also been trying to keep things simpler, less processed things and make more of our own foods with the basics from the co-op. Tammy is going to start baking artisanal bread. I’ve started making applesauce for Mazie here at home. (Yes, baby steps. I was inspired by my sister-in-law who makes her own food for my niece!) I made the first batch last week and it was really easy, except for peeling the apples which took a long time. I also couldn’t get the applesauce as smooth as I really wanted it.

I had never seen an apple peeler. Tammy suggested that we just get one since they make peeling apples a breeze. I got the Norpro Apple Peeler at Kitchen Window and used it for the first time tonight. It is amazing, and its fun! I had 5 pounds of apples ready to boil down for applesauce in no time at all. I have no idea how my mother and grandmother never produced one of these in the kitchen when making an apple pie. I can only assume that there is some big issue where these cannot be “exported” to North Dakota. Put down the paring knife, and get one of these things.

The next challenge was making it smoother so we finally picked up a stick blender, something we’ve been thinking we need for a long time. We make a decent number of pureed soups and a stick blender makes that so much easier. We got the Bamix stick blender for its power and durability. It made short work of the boiled down apples and made a great, smooth sauce.

Chill it down with a little brown sugar, high-end cinnamon and fresh ground nutmeg. Knocks the socks off of any applesauce you can get in the store.

I’ve struggled with my weight for a long time, my entire adult life really. In 2000 I started an intensive program working extensively with a trainer and focusing with complete obsession on my food intake. In the course of 10 months I lost 100 pounds and changed a lot. Slowly though discipline broke down and focus was lost. This chart tells the story better than words.

I’ve asserted myself and decided it was time to get back into shape before, see 2004 and 2006. Both of those attempts were quick failures.

I believe that when you are making major changes in life it is an opportune time to push some bigger changes through. If you’re disrupting things, disrupt them big. I’m at a big inflection point in my career, so I’m making it an inflection point for fitness too. On top of that I’ve noticed that my lack of fitness and excess weight has become a bigger problem than it ever was before. Perhaps showing signs of getting older, my blood pressure has crept up. In order to do fun things with Mazie and Tammy I need to be lighter on my feet.

A week ago I began to work hard on this, and I’m going to keep on working hard until I get to my goals. I’ve got a lot of work to do, and it’s going to be hard, but I’m going to hold myself accountable to it. If I pass on the appetizer or beverages at dinner you will know why. My goal is to get back below 300 by the New Year, and to reasonable fitness by next summer. If you see me attempting to be stupid, feel free to point it out. My plan to get there includes daily exercise and strictly watching food.

Wish me luck! I’m feeling great!

Tomorrow morning, bright and early, Tammy and I head off to the train to spend three days in Scotland. We are going light with reading and photography being the only real loads. I won’t be blogging from there. Mazie and Grandma are going to be exploring London from the basecamp in Kensington while we are gone.

When we told people that we were coming to London one of the most popular questions was “Are you going to any shows?” We gave what seemed like a pretty disappointing answer to most people – “We don’t know.” We didn’t know because a show would require someone to watch Mazie at night and it wasn’t obvious that would happen. But, when my Mom arrived she suggested that she watch Mazie and get to sleep a little early and we go out for the night. Sounded great to us!

Tammy did some research and narrowed it down to two shows, which quickly became one, and we headed off to see Zorro the Musical!

Let me just say, “wow!”

Neither Tammy or I are qualified theatre people, but we absolutely loved Zorro. It was filled with energy, great music and dancing. It kept me completely engaged all the way through and really looking forward to returning to my seat after intermission. I think it was better than Wicked, which I liked a lot. Tammy thought it was her favorite musical ever, even better than Mama Mia!

If you get a chance to see this musical, make every effort. It’s a great night!

This morning Tammy and my Mom took off for Liverpool. When we were looking at our trip over here, and when my Mom would come over, we found out there is a Beatle’s Festival in Liverpool this week. They took an early bus ride, followed by a very late overnight ride back to go see it. Mazie and I had the whole day to ourselves!

I hadn’t done a great job of planning out our day, but it came together really well.

London Zoo

We started our day at the London Zoo. Zoo’s are always the old standby for Dad’s Day with the Kids and I’m not too proud to use it. A quick trip to the Transport for London Journey Planner and I was able to figure out the right bus connections to get us there, and that it would take about an hour. They were right, an hour later we arrived at the Zoo.

The London Zoo is a cool destination if only for being the oldest zoo in the world. According to Wikipedia it opened on April 27, 1828. Given this long heritage, I was a little curious how the zoo would shape up. On our trip out west we stopped at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle. The Woodland Park Zoo opened in 1899, again from Wikipedia. London’s Zoo was already 71 years in the running at the time. More impressive to me is that the Woodland Park Zoo owns the domain zoo.org. I digress. The point is that the Woodland Park Zoo was completely amazing and reset my expectation for what a zoo could be. I was curious to see how London had adapted over the years.

To say I was disappointed is too far, but I think London could really use an infusion of investment into the London Zoo. It is massively improved from the days of gorillas in cement cubes, but it didn’t strike me as leading in its approach to animal habitats. The London Zoo did however send a strong conservation message and highlighted some key roles they have played in zoological research over the years.

All of this was neither here nor there for Mazie of course. She had a great time, and particularly adored the giraffes. They had three of them and we watched them for nearly thirty minutes. I asked her if she wanted to name them and she suggested they were all named “Giraffe-y”. The “-y” naming convention is a trend lately. We also made a special point to see the lions and she really loved the butterfly tent. She found the large birds pretty boring, although I didn’t. They have some pretty huge vultures at the zoo.

We spent all morning there and ended the day with a run on the Zoo Carousel. Mazie insisted on going, which was surprising and new. She previously hasn’t been a big fan of them, but not today. She really enjoyed it.

At the end of our zoo trip we debated taking the bus or train back to the apartment for quiet time. I wanted to take the bus, Mazie insisted on the train. Since it was her day I obliged and walked a mile to the nearest tube station only to find that for a 5 hours slice of time, only on Sundays, particularly right when we showed up, they don’t allow inbound traffic there. So, another 10 minute walk to the next station down the line and we headed back.

I tried to convince Mazie to take a good nap because we had a special afternoon planned. We were going to High Tea at the Orangery!

High Tea

When thinking about our special Dad-Daughter day in London I wanted to do something that was local and a first. It hit me pretty quick that it would be fun to go and have High Tea together. I had no idea what the entailed as I had never done High Tea before [1]. We had heard on a tour the other day that if you “tea at the Ritz” men must wear a jacket and tie. I have neither along, and that wouldn’t be fun for Mazie so I started doing some searches.

I quickly found that High Tea is actually a pretty kid friendly thing at the right places. I ran across a site that mentioned that the Orangery at Kensington Palace offered a special “Tea for Kids” and it was casual. Perfect!

After Mazie’s non-nap we took off for our first High Tea. I wasn’t real sure how to get where we were going. The tube wasn’t close, and I wasn’t wanting to negotiate the buses so Mazie and I flagged a black cab and made our way to Kensington Palace. We found the Orangery straight on and started our tea.

Mazie’s “Tea for Kids” was a good sized glass of apple juice (more on that later) along with the typical High Tea cucumber and cream cheese sandwich. She wouldn’t touch the sandwich, but loved the apple juice. We substituted her orange sponge cake for a slice of chocolate cake as well.

I had the traditional tea and really liked it. We had a great time sitting and chatting about our tea party and how much fun we had had at the zoo. The tea took just the right amount of time, and some coloring kept Mazie content.

After tea we went into the gardens at Kensington Palace and looked around, followed by some full on running in the park surrounding the palace.

Too Much Sugar

It was time to head back home and Mazie and I discussed our mode of transportation. She suggested that we get a cab again because “the guy that worked there was nice”. I was eager to agree but that the £10 could be easily saved if we just looked. We poked around and figured out it was a short bus ride to Knightsbridge where we would be able to get the Picadilly line back to Earl’s Court and be two blocks from the apartment.

While we were waiting for the bus Mazie informed me that her stomach hurt. This is not normal. She doesn’t get upset stomachs as a normal course of things. I asked her if it hurt a lot and she informed me it did.

At that point I ran through her food for the day and the lack of any proper nutritional oversight became apparent. Cereal and fruit for breakfast was the high point. A snack of mini-donuts followed by a waffle with Nutella on the go at the zoo for lunch was not a good choice. And then high tea with a huge glass of apple juice followed by chocolate cake. Uh oh!

It didn’t seem like I had any options. We got on the bus and went a few stops. She reported that her stomach still hurt a lot. I figured it was maybe too much running around with a full stomach and was hopeful that it would settle down. She was calmer than normal on the bus but seemed okay. We made it off the bus and then walked two blocks to the Knightsbridge tube station and headed down for the train.

She still wasn’t feeling good but I kept asking how she was doing and she said it hurt but was getting better. Then it happened. On the platform for the Picadilly train at Knightbridge, heading east, at about 6 p.m., she started puking up all that sugar.

One, two, three and finally four good size heaves of puke came up. Puke was all over the floor, on her shoes, on her pants, on her shirt – on my pants, on my shirt, a little on my camera. I had one single napkin in my pocket that I used when she gave the first explosion and was completely soaked and covered in puke by the fourth. The tube has no bathrooms, no trash cans, no nothing.

So, I asked if she was done and we walked to the other side, down the whole length of the platform, back over to the eastbound side on the other end and boarded the next train. Both of us had a fair amount of puke on us standing in this absolutely packed train full of nicely dressed people heading to a concert at Earl’s Court.

But, hey, what are you going to do.

Great Day

We got the rest of the way on the train with no more puking and Mazie reported that she felt good now. I asked her several times if she still wanted her dinner of frozen Macaroni and Cheese at home and she confirmed that she did every time. She gobbled it down actually and I think it settled her stomach a bit. The poor kid suffered through absent minded meal planning but still had a grin.

We had a stellar day filled with fun at every corner. No temper tantrums and things went really smooth. Plus we got to have our first High Tea. What a great day!

[1] There is some debate on this. I’m told by Alice Kim that I did indeed have High Tea on a business trip to London around the year 2000. I have no recollection of this.

Food culture is always interesting, and now with Mazie I’ve started to appreciate the food culture of the kid’s menu. Here is a shocker: kids in England don’t eat Macaroni and Cheese. Right, amazing, huh? To a guy that grew up in the midwest this is like saying that people in England don’t breath air.

Mazie on the other hand requires a regular uptake of Mac-n-Cheese. She’s a bit particular about it too. Seh doesn’t like the box stuff. She insists on “super cheesey” Mac. She likes the Mac-n-Cheese at Yum! Kitchen & Bakery a lot but her favorite is probably Amy’s Organic Frozen Macaroni and Cheese. It is “super cheesey” and she just scarfs it all down.

It really is that cheesey.

When we got to London our plan all along was to have breakfast and dinner at the apartment and lunch out. We searched for Mac-n-Cheese and came up really empty handed. We found one option, frozen, at Tesco and Mazie hated it. She ate one bite and didn’t want to touch it again.

Tammy did some research on the Internet and found that Whole Foods may have had the holy grail – Amy’s Organic Frozen Macaroni and Cheese.

Brits queueing at the oddly designed checkout aisles.

We took the District Line a couple stops up and walked the two blocks to Whole Foods. It was a bit like going to a grocery in Minneapolis. So many options. We struck gold with a good supply of the infamous Macaroni and Cheese and also stocked up on other essentials. I was a bit surprised to find that I couldn’t get deli sliced turkey. No turkey sandwiches in the UK either?

Big, huge, parent-minded gratefulness goes out to Whole Foods in Kensington!

Yesterday afternoon my Mom arrived in London to join us for part of our month abroad! She is hanging out with us a couple of days and then will be exploring London with Mazie while Tammy and I flit over to Scotland for a couple of days.

After a week here her new husband Kurt, will be joining us and they will be going off for a week of fun on their own in Scotland with a quick trip to Paris.

My mother is an energy generator. She arrived here just ready to get going and without even adjusting to the time change she headed off with Tammy to the Beatles Festival in Liverpool!

Okay, lame picture of Grandma and Mazie. The white wall is our apartment. You’d have no idea this was London, or Minneapolis or Beijing. You’ll just have to trust me.

One of the benefits of visiting London is that we got the chance to visit with our friends Alice & John who moved here a little over a year ago. It’s an easy visit too since our apartment is only about four blocks from them. A short walk after Mazie’s nap yesterday and we were at their place. It took a while for Mazie and the girls to get in the playing mood with plenty of shyness to go around, but after an hour they were having a lot of fun. Mazie really enjoyed playing with other kids and more than the handful of toys we packed over here. Tammy and I enjoyed catching up with Alice and John and hearing all about their adventures in London. Good times around, finished with good pizza and a couple of pints.

We’ll definitely get a couple more visits in before we leave town.

This morning we decided to head to Harrods (store) and visit the worlds largest department store. My first piece of advise is to treat Harrods like an amusement park. Don’t plan to actually shop there unless you want to burn through significant £’s. There is some nice stuff there, but the prices match it. I was thrown back by kids shirts marked at £79.95 ($149.97 as of today). But then again, I don’t think I’ve even seen Juicy Couture for 3 year olds. ¹ Tammy compared Harrods to a casino without the gambling, which is a good approximation. Cruise ship would also be close, but not nice enough.

Even with the ridiculous price tags we had a really fun time just walking around. Mazie had a blast in the kids department with loads of toys and babies. She got to pick one thing to get and much to her parents chagrin desperately wanted a baby that we could get for $12 at home but got to pay £14.95 ($28.04) for.

It was fun to walk around in the household stuff and see all the cool Euro fixtures and such. There are so many more modern options here than at home. We stayed from open through lunch and had some very good pizza in the food hall followed by a nice gelato for desert. We wisely chose a weekday for our visit, and also chose the morning to avoid larger crowds in the afternoon. Happily we didn’t have to queue a lot and could tell that the afternoon was getting notably busier as we left.

1: I think this is so funny. The Juicy Couture website, which sells way overpriced clothes based entirely on brand appeal, has the Sun Microsystems logo for it’s favicon.ico. Somebody at Juicy needs to call their web shop.

Our London trip is a lot different from our Summer of Love West Coast Road Tour. Notably, we aren’t on the road very much for London and with the exception of a short jaunt to Scotland for Tammy and I, we are staying put in London proper.

We rented an apartment for the month and have gotten settled in. We are in the Kensington area at Philbeach Gardens. The apartment is good. We have about 800 square feet and behind the apartment is a very large private courtyard where Mazie can play. I think the nicest thing about the apartment is the dining room with a glass ceiling. I’ve setup my computer in this area with great light.

On the downside we are missing some niceties. Mainly what was advertised as included Internet access is really a 3G HSDPA Modem (Huawei E220). It’s better than nothing, but you have to tip toe around the Internet and wait for long delays. We have a washing machine but no dryer, I guess we just hang our clothes to dry.

We went shopping for some supplies at a nearby Tesco. It took us over an hour to find what we were looking for. It’s great that London is English, but there is no doubt you are in a foreign country. It took us about 10 minutes to find baking soda.

I put a set of photos of the apartment online for a little virtual tour.

The trick with spending a month in London is that you have to get there, and that has to be done on a plane. Mazie had never been on a plane before and we bullishly pushed through with a trans-atlantic flight as her very first one. Tammy has been on many flights, but has a very real fear of flying causing much stress and anxiety. She was an absolute rock star though keeping all of that to herself and not causing any undue stress for Mazie.

We departed at 9:45 p.m. For whatever reason I felt it absolutely necessary to get to the airport at 6:30 p.m. Having never flown with a kid, and knowing we had 5 bags to check, I figured we needed all the time we could get. In reality, we checked all 5 bags in a few minutes at the curb and flew through security without any issues. With over an hour to spare we decided to have desert at Ike’s in the airport. They have a chocolate cake that is a foot tall, rather crazy actually.

The flight itself was fine, but getting Mazie to sleep was not. I had this idea that we would leave at 9:45 p.m. and after the excitement of takeoff ended Mazie would just naturally fall asleep. This was not the case. She didn’t go to bed until 1:30 a.m. central time. We tried everything short of medication and nothing would work. I got furious with the screens in the back of every chair that constantly flashed different messages at us, keeping Mazie enthralled with them.

Anyway, she finally got to sleep and I crashed about the same time. Tammy on the other hand spent most of the night playing Quordy on her iPhone and got maybe 15 minutes of sleep.

After landing we collected all of our luggage, got through customs, and found a cab for the £55 ride into Kensington. I’m trying to not do £ to $ conversions here since it’s just depressing.

Our first day here was spent mostly recovering from jet lag. We were all crazy tired.

Our friend Marilee Tangen took this picture of Mazie. I think it’s absolutely stunning.

Tammy and I are doing final preparation for the second big trip of the Summer of Love. We leave on Sunday for London. We’ll be staying there for four weeks and exploring London in detail and taking some day trips as well. We’ve booked a trip to Stonehenge and are also planning a day trip to the Royal Observatory to stand on the prime meridian.

We’ve rented a flat for the month. This will be a very different trip than our 6-week tour around the Western US. We’ll be staying in one place. We won’t have a car and will be using public transport only. I expect to take a lot of pictures and will be trying to post regularly.

Tammy and I will also be taking a short trip to Scotland. My mother is coming over for a couple of weeks. The first week she is spending with us and will be watching Mazie while we are in Scotland. The 2nd week she is honeymooning with her new husband.

There is much planning and packing to do.

Mazie and I had our very first Tiny Tonka T-Ball game last night. Sorry, no pictures or video from it. Tammy had plans, and I’m one of the coaches! Next week we’ll get some media coverage.

Of course Mazie just turned 3 a couple of weeks ago and you may be asking how exactly t-ball works with 3 and 4 year olds. Let me explain a bit.

