Called the agent and keys should arrive within the hour. On the other front, Suzy gets to eat her first solid meal tonight.
May 2002 Archives
Should get the keys to the new house today. For all that people that said getting a house was the most stressful period in your life, it didn't turn out to be too bad. Sure, there was a few mornings of anxious phone calls, but all-in-all, not too bad.
Suzy is doing well now, but is starving. Still on a liquid diet, doctor's orders. Hoping Friday for her first solid food. One thing about this hospital is that they have "room service". You pretty much order whatever you want and they will make it -- pizza, pasta, burgers, sandwhiches and more.
Katherine met Vincent today. She's the sweetest girl. First she brought mommy and the doctors presents (her idea) - for mommy, a chocolate bar and for the doctors cookies. Next, she asked if she could hold the baby. How can you say no.
Memorable quote in surgery today:
Suzy: Do you smell something burning?
Steve: Yeah, it's you. They're using a laser scalpel.
Memorable quote before surgery (sounding like a commercial endorsement):
Suzy: Steve, if something happens today, promise me one thing.
Steve: Sure babe, what is it?
Suzy: Promise me you'll use Similac w/ Iron
Baby Vincent Stephen, born May 29th, 2002 at 1:38pm.
Dogs are most uncompromisingly loyal when you are napping. They may wander off when you're on the computer, even when you're in the kitchen, but if you're lying down, they will be on the floor beside you.
By some miracle, all the loan docs were finished today and we signed everything at escrow. Escrow just needs the "big" check and we get the keys. That wasn't as stressful as a lot of people made it out to be. Just a lot of faxing, and a few frantic phone calls.
Coming down to the wire on escrow. ETrade waiting on escrow for 2 more docs before they can finish the loan papers. We want to sign the papers this afternoon, before the baby. Time for a few friendly phone calls.
30 hours and counting for the new baby. Charging the electronic gear now: cell phone, digital video camera, digital still camera. Not to be left out, bought new batteries and film for the SLR.
This is fun -- watch how your name varies in popularity over the century.
The closer we get to the baby, the farther we get from agreeing upon names. Girls, maybe Madeline, Elizabeth, Natalie. Boys... that's the tough one. Only possible agreement right now is Eric. Think about names is that you don't want to pick the popular ones -- otherwise, there's 50 kids in the class called Emily or Jacob.
My money is on a boy. It's fun to be low-tech in this hi-tech world. Sure we could find out, but it's fun to leave a little to chance.
The baby 50 hours away. So weird knowing the delivery date and time. Today, I think I'll make a Costco run to stock up the fridge. Nice to have options without constantly running to the market.
The house is 30 hours away. Hopefully all the loan papers will be ready tomorrow, and we can sign away at escrow tomorrow afternoon.
The move is 30+ days away. Still need to arrange to have the ceilings scraped and the interior painted.
I can't tell you how strange it is to plan your baby's birth over your doctor's palm pilot. Talk about invasive technology.
For the past 9 months, I haven't been thinking about the consequences of c-sections or second children. Now, the advice is pouring in. First, a second child makes things more than twice as difficult . Like earthquakes, children are on a logarithmic scale. Second, well, I won't even get started on the c-section. Best not the stress the wife at this point.
We saw the obstetrician tonight. Suzy's 39 weeks, officially due Saturday, June 1st. From the ultra sound, the baby is estimated at 9lbs, 10oz. That's a big baby, approaching turkey size. With all the difficulty of the first, this one will be delivered by c-section. Wednesday, May 29th it is.
Next week will be interesting. Escrow is scheduled to close on Friday. Might have to make a field trip from the Escrow office with notary in tow to the hospital.
Another site that I highly recommend is PayMyBills. For $13 a month, your bills are sent directly to them, scanned in color, and processed according to rules you set up. For example, you can have them automatically pay the cable bill if it's less than $100, the gas bill if it's less than $50, etc. They address the envelopes and lick the stamps from you. For credit cards and such, you can manually select how much to pay each month. Need to pay rent? No problem. Have a check sent to a "payee" month. Easily saves me a hour a month, well worth it.
NY Times: Netflix IPO Raises $82.5 million. 
