A Guy, Two Girls and a Pup

Hey, remember when we had a blog? *sigh* It probably seems like nothing is happening, which is partially true, and partially completely wrong. Of course, lots of stuff is happening, but all in the context of a normal day, which makes it seem like not worth blogging about, really.

Meredith cracks us up daily with her developing personality. Thursday, when Billi, the nurse who gives me my weekly “butt shot” (as M calls it) visited, Meredith decided to play nurse assistant. She stood and watched Billi and Daddy get the shot ready, then, afterward, got out Billi’s stethoscope for listening to the baby for her, including pulling out the earphones and the tube of ointment she uses. Then she helped me get a Kleenex to clean up the ointment (getting one for herself, of course, so that she could clean her own belly. CLEANING. Still a favorite activity.)

Tonight we introduced her to the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer TV special via my DVD. She was very aware of Rudolph (or as she calls him, Rudolph Brightnose) from our trip to the mall and seeing Santa and his reindeer. So she’s been walking around all week talking about Rudolph. We watched Rudolph while I made dinner and when it was done, she went BALLISTIC when he wasn’t on screen anymore. Wailing and gnashing of teeth. (Of course, that couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that she was worn out and tired from Christmas shopping all day with Daddy, could it? Naaaah. :>) I have a feeling we’ll be watching Rudolph quite a bit from now on…

And, on the other side, of course, we have Numero Dos coming along nicely. Kevin’s kid seems determined to make sure I don’t forget it’s still in there, kicking up a storm every chance it gets. Although I’m not looking very pregnant, I’m FEELING more and more pregnant — I think I’m just displacing all my internal organs instead of growing a stomach. Even at that, the pants are definitely getting tight — I’m wearing them unbuttoned more often than not these days. Fortunately, sitting at a desk all day affords me that luxury. :>

So apologies for the absence — we’re here, just working on keeping up with everything else first… :}

This weekend, we spent most of Kevin’s birthday down in Fremont (aka The Center of the Universe) attending the Solstice Parade, the biggest event of the year there. Most of Seattle, it seems, congregates to take in the sites of colorful floats, eccentric characters…and yes, naked bicyclists.

Meredith did great for pretty much all of the parade — there was a little crabbiness about 4/5ths of the way through when she started getting hungry and sleepy, but otherwise she was content to sit with us, watching everything that went by. And there was a LOT. (Including the big beach ball above.)

Saturday night I went for my usual run, with one big change: for the first time ever, I was able to run all the way around Green Lake without stopping, which is HUGE. I haven’t been running since, so it may have been a fluke, but we’ll find out next time.

Sunday was, of course, Father’s Day, so we celebrated with some chocolate-stuffed french toast and bacon, and then Kevin finished up work on the fence, which turned out really great! Now Meredith and Devi can run around the backyard to their hearts’ content. The rest of the afternoon/evening was Kevin’s D&D game, so Meredith and I had a girl’s-only dinner, just the two of us…

Sunday I took part in my second 5k race, the Furry 5k, a fundraiser for the Seattle Animal Shelter. Kevin, Meredith and I all got up bright and early Sunday morning and headed down to Seward Park in south Seattle to pick up our registration materials and get ready. It was cloudy and slightly cool — nice weather for running, since the sun wasn’t beating down. There were hundreds of people there already, most with their dogs, ready to walk or run. (We left Devi at home for obvious reasons — Devi + other dogs = not fun.) Meredith was fascinated by the people in dog and cat costumes walking around greeting the crowds.

At 10am sharp, we started. I started my run, getting passed by tons of people, of course, since I run verrrry slowly. The nice thing about running with people with dogs is that, eventually, they have to stop to let their dogs go to the bathroom. Woohoo! Kevin and Meredith were supposed to start the walk 10 minutes later, but apparently everyone just went all at once, as they were only behind me by 5 minutes for the whole way. Had I known that, we could have gone together! Oh, well.

I was able to run almost the entire race — there was one huge hill that I had to walk, but it couldn’t have been more than 1/4 or 1/2 mile. Otherwise, I did the whole thing, which was a great feeling — much different from the St. Patrick’s Day race! I finished strong and actually sprinted at the end when I saw I might be able to make it under 45 minutes. My final time was 43 minutes 49 seconds!

All in all, it was a fun time — I would absolutely do that one again. Not sure what my next race will be: I might try to do one in the fall. Stay tuned!

Hugs for everyone! Meredith is really into hugging right now: Baby, Devi, random people on the street. (Well, maybe not that last one. YET.) Which is just so cute it makes your teeth hurt. :>

Kevin and I are both working hard the last few weeks — I have a big project that is keeping me occupied all day, every day. It’s fun and challenging, but hard work that keeps the ol’ thinker ticking. Kevin is likewise working on learning the ropes and finding out more and more every day about how Cray is put together. His Australia trip has been pushed back to August, which is kind of nice, since he’s in the middle of building our fence for the backyard! It’s coming along really well — I’ll take pictures when it’s farther along.