First, this is for fun and there are no scores, no strikes. In fact, there isn’t much left of the “game” and it’s more just fun for the kids. And fun they had!

The first “inning” the kids were really into it and having a blast. It was funny to watch the different kids. There is only one girl other than Mazie on the team and they became fast friends. They were standing in the infield with their arms around each other. On the other hand, some of the boys didn’t feel like taking turns and were pushing and shoving each other to get at the ball. By the second “inning” our entire team, with one exception, was sitting on the infield with their gloves next to them playing in the dirt.

Our team, the yellow team, now known by unanimous vote as the Yellow Bees has one ringer. One of the kids is a future hall-of-famer. He can hit a line drive right up the middle, has a heck of an arm and can play all bases equally well. He was not playing in the dirt.

9:27 am: Nice breakfast at Cali Cochitta B&B in Moab. Heading to see Arches soon.

10:51 am: Great vistas at Arches National Park.

12:12 pm: Heading out of Arches park and starting drive to C-Lazy-U Ranch near Granby, CO.

2:30 pm: Hello Colorado!

2:59 pm: U2 seems like Colorado music. Working well for us!

4:37 pm: Iced Triple Espresso from Sacred Grounds coffee shop in Glenwood Springs, CO.

5:43 pm: Still decent amount of snow at 11,000 feet.

6:44 pm: Trying to explain to Mazie why a mosquito bit her. Not going well.

6:56 pm: Hello Winter Park, CO! Shout out to Jim Bernard and Jeb Sr.

2:49 pm: Hello Utah!

2:50 pm: Driving from Sedona, AZ to Moab, UT today. Quick stop in Moab on way to Colorado.

4:36 pm: Exploring downtown Moab.

6:51 pm: Nice dinner at Miguel’s Baja Grill in Moab. Trying to quick adapt Mazie to time change.

9:25 am: Heading to the Grand Canyon today!

5:16 pm: Waiting for Tammy and Mazie to emerge from Target in Flagstaff.

5:18 pm: Arizona is really hot. Yes, obvious. You’re welcome.

5:31 pm: Qualifier for a really long road trip: Getting the oil changed. At the Honda dealer in Flagstaff.

8:35 pm: Dinner at the New Jersey Pizza Company (wha?) in Flagstaff.

4:26 am: I seem unable to sleep in Las Vegas. This sucks.

9:44 am: Heading down to the pool. Lazy river today.

1:52 pm: At Mesa Grill (Bobby Flay) for lunch. Awesome. Cactus Pear Margarita.

9:33 pm: Mazie: “I’m going to blog on my post. This is blogging on my post.”

Have a couple of minutes? Join us on the Summer of Love for a trip around the Lazy River at Mandalay Bay. Mazie’s very first time in a lazy river.

This year marks something that will not happen again until 2014, when Mazie turns 9. Father’s Day is the day right after Mazie’s birthday! Father’s Day is always the 3rd Sunday in June. After 2014 it won’t happen again until 2025, on Mazie’s 20th birthday. Now, I know what you are all wondering. When will Mazie’s birthday be on Father’s day? Never. It gets to the day before, and then flips back away because Father’s Day moves back due the third Sunday thing.

I love being a Dad and as the years pass I realize more and more that it’s the most important thing in my life. Your job changes, your hobbies come and go. Your family is always your family. Your kids are forever your kids. Taking this summer off has provided a luxury that I’m so lucky to have. To be able to spend all my time with my family. Completely unrelated, I was reading The Soul of a New Machine today and this passage seemed so fitting for the day (p. 279).

During that summer, West suddenly remembered bike rides he’d taken with his father on Sunday evenings, and he found time to reassert that tradition with his oldest daughter. Suddenly, it seemed, he realized that his children were growing, and apparently he intended now to guide them on their way. He said one evening: “That’s the bear trap, the greatest vice. Your job. You can justify about any behavior with it. Maybe that’s why you do it, so you don’t have to deal with all those other problems.”

I like to think that I’ve kept my priorities in order, but I think the “bear trap” reference is appropriate. Its good to remind myself what is important and where priorities lie. I’m grateful to have this summer for that, and to have Father’s Day every year to reflect on it.

See also: Father’s Day 2006

11:42 am: Heading to the pool.

4:21 pm: Trying to figure out best Fathers Day activities in Las Vegas. Any suggestions? Thinking of Hoover Dam visit.

7:44 pm: Walking to The Four Seasons to get Mazie macaroni and cheese.

8:01 pm: Found my way to Four Seasons after several wrong turns.

Today my little girl turns three years old! Happy Birthday Mazie!

Mazie has been blowing my mind lately. This morning she told us “my birthday is June 14.” I know I easily suffer from being an overly Proud Papa, but she is making leaps and strides in so many areas. Clearly we are witnessing geometric growth. Perhaps this all comes at the expense of some other development. She did just figure out how to jump not that long ago.

In addition to her big jumps in vocabulary, her turn to three has also brought with it some gaming. Now whenever I tell her she can’t do something or cannot have something, apparently “Daddy is saying bad things.” Mazie is clearly establishing her own ideas and opinions and deciding what she wants to do and may, if she feels like it, take some input from you.

In return for this I now get a wonderful “Love you Daddy” at bedtime. I melt on the spot. She’s a little sweetheart with her super grin, chipped front tooth and all.

Mazie is getting to celebrate her 3rd birthday in Las Vegas. We planned this stop on the Summer of Love so that she could have her day. No driving. Morning in the pool. Chocolate cake. Presents. Whatever she wants to do. She’ll have great stories to tell her friends. Most people don’t get a Las Vegas birthday until there 20s.

Happy Birthday (Maze Sweetie Pumpkin Pie Goofball)! I love you! – Daddy

Some of Mazie’s Favorite things: Mac & Cheese from Yum!, Lion, Chocolate Cake, Mango, Ralph’s World, Charlotte’s Web, Curious George, Elmo, Water, Playing in Water

Some of Mazie’s Unfavorite things: Green stuff on her Mac & Cheese, Milk (except chocolate milk), Stopping to Play to go to the bathroom.

11:11 am: Heading to Carmel this morning.

1:48 pm: Amazed with Carmel. Blue Dog gallery is dangerous.

4:34 pm: Left Tammy in Carmel for the afternoon. At house with Mazie for nap time.

4:55 pm: Ugh - carpenter starts drilling in room right underneath where Mazie is napping!

4:58 pm: Theory that we may be the very first guests to stay at this rental house is being reinforced. Not bad. But very uncoordinated.

1:24pm: Stop at Ramone’s Bakery in Eureka, CA.

1:46 pm: Having a very nice stop in Old Town section of Eureka.

2:18 pm: Mazie and I playing with the pigeons.

2:51 pm: Resuming leisurely drive down 101 to San Francisco.

8:06 pm: Ate at In-n-Out Burger for the first time. Yum!

This is definitely a parent story. If you don’t have kids, you may just want to skip this. :-P Being a parent is really great. When Mazie says “I love you Daddy!” I pretty much melt on the spot. But being a parent brings you really close to things like boogers, poop and puke. Traditionally Mom’s bear this brunt more than Dad’s, and that is definitely true in our family.

Mazie is now totally potty trained. She hasn’t touched a diaper for a few weeks, even at night. She’s doing a great job. Fantastic actually. She sleeps through the night and everything. However, she wont go near a normal toilet. She insists, and will really only use, her kids potty. We have it with us as a result. It sits in the van and has made appearances all over on the Summer of Love road trip. Side of the raod potty stop, check. Sidewalk potty stop in downtown, check. Quick potty in the car while getting gas, check check.

Today Mazie announced at lunch that she wanted to “go and take a poop”. We were downtown Portland at a fabulous restaurant and had finished. Tammy took Mazie to the bathroom and she predictably decided she didn’t have to go when she saw the toilet in the bathroom. Off they went to the van to use her potty. Right there in downtown, in the van, we had a #2 stop but lacked anywhere to “take care” of the potty. So, we started driving with a window cracked open.

We stopped after about 15 miles to get gas and Tammy took care of the potty. Tammy, being a fully immersed mom grabs the ‘container’ in the potty. She doesn’t put it in a bag or anything. No real attempt to conceal anything. She just grabs it and walks right into the gas station and heads to the bathroom. Total bad ass. I chuckled to myself while pumping the gas thinking of the amount of angst that would have went into that procedure before being a parent. What are you going to do, right?

We just left Portland today on our continuing Summer of Love trip. You wont find much about Portland from me though. Our stop in Portland for me was a visit to RailsConf 2008. Tammy did post about her thoughts on Portland. It was totally awesome that our good friends, the Tangen’s were able to come out and join us in Portland. Kent attended RailsConf with me, and Maril, Simon and Caroline hung out with Tammy and Mazie. Mazie just adored Caroline the whole time.

Let me share some of my comments on RailsConf 2008. I’m not going to dive into super detail on the Rails 2.1 release announced at the conference, or the details of various sessions. You can find that elsewhere online and many of the presentations and sessions are now up on the RailsConf wiki.

Sessions

Here are the sessions I attended:

• Building Great Products Keynote by Joel Spolsky

• Entrepreneurs On Rails by Dan Benjamin

• Hosting and the Woes by Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Jamie van Dyke, Tom Mornini

• CRUD Doesn’t Have an ’S’ in It: Managing Complex Searching in Rails by Stephen Midgley

• Flexible Scaling: How to Handle 1 Billion Pageviews by TJ Murphy

• UI Design on Rails by Ryan Singer

• Keynote by David Heinemeier Hansson

• Rails 2.1 Keynote by Jeremy Kempter

• Using Git to Manage and Deploy Rails Apps by Scott Chacon

• Asynchronous Processing with Ruby on Rails by Jonathon Dahl

• Build Your Own Distributed, Self Configuring Rails Cluster by Dave Fayram, Tom Preston-Werner

• Custom Nginx Modules: Accelerate Rails, HTTP Tricks by Adam Wiggins

• The Worst Rails Code You’ve Ever Seen (and How Not to Write It Yourself) by Obie Fernandez

• De-Railing: Smashing the Rails Stack by Aaron Bedra

Sadly, I missed Kent Beck’s Keynote on Saturday evening. I hear it was really good.

Highlights

The conference started off on a strong note with Joel Spolsky’s keynote. Some of you that have mentioned Spolsky to me may have heard my immediate rant. Prior to his keynote I wasn’t a Joel fan. However, his keynote was great. He had a good message, presented it very well, and really got his point across. I liked it a lot, and take back anything bad I’ve said about Joel in the past (or at least most of it). It was really good.

I liked the Entrepreneur session quiet a bit. Unfortunately halfway through it the fire marshall ordered about ¼th of the people out of the room because it was standing room only. Ryan Singer’s session on design and Rails was awesome. Ryan was preaching what I truly believe is the model for designers and developers to engage and work collaboratively to make great things. The world needs more Ryan Singer’s out there evangelizing and showing how this can be done to do great things. Jeremy Kemper’s keynote on Rails 2.1 was really good as well. The 2.1 feature set looks great.

Perhaps the most high-density presentation was Scott Chacon’s Git presentation. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten barraged with so much high-density information so quickly. At one point I turned to Kent and joked “I feel stupid.” Directed acyclic graphs were being thrown around as quickly and furious as could ever be done. Great presentation though, really liked his stuff. I recommend checking out his site, Gitcasts.

David Heinemeier Hansson’s keynote on Friday night was a little odd. He steered away from any technical topics and really focused on giving some input on creating great products and being a great developer. I’m not sure how the talk went over with the audience. DHH is the creator of Rails, and as a result I doubt anyone would pan it that much. He drew a full crowd back from dinner at 8:00pm after all. His talk however seemed to me to be trying to get people to appreciate the aesthetics of code. To admire the beauty of architecture. It seemed clear to me that he was trying to send a message beyond Rails, to creating great things and continuing creative inspiration. I liked the message, but I wondered how many people in the room really heard it.

Lowlights

There weren’t any bad sessions that I went to. Some could have been better, but I wouldn’t say any of them were horrible. However, I would have liked to see a bit more technical depth and heavy lifting in the sessions. Too many of them seemed to gloss on big topics of scaling, deployment and architecture. I realize it’s a big conference, but more technical depth would have been good.

The WiFi network for the conference was a general disaster. It had 14Mb and was 100% full every single day except Sunday. Not sure what was using that bandwidth, but it made even checking email painful.

With that said, I almost wish they would just get rid of the WiFi. There was simply too much social networking, messaging going on. RailsConf has an “official” back-channel in IRC at the #railsconf channel. I hopped on it at one point to see what was going on and found 200 people bitching, whining and making inappropriate comments in the channel. It was horrible. The worst of anonymous streaming spew that you could find. In several sessions I watched more than a couple of people just sit there and type into the IRC channel the entire time. Yikes!

Lastly, I really wish there was some more diversity in the developer community. There was maybe 1 woman in attendance for every 50 or 100 men. The group could use more diversity, I think it would help the developer community in a number of different ways.

11:24 am: Awesome bakery stop this morning followed by an improptu haircut at a cool barbershop.

12:12 pm: Childrens Museum in Portland, OR. Very well done. Much Mazie happiness.

2:57 pm: Amazing falafel at Karams in Portland. Wow!

3:34 pm: Filling up Honda at $4.16/gallon.

3:34 pm: Leaving Portland for an impromptu 1-night stay in Eugene, OR.

7:08 pm: At Mezza Luna Puzzaria in Eugene, OR for dinner.

I’ve been trying to post updates from the Summer of Love trip pretty regularly but we seem to have arrived and left Seattle without even a mention of the stop. So, rather than backdating some posts (which I always feel gross doing) I’ll just do a big recap post. If you get bored easily, suffice it to say that Seattle was really cool.

Put on Your Walking Shoes

We did a lot of walking in Seattle. After being in the car for three long days of driving interspersed with a decent amount of driving at Glacier National Park we decided to park the Honda and set out on foot. We stayed on the fringe of downtown, about 5 blocks from Seattle Center, and about a 10 block walk from downtown Seattle. We probably walked around 4 miles or more total each day. It was nice to stretch the legs and see the city up close. However, the downside of this was that we didn’t get much further out of downtown than our feet allowed.

Great Places

We found a number of great places to check out. The first full day we were in town we found the Elliot Bay Trail and had a nice morning walk while checking out Puget Sound. Then we had a nice coincidence of being in town during the Northwest Folklife Festival. We didn’t plan it but we really enjoyed checking it out, listening to some music and hanging out in Seattle Center.

We decided, and Mazie let us know, that it was high time she got to swing. She was looking for the swings when we got to Glacier National Park. It was high time she needed to do some swinging. We walked over to Cascade Park and Mazie was able to get a solid hour of swinging in before we went over to the Flagship REI store. I feel a little odd gushing about a store, but this REI in Seattle is amazing. Just entering it you go on a little mini hiking path and can’t help but want to buy some hiking boots by the time you get into the store. Plus, they had the perfect layout with the play area for the kids, sitting area for dad with free WiFi and the massive array of womens clothing for mom. Genius.

We checked out the Experience Music Project. The architecture of the EMP is pretty amazing, so even just visiting the building was a lot of fun. They had a great exhibit on Jimi Hendrix as well as an overview of music of the northwest, with a big spread on grunge music and related bands. It was a cool place, but not the best place for little kids. In contrast though, it would be a great place for older kids, and there were a lot of them there having a great time.

Great Eats

We had some good meals in Seattle but two places were really great. We had some amazing pizza at Tutta Bella followed with some great gelato. And we had a wonderful dinner at the Five Spot with a relative of mine that lives in Seattle. We liked it so much we made a return visit for breakfast before we left and had the most amazing cinnamon french toast I’ve ever had.

Today we hooked up with the Tangen family on the Summer of Love. Kent is here going to RailsConf as well, and Marilee and kids came out to join Tammy and Mazie while he and I go to the conference. Today though, Tammy and Marilee decided to hit the town all day and Kent and I loaded the kids in the van and headed to Mount St. Helens. It was a great day.

The drive to Mount St. Helens from Portland wasn’t too bad; about 50 minutes on the interstate and 30 or so on the highway. We got started somewhat late and stopped for lunch at the last place for food before heading the final 20 miles to the Volcanic Monument. Driving through the valley presents you with evidence of the massive destruction of this eruption even 28 years later. The valley that you drive through is 100 feet higher than it was before. Before it was a gorge and now it’s a pancake flat valley settled between the mountains. All the result of the eruption.

The view of the volcano, and the very young trees everywhere, just exclaim the power of something as mighty as a volcano. Looking at the mountain inspires awe and respect. It takes a wild imagination to envision the cubic mile of dirt that was blown out during the eruption.

If your in the area, take the time to see it. Even the kids thought it was pretty cool. I’d love to come in the summer and hike around the area – although access is very limited even now. I took a bunch of pictures – good stuff.

Doing extensive travel with Mazie has a certain rhythm to it. I’m sure this is very familiar to all parents. I find that this rhythm provides some structure to the day, as well as some forced downtime that is good pacing. Given that the Summer of Love is six weeks long, a more relaxed “marathon” style trip is appropriate.

Each day starts between 6:30a and 7:00a. So far on the Summer of Love we’ve started the day right around 8:30a with a little variance on breakfast. Everyday at 12:30p is the search for a kid friendly food spot, and then a return to the hotel for Mazie’s nap at 2:00p. She sleeps for approximately 2 hours and then the second part of the day is picked up. Bedtime is at 8:00pm so the 2nd part of the day is always pretty short so the agenda is lighter.

For Tammy and I the result is an early start to the day, a forced two hour break in mid-day and evenings are spent usually tucked in the hotel while Mazie sleeps in the other part of the room.

So, when you see me on email, posting on the website or twittering – it’s probably timed with this rhythm.

Tammy and I are hanging out in this extremely cool, funky hotel in Portland called McMenamins Kennedy School. It used to be a school, but they converted it to a hotel, restaurant and bar. It’s very cool.