[Scripting News]
[Scripting News]
Good, I'm happy for them. It's one of a handful of useful sites that survived the dot.con. I've been using Netflix for over a year now. It all started when I was a day late returning 3 movies to Blockbuster. $23 to rent 3 movies is a tad excessive. Saw Netflix and that would get me a month -- that's 12 movies if your consistent in your movie watching habit.
Rain has made it's way down to SoCal, almost unheard of for this time of the year. The flowers are happy, I can forget to water them again.
Why Ozzy Osbourne is like your father -- he can't figure out the remote and his favorite station is the history channel.
Time's ticking away. Two weeks before the baby, two weeks before escrow closes, and we're not packed or fully prepared for the newborn.
Starting to clean out one room at a time. Tonight's the guest room, though it's already 9:30pm and we're out of boxes. It's amazing how much stuff just follows you, never used, shoved inside in some corner. It's good to move every few years. Discover what you haven't unpacked from the last move, what you won't use in the future. The hard part is throwing it away. Once you do, you won't miss it.
Pictures from T's confirmation. The ceremony was long -- close to 2 hours. Katherine got restless early (luckily), so we played outside.
EditLive for Java "empowers business users with an easy-to-use, intuitive interface for creating and publishing web content." [Scripting News]
The problem with EditLive is that it's an applet. No matter what you do, applets are always going to be slower than DHTML. Whenever you edit an article, it takes 5-10 seconds for the page to come up. That's gives the applet a clunky feeling. I'd much rather use the built in IE editor, which is immediate. You feel more in control when the website is responsive.
One potential problem with the default "radio" templates is that all images are served from scripting.com. Is that why some sites seem slow to load. If you have your own server, consider moving the images to your server to speed things up.
I'm still not use to the color difference between my iMac and PC. I wrote the CSS on my pc, with a CRT. On the iMac with flat panel, the colors don't work quite so well. Don't know if the problem is the different type of monitors, or just basic pc/mac color differences.
The "radio" template system isn't quite so intimidating once you separate the wheat from the chaff. In the default template, there's a lot of images in the way. Once you get rid of them, there's not too much to replace. Basically, you will need
title, siteName, description, bodytext and the calendar. I'm still working on this css template, but the calendar is next to go. After that, I'll worry about the main template.
Mother's day at Zuma Beach. Beautiful day, 94 in the valley, 74 at the beach. Perfect. The great thing about digital camera's --no wait for the pictures.
Uh oh. It seems that the new version of iPhoto (1.1.1) is broken. File->Export brings up an empty dialog with 1 blank tab. What happened???
All is well again. Needed to update BetterHTMLExport again.
Ally, up close. Think Photoshop needs a yellow eye filter for animals.
Right before my parents left on vacation, my mom warned, if Suzy starts having back pain, the baby may be coming. Last night, maybe 4am, Suzy started complaining of lower back pain. Worrying about that and getting in all the loan papers doesn't make for the best night of sleep. Suzy's still asleep, so I think the baby is waiting (official due date, June 1).
I don't drink enough. Just added a splash of Belvedere to my lemonade. I've had the same bottle in the freezer to 2+ years now. 'Bout time to make a dent. Might help in the sleep dept. Buying a house and having baby(#2) doesn't do wonders for sound slumber. Plus, the wife is tossing/turning, getting up for "relief" every 2 hours. Being pregnant is 99% hardship and 1% glow.
This is too disturbing to pass up. If you don't think there's anything wrong, I have a botox party to invite you too.
Katherine, this morning. Finally has enough hair for pony tails. This picture has halved in size -- may need to be sharpened ???
Photoshop is too expensive for what I need it for. I'm waiting for the Mac OS X version of Photoshop Elements. To my amateur eyes, the only difference is the 600 dollars you save. Seems to have all the same features, at first glance.
Back on the net just in time ... just in time for the new iPhoto. Going to try PixelNhance for the new editor, though iPhoto now has brightness/contrast controls built in to their editor.
Back on the net again just in time. Bit of a problem with the cable modem for the last week. Signal strength was too low, so cable modem could not connect. Got the cable guy out today and he found a few fault connections outside. Let's hope all is well now.
First thing I thought after taking this picture... man, that's a lot of fabric.
Funny thing happened after work, yesterday. We bought a house. Strange how quick these things can happen.