Anyway, Mazie is asleep and the monitor doesn’t quiet reach to us. We have it sitting in the hallway about 30 feet from us where we can see the lights if she started hollering for us.

The funny thing is watching people walk by. People keep looking at it. Picking it up. Listening. Etc. It’s a pretty funny social experiment. It makes me think it would be pretty funny to actually broadcast something over it and put it in the hall. Maybe the original War of the Worlds or an early episode of The Shadow. Hmmm…

Contrary to the predictions of the weather people, today was a better day than yesterday. The temperature seemed slightly warmer and there was definitely much less rain. We stayed dry most of the day, except for our treacherous trip to East Glacier.

We had a great breakfast at the West Glacier Restaurant. The only restaurant open. Tammy and I are both confused why there are nearly 10 gift shops open in the park, but only one restaurant. It would seem that visitors in need of gifts would also be in need of dining. After breakfast we took headed up the Going-to-the-Sun Road as far as we could go, to Avalanche. It seemed like a popular destination as there were more cars parked there than we’d seen almost anywhere this early in Glacier.

Tammy and I have been trying to gauge our hiking (if you can call it that) expectations with little Mazie. As is typical, we have different worries. I’m worried about her getting in way over her head on even a moderate trail and that we are idiotic parents if we don’t have a basic first aid kit, compass, tent, sleeping bag, 3 weeks of food, etc. along if we have a small child with us. Tammy on the other hand isn’t worried about any of that, she’s just afraid of the bears.

The hike we took along Trail of the Cedars was perfect though. It’s a rare wheelchair accessible trail in a national park so Mazie could walk the whole thing. Most of the trail was a raised boardwalk. Just under a mile long with nice scenery in all directions. We had a great time and took a lot of photos. Thankfully, no bears encountered (or mountain lions!) and we didn’t fall in need of dire first aid care.

We were headed back for lunch and Mazie fell asleep on the drive so we decided to do an impromptu trip to East Glacier. First, a little background. Glacier National Park is huge. There are a couple of main entrances, unimaginatively named West Glacier and East Glacier. Tammy chose to stay in West Glacier because it is much more connected to the park. Typically the Going-to-the-Sun Road is the way to get between these two towns. However, that is closed. So we had to take US-2 all the way around the park, 56 miles one way, to get to East Glacier.

As soon as we got on the eastern side of the park is was raining and the temperature dropped 15 degrees. No good. We continued on and took the road up to where we were told a cool falls was that was an easy hike. We got there after nearly turning around a few times and decided to try the hike. Here however both my fears of hypothermia and Tammy’s fears of bear attack rung loud and after a short 0.2 mile walk we turned back to the van. There was a reasonable amount of snow there still. Not that much, but we were totally not prepared for anything. The lack of fellow hikers got Tammy thinking we were the sole prey for that hungry bear that must be lurking. So, around we went.

Since the Going-to-the-Sun Road is closed and isn’t going to open anytime soon we decided tonight to cut our trip short a day and head to Seattle tomorrow. There is much more to see here at Glacier, but it’s better seen in July, particularly if you have a toddler with you. I definitely want to return here. Next time we’ll maybe just pack our backpacks and hope on the Amtrak. We’ll be driving most of the day tomorrow.

Today was our first full day in Glacier National Park. This place is pretty amazing. Our cabin is a just a couple of steps from McDonald Creek, connecting to Lake McDonald. The water moves quickly, and is so clear that you can see right through it to all the rocks underneath, even at several feet of depth.

Glacier has just opened up for the season. There is only one restaurant open, and it just started up again on Friday. We’ve been there three times so far. Today was cold and rainy. Unfortunately it looks like we will have more of this. The forecast is for rain and temperatures in the upper 40’s to low 50’s for our whole visit. We took it easy today and only really walked around for a couple of hours. Mazie spent two days in a car seat so she got some nice time to just hang out in the cabin and play with toys. With the rain and temperature, Tammy and I were happy to oblige.

I’m making my way quickly through Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. I watched Into the Wild a month ago and the movie really struck me. My friend Kent borrowed me his copy of the book. Reading it in Glacier is a bit of a treat since Alexander Supertramp “tramped” around this area a bit. In fact, I’m sure that he hitched a ride on the rails going right through Glacier. More about this book at another time.

The Going-to-the-Sun Road is not open through Logan’s Pass since it’s early in the season. We can take it up to Avalanche and are going to do that tomorrow. Since the road isn’t open the whole way, our glacier viewing will be limited. We are still hoping to see a couple of glaciers and some good falls.

But even with closed roads and less than great weather this is a stunning place to be. There are beautiful things to see in every direction, and having nice quiet time as a family is priceless. There are no distractions here. No television. No Internet. No telephone. And we are far from even any cellular coverage. That is a treat in its own regard.

7:23 am: Up earlier than I would like. Time change to mountain time to blame.

9:21 am: False alarm roadside potty stop for Mazie.

9:59 am: Passing through Circle, MT.

12:57 pm: Lunch in Lewistown, MT.

1:28 pm: Noticed that Barack Obama is in Montana too. Wish he’d stop following me around.

4:49 pm: Through Great Falls, MT.

5:02 pm: Getting closer to the mountains.

6:50 pm: In Glacier National Park!

Today was another driving day. We got up early in Glendive, MT and hit the road after having breakfast in the hotel. We had a full 10 hours of driving ahead of us and wanted to get it behind us quickly. I drove all day yesterday, so Tammy took the wheel today. While I spent all day on I-94, she spent all day on smaller state highways going down roads that seemed to stretch on into infinity with a perfectly straight path. This was boring stuff.

I got in the back with Mazie and we decided to watch one of the movies on the new iPod. I had purchased some new kids movies for the trip. Dumbo was one of them. I vaguely remember watching Dumbo when I was a kid and thought it was pretty cool. After watching it today I’m tempted to delete it off of iTunes.

Seriously, have you watched Dumbo lately? Watch it yourself before you have your kids watch it. In an hour this children’s classic teaches some less than valuable lessons. First, we start of with a whole-hearted reinforcement that if you are different you will be laughed at, picked on and ridiculed. The movie is completely over-the-top on this.

After starting with this, the characterization of the circus that Jumbo, Dumbo’s mother, is in is so backwards as to be offending. She is whipped and then caged for protecting her baby elephant? And there is no backstory here on how horrible and bad that is. Oh, and then it gets better. We learn when Dumbo and his mouse friend accidentally drink a bunch of alcohol that that is really funny!_ Hey kids, go get drunk!_ It’s hilarious!

Now, we start the highlight of the whole movie, the 5-minute pink elephant drunk hallucination scene. I mean really, forget about watching The Wall. Just fire up this doozy. I encourage you to make sure you are flatly sober since anything else would likely result in you hiding under your bed shaking in fear.

For its final touch Disney introduces you to the four crows that help Dumbo figure out that he can fly. Here we have black crows, that are wearing fedoras and other garish hats, sucking on cigars and doing everything they can to invoke black imagery. Wow!

If you, like me, remember Dumbo as this nice movie about an awkward baby elephant with ears so big that he can fly, I offer the following advice. Watch the first 5 minutes, and then the last 7 minutes. Done. Cut everything in the middle.

The movie aside, we had a nice drive and got into Glacier National Park just before dinner. As we pulled close to Glacier we realized that Mazie has had a different understanding of Glacier National Park. She immediately asked to go to the swings. She wanted to go swing for a while. And hey, we had driven all this way to go the park after all! Let’s swing. This presented Tammy and I the challenge of explaining to a nearly 3 year old that a National Park wasn’t the same as a park at home, and there certainly weren’t any swings here.

We had a nice dinner and got checked into our cabin. We are 10 feet off of McDonald Creek right where it empties into Lake McDonald. The water is sparkling clear. The mountains are beautiful. I’m looking forward to exploring, although Mother Nature looks like she isn’t going to cooperate and is sending cold and rain.

Before heading out on the Summer of Love, our 6-week family road trip, I suggested to Tammy that we may want to consider getting one of the big iPod Classics. We are going to put a lot of time in the van on this trip, and the van has a full AV input that can take the audio signal as well as video. We picked up the 160G unit before the trip and I was really happy to be able to put every single on of our 15,000 songs on it as well as a dozen movies for Mazie and even had enough room to put 4 rented movies on it for us.

Today was the first day of use and I was really happy we splurged for this extra. It was just great to have all of our music on hand at any whim. It was also nice being able to play movies for Mazie without having to fumble around with the DVDs and then navigate their menus to get them playing.

I love this use case for rentals too. We dumped 4 rentals on the iPod and will just watch them as we wish over the next 4 weeks of the trip.

We also happened to have a set of compact speakers to use with our other flash-memory based iPod. I’m still getting life out of the iPod Mini that I have using it only for kids music. But now we can drop the iPod Classic in it on our stays and enjoy some tunes in between the drives too.

Today we loaded up in the Honda Odyssey and started our big trip. Packing was a bit last minute, we weren’t really done until just shortly before leaving. It was a pretty busy weekend.

Today was spent entirely in the van except for two quick stops for food. We went about 15 miles from our house and got on I-94 and didn’t let it leave our site the whole day. Mazie did a great job all things considering. We fired up a bunch of different music on the new iPod Classic that we got for the trip. Mazie enjoyed a full watching of Charlotte’s Web as well. Tunes for the day included Son Volt, Willie Nelson and Frank Sinatra among others.

Yesterday we had a birthday party for Mazie. Her actual birthday is a few weeks away and we’ll be in Las Vegas on the Summer of Love trip at that time. So, we had this one so she could celebrate with the family. She had a great time and really got into the birthday celebration. She also likes to make up words. Here she is having a great time doing just that for the camera, and Uncle Max joins in the fun as well. www.vimeo.com/1033593

She had just eaten all the frosting off of her cake. :-)

One member of our family sure is happy to have Dad home this summer! Mazie has been Daddy-this and Daddy-that. It’s awesome. She keeps asking me if I’m going to stay for a long, long time. You bet. Here she is before we went to school this morning.

Cute isn’t a big enough word. :-)

I love this picture! Mazie had her very first school pictures at preschool this year. She seems to be communicating very well what she thinks about it.

I wrote earlier about FriendFeed and I’m continuing to really enjoy it. I’ve played in the past with aggregation and this is by far the best solution for “life streaming” out there yet. Here is the perfect example of why FriendFeed is cool.

The Twitter and Flickr actions tied together; open and mashable in a “Web 2.0” way. Very cool.

After swim class today Mazie and I had our usual bagel routine and afterwards we walked down the mall. Along our walk she found these mirrored columns and had a great time.

Mazie and the Mirrors from Jamie Thingelstad on Vimeo.

Do you have a video camera? You need a monopod!

This Christmas I got the Bogen-Manfrotto Pro Black Monopod with Swivel Tilt Head. This item has been on my wish list for a long time and after having it for just a couple days I wish I would have pulled the trigger on it a long, long time ago.

I had thought that I would use this for photography, and it will be great for that. Particularly if you are going to put a really long telephoto lens on and take a lot of shots. The monopod will help with stabilizing and framing the shot, as well as just keeping your arms from getting tired of holding the camera rig. Great for a photo trip to the zoo or arboretum.

However, the video side is the unexpected killer application. I popped my Panasonic PV-GS400 on the monopod and started to take some footage. The difference in the shot was amazing and immediately noticeable. Even with the video cameras optical image stabilization you always get a bit of shake when shooting handheld. With the monopod I was able to just lock the frame.

A tripod just wont work in this mode. That is the brilliance of the monopod. You still have the freedom to tilt, swivel and twist the camera around under full control. Then, just lift it up and walk around. No hassle. Really, go buy one.

Another cool use I found today when shooting with Mazie was to flip the video camera screen over and turn the camera back on yourself. Mazie and I took some video together just by swiveling the camera 180 degrees and then pointing it back at ourselves. I never could have done this hand-held. Very cool!

Christmas 2007 is a wrap! Great time with family. Mazie really started to grok the holiday this year and was pretty excited. She loves presents. In honor of the season and Dad traditions, here is a time lapse video of me and Grandpa Don assembling Mazie’s new doll house. She’s totally digging it.

Assembling Mazie’s Present from Jamie Thingelstad on Vimeo.

Tammy and I are both pretty shocked that we got a holiday letter out this year. It just sort of happened. Tammy started writing something and it just appeared. After a night of tweaking, adding some photos and an online printing order to Kinkos we had ourselves a letter! A bunch of these went out in the mail, but I wouldn’t dare deprive the dedicated blog reader of this great content as well. Read the 2007 Holiday Letter right here.

As a special bonus for the web I’m going to highlight a selected set of blog posts from this year as well.

2007 Highlights from thingelstad.com

• Red Glasses Make Water Taste Wrong
• I got Obsessed with Twitter, and then Abandoned Twitter.
• We took our first weekend away from Mazie in Chicago.
• I started my Apple TV obsession and got an iPhone.
• Tammy went away for a trip and I was Mr. Mom!
• I started playing with time-lapsed video: Drive to Work, Table Assembly, Christmas Tree.
• We had a great 2007 Olson Family Weekend.
• We had a great time at the Winnipeg Folk Festival.
• I went to Canada fishing with my brother-in-laws courtesy of my father-in-law.
• We got some awesome avatars!

We’ve been a bit slow getting our Christmas tree up this year. We finally got one today and I figured it was a great time to do another time-lapsed video!

Christmas Tree 2007 from Jamie Thingelstad on Vimeo.

You don’t get to see much of Mazie because she’s blocked by the table most of the time.

My One Laptop Per Child XO-1 arrived today! I haven’t had any time to work with it so you will all have to wait to hear my thoughts on it. Some things that jumped right out though include…

• The keyboard was designed for children (duh!) and is really small. Wow!

• So far I haven\’t been able to get it to join a WPA2 WiFi network.

  See comments below.

• It’s really cute.

To tide everyone over, here are some pictures of Mazie holding it. She’s a kid after all! :-)

Tammy and I had our first of two sessions getting CPR certified last night at the Twin Cities Red Cross. The class was a lot more than just CPR. It really went into general emergency response practices. The 3 C’s – Check, Call, Care.

The last time I took a CPR class was probably 20 years ago and a lot has changed. We’ve been planning on doing this since Mazie was born, so we’re only about two-and-a-half years behind schedule.

Monday was a big day in the Thingelstad household! A few weeks ago we ordered Mazie’s new toddler bed and it finally arrived. After dinner that night we opened everything and put it together. Mazie was very excited to see her new bed come together. She has been talking about it for a long time. When we put her mattress in it at the very end she immediately laid down and closed her eyes.

She went to bed that night in her new bed. We asked her if she wanted to sleep in her crib or her bed, the answer was clear. There was a brief moment right at the end where she got a little scared but it passed. She had no problems going to sleep. Yeah Mazie!

She’s been sleeping in her bed now every night and with every nap. She’s doing a really great job!

I’m giddy! It’s like Christmas around the Thingelstad house. Why?_ We have new avatars!_

Several weeks ago a friend of mine clued me in on this service at Iconize Me! Iconize Me is the brain-child of Paul Sahner who decided to start creating caricature based avatars for people online. Iconize Me! is a great service, but it’s completely overloaded. They’ve stopped taking pre-orders again. Huge plus, you get vector images back. Can’t wait to make my 10 foot poster!

I think this is brilliant. I’ve always just used a head shot photo but using a real photo is, well, a real photo. A drawing is a little less personal but still gives you that individual identity. Enough of the words, here is my new avatar. (These images are all much bigger than would be typically used.)

Of course I didn’t want to be the only one around the house with a cool avatar, so we got them for the whole family!

Here is Tammy’s

Mazie got one too of course. She does have an account on the iMac after all.

And lastly I as trying to find a good option for an image for this website and to use as “cover art” in iTunes for home movies. Voila!

This weekend we were adventurous and decided to take Mazie to her first Renaissance Festival! And just to keep things really interesting, we brought Izzy along as well. It was awesome. Everyone had a great time. Mazie really enjoyed it and had fun with just everything going on. Izzy did well, and was very interested when she realized there were bones laying around.

I put up a few photos and here is a quick video from our day…

TODO: add photos

While I was in Canada fishing I was without any means of communication. The only thing that would have worked was a satellite phone, and while I considered it I figured I was being ridiculous. I did know that the camp had a radio, and I figured that with enough work you could get through via the radio if there was an emergency. I had visions in my head of Radar in M*A*S*H patching calls through for Hawkeye to talk to his Dad. It all seemed very do-able.

On only the second day of fishing, after we came back in from the afternoon session there was a message. Everyone was pretty confused since it was so unexpected. George, the Native American that ran the camp had left a scrap of paper for us. The message, exactly as it was delivered is below.

Nobody knew what to do with it, until someone figured out whose phone number that was. It was mine! Obviously there is no message there, so I went to find George a bit anxious about what my message was. George spoke very little English. It turned out, that was the whole message. That was all he had for me, my phone number.

Now, imagine yourself in the middle of the wilderness the recipient of an envelope with no letter in it. It drove me nuts, and of course my mind started going crazy. Was something wrong with Mazie? Tammy? Was there an accident? What’s going on? Argh!

We put the radio to work and it turned out that Radar O’Reilly was nowhere near. The radio couldn’t even reach the nearest village without relaying through another person in another camp. All radio communication was in Ojibwe/Cree so I had no idea what was being said. Theoretically they were going to relay a message and try to call my house to find out what the message was. According to caller ID nobody ever called the house. After a day nobody had flown in to get me, so I figured that it must not be an emergency. It was 4 days before we would leave.

I never did get the message until we flew out of camp on the float plane and got to the nearest airport. I immediately called home to find out what was going on. The message was that my Grandpa had been in the hospital and that they did not think he was going to make it. His health was very poor, and cancer was getting him. But he had recuperated a bit and had returned home. Unfortunately, time was against me and my grandpa passed away less than 24 hours after I got home.

Tammy, Mazie and I went on a bike ride today. Tammy is prone to comment about how great it is to just “ride your bike”. What she means by this is to disregard the crazy gear of cycling – special shorts, shoes, shirt, socks and everything else – and just ride your bike. Street clothes. Normal shoes. You know, like “normal” people do. We were riding to Yum for lunch, about 17 miles round-trip with a long lunch in the middle. So I went with normal shorts like a normal person.

I have no option to not wear my cycling shoes since all of my bikes have clipless pedals (a must!). But I decided to go ahead and just wear my normal shorts and spare the world me in lycra. This was horrible. It’s not just that the cycling shorts have padding that make the saddle more comfortable. It’s that regular shorts are hot. They are baggy and restrict leg movement in odd ways. They bunch up all over. It was absolutely horrible.

I’ll never ride my bike over 2 miles without cycling shorts again. I’ve learned my lesson.

Last weekend I made my fourth visit to the Winnipeg Folk Festival (previous years were 2006, 2003 and 2001). Tammy was at all of those except 2001. We left Mazie with Grandparents this time. We continue to plan on bringing Mazie every-other year.

This years festival was great as always. There were a number of firsts this year too. It was the first year I’ve been there that my mother wasn’t able to go. She’s been going to the festival for many more years than I, so it was odd that she wasn’t there as well. We preserved the tradition of getting an evening Whale’s Tale every night in her absence.

It was also the first, and last, year that we stayed in Festival Camping. In the past I’ve either camped in the quiet campground, or stayed in a hotel in Winnipeg. The appeal of festival camping is that you can walk right over to the festival grounds. It’s also a full party, with pretty loud “festivaling” going on until about 6am every night. Not my thing these days.

Here are the musical highlights from this years festival for me:

• The Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir absolutely knocked my socks off. First of all, these guys aren’t a choir. In fact, their name is pretty misleading. Think of Tom Waits with more pep and bluegrass mixed in. These guys were my favorite new band out of the festival.

• We didn’t get to see Todd Snider play, but liked what we read and are really enjoying his CD we got.

• We saw Ndidi Onukwulu play a couple of workshops with other bands. I wasn’t digging her stuff at first, but Tammy started liking it and it’s pretty good. She has some really nice vocals.

• Elliott Brood, besides having 3 sets of double letters in their name, plays some really nice music. Tammy briefly heard them in a workshop and figured I would like their stuff a lot, and I do. She describes them well as a bluegrass Jane’s Addiction. You know…

• We didn’t see Carolyn Mark, but also picked up a CD of hers and are liking it.

• Buille is an Irish group that came over for the festival. If traditional Irish music is your thing, you’ll like them a lot.

• The Carolina Chocolate Drops intrigued me for a number of reasons. I like their traditional music, and they learned with some of the most significant southern musicians ever.

• Michael Franti & Spearhead closed the main stage out on Friday night, and they just blew the place up. Franti’s politically motivated, reggae inspired performance made you want to be a better person. Great stuff.

• The Ponys hit a groove of Americana, Rootsy music that is in my sweet spot.

• Ben Weaver proves again that sometimes I have to go to Canada to find someone in my own city. Weaver is a Minneapolis local that is putting out some really great stuff.

• I really wanted to see Romi Mayes perform but there were always conflicts, or too much sun! She has a great folksy, Americana sound as well.

• When Indio Saravanja did his “tweener” set we all looked at each other because we thought Bob Dylan had taken the stage. Saravanja has an amazing voice, and some great songs to go with it.

Check out these musicians and pick up some of their music. It’s all great, independent stuff.

We’ve already blocked out July 10-13 of 2008 for the next festival. Next year Mazie comes along again.

Grandpa Bruce came into town for the Memorial Day weekend. It was a nice time, and the most time that Mazie has gotten to spend with Grandpa Bruce since he lives so far away. I think the highlight of the weekend was the Twins game. Mazie’s very first baseball game and the Twins put a “W” on the board for her.

Alona, Bruce and I went to the game and Tammy hung out with Mazie while she finished her nap. Mazie and Tammy joined at the top of the 7th inning which was perfect timing for her. There is just no way she could have sat through an entire baseball game. I got to have some great Dad time with Mazie on my lap. I explained that our guy throws the ball to this other guy and that one of their guys stood in the middle and tried to hit it with the bat. If he did hit it, our other guys out there would try to catch it. Baseball redux for a 2 year old. I brought my crazy camera lens and got some great photos.

Shortly after she arrived the Twins had a big play and drove 2 runs in. The crowd roared with enthusiasm and Mazie was a little freaked out but held it together with a lot of thumb sucking and me holding her. I think she actually had a pretty good time, particularly when we got some ice cream. :-)

This year was the 4th annual Olson Family Weekend! This year was Angie’s turn to plan and there is only one more year before we loop back around for the next round of trips. It was a great weekend and Angie did a great job putting it all together.

We had a great weekend up at the Lundeen’s cabin (huge thanks to Lundeen Sr. for allowing us to overtake their cabin!). The cabin was cramped with 11 people and 3 dogs, but it added to the fun actually. The weather was sketchy but that didn’t slow anyone down either.

Rather than reading, go take a look at the pictures from the weekend, or watch a couple of videos of Mazie from the weekend (thanks for the videos Angie!) [I removed the videos from YouTube].

One of the cool features of my new Canon SD750 is a brain-dead simple way to do time-elapsed movies. I just had to play today while putting together Mazie’s birthday present. In case you are wondering, it isn’t Mazie’s birthday today. That’s a few weeks away but the present we got her had arrived and we decided to let her have it now. Fewer things on her actual birthday make it easier for her little 2 year old self.

Anyway – here in 48 seconds is Mazie and I putting together her new table and chairs. I love it.

A couple of weekends ago Tammy and I went on a weekend getaway for her birthday. Now that we have Izzy, getting out of town was a little more complicated than before. There was a careful choreography of hand-offs for both Mazie and Izzy between relatives while we were out. Thanks to everyone for being so helpful!

I booked a weekend away at Birdwing Spa to celebrate Tammy’s birthday. A weekend away, at a spa, seemed like the perfect thing for her. We were a bit underwhelmed with the spa, but the weekend was still really great. Just getting away and having time to read a book in silence was really nice. Tammy read a book I got her for the weekend called Wild Trees, and I finally read Into Thin Air. We both finished our books on the trip, and even got a little ways into the next books.

The spa itself was okay. The facility was dated and the all-inclusive meals, while obviously focused on healthy eating, were a bit too skimpy for me personally. The property that it is on is great, and we hiked pretty much every trail on the place, some twice.  While tromping around in the trees we ran into six snakes. Did I mention Tammy hates snakes? Yeah, she jumped out of her skin a couple of times.

It’s funny that now being a parent my expectations of a weekend away are so different. They have simultaneously went up and down. On one hand, simply getting away for the weekend and having some relaxation, regardless of surroundings, is great. On the other hand, it’s really hard to get away so when you do you want it to be exceptional! So, in that regard it was a great, not-so-great weekend. :-)

I’ve been a bit enamored with Twitter for a bit now. Mr. Mom Weekend was a great time to do some “tweeting”. For posterity sake, here is the Twitter stream from the Mr. Mom Weekend.

• Riding on school bus with Mazie 09:44 AM March 29, 2007 from txt
• 5 hours as solo parent and all is ok. 12:47 PM March 29, 2007 from txt
• Just put Mazie to bed – whew! 07:34 PM March 29, 2007 from web
• Gave Izzy a real, honest to goodness smoked bone. She’s completely obsessed. 07:37 PM March 29, 2007 from web
• Sitting down to have some fun in Lightroom. 08:45 PM March 29, 2007 from twitterrific
• Still playing in Lightroom after a break to blog. 10:22 PM March 29, 2007 from twitterrific
• Ran the morning gauntlet and now heading out with Mazie for a bit. 08:57 AM March 30, 2007 from twitterrific
• Getting a fly rod. 11:16 AM March 30, 2007 from txt
• Mazie in crib, cleaning up dog sh**. Exhausted. 07:25 PM March 30, 2007 from twitterrific
• Reminding myself that I like my dog. 07:35 PM March 30, 2007 from txt
• Noting that my dog seems to not want to go out in the rain only slightly less than I. 07:49 AM March 31, 2007 from twitterrific
• Made it to lunch without Mazie falling asleep! 12:29 PM March 31, 2007 from txt
• Very excited about kitty and lion getting a sticker! 12:33 PM March 31, 2007 from txt
• At Apple Store. Feeling bad for Jim. 03:39 PM March 31, 2007 from txt
• Why does my dog think she should be able to dig through the rug in the living room? 07:59 PM March 31, 2007 from web
• Posting on my blog. 08:51 PM March 31, 2007 from web
• Struggling with how to manage my digital media assets best. 11:36 PM March 31, 2007 from web
• Everyone ate. Kitchen cleaned up. Not so bad. 08:00 AM April 01, 2007 from twitterrific
• Mazie’s been in crib for almost an hour and not asleep yet. Not sure exactly what to do. 07:45 PM April 01, 2007 from web
• Decide to go see if she has a dirty diaper. Wish me luck… 07:47 PM April 01, 2007 from web

Per the last line there, her diaper was fine. She just took a really long time to go to sleep.

I’m late writing my wrap-up post from the 5-day Mr. Mom Weekend adventure. Mazie and I spent our final day with Aunt Alona and went to the Minnesota Zoo. It was a lot of fun and Mazie was definitely liking the zoo a lot more than ever before. She just stared at the Dolphins during their entire show mesmerized. It was really cool. We had lunch at the zoo and then went home.

Aunt Alona hung out with us for a little while and then took off. We just stayed around the house the rest of the afternoon and then Tammy surprised us by calling around 6p with news that she was only about an hour away. I was expecting her closer to 10p. It was nice that she got home earlier and we got to catch up before the week began.

The Mr. Mom Weekend was really a great time. The most stressful thing was really taking care of a puppy for the first time ever. Mazie and I had a really good time. Tammy is talking about taking an extended weekend trip like this every year now, and I think that is a cool idea. We all made it through the other end of the time in great shape!

Mazie and I had a nice Sunday. We ended up skipping swimming class. Mazie wasn’t feeling very well and was pretty congested. I imagined being in the pool and having Mazie sneeze and snot shooting right into the pool. Nah. We’ll skip this one. Grandma Rosalin and Aunt Alona came over in the morning and Mazie had a great time playing with them while I got a shower and took Izzy out. A highlight of the day was that there were no Izzy “accidents” today! Yeah!

We had lunch at the Good Day Cafe (highly recommended by the way) that ended up taking us way too late and Mazie nearly fell asleep waiting. Lunch was challenging with her being so tired, but even with her nap near she was pretty excited to see the chocolate cupcake that she got after her pancakes.  She feel asleep promptly on the way home, and unfortunately she didn’t get a very good nap. She woke up really groggy still.

Aunt Angie and her dog Louie came over in the afternoon and pandemonium resulted. Izzy and Louie were insane, chasing each other around with abandon. Izzy was all puppy – just going crazy and jumping, leaping and sprinting everywhere. We had to pull them apart a few times just to keep it civilized, in dog terms.

With all the craziness I missed a critical item and forgot to give Mazie her afternoon snack. This became a problem when she realized she was really hungry about an hour before we went and had dinner with our neighbors. It was real touchy from 4:30pm until an early bedtime at 6:45pm, but we made it.

Tonight was a relaxing evening of discussion with my neighbor on a variety of topics, mostly consumer electronics related. Tomorrow is our final day of the big adventure.

We had a pretty good Saturday. Even though I was up way too late I woke up at a reasonable time with enough of a gap to get Izzy out before Mazie woke up. We got up and made it through the morning routine pretty well. Mazie was pretty happy this morning and we had some fun playing and getting ready. She was an angel reading her books while her Dad took a shower. Izzy even laid there and took a nap. I think Izzy was pretty tired this morning since she was up much later than usual.

My friend Dan and his son Henrik came over in the morning and Henrik and Mazie stared at each other for a while before finally deciding to play for an hour or so. Mazie showed Henrik her shopping cart and then she took her stroller and they walked circles around the house having a great time. Izzy was good with both kids.

After they left Mazie and I went to Yum for lunch and had some great macaroni and cheese. Mazie was pretty awesome at lunch. She really had a great time. We got a cupcake for dessert which she was really excited about that.

I have come to two conclusions at this point in my Mr. Mom adventure. First, the puppy chores and Izzy are way harder than Mazie. Mazie listens, can entertain herself, doesn’t crap in the house and has never attempted to dig a hole in the rug. I can’t give these same qualifications to Izzy. My second conclusion is that 5-7pm is horrible. Mazie is starting to get cranked up and a bit tired. Izzy is usually wound up like a top. There is a lot going on with everyone eating and Izzy needing to go outside about 5 seconds after eating. It’s a 12 on a 10-point scale in my book.

Izzy only goes out two more times. I sure hope that when she’s a bit older she doesn’t need to go outside so often. Seems constant at this point.  I’m hoping to relax a bit and get ready for tomorrow. Grandma Rosalin and Aunt Alona are coming over and going to swimming class with us and then out for lunch tomorrow morning.

Today was a challenging day for Mr. Mom. It started right away. Somehow I slept until 7am and woke up to Mazie saying “Get out” over and over on the baby monitor. Izzy was also very eager to get out of her “house” and do her business outside. I got Mazie first, before letting Izzy out, then brought her upstairs and took Izzy out before Mazie got her fresh diaper. This set the tone for the most of the day it seemed.

Granted I think I brought some of this on myself by planning a lot of things and not scheduling it quiet right. We met up with Grandpa Don in the morning which meant a lot of driving, including a trip into my office, and Mazie fell asleep during all the driving – way too early! She did another nap in the afternoon after we made a trip to the grocery store to balance it out.

Today was a hot and cold day. The high point was Mazie cuddling up with me on my lap with Izzy hanging out on the couch. Totally cool. The low point was me on my cell phone for a business call, Mazie demanding yogurt in her high chair and Izzy crapping on the floor – all at once. Ugh! I was getting a bit too frustrated at one point and decided to just put Izzy in her house. Mazie wanted to nothing more than to give Izzy her food. Izzy wanted nothing more than to have it. Dad was right in the middle of it!

A couple of friends came over with dinner, Guiness and cigars tonight along with some much needed relaxation. I’m up way too late, but I wanted to post something before I went to sleep. I’m hoping to wake up before Mazie and avoid the gauntlet tomorrow.

I’m taking a moment to relax a bit and plugging this post up on the blog. The photos from the day are uploading right now as well. Today was the first day of Tammy’s 5-day trip with her Mom. They are going on a Heifer Ranch’s Women’s Lambing Weekend. Mainly they will be working on a ranch with the animals, and help deliver a number of newborn lambs. They are going to ride a water buffalo at some point. I can’t wait to see the photos from the trip! :-) I’ve been looking forward to this weekend for a long time. I’m taking today, tomorrow and Monday off of work and Mazie and I have a lot of fun things scheduled. However, the addition of a brand new puppy has greatly complicated things and added a bunch of stress. On the plus side though it will give Izzy and I some good quality time together. Mazie also came down sick yesterday with a high temperature. She did okay today with some medicine, but we’ll be skipping ECFE class tomorrow.

Tammy and Grandma took off at 9am this morning after many hugs and kisses. Mazie and I wished them off from the door and immediately got ready to head to our big event for the day. We headed to the location of her ECFE classes to join the group leaving for the state capitol. She seemed good enough to go on the trip, and unlike ECFE class there wasn’t going to be a lot of playing with other kids so I figured it was fine with her being a little sick.

The event today was the Voices for Children Advocacy Day at the State Capitol. This is a pretty simple event that seems to fulfil two objectives. First is for parents to come with their kids and express their continued support for ECFE and other early-childhood programs. The second is for state legislators to get photo opportunities with young kids for the next campaign brochure. It’s very lightly organized, and mostly Mazie and I just spent an hour wandering around the capitol and having fun.

The main draw of the event really was the bus ride. Mazie loves school buses, or “big trucks” as she used to call them. We boarded the bus and her glee turned to fear. She kept repeating “don’t like” while sitting in the bus, feeling a bit scared. I was pretty worried she would totally melt down when the bus started going but she did okay. She was fine the 2nd time on the return ride. We sang “Wheels on the Bus” about 114 times. ;-)

That was our only big event for the day. We went and got groceries. Mazie was able to have toast for dinner, one of her new favorites. I got a super-great real-bone for Izzy that she has been fascinated by all night, making me happy to have some time to relax.

Tomorrow we are going to make a short visit to my office and then visit Grandpa Don and Rusty!

Today we welcomed the newest member of the Thingelstad family, our new dog Izzy!

Tammy, Mazie and Grandma Kaye made the trip to pick her up from the foster home. I guess she was really nervous in the beginning, but settled down pretty quick. However, not until she had puked on Grandma Kaye three times on the drive back. I got home after work and she was having a great time meeting the neighbor kids that had stopped by to say Hi. Mazie sure likes Izzy already and was providing her with a lot of attention.

She’s a really nice dog.

We’ve been thinking about getting a dog for awhile. We figured we would get one sometime after we had kids, since a dog does make travel a bit harder, and hey, so do kids so why not really make it hard! :-)

(She’s the one on the left in the 2nd picture, and the right in the 3rd picture.)

Mazie loves dogs. She likes cats as well, and enjoys attempting to smother Logan on a regular basis. Gypsie is more of a flight risk, and rarely does Mazie get to have her way with her. However, Mazie is a big fan of Rusty, Grandpa and Grandma’s dog, and Louie, Aunt Angie and Uncle Max’s dog.

I’ve never owned a dog but have flirted with the idea many times. Tammy’s folks have always had one. It’s a bit of a leap, but today we officially became dog owners (well, at least next Wednesday we will be).

Tammy has been scouting the adoption sites for a good pup. We wanted to adopt a dog, since there are so many (really, that many) dogs that need homes. She found a couple in recent weeks that she really liked but they were adopted instantly. Last night she found one online, made a long drive today to meet her and it was an instant match.

She’s a terrier-poodle cross. We’ll get her on Wednesday. I’m really excited, and need to learn a lot about dogs.

Tammy and I had our first big weekend away without Mazie. We went to Chicago and took advantage of the long weekend. Tammy did all the preparations and built an entire weekend agenda around what she knew I would like to do. We indulged in a fancy hotel, great restaurants, museums and shows. I like nice hotels – I admit it. I’m not high maintenance, requiring them. But it’s nice to enjoy a great hotel. The Chicago Peninsula hotel was certainly spot on. The service was lavish, the rooms were opulent and the amenities were amazing. The rooms were wired up with central controls for all light, entertainment and heating controls. All the controls for pretty much everything were right there on this great console next to the bed. The Spa services were amazing, although very overpriced. It was a shame that we didn’t get there until 2:30 am on Saturday morning to enjoy the hotel!

On Saturday we had a full day. We had a great breakfast at Yolk, a new restaurant south on Michigan Ave. After that we went to the Field Museum for a short trip through one of the wings. We only had less than 2 hours at the museum. Then onto our massages and an hour at the gym before heading to dinner at Trattoria No. 10 followed by two seats at Wicked.

Wicked was simply great. Neither Tammy or I are huge theater people, but we enjoy an occasional show. As such, my view of Wicked is far from thorough or scientific. That aside, I really enjoyed it and it was the first musical that I would happily go to again. You should check it out if you have the opportunity. It is worth the effort!

We had a more relaxed day on Sunday with breakfast in the room and a somewhat cheesy Untouchables Bus Tour of Chicago. We got to drive around the city and get the lowdown on various gangster shootings and see some the places that Capone and others hung out during there times.

We did a little shopping on Michigan Ave, including an obligatory stop at the Apple Store to marvel at the glass staircase. Walking across the glass bridge on the 2nd level was a bit eerie. We tried a new place for deep dish pizza, Paisano’s. I was a bit disappointed. Gino’s East is still my preferred. Paisono’s just wasn’t deep enough. Not enough sauce.

It was a great weekend. A huge thanks to both Grandma’s for watching Mazie while we were gone. It was a little hard leaving her behind for so long, but was great to know she was in great hands. And an even bigger thanks to my great wife for setting up the whole weekend! You rock dear!

A couple of days ago it was my birthday! Have I mentioned how amazing my wife is? Anyway, it was my birthday, or should I say the week of my birthday. The festivities have continued all the way to today.

We have decided in our household that birthdays are vacation days so I take my birthday, Tammy’s and Mazie’s off of work and we spend the day as a family. Tammy this year just made the most amazing birthday I could ask for.

It wasn’t just the gifts, which were great. It wasn’t just the plans and events, which were awesome. Not even the “Dad-oriented” schedule, which was very nice. To be sure, she spoils me greatly. Thanks Dear! You rock!

My mother and I in the park about 34 years ago.

I’ve learned to appreciate birthdays more since meeting my wife. I’ve always celebrated them, but we certainly do more now. I continue to prove out my theory of fractional life. The years just go by faster and faster.

This years birthday was really special because of all the great things Tammy put together, but also because Mazie was a lot of fun. She knows what presents are now, and she had a great time ripping into “daddy present!” and playing with stuff. Amongst other things I got a model train that I hope she likes to watch now, and play with as she gets older.

I’m another year older, and I’m gradually starting to feel like things could slow down now. I love where I’m at right now and it would be great to just pause here for a while. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Plus, I’m positive that this year is going to be great.

We have been perpetually frustrated with the baby monitor that we got when Mazie was born. We got the Sony NTM-910 because it had good reviews, brand reputation and specifically since it was 900MHz and wouldn’t collide with our wireless network at 2.4GHz and our wireless phones at 5.8Ghz. However, they just don’t work very well at all. The range was horrible and we started to go slowly insane with the random injection of it’s “out of range” beeps at various times.

We decided to upgrade to the Rolls-Royce of monitors, the new Philips Digital SCD-589. This is the first baby monitor to use the new DECT technology that guarantees completely noise-free operation. We started it up today after giving it a thorough charge overnight and initial tests are great. Tammy was able to walk to the top of our cul-de-sac and back without losing any signal. The audio is crystal clear. On top of that you have nice features like knowing the temperature in the kids room, you can talk to them and even start music or lights in the room from the handset. The parent unit is also significantly smaller and lighter, but not as loud at maximum volume as the Sony was.

Tammy, Mazie and I all want to take a moment to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a great holiday season. You have possibly been checking your mailboxes eager to open the 2nd annual Thingelstad Christmas letter. The anticipation has been high, everyday eagerly looking forward to that postal delivery, only to be let down.

Well, unfortunately the post office isn’t to blame but instead we are. We never got it done. We held out hopes for a last minute “hail Mary” letter to be produced but it never happened. You can stop checking your mailbox with vigor and jeering at your postal carrier for not bringing you the letter. It isn’t coming.

Keep your eyes out however for a 2nd semi-annual Thingelstad Christmas letter in 2007. From our family to yours, Merry Christmas!

I got to play Super Dad today and put together Mazie’s christmas present. December 3rd? Sure – she’s 18 months old – it’s Christmas! :-) Tammy and I got her a “kitchen thing” for Christmas and have coordinated with her Grandparents, Aunts, Uncles and other relatives to get presents that go along with it.

The kitchen came in 4 boxes, with lots of assembly required. Just a bunch of peices of wood. Tammy suggested that she put it together while I was in NY last week. I thought about that for a moment, and I didn’t like it. Assembling the “assembly required” Christmas present is a Dad job for sure – and I didn’t want to be deprived of my fatherhood rights.

I got a bit frustrated at the beginning. Not too frustrated though, I’m pretty sure my language was clean the entire time. I put every joint together with added wood glue. This thing will be around for generations to come. She is having fun with it and it will be nice for her to get her pots and pans and other accessories to go with it.

Lately most of the news on the Mazie front has been about new words. Lot’s of new words. She can usually get her point across now, at least to Mom and Dad, and she’s picking up new words faster and faster.

However, a couple of days ago she made it down both flights of stairs in our house without any help. Obviously Mom and Dad are surrounding her with hands ready to grab her if she falls. She’s really careful, and braces herself to the wall but makes it pretty solidly down each stair – one step at a time.

She’s a long ways from navigating steps without help, but she sure does have fun walking down them. She gives a triumphant giggle when she finishes all the steps.

This site showed up in one of my RSS feeds recently, How Many of Me? It is a fun little site that takes census data to do rankings of people with the same name. For example, did you realize there are 49,535 people with the name John Smith. That is bigger than my home town. You could fill a medium sized city with John Smiths.

According to the census data, there are no people in the US with the last name Thingelstad. There are however 328,466 people with the first name Jamie. Of those people, 69.86% of them are female. This is something that Tammy loves to tease me about all the time, even before she had the hard data to back it up. This usually presents itself as me paying at a restaurant and the waiter not knowing who to give the card back to.

My name is the 182nd most popular first name. While Tammy’s name is compltely unambiguous – 100% of Tammy’s are women – her name is 144th most popular so not quite as creative. Of course her actual name, Tamara, is much less popular ranking 421st. However, we know from Name Voyager that neither Jamie or Tamara (Tammy) were creative for their time since they peaked in popularity when we were born.

Mazie enjoys a very rare name. There are only 4,500 Mazie’s in the US (100% are female) and it’s the 2,762nd most popular name.

Isn’t the Internet so much fun? :-)

On September 30, 2006 our Great East Coast Adventure came to a conclusion when we arrived back home on Saturday evening. After 37 days, 5,890 miles of driving and 8 different beds we finally got home. It was great trip, but it was equally great to finally get home and relax.

We were curious to see how Mazie would react when we got home. 5 weeks is a long time for a 15-month old kid and we thought she may just think it was another hotel. She proved us wrong when her face lit up after seein her toys and play area. You could tell she was noticably relaxed to be home.

I did a final update to the Google Earth Great Adventure with all the relevant interesting stops from the trip.

TODO: add link

We spent Wednesday in Charleston. The real newsflash is that we didn’t drive anywhere the entire day! Amazing! We had a relaxing morning and then took the water taxi to Charleston. We had great barbecue for lunch at Jim n’ Nicks and in the afternoon we went to the South Carolina Aquarium.

Mazie didn’t dig the water taxi in the morning. It was her very first time on a boat and when we got going she got scared. She overcame her concerns quickly though and on the ride back over in the afternoon she sat in her stroller on her own the whole way over like a champ.

The aquarium was nice. They have the tallest glass wall in the country in their huge reef tank. It’s a full two stories tall. At the bottom of it, it looks pretty immense. The picture on the right shows the wall. For scale, that is 20 feet tall. I’m excited to see the aquarium in Atlanta on our way home. It’s wall isn’t as high, but it’s 60 feet wide.

I wrote earlier that Mazie was having a horrible time getting her sleep. Asheville was the breaking point for Tammy and I. We were like zombies, Mazie was miserable and incredibly unhappy. We finally went to a different hotel the last night and Mazie was able to sleep. The good news is that she slept great at Ed & Nancy’s, and she’s been doing great here in Charleston.

She’s slept through the night and went to bed well for the last 5 days and is doing great. It’s amazing how big of a help that is to all of us. Yeah!

We spent Monday walking around Charleston in the historic downtown area. We took a drive around for a while to let Mazie get her nap in and then headed out on foot to explore. The historic downtown area of Charleston is really interesting. You pretty much trip over historical landmarks at every turn. We walked down most of King Street, which has a ton of shopping. Tammy was feeling in need of some shopping opportunities.

We had lunch at Sermets Corner. The food was great. I recommend the sweet potato french fries. We spent the rest of the afternoon walking down East Bay street, and then down Market street.

Market Street was a bit of a trip. They have a big open air market there selling cheap “stuff” (nice way of saying mostly junk). However, the history of the building is that it was where slaves were sold after getting off slave ships. Being a “yankee” as I am, it is a bit of an eye opener to see so much of the legacy of slavery surrounding everything. So much of what you see is bittersweet – I find myself wondering how much of this was built on the backs of slaves. Too much, to be sure.

Over the last couple of months Mazie has really started to develop a lot more language skills. It’s so fun to watch her pickup new words. Tammy and I were curious how many words she knew. Not just words she would mimick, but words that she actually uses on her own. Here they are in no particular order.

• Help
• Up
• Down
• Please
• Keys
• Credit Card
• Water
• Ball
• Hi
• Bye
• Mom
• Dad
• Shoe
• Sock
• Book
• Lion
• Kitty
• Dog
• Duck
• “All Done”
• Okay
• “Oh Jhez”
• “I know”
• No
• Bra
• Nose
• Mouth
• Eyes
• Meow
• Roof
• Keys
• Towel
• Blanket
• Fish
• Bee

The list gets longer everyday, so this will be instantly out-of-date.

Here’s a big bummer.

Last night while driving back to the hotel getting ready to put Mazie down a car was trying to run the light as it turned red. The other car was turning left onto my street, I was going straight. I honked and the other driver slowed, but did not come to a complete stop. Luckily the other driver slowed to probably less than 5 mph. Very unluckily, the other driver was uninsured and I’m probably going to get stuck with the repair costs or face my insurance going up since I actually used it. [Insert rant here about the scam that the insurance industry is.]

The damage is to the rear lower panel on the passenger side. It’s totally drivable, thankfully. The other car hit the wheel and then scraped the crap out of the panel.

The even bigger bummer is that the panel that got dinged up is the entire rear bumper. I imagine they are going to have to replace the whole thing which will add up quickly.

Today we ventured out of Asheville again and went to Chimney Rock Park. The park was pretty cool. We did a short hike to the base of a 400 foot water fall. Mazie did really good in the carrier, although we failed her by not bringing warm enough clothes. We had to bug out pretty quickly since Mazie was cold.

We also went to the North Carolina Arboretum in the afternoon. It was nice. They had a great bonsai exhibit that I really enjoyed. Mazie enjoyed running around for an extended period of time.

We have moved to a different hotel for this last night in Asheville. This hotel is much better equipped for Mazie and we are hoping she gets a good nights sleep. I didn’t need to put tinfoil on the windows here. :-)

Lastly, I updated the Google Earth file with our Asheville adventures. Load the Great Adventure KMZ file to check out where we’ve been.

TODO: add link

Today we left Asheville and headed into the mountains. We drove about 30 miles northwest of Asheville to Hot Springs, NC. Hot Springs is one of the cities that the Appalachian Trail goes right through the middle of. The sidewalk that is on the main street of Hot Springs has “AT” trail blazes embedded right into the cement. Our visit was more to the AT than to Hot Springs, so Mazie loaded up into the kid carrier and we headed out for the trail.

I knew we weren’t going to get much of a hike in. I figured Mazie would make it an hour in the carrier and she did just about that. She did a great job walking by herself on the flats. She navigated the roots like a star and looked smashing in her bright green fury jacket.

It was fun to be on the AT and hiking with the white “blazes” of the AT in sight. Honestly the trail was no different than any other hiking trail we could have been on. However, this one could take you all the way to Maine if you just kept on walking. How cool is that?

We put up a set of picture from today. Enjoy!

Ever since we’ve arrived in Asheville, Mazie has had a horrible time sleeping. She’s just screamed all the time in her crib and for the first time ever she has been waking up in the middle of the night and we’ve had to bring her to bed with us where she proceeds to kick us and wake up constantly making everyone unhappy.

The sleep issues have driven her father to the brink. I left the grocery store tonight with two 50 foot rolls of tinfoil. You bet, tinfoil! I’m determined to get this kid to sleep better. The room she was trying to sleep in was too bright. So there I was at 7:00pm tonight slapping tinfoil on all the windows to black out the room. I have to admit that I felt a little crazy while doing it.

So far it’s worked. She went down on her own (first time in Asheville!) and is still asleep. I only hope that she makes it the whole night. Oh please, oh please…

Update: While the blacking out of the windows did get Mazie to go to sleep on her own, it didn’t solve the problem of sleeping through the night. She woke up at 3:30am and would not get back in her crib. After 30 minutes of attempting to calm her I brought her back to bed with us.

It’s now the 25th day that we’ve been “on the road”. For me, this now marks the longest I’ve ever been away from home. While it’s not a huge deal, I do miss the creature comforts and the simple familiarity of your own domicile. Traveling is always a bit stressful. Yes it is fun and all, but I find that I never really relax. Even now, sitting in the hotel unwinding and tapping on this laptop it’s not like if I were at home doing the same thing.

However hard the travel may be for me though, it’s peanuts to what it’s like for Mazie. We are still just getting going on the vacation part of our trip but Mazie is taking a while to get used to it. The biggest problem by far is sleep. She just isn’t getting enough of it. And as anyone with kids knows, a lack of sleep results in a very unhappy baby, and equally unhappy Mom’s and Dad’s.

At home Mazie is a great sleeper. You put her in her crib at bedtime and she just goes to sleep. On the road, she screams. And screams. And screams. Getting her to sleep is an accomplishment of it’s own. Tonight we let her cry for 10 minutes (blood curdling, shaking the other hotel rooms kind of crying) and after that I went in and held her in the bed while she fell asleep and then moved her to her crib. Last night she woke up at 2:00am, ready to go. Wide awake. Oh, and screaming. I brought her to bed and she finally went back to sleep in our bed, but it was a long night for everyone.

She has refused to take a nap anywhere other than her car seat since we left Minnesota. This issue highlights one of my pet peeves on toll roads. While driving on the toll roads Mazie would be sleeping away, ever so happy, then we’d have to stop for a toll. As soon as the van came to a complete stop she’d wake up and it took some extra special quiet to get her to go to sleep again. Usually she was then up and ready to complain about the car seat. Toll roads and sleeping babies do not mix!

The hotel we are staying in has three rooms, but unfortunately the only door is to the bedroom. Tonight we put her in our bedroom to see if that works better. I sure hope it does, the meltdown that took place at 3:00pm today doesn’t need to be repeated. This afternoon’s meltdown included a full on screaming festival followed by rubbing food into her hair. Tammy’s looking at other hotel options now, just in case.

We have arrived in Asheville! We got going quickly this morning and clicked off the last 4 hours of the drive pretty fast. Mazie was kind enough to sleep for nearly two hours, so it all went pretty fast. We arrived in Asheville around noon and decided to head straight to the Biltmore Estate before getting into the hotel.

The Biltmore Estate is pretty amazing. Imagine 8,000 acres of lush landscape with the largest private residence in the United States hidden away in it. We toured the estate itself, which took about 45 minutes at a fast clip and spent a couple of hours walking the grounds. There is a hotel on the estate and at first thought the idea of spending a few days there sounded kind of boring, but after visiting I would be up for that trip with no reservations. If you are in the area, you should definitely try to take it in. The amount of wealth necessary to create something like that, and even more, to keep it in the family still, is simply astounding.

After our afternoon at the Biltmore we checked into our hotel. We are staying at the Princess Anne Hotel. We are in #207 if you look at the floor plan. This is a very old-world hotel that is listed in the national register of historic places. It only has about 25 rooms, but each room is spacious with a living space, separate bedroom, and small kitchen. The elevator is a trip, it will fit me and about two suitcases as it creeks up. We are in a good location, with a number of things within walking distance.

Today is a driving day! I’m catching up on the Big Adventure from our hotel room in Roanoke, Virginia. We drove a little over 6 hours but I feel like we put in a lot more hours than that. The first 3 hours were in very busy traffic along the eastern corridor. Six lanes going each way with ridiculous traffic wears on you quickly. Add to that that Mazie had a pretty horrible day in the car, spending at least 3 hours of it crying. Oh, and one more thing, Tammy has an ear infection that is causing her a lot of pain. She went to the urgent care on Friday and got a prescription for some anti-biotics. She’s feeling a little better, but not much.

While we were driving I saw a road sign for Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park. I knew about this road from A Walk in the Woods. Bryson’s book highlights this as a bit of a travesty. The national park is amazing, and the Appalachian Trail goes right through the park. The 105 miles of Skyline Drive were more than we could explore with our time, but we could do a part of it. Now, you could argue that with a screaming baby and a wife with an ear infection, taking an unplanned detour through a drive at elevation was not a smart idea. You could argue that, and you would be right, but I still took the detour.

Bryson makes the point in his book, and this is the travesty, that something like 95% of the visitors to this amazing national park never even leave their cars. They simply drive through it on Skyline Drive. I’m happy to say that we at least stopped at one lookout point. But, with the conditions being what they were, we quickly boogied down the road and resumed our path on the Interstate as soon as we could.

We made it to Roanoke, Virginia and had dinner at Macado’s (truly, everyone does have a website now). We are going to get an early start tomorrow to finish the drive into Asheville and hopefully see the Biltmore Estate.

I just put up a bunch of pictures from the first two weeks of the Great Adventure. These were edited down by Tammy, which is far superior to me and means you actually get pictures of people instead of just things.

Other updates from the first two weeks:

• One of the memory sticks in my MacBook seems to have died. I isolated the bad DIMM and I’m back up and running on the single good DIMM. I had to head to Radio Shack for a very tiny screwdriver. I’ve already files for an RMA. Luckily I have multiple laptops along so it was all fine.

• Mazie has learned lots of new words. She’s learned “please” although it sounds like “plea” and she now appends it to everything she says – which is very cute.

• This tiny 2-bedroom apartment is actually starting to feel like where we live. Scary.. I miss our house.

Also, happy to say that I’ve been sticking to my weight loss program with good diligence and I’ve lost 5 pounds in the last two weeks. Yeah!

Day 17 of the Great Adventure is starting with Grandma Kaye and Aunt Angie visiting. We are heading to the Bronx Zoo this morning!

Today we extended the Great Adventure both North and South. The day started very early when Mazie woke up at 5:15am and decided that she was going to be awake. We didn’t get to sleep until very late so it was a tired morning. We took a drive this morning and went to the Bronx Zoo. Mazie, Tammy and I along with Grandma Kaye and Aunt Angie had a great time. The Bronx Zoo was really impressive. We had seen a special on their new Congo Gorilla Forest exhibit and it was pretty great.

We then headed back down to the apartment and left Mazie with the relatives and headed to Philadelphia for dinner. I’d never been to Philly and I was really impressed. It seemed like a really nice city. We visited the store we have some furniture in our house from, American Pie. We had an awesome dinner at El Vez. If your in Philly – go to El Vez. Great food, great atmosphere; just a lot of fun all around!

Day 16 of the Great East Coast Adventure was a lot of fun. Mazie got us all up at the normal time and we decided to go into Princeton to have breakfast at PJ’s Pancake House. I’m stunned that they actually own pancakes.com. What an awesome URL. I can almost guarantee that some “with it” student at Princeton gave it to them. We had a stunning breakfast that could not be beat and started the day out right. If you find yourself in PJ’s – I highly recommend the Buckwheat Pancakes.

After that we met my boss and his wife and we all headed to the New Jersey Grounds for Sculpture (Sculpture Garden). This place was really impressive and a lot of fun. Perfect outdoor activity for Mazie as well. It’s much bigger than I expected, and the sculpture is very well done. As a bonus, they have done an incredible job of getting the landscape that surrounds the sculpture just right. A+ and a great time with kids.

Tammy, Mazie and I headed to dinner at the Main Street Bistro after that and had some really good food. I’ve wanted to take Tammy to the places that I typically go to when I’m here on business. That way when I call home and say “I went here” she actually knows where I went. I’ve probably been to this restuarant more than any other in Princeton.

We had a relaxed evening and at 10:00pm I drove to Newark airport to pickup Grandma Kaye and Aunt Angie who are staying with us for the next couple of days.

It’s Sunday morning and the beginning of Day 10 of the Great Adventure. We are in Washington DC beginning our second day of sightseeing. Grandma Chrest and Aunt Alona arrived on their flight last night just before the bad weather really settled in from Hurricane Earnesto. It was very windy with lots of rain. Their flight was almost diverted to Philadelphia, and the next flight into DC wasn’t going to land. They arrived on time and made it to downtown on the metro.

Yesterday we had breakfast at the hotel and then went to see the sites:

• The White House
  We didn’t go in the grounds or anything – that requires security clearance from your state senator (really!). Just took the usual pictures from in front, etc.

• Washington Monument
  Several comments about the phaelic nature of this national monument followed by me saying “But I really like it” and then Tammy saying “Go figure.”

• National Holocaust History Museum
  This museum leaves you awe struck at the horror and misery of what happened during the holocaust. It was pretty hard with Mazie. She wasn’t too excited about sitting in her stroller that long and with subject matter like the holocaust you really don’t want your kid disturbing everyone else. Not a great place to go with kids, but if you can go, go. It’s a must see.

• World War II Monument
  This is one of the newest monuments on the mall. It is at the opposite end of the reflecting pool from the Lincoln Monument. It is also a really good monument. There was a group of WW II veterans there when we were there that made the monument more impactful. Seeing three vets with a picture of one of there friends that didn’t make it taking a picture of themselves at the location of their state makes it all much more powerful.

• Korean Monument
  I hadn’t seen this monument before and I really liked it. I wasn’t able to see it at night, and this one would strike me as amazing at night. There are scenese engraved into rock that appear to float in the dark at night. There are also a number of statues of soldiers on patrol in the monument. It feels like you are on patrol with them.

• Lincoln Memorial
  I hadn’t visited this before, so it was nice to spend some time here. Lincoln was such an amazing president. Reading the excerpts from his addresses makes me sad at the state of policitical discourse in the country these days which essentially boils down to “terrorism, scary!”

• Vietnam Memorial
  The Vietnam Memorial struck me more on this visit than the previous times I had seen it. I’m sure because my Mom was with me and she actually knew someone who’s name was on the wall. What an amazing monument really. No other monument actually engages the visitor in an activity. Mom got a rubbing of the name off the wall. Powerful stuff really.

We had dinner at the Capitol Grill (not the steakhouse) in downtown and then took it easy in the evening.

Still making our plans for our final full day in DC. Hopefully the weather is better. We are probably heading to the Smithsonian for part of the day.

Day 8 of the Great Adventure starts with a relatively lazy morning as we prepare to head to Washington DC for the long weekend. This week has been crazy. I had two evening business events filled with very busy schedules in the day. I mostly just got up at 6 am each day, got showered and left very early to get a head start on the day and came home well after Mazie was asleep. Mazie decided that she should just wave goodbye to me whenever she saw me. :-(

It rained most of the week as well so it wasn’t a first great week of the Great Adventure for anyone. Tammy and Mazie came into the office on Thursday and we all had lunch together at the company cafeteria. I showed them around the office a bit.

I’m pretty excited to head down to DC. My mom and sister are coming out to spend the weekend with us. I’ll post some updates from DC and try to get some pictures up as well.

So the headline from the Great Adventure tonight is that Mazie absolutely hates, and I need to emphasize this, hates, sleeping here. Tammy is in with her right now and Mazie just screams at the top of her lungs whenever she is placed in the crib. We’ve never seen her like this before. She is a very good sleeper and you can usually just put her down and she goes to sleep. Not here.

Last night it took Tammy 90 minutes of absolutely top-notch Mom work to get her to sleep, and it’s not looking any better tonight. She wouldn’t sleep in there for her nap. In fact, she only got a nap because they went to the store and she fell asleep on the way there and proceeded to sleep for 2 hours in her car seat.

I’m sure she’s pretty exhausted from the two long days of driving, and I’m hoping that she will get back on track soon. The time change, however slight for us, also throws her for a loop I’m sure. But boy oh boy do I hope this doesn’t last much longer.

On Friday we embarked on the Thingelstad Family Great East Coast Adventure 2006! What is this amazing event you ask? We are going to be away from home for 5 weeks. The first three will be in New Jersey while I work out of our office here, taking advantage of being in the same office as so many others. The last two weeks will be on vacation in North Carolina. Yeah!

Days 1 and 2 of the adventure were travel days. We left Minneapolis on Friday morning around 9:30a and drove, and drove, and drove. We took breaks for Mazie to get out and run around. We camped in a Starbucks in Rockford, Illinois waiting for a monsoon like rain to pass and providing an opportunity for Mazie to let out some energy, and me to get some back (triple espresso!!!). We also had a great Japanese dinner in Rockford. However, we didn’t take into account that as soon as Mazie saw the food on the grill getting cooked that she would want to eat. Squaking was moderately high. We spent the night just outside of Toledo, OH in a splendid Holiday Inn Express.

We arrived to our great little apartment here in Lawrenceville, NJ last night after another long day of driving through Ohio and Pennsylvania. At one point while driving through Ohio in the morning Tammy looked over at me and said the best line of the whole drive
_
_

I’m going to sleep. Try not to do anything stupid.

I appreciated her vote of confidence and continued to motor along while her and Mazie got some rest.

We spent Sunday here in NJ getting the apartment setup and preparing for the week. Stay tuned for more updates from the Great Adventure.

Mazie is growing up so fast. She’s such an amazing kid. For the last couple of months if I asked she would come over and give me a kiss on the cheek. Well this weekend she decided all on her own she was going to give her dad a kiss! Man was that awesome. I was holding her and she comes around and gives me a smack on the cheek. I’m still beaming!

She’s doing really great. I can tell that she’s trying to learn how to deal with stairs which has her, at times, over-protective dad freaking out. I’m constantly lurching to grab her as she approaches anything resembling a stair. She’s doing a lot better walking along with me – she stays with me well for as long as a block only wandering off a little bit.

She is also starting to talk more and more. She’s figured out “help”. If she gets into a tough spot walking around, or wants something off of a counter, she will ask mom or I for “help”. She’s got “dog” or “cat” down well, including a very convincing “meow”.

She just gets better and better, and being Mazie’s dad is the best job I have. :-)

We are all in Iowa City this weekend to see our friends Lisa & Eric and particularly their new baby girl Rachel. She’s as cute as can be and so tiny! I know Mazie was that tiny, but I have no real recollection of it.

We are staying at the Hotel Vetro, which is an overly hip hotel for Iowa City and while going to the elevator today Tammy saw someone in the hallway she was positive she knew. She stopped the guy while telling me “Isn’t that someone we know?” I looked at it wasn’t, but it was one of the actors from Desperate Housewives, Doug Savant.

I checked online and his wife is from Iowa City so I would guess they were here visiting.

Yesterday we were at Best Buy on my occassional visit to wonder around the store and just check stuff out. Tammy finds these trips annoying since I rarely buy anything, and after 5 minutes decide to leave. Yesterday though I decided to check out the gaming aisles and stumbled on the Nintendo DS. I had read about these “brain games” for the DS in Scientific American Mind magazine and was intrigued. They had one of these on the demo unit so we played it, and it was pretty fun. 10 minutes later we walked out of the store with a DS Lite and three games.

I decided that my ban on ever buying a gaming console again (at least until Mazie is old enough to find it fun) was not applicable since this is a portable unit. So far, it’s a lot of fun and the portability makes a great for flights. The initial set of games we got were Brain Age, Big Brain Academy and Super Mario Bros. Now it’s time to start looking up information on hacking the DS! :-)

Tammy and I have been talking for a couple years now about getting some land that we could eventually (10+ years) build a house on and maybe live on when Mazie (and any other potential, future kids – settle down Grandma’s, no news here) have moved out, etc. I’ve been thinking that we shouldn’t bother waiting to get the land until then – prices are likely to be higher and we could use it right now as a getaway on weekends.

This Friday we did our first road trip to tour some options and looked at 6 properties in the Red Wing, Zumbrota area of Minnesota and in Wisconsin on the other side of the river. Mazie was with her grandparents so driving 240 miles in the country was actually pretty fun. We are looking at property between 15 and 25 acres. We want something within one to two hours from the Twin Cities. We want something fairly wooded, with a good building site. Electric service is not needed.

It was really good to look at these properties because it helped clarify how we would use the land and what qualities are important for us. There is a lot that we want to do.

First, a small living option is necessary right away. Tammy did a bunch of research and found this great option for us called the miniHome. As soon as you own the land, you need a place to stay on it and the idea of camping every time you visit wasn’t that appealing to either of us.

The miniHome is a near ideal solution for this. It’s rated as a mobile home so it can be brought to a site without any special police escort. It’s designed to be ecologically friendly and self-contained. They have an option that puts solar electric and a wind turbine with it for complete off-grid usage. It has reservoirs for water and waste. In short, this is a one-stop solution to having 350 square feet of comfortable, heated space with all the conveniences you would expect. The only thing lacking is air conditioning, which you could add if you wanted. (Note: it even has an ethernet network!) We would plan on leaving this on the land to be used as a guest option as well.

The other structure that we would need right away would be some sort of utility building. This essentially would be a 2-car garage. This would be where the solar array and wind turbines would come together with a battery bank to store electricity. The utility building would house all of this and also provide storage for a car and other tools. I would probably need an ATV with a trailer that could be parked in there as well.

Obviously we need to identify a good spot for an eventual home. There are a lot of structural issues to consider for this. However, we would add other issues as well since we want it to be efficient and integrated with the location. Correct sun alignment would be important for passive solar heat, for example.

All of these locations would require access by large machinery. Everything else would be fine just being accessible by ATV.

I would want to have a nice, big firepit on the property. Ideally this would allow 10-15 people to enjoy a fire, and include an option for open pit cooking as well. Preferably this would be in an area with a lot of trees.

For the evenings, and since we’d have the dark sky for it, I would want to put up a dome for my telescope with a permanent mount. This would be wonderful and make it so much easier to take in the night sky. This would ideally be in a fairly open area, on the highest point possible to get the best view to the horizon. Electricity is necessary but can be easily provided by a small solar PV module and an isolated battery. I would need to extend the network to it as well, most likely using some sort of wireless option.

It would be a shame to have a bunch of land without a good spot for a garden. Tammy and I are far from green thumbs, but we definitely want this option. And last but not least we want to have a cool walking path that would snake through the land and connect everything up. This would allow for nice, evening strolls or just serve the utility of getting to various places.

We also learned that the approach to the land was important for us. We didn’t like land that was right next to a busy road. We liked it much more when you left the highway, then took a smaller road with may eventually meander to a gravel road for access. Also of importance is what is around you. We really liked one property but didn’t like that there was a big campground a couple of miles down the same road.

There is much more research to do, much to learn about this, and we aren’t in a rush. However, it is pretty exciting to think about the potential!

TODO: Add Photos.

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Last night Mazie’s aunt came over and babysat while Tammy and I went out for a “classic” date – dinner and a movie. We went to Wordplay at the Edina Theater. It was a fun movie all about the world of crossword puzzles. Sound like a topic that doesn’t really deserve a movie? Well, that just means you aren’t aware of the annual crossword puzzle tournament and the ridiculous speed at which some people solve a crossword puzzle (just over 2 minutes!).

The movie was great, and particularly fun for me since I have so many geeky hobbies: rc helicopter? rc cars? telescopes? home network? solar power? Watching Wordplay is like getting a 90 minute pass into this world of crossword puzzles. To an extent, you could envision a movie about one of your geeky hobbies with you in the hotel convention center talking to the guy about how amazing your telescope, helicopter, car is.

Fun, lighthearted movie.

Tammy and I decided that we wanted to make sure to raise Mazie understanding the value of charitable giving and in general “doing good” in the world. One of the things we are doing to that end is making a donation to a charity of her choice (or our choice on her behalf until she is old enough) on her birthday. This year we decided to support PAX, an organization that is working to reduce gun violence amongst children and teenagers. I attended an event of theirs a few weeks ago and the numbers were shocking. Eight children or teenagers die everyday as a result of gun violence. Even more shocking is the fact that more houses have guns than Xbox’s.

PAX has two main programs. The first is called “ask.” and is aimed at parents. The simple goal is for parents to ask if there is a gun in the house before their children go to play somewhere. Awareness is key, and many accidents happen while children are playing and some of the parents have no idea a gun was even there. The second is “speak up!” which is a toll-free hotline for students to report gun related concerns in school. The hotline receives over 15 calls a day of reported gun issues in schools, and coordinates with the school administration to respond.

They are an impressive, national organization with low overhead and a passion for working on this issue. Hat’s off to them and all the great work they are doing!

Being a dad rocks.

That pretty much sums it up. I could just end this comment now and be done. Dad’s that are reading it would understand. In fact, the openness of the statement is ideal as you can consider all that individual greatness of being a dad with your kids.

This year was my 2nd fathers day. It’s fun that Mazie’s birthday is right before fathers day. It makes for a better day as you are already celebrating how awesome it is that your child has grown more and more.

Mazie is so cool. She’s a pro walker now, rarely falling or getting tripped up. She even does pretty well on uneven surfaces with actual shoes on. She’s really verbal. She ranges from her version of dog, banana, gypsie, logan, mom, dad to her tendency to be, as Tammy and I put it, squaky.

She is a strong willed kid. She knows exactly what she wants to eat, in what order, and will clearly communicate it to you. She has started to play games with me. She’ll pretend like she’s going to come to me and turns away at the last minute giggling. Simply put, it’s pretty awesome to watch this little girl growing up.

Being a dad is a pretty great thing. I realize that it’s so much easier than the mom side of the fence. No being pregnant. No delivery. No breastfeeding. Even the things that are shared, this dad gets the easy route on. I change a tenth of the diapers Tammy does. The hardest thing I do is going away on business trips, but I credit that away time with making me truly appreciate the wonder that is my kid.

I love my kid. I love my wife. I love being a dad.

Tammy here again…

One week ago today, Mazie had a blast at her very first birthday party. All of our family that lives in town were invited and everyone did their best to dress and act like the pirates that they know they are. We beat at a parrot until it spilled its guts, made clothespin people walk the plank and dive into a shark pail, and were merciless in our pinning of an eye patch on a poor pirate over and over again. Mazie’s friends from across the street came to help with the fun.

After all of the fun and games we sat down to our spoils and enjoyed the very best pirate cake ever! Mazie blew out her candle (with a little help from her friends) and got involved good and dirty-like with her cake. She squished and gushed chocolate frosting all over her little self just like a good pirate would do. Presents were next and Mazie was pleased with all of the treasures she received. She balanced on top of her new rocking chair like a circus star, flipped the pages of some stellar books, and reveled in the beauty of her new fashions.

In true Pirate fashion we then kicked everyone out! See the pictures!

Hello, Tammy here. It was Mazie’s first birthday today! Whee… I have been looking forward to this day since before she was born. I finally have a kid that’s one. I don’t know why that matters, but to me it is a big milestone. Jamie took the day off of work to help celebrate. There were pancakes and a visit from the neighbors and our favorite landscaper, a trip to the beach where Mazie found her sea legs in preparation for her pirate party on Saturday, lunch with my mom, her friend and her friend’s granddaughter, and then off to the Minnesota Zoo. Mazie thought that all of the animals at the zoo were interesting, but the pigs were her favorite. I think she fancied the snorts and other fun noises they made.

After Mazie hit the sack, Jamie and I headed over to our neighbor’s house for an evening of ART! We met a local artist that our neighbors know, saw and helped in the hanging of the really cool paintings that they purchased from him, and had lots of fun talking and looking at art. It was a great way for the two of us to celebrate the passing of our first year with little Mazie.

Thanks to everyone who emailed, called, visited and sent Miss Mazie birthday wishes. She very much appreciated all of the love that she felt today. Mazie’s first birthday rocked! Jamie uploaded some of the pictures from the day which include several shots of Mazie wearing her fabulous birthday hat.

Tammy over and OUT

I’m a super-excited Dad! I’ve been on the search for a long time for a gate that we could put on the stairs in our house and was having no luck. And now that Mazie is mobile, the lack of a child gate was elevating my blood pressure significantly. The problem? One of the sides that the gate must connect to is relatively short.

The left side in this picture is only 30.5” high. This turns out to be a major problem with most child gates. I was lucky to find this one at USA Baby that turned out to be a perfect fit for the space. If you have a challenging spot this is a wonderful gate.

I can now relax a bit while Mazie runs all over the top level of the house.

Two weekends ago Mazie really started to walk. She’d been able to take a step or two for a while, but while we were in Lanesboro on the Olson Family trip she “took off” and decided she was mobile. In the last two weeks she’s gotten pretty good at it and now pretty much demands on walking on her own. Here is a video of her walking at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. (Excuse the video quality, it was taken with my Canon S500 camera in movie mode, with a shaky hand.)

TODO: Add Video

It seems amazing that in only 3 more months Mazie will turn 1! She is doing great. She has recovered from her 2nd real cold with lots of coughing and sneezing, and most notably plenty of running nose. An almost never-ending amount actually. She’s decided she likes baby food and we think she has her 2nd set of teeth coming in since she’s been eating her hand pretty much constantly lately.

She’s turning into such a little kid now. She likes to babble at you for a while and will share some stories with you. They are pretty short still, but it’s just amazing to hear her voice and particularly to hear her giggle.

We had a trip to Ikea this weekend and Mazie and I had a great time while Tammy shopped with our friends Lisa and Eric who were in town for the weekend. All sorts of fun to be had at Ikea.

Mazie has chosen to stay fairly immobile thus far. She’s not crawling, and from the looks of things she is likely to just skip that whole process. She doesn’t like being on her belly at all. She does love it though if you hold her hands and let her walk around the house or around stores. She finds that to be a great old time. She can scoot around pretty well and can make it all over her play area.

I’m itching for spring to come and for us to be able to spend more time outside. We ordered a bike carrier/jogging stroller (Chariot Cougar 2 if you are interested, I’ll post impressions of it after we get it).

I put up a whole bunch of pictures from January and February. Don’t miss the pictures of her in the bowl.

We got Mazie’s next car seat today, a Britax Marathon. They had a sporting pink one with flowers all over it, but we went for the more neutral and car appropriate (oh, and washable) version.

Mazie tried it out at the store and she loved it, or at least she didn’t yell at us right away. She is big enough now that she can use the bigger car seats but not too big for her infant seat, so we’ve still been using that. I’ve been thinking that she finds it annoying and wants to move up to the real car seat and stroller combination. That way she can sit up and see more things. She’s always craning her head around trying to look at things. I’d find it annoying at least.

Mazie is finally over her cold. Just some minor sniffles at this point. Tammy and I were able to catch it before she fought it off. Luckily we are able to blow our nose and have cough drops.

So yesterday when I got home from work Mazie was having dinner and she was really sick. She didn’t seem nearly as sick when I went to work. She had a full-blown cold. She woke up this morning not feeling any better.

She has had a cold before, when she was very small. It wasn’t that big of a deal – runny nose and some mild coughing. This one is different though. This is her first, real cold. Nose is going crazy. She’s super-congested. Coughing stuff up. And I’ll tell you it’s killing me!

This morning I gave her a bath while Tammy was at the gym and after the bath, which I think she sort of liked with the cold and all, she would cough and then wimper. I could tell her chest was hurting when she was coughing. And what could I do? Zip. I just held her and she hung out with me a lot less excitable than she usually was. To prove the point, when Tammy got back from the gym Mazie just hung out with me and didn’t feel a need to jump into Tammy’s arms as fast as she possibly could (as is typical).

I sure hope she gets better soon. I don’t know how much of this I can take!

Quick Mazie update – she has teeth! Her bottom two teeth have come through and boy are they sharp. I know since I was feeling them this morning and she decided to take a bite on my finger.

For the first time in the 196 days since she was born, Mazie slept through the night last night. She enjoyed restfulness, with minimal disturbances, from 7:00 pm to 6:10 am. Her mother was extremely excited but realistic that this is not a pattern yet. Her father was proud but thought she did this all the time. News at 11!

Mazie turned 6 months old on Dec. 14th, and she had her 6-month Doctor appointment on Monday. She’s doing just great. She’s just growing faster and faster. She’s essentially 75th percentile for weight, height and head circumference. She’s mastered sitting up now and loves to sit on the couch or on the floor with tons of toys all around her banging things and having a blast. She’s also started real food now. She only had rice cereal, aside from milk of course, until she was over the 6-month mark. She’s started oatmeal now and really likes it. We’ve tried carrots which she was a bit suspect of, and at this point she’s decided that bananas are not for her. Whenever she gets a mouthful of bananas she gets a really funny look on her face.

I can tell she’s super excited about Christmas, or perhaps I’m just more excited about Christmas because of her. She’s going to love digging into all her toys. :-)

Okay, so maybe this is the Minnesota version of a celebrity spotting. It’s not Madonna, or Bono, or any other single-named person (really, how pompous do you have to be to only have one name?).

Today when Tammy, Mazie and I were going into the Galleria for some shopping, we were passing in front of the entrance of Barnes & Noble and there is Al Franken getting out of a black Lincoln towncar. Apparently he was in town for a book signing event so a lot of people had this “Celebrity Spotting”.

Anyway, we didn’t gawk or anything. Didn’t want to make Al feel awkward. :-)

I’m taking this week off, using up some of my remaining vacation time before it vanishes. Tammy and I are not feeling adventurous enough to go on a big trip with Mazie, so we are staying home for the week. I’ve picked a couple of projects to work on (like I need more of them!) and spending time relaxing and hanging out with Tammy and Mazie. We have some babysitting arranged so we can head out and have some outside fun as well.

I’m feeling really pumped about what I’m working on at the office lately (read: change the world), and it’s hard to disconnect. But, I know it’s healthy and I will come back after a week with even more focus and clearer vision.

The holiday season is now officially upon us. We were at Southdale today and Mazie got her first picture with Santa! She didn’t have a lot of things on her list, but I clearly heard Santa mentioning something about the Teletubbies.

She had a great time today going around to different places and getting carried around by Mom and Dad. Such a cutie!

Santa’s little stand there had several print options, along with the option of getting a CD with the “Hi-Res Digital Photo” on it. I asked what resolution it was and none of Santa’s little helpers knew. They were shooting with a Canon Digital Rebel, so I asked if it was just native resolution of the Rebel. They figured yes. $26 later I have a CD with a 3.15 megapixel image on it. Now, that may be “Hi-Res” to some, but it’s practically a camera-phone in my book. Grrr…

Tammy and I went to our first movie since Mazie was born today. We saw Walk the Line if you are interested (and yes, it was very good). We also went to a new restaurant for lunch before the movie. We tried out Naar Grille. They opened up about 2 weeks ago. If location really matters I worry for them. They are not in an ideal location, there is no major road with people zipping by. The food however was very good. We went on Sunday which we did not know was buffet only, but it was quiet tasty.

The food is billed as Mediterranean fare. The gyros were very good, and everything looked tasty. I’d encourage people to give it a try - particularly if you like this cuisine.

A few months ago I bought the Roku M1000 MP3 player for Mazie’s room. I really liked it, even wrote on here about how great it was. Well, I liked it so much I decided to buy two more. Not the M1000, but the cheaper M500. Roku was running a sale, I think moving them out to make room for new models. I picked up two to put the whole music collection in the bedroom and a yet-to-be-determined location.

Install was easy as can be. Hardest part was finding a power outlet for it. (Note to self, need to redo power in bedroom!) Still like these units, even though I’m ultimately left a little frustrated with UPnP servers.

Newsflash! Mazie has moved to her bedroom! This seems like a pretty giant step to me. I took her crib apart and moved it out of our room into her bedroom on Sunday night. Last night was her first night in there. She was a brave little girl, sleeping all by herself in that big room. It was a little shocking to have our bedroom back. Seems like there is all this room now, but it’s nice for us and I think she was ready as well. She seems to sleep a bit better in her room, it’s a bit more quiet.

She also figured out last night how to kick the music toy in her crib. After a few hours we started hearing music on the baby monitor and it finally dawned on us what she was doing.

I still miss taking naps with her though – she won’t do that, at least not easily, anymore.

Last weekend was the 2nd annual Olson Family weekend. This is a fairly new tradition on Tammy’s side of the family where everyone does a mini-vacation together for a weekend once a year. Each year someone different plans it. Tammy is excited for the 3rd one next year already because she is planning it. :-) This year started off well by being much warmer than our trip last year up past Duluth.

Corinne did a great job picking this years trip to the Wisconsin Dells, or as those in the know call it, “The Dells”. We stayed at the Wilderness Resort cabins, which were very nice. The Wilderness is a little crazy, it’s a giant resort, waterpark, golf, spa location and I think it has some locals unhappy – but they seem to be doing a very good job. Tammy and I went to Sundara a while ago and loved it, which is also a Wilderness property.

It was a nice weekend with days outside hiking, geocaching and exploring the Dells, and nights goofing around and playing Xbox. I put up a number of pictures from the weekend. It was also Mazie’s first trip to Wisconsin, and she had a nice time hanging out with all her aunts and uncles (grandma and granpda too!).

On Saturday Mazie went to her first concert, and it was rocking! Our neighbor suggested that we go to see Ralph’s World with their family. Mazie had a great time!

When I first walked into the concert I was a bit surprised. It was loud! Not as loud as a show I would have went to at 1st Avenue, but a far, far cry from a guy with a guitar. Ralph’s World looked like a real band. Dudes in t-shirts and jeans, guitars, bass and drums. The three things that were a tip that this was a kids concert were the hundreds of kids having a blast, the song titles like “We Are Ants”, oh and the predominance of minivans in the parking lot.

I really thought Mazie would be screaming mad due to the volume, but she was digging it. She had a great time but had to cut it short because she got tired out.

If you have kids (you know who you are, see the minivan comment above), you should definitely haul the kids to a Ralph’s World concert. You will have some fun too!

Sometimes I just feel like typing something on this here website. I guess that’s the advantage of being the site operator, author, editor, publisher and everything else.

This has been a busy week. I’ve been completely absorbed with this project at work. We finally got it launched today and I really think it’s one of the, if not the, most amazing thing we’ve done. If you are curious, go to MarketWatch when the market is open (M-F 9:30a to 4:00p ET) and look at news stories, quotes, etc. You’ll see the quotes are streaming at you. We did this ourselves, and it was a massively challenging and fun project. I was literally unable to sleep, waking at 4:00a most days, my mind whirring with ideas. I’ve gotta take some time this weekend and decompress a bit. I put some especially peaceful music on my iPod so when I wake up in the middle of the night I can try to listen to that to help me sleep.

I sort of took today off, even though Mazie and I went into the office for a couple of hours and I was email for a couple more hours at home. We had furnace contractors, roofing contractors and our landscaper over today to discuss projects. I pulled the trigger on the furnace one so that is going forward. I need to decide on the roofing project soon so that I can let the solar guys (we are also looking at solar heat and electric) know what is going on.

We are starting phase 3 of our landscaping project. First phase was the front yard, 2nd was some hardscaping in the back yard, and this final phase is the conversion back to native plantings for the undeveloped area in our backlot. It was completely filled with invasive plants, and we are now getting ready to transform it. It will be perhaps the most challenging and interesting of the projects, but the least visible, at least from the curb as it were.

I’m debating the whole solar thing. I’m not sure what I think about having 4’x6’ black panels sticking up off the top of the house for heat. The solar electric stuff is much less obtrusive, but has a lot higher cost.

We are heading to Wisconsin for a family weekend with Tammy’s side of the family. I expect it to be a blast. May pack up the telescope since we’ll be in darker skies. I feel a little bad that I haven’t given that the time it deserves. I really do have too many hobbies. It’s just that everything is so interesting! :-)

Ever since Mazie arrived we have been learning that taking a car seat in and out of a station wagon is not a terribly comfortable thing to do. We’ve also been planning on getting a new car for Tammy. We started looking at minivans a few weeks ago and today we pulled the trigger!

We bought a 2006 Honda Odyssey. I got completely “shiny pebbled” (shi-ny peb-bled, v. 1. to get obsessed with bright and shiny gadgets and forget all practicality) as we were exploring our minivan options and went all out on the Touring edition with DVD and navigation system. I worked a good deal (thanks Internet!) and got a reasonable price relative to dealer invoice at Richfield Bloomington Honda. Their Internet sales guy was quick with emails, only took a couple of back and forths to get to a good price and we had a deal done. Walked into the store the next day and did the paperwork. We got the silver pearl metallic color, pictured above.

A year ago I would have told you you were crazy if you told me that I would be all hyper about a minivan, but this thing is so cool! It has every gadget, bell & whistle you could ever want. It’s too much to even go through here, and I haven’t figured out what they all are yet. The side and rear doors are all motorized. I’ve vowed to go as long as possible without actually touching one of those. :-) It also has a backup camera, all kinds of different sensors and of course twice as many cup holders as passengers. There is even a 110 outlet in the back with AV ports to plug in your camcorder or game system.

On top of the gadgets, it drives very well with some very notable braking power. I also like the “ECO” mode that shuts down three of the six cylinders to get better gas mileage. It has the run flat tires with the mandatory tire pressure sensors. If you get a flat it just lets you know and you need to get to a shop relatively soon.

Can’t wait for a road trip!

I wonder if when Mazie is older she will think this is a cool picture, or shake her head about her geeky dad. (Get your own Hello World Creeper.)

Just put more great Mazie pictures online. A lot of pictures from her recent trip to North Dakota as well.

I’m no expert on this matter. In fact, I’d say I’m far from it. But clearly I’m doing an adequate, or even above adequate job. Some wisdom to share:

1. Changing tables? Waste of time and money. First of all, changing a baby that is sideways in front of you is stupid. Second, you never take the baby to one of these changing things, you just change them. I insist on Mazie having her feet toward me to change the diaper.

2. The crib in the baby’s room? Try the crib in your room. Today we moved the crib up into our room. The family bed is great, but going from that to a crib in her room, in another room, is too much. Crib goes to our room for a few months, then into her room. (Or so we think…)

3. Mazie currently doesn’t dig anyone but Mom holding her after around 7pm. Nothing to learn here, just that this stuff happens, it will change in a while.

4. Stuff is everywhere, almost, and she’s still not mobile yet! The Intellitainer has taken over the fireplace. And the great thing is, I don’t really care.

5. This swing is the most important thing in the world.

6. Function over form. Who cares how it looks, it works.

7. When the baby is melting down, and you know Mom can make it better, but you really want to try, don’t. The continued meltdown results in frustration for baby, you and Mom. Know when to fold ‘em.

8. Honda Odyssey. ‘nuff said.

Feel free to add your own!

I think both Tammy and I are stunned at the thought that little Mazie is only going to be 3 months old this week. The 14th is the big day! She is very excited, I can tell. We are stunned because it seems like forever since she came into our lives. That should not be read as a good or bad thing, but that the period of time before she arrived seems very, very far away. It’s easy to sit back and think of things that happened, say a year ago, and feel like you are reminiscing about a previous decade! Anyway, time goes on for all of us and I’m sure that these first 3-months have seemed even longer for her.

Mazie continues to grow and amaze us both. Since the last update here, she’s developed a lot. She tracks you as you speak, or walk around. She giggles a lot and at least has convinced me that she likes to play little games with me. Mostly this involves me tickling her belly or cuddling her up and rocking her around. Then she giggles, I feel amazed, and we repeat until she’s had enough of it and gets ready to blow a gasket.

Speaking of blowing gaskets, she has started to do that. The last few nights she’s discovered her full-bore cry. We have started to wonder if babies can just get colic at 3 months!? This is when she’s supposed to be settling into more of a pattern and relaxing. We’ve started to put her to bed earlier, partly as a result of the crying. She’s getting more sleep but it’s not necessarily doing anything about the crying.

Mazie went to visit her great-grandparents last weekend and did great. She went through 10 hours in her car seat each way without too much fussing, and delighted us both by keeping a fairly stable nighttime sleep pattern, however she was way too excited to take any naps during the day which lead to some cranky behavior.

This is wedding weekend for us! Tammy’s sister Michelle is getting married tonight and we are both in the wedding. Tammy is a bridesmaid and I’m an usher. Luckily my mother is coming to help with Mazie duty but it’s going to be an interesting adventure timing breastfeeding and other parent duties with all the wedding stuff going on.

Then, tomorrow morning I get on a plane to New York for my friend Greg’s wedding. Tammy and Mazie are staying here. The first Northwest flight out is at 10:20am arriving in La Guardia at 2:00pm. The wedding is at 4:00pm in Central Park. And just to make things exciting the Northwest mechanics are expected to go on strike at the end of the day today. Luckily Greg’s wedding is going to be a relaxed affair so I could get there as late as 3:30pm, but it’s tight!

Whew! Hope this all goes smoothly!

Mazie had her 2-month checkup today with the pediatrician. I arranged my schedule so that I could go as well. We really liked the pediatrician that we met with. He was recommended by our neighbors who have two kids.

Mazie is doing great. She’s a big girl! She’s 97th percentile for both height and weight, and 75th percentile for head circumference. She’s already 24” long and tipping the scales at 13 lbs 1 oz. (For reference, she was 7 lbs 11 oz and 21” long at birth.)

The hardest part of the visit were the shots. Mazie got 4 different shots, after we confirmed they were single dose vaccines that contained no mercury. The nurse had me hold her hands and talk to her to comfort her. The shots were done in like 5 seconds, but Mazie let out one heck of a yelp when she got poked. I picked her up right away and held her tightly in my arms and she relaxed pretty quickly, and then even fell asleep. I felt really bad for her – poor little girl.

She’s been having a hard time tonight, residual effects from the vaccinations. After a good nights sleep I think she’ll feel better.

This Tuesday Mazie will be 8 weeks old. It’s time for us to schedule her 2 month appointment. I remember thinking how insane that was. We went from the 2 week appointment and then 6 whole weeks without seeing professional help. How would we do it!? Well, it’s been fine. Mazie is doing great and so are we.

She’s put on a good amount of weight. She’s already well over 12 pounds. This last week in particularly seems to have been a watershed week. She’s been so much more engaging and interactive than ever before. She will smile and play with you for a while. She loves it when you tickle her and play with her while she’s on her changing table. Also, much to the pleasure of Tammy and I she’s actually started to smile at us, instead of randomly at walls and other objects in the house.

She’s been doing well with sleep, although sometimes she puts up a bit of a fuss trying to get to sleep. But once in the bed and snoring away, she does well. She seems to be spitting up a lot more lately than she did at first. I’m guessing that has to do in part with a lot more volume of milk going her way. It’s pretty funny how being a parent pretty much makes all your “eww, gross” reactions go away. A pile of spitup goes all over your shirt, you wipe off the visible stuff and continue on your way, no worries.

She’s a strong girl too. I’ve been holding her up and letting her support her weight with her legs. She can do this for a few seconds at a time and then needs a break. She likes to lean up against me in a standing position for minutes at a time.

That’s all for now. Of course I put up some more photos as well. You’ll notice two pictures of me sleeping with Mazie. This seems to be a not to uncommon occurrence.

TODO: pics

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Tammy and I returned to the Uptown Art Fair after having previewed yesterday. We brought Mazie with us this time, so we went early to avoid the heat. It was another great day and the crowd was immense even at 10am.

We took a walk through the area we like the most and saw some more artists that we really liked. Tammy also found a custom purse by Laura Maclay that she really liked and decided to get.

Further artist highlights (again in no order):

• We found John Sumner at the art fair. We totally missed him the first day and we have a giclee of his, Moe, that we got in his gallery in Sonoma, CA.

• We were struck again this year by the photography of Edward Holland. We came really close in previous years to getting one of his items. He’s got an amazing eye and produces these striking, vivid photos.

• I was struck by the work of Liang Wei from Washington. He had a number of pieces that I really liked. Tammy wasn’t quite as taken with him as I. Hope to see more from him.

• We really like the work of Jay Long as well. The art is striking. Unfortunately for us it was all framed in oak, and we really, really don’t like oak.

As I predicted yesterday we returned to Keith Grace to make our annual purchase. We got the dog painting that you see in this post. It’s a great piece and we really liked his technique. He combines collage, acrylics and oils to make these striking, graphic pieces. The collage work also ties back to the subject of the painting as well.

Mazie will be six weeks old in a couple of days. This seems to be a pretty big milestone, at least in her parents eyes, since supposedly after six weeks of breast milk she has now built up an immune system that will keep basic nasty germs and viruses away. This will give Mazie’s Dad and Mazie’s Mom confidence to take her out more, into more varied environments, without constantly worrying about the cleanliness of everything around us and giving sinister looks to strangers who emit a short cough while passing. Really, don’t these people know better than to cough around a baby!

Mazie’s getting much better with the whole controlling the head thing. She likes to be held in a sitting position where she can then survey the room and check things out on her own will. After her rapidly developing neck muscles get tired of this, she assumes a rather odd position resting her head forward onto her chest.

She doing fairly well with the sleep thing. Still wakes up a couple of times and maintains her track record as a pretty loud sleeper, lots of grunting and squeels. Sort of like a pig farm, but if you take that analogy any further Mazie’s Dad will smack you, hard. Some nights she decides she just doesn’t want to sleep and this spirals her parents into despair, as they become achingly more and more tired until they reach the point of misery.

It’s been hot as blazes here so Mazie’s stayed inside most of the time. Her Mom is completely and totally obsessed with her being too hot or too cold. How are babies born in the tropics? Mazie has lived so far in a well controlled 72 degree house. We got a Maclaren Vogue stroller so that she can get outside without being in her crazy, five-point harness car seat. Mazie loves it, or at least I think so.

Tonight she’s taken to “spitting up”, but with a bit more volume than a spit, and only on Mom so far. This seems to be a new thing.

I put up some new photos to share with everyone (including what her Mom has decided is the cutest photo of her and her Dad!). Also note the photo included here, where Mazie is modeling her great Road Sign Math onesie!

I’ve been riding into work, bicycle commuting, for about a month now this summer. This is a big part of my plan to get rid of the “sympathy weight” I put on while Tammy was pregnant with Mazie. It’s working, I’ve been able to take off good weight every week without getting completely obsessed about what I’m eating. I’m really lucky when it comes to my commute. In some ways, I feel like I should be obligated to ride my bike to work. I can get on a bike path after going 3 blocks from my house on residential streets. The path crosses some roads, but mostly it’s just a great trail. I then have two options of trail that I can take going into downtown. So I get to take one trail in the morning, and a second trail in the evening on the way home. There are also a few people that ride into work as well so on the way home I usually have some company as well. One of the highlights of this commute is when the trail that I take on the way into work crosses over highway 100. This is the same highway that I get onto after a few miles and crawl the rest of the way into work when I drive. Everyday as I ride in I always take a moment to let up on the pedals, look to the left and chuckle a little bit to myself as I look at the hundreds of cars piled up, going very slowly. When I look ahead I see clear trail, trees and fellow riders or walkers out having a good time. The only part I miss about riding into work is the music. I really like listening to tunes in the morning and there just isn’t any safe way to do that on a bike. The weather has been great, making it even more enjoyable. I find that when I ride into work I show up with a better outlook on things, and in general a more pleasant disposition. On top of all that I’m saving money on the record high gas prices and not paying for the toll-lane on the way home. All this and I get to help the environment, and my body, all at the same time.

I was reading some “evergreen” content on BabyCenter.com tonight. They have some semi-decent content targeted at dad-types. Anyway, they highlighted hiking as an activity to do with your baby. I like hiking so took a gander.

They mentioned this group started in San Francisco called Grateful Dads.

It’s a group of dads that get together once a month on a weekend morning and go for a hike. It’s all dad’s and the kids vary from very young, 2-3 months to about 2 years old or even older. I checked out the site and I like the idea.

I know there are a decent number of dad’s that read my site. Anyone interested in doing some daddy/baby hiking? Mazie is a little young right now, but in a couple of months would be plenty old enough.

I learned a new trick tonight while holding Mazie. We were sitting onthe couch and I had my laptop next to me. I was singing to her and keeping her occupied and decided to put on some classical music. Mozart of course. And then it dawned on me that I had a great infant toy in front of me, so I gave it a shot.

I maximized the WMP visualization window and put it in random rotation with Mozart. I then held Mazie on my lap so she could see the screen. I had always figured these visualizations were only interesting to those on illegal substances, but it turns out 1-month old Mazie really dug it. She was watching the spinning graphics and when the screen would suddenly change to something else she would stop sucking my finger for a moment and check it all out. She particularly liked the flutes in the Mozart selections we were listening to.

Forget the Leap Frog – just grab your laptop!

Today is Mazie’s 1-month birthday! It’s an odd stretch of time. It seems in some ways like forever ago that we were in the hospital and brought her home. I look at her now and she’s already grown so much. We have gotten over our regular panics and now just panic every once in a while. We no longer have to track feedings and diapers to make sure all the inputs and outputs are working right.

Other milestones are starting to occur. Tonight, for the first time, I got to watch her all by myself for about an hour while Tammy went grocery shopping. We are teaching her to start taking a bottle, and it’s not a very easy process. We are also trying to get her to accept a pacifier, but that also isn’t going so well. She seems to only want the “real deal”.

We’ve made it out now a number of times but we still feel a lot more comfortable at home. We haven’t taken her on many walks due to the extreme heat. So, we’ve been mostly sticking to the house waiting for 6 weeks to pass when she’ll have more of an immune system.

I put up a collection of photos from the last three weeks as well.

She’s a great kid, amazing, we love her like crazy… and we’re pretty tired. :-)

Tomorrow Mazie celebrates becoming three weeks old. She is filled with anticipation of exciting “three-week-old” things like having some milk, making some dirty diapers, maybe even taking an extra nap in the afternoon.

In her first three weeks Mazie continues to be amazing and incredible and beautiful and simply the best, or at least according to yours truly, Dad. She’s learned to exercise her lungs more with some mild wailing. I find that it bothers me less if I consider it exercise. She’s gotta learn how to get all that air in and get it out quick after all! She is still being very nice to us and sleeping relatively well. I’ve acquired a very valuable skill – being able to put her to sleep at night. I just talk about computers, telescopes, Road Sign Math, etc. :-) In all seriousness, the nightly routine involves me swaddling her real tight, which she hates at first and cries and pushes against but after a few minutes of rocking she settles down. Then we put the “heartbeat” CD on fairly loud which makes a womb-like sound for an hour. Perhaps not surprisingly this puts all of us to sleep pretty quickly as well.

Tammy is obsessed with her being too hot or too cold, still. She’s also obsessed with cleanliness. We changed her diaper for the first time today outside the house, at Eden Prairie center. There was much care taken to make sure nothing was touched. Germs! Everybody had to wipe off with the baby wipes after leaving. I find it all very funny and cute, but it’s really great too.

We aren’t doing much exciting for the fourth this year. I really like fireworks but with Mazie being just under three weeks old fireworks don’t sound like a good idea. [Hint: Stillwater has the best fireworks around!] We had a classic 4th of July barbecue in it’s place. Barbecued bison burgers and baked beans. Yum!

Some Independence Day moments of Zen to share…

The people at the hospital were clearly out of their mind when they decided that we could go home with this small, fragile little baby. Seriously! Like we have a clue what we are doing? This should be left to the professionals.

The basic newborn crises have went away. We have plenty of diapers to change now. Mazie is gaining weight like, well, like only I can. Her belly button has revealed itself. Replacing these fears are the more basic issues of her being too hot, too cold, too sleepy, too awake or whatever the concern of the moment is.

This morning she had her first real bath (as opposed to the sponge baths she got before). The bath went well, but when we were done she was freezing cold. You sort of freak out when your baby is shivering. Fast forward to this afternoon. We took a brief trip to the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum and left after about 10 minutes. Why? Too hot! She had to be baking! We took all her clothes off except her onesie and then the dreaded sun came out! She’s going to get burned! RUN!

We retreated to the safety and air conditioned, sun protected comfort of our home to attempt to venture out another day.

A week ago today Mazie introduced herself to us. Since then Tammy and I have shifted from glee to fright many times, sometimes all within a matter of a few minutes. We’ve been worrying about everything. First there was the lack of dirty diapers. My read of the situation was that she was starving to death. Tammy frets constantly about her being warm enough. Then there was the incident with blood around the umbilical stump – I won’t even go there. But it seems that we are getting the hang of it. Yesterday was our first crisis free day.

Mazie on the other hand seems to be doing just fine even with her neurotic parents. She sleeps amazingly well, at times sleeping six hours straight through the night. We hope that isn’t just a phase. She’s co-sleeping with us which makes it a lot easier for everyone and I think keeps her calmer at night. She’s caught up on her dirty diaper quotas, making up for lost time. She’s simply adorable. After she gets her milk she has a tendency to get the hiccups. We ventured outside today on our first walk with the stroller.

Everyone kept telling me that everything will change when you have kids. I knew it would, it’s a huge thing after all. But I feel a need to reiterate it and reflect that yes, everthing did indeed change, for the better.

I also put up some new pictures from Mazie’s first week.

Mazie turns 4 today, 4 days that is. It’s been an incredible four days. I realize everyone all over the world goes through this process all the time. As a result, it should seem somewhat routine from a global perspective, but on an individual level everything seems profound and amazing and like you are the first person in the world to ever do any of this stuff.

Mazie overall is doing great. She needs to catch up on diapers. There are numbers she’s supposed to be hitting and she’s behind. How do you like that? Four days old and already behind quota. She sleeps really well, usually getting two 4 to 5 hour sessions in per day, along with some shorter naps. She’s a great sucker!

Some thoughts on my new title of “dad”:

• The first thing that comes to mind is that the parts that are easy are easier than I expected they would be, and the parts that are harder are way harder. I know that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but maybe if you’ve been there before you know what I mean. Like changing diapers, is trivial, but calming your kid at 3 a.m. is really hard.

• Those protective father instincts sure kick in. I’m always worrying about her and want to protect her at every turn. Imagine when she starts to walk! I’m going to need a sedative.

• I’ve never been one to be real comfortable with newborns. They seem so fragile. All that disappears in about 2 seconds with your own kid. There just isn’t much better than laying with her on your chest and patting her back.

• The most amazing thing in the world is being able to bring comfort to your baby. When she’s crying for whatever reason, and you pick her up and put her to your chest and she calms down and is happy, that’s amazing. Of course the reciprical is also true, when you cannot provide her that sense of calm, that is pretty much the most horrible thing in the world.

• How can a kid that does not have precise muscle control get her socks off so easily!?

It is tradition that a husband get his wife a present after the delivery of a baby. After being in the room and seeing in every little bit of detail all that is involved, a present hardly seems a satisfactory way of saying thank you. We decided to celebrate this event with art rather than the classic gift of jewelry. Art lasts just as long as diamonds. I contacted Amy Lynn Stevenson who we already have one piece from and discussed what I wanted to do. She came up with a wonderful painting that she titled “New Addition”. The dimensions are 5 feet wide by 3 feet tall.

I really love it and Tammy was very happy with it. I can’t wait to some day give it to Mazie to have in her house.

Mazie Kaye Thingelstad was born on June 14th at 3:17 pm. She weighs 7 lbs 11 ozs and is 21 inches long. Baby is doing great, and Mom is recovering from the [most amazing and traumatic] event.

I went to North Memorial today for Daddy Boot Camp. They recently renamed the class to the much more boring title of New Dads Class, but I’m going to insist on calling it Daddy Boot Camp. I guess they didn’t like the military overtone of boot camp? I dunno.

I got there promptly at 9:00 am and was a little surprised to only find two other expectant dads there. To be clear, this is a guys only class, no chicks allowed! We started at five after and it took until about 20 after for all the dads who were registered to finally arrive. Rule #1 to being a dad, learn to be on time and reliable!

We went around and made introductions. There was a truck driver, a computer guy (not me), golf course manager, machine builder, etc. Huge variety of backgrounds and professions. We also had to explain why we were there. One of the future dads said “so I can stop being afraid of being a father?” Get a group of anonymous guys like this together and your not going to get a lot of “touchy feely” talk, but he certainly hit a nerve with the whole room. It was nice to hear people actually fess up to being really excited, and also being totally freaked out about what is to come.

The instructor commented that when his wife and he were expecting he felt like he was always two months behind his wife. When she got pregnant she was engaged right away, but it took him until she showed. I can surely relate to that. Our baby is due in two weeks and Tammy is ready for it anyday. I feel like two more months would be just right.

The class was good. I learned how to swaddle a baby the right way, like the nurses do it. Down-up-down-up. I’ll show you sometime – I rock at it. While I’m now comfortable with the mechanics of changing a diaper, I still think it’s probably pretty gross. It was really funny how much happier all us guys got when we got to do things with the plastic baby dolls. Give us something to do and we are much better off than just sitting there.

They showed a video on Shaken Baby Syndrome that was horrific. It wasn’t violent or anything, didn’t show some baby getting shaken, it was just so bad. What a horrific thing to do to a little baby. Nauseated me just a bit.

In the last half-hour a “veteran” Dad came in with his daughter who was 6 months old and fielded questions. That was really good and the kid was just darn cute. He talked about the experience which was still fresh in his mind. I liked that.

PS: Quick update on the name front. Zaida is probably nosing ahead right now over Mazie. We’ll see what we think when she’s born. And, if somehow it’s a boy, we’ll just have to make something up!