Meredith is doing better and better and getting to bed and falling asleep by herself, and she’s even getting back into her sleeping-through-the-night routine. Yay! I’m sure part of it has been a veritable explosion in vocabulary — that will disrupt anyone’s sleep schedule, for sure.

Otherwise, things are good here. Kevin and I are looking forward to date night tomorrow, going to dinner and the Experience Music Project. Sunday, we’ll be doing the Furry 5K race (me running, Kevin and M walking). And summer has finally come to Seattle — temps climbing steadily (today was almost 90!) At least it’s a non-humid heat — add some wind and it’s almost pleasant! (Almost.)

As soon as I started working with Aptimus, I jumped right in to working on the new design for the University of Phoenix site. It’s been a busy couple of months, but all the hard work has paid off, as the new design goes live April 17! Check it out!

In non-work-related goings-on, we’re trying to get Meredith to start saying “please” when she asks for things. For some reason, she’s not as keen to repeat the word “please” as she is, oh, every OTHER word she hears. You’d think she’s be MORE likely to say it, especially if it gets her delicious Teddy Grahams that much more quickly.

And, last, but not least, happy birthday to Christi!! It’s already April 17 in the Eastern Time Zone, so she’s officially another year older. We love you!

Tonight I got home from work at 8:30pm — our team was working on a website feature that really needed to be done tonight. We got the job done, even though it took awhile. Even though I wouldn’t want to do it more than once every, oh, 3 years or so :>, I learned a lot and got to know my teammates a little better. So it was time well spent.

The downside is that I didn’t get to see Meredith at all this evening — I missed dinner and her bath and putting her to bed. I didn’t get any hugs or kisses from little Goober. Not a good evening in that respect.

So yesterday was the day of The Big Race, the 5k I’ve been working up to for the last 4 months or so. The day started out bad and got worse — it snowed. AND rained. Apparently the first time it had snowed for the race in its entire 25 years. Lucky me. My clothes were SOAKED. My hands were so cold I ran with my sleeves pulled over them the whole time.

The route was super-tough: it was all uphill for the first half, back downhill for the 2nd. I walked up once I got to the hills — couldn’t manage running on the hill. But I ran the entire downhill and crossed the finish line running, woo! Here’s the final results:

overall place: 7119 out of 7233
division place: 724 out of 736
gender place: 3731 out of 3813
time: 1:11:34
pace: 19:05

There were 15,000 runners all together. I’m not going to be winning any gold medals, but at least I wasn’t last. Maybe there will be a next time…

Christi says I’m not blogging enough — fair enough, but it’s kind of hard to grab free time when you’re going to bed ever night at 8pm like I’ve been doing for the past week or so. Meredith has infected the entire house with the plague, so we’ve all been slowly recovering in our own time, and I seem to be bringing up the rear. It’s pretty nasty — lots of coughing and congestion and clogged sinuses. Meredith seems to be just about over it, except for a runny nose. Kevin is in the middle somewhere, and I’m still getting clogged sinuses, but I haven’t been hacking QUITE so often…hopefully a couple more days and I’ll be good to go!

Work is still going well! I took a sick day on Monday (see above :P) so the last couple of days have been a little bit of catchup. We’re doing a release tomorrow of some sort — not sure what it encompasses yet — something to do with adding more Schools to the website (like Engineering, I think? You can tell they don’t tell me anything. :>) The stuff I’m working on isn’t part of that, but I’m sure I’ll be in the thick of the next release.

Kevin had very good feedback from his interview, and he is feeling cautiously (VERY CAUTIOUSLY) optimistic. He had some really kind words from the IT manager he interviewed with (praising his diligent preparation for the interview!) and really prompt replies to questions/followup, which he’s taking as a really good sign. So cross your fingers…not sure when we’ll hear back next, but hopefully soon!

Meredith, like I said, is getting through the ickies of her cold. Tonight we helped her put two and two together and start learning how to blow on command so that we don’t have to use the nose sucker anymore! Is it too much to hope that tomorrow she’ll be able to work her own Kleenex and everything?

Another day, another long night thanks to Miss M. I think Kevin and I were awake more than asleep, up and down with her. At 5am, I finally took her to the guest room so that we both could get a little bit of sleep. Poor girl has the stuffed nose phase of her cold, so she is snorty and miserable.

Today was a good day at work — I was complimented on my Javascript and I got to do some good work and pick up the slack where my manager hadn’t had time to do the work. So I looked majorly indispensable. We had a BBQ cookoff, too — lots of meat to be had! I brought bread. (Hey, I wasn’t going to try to get meat for 30 to work on the bus!!)

Kevin is still waiting to hear from Cray, but networking his tail off in the meantime. Keep those fingers crossed, please!

We found out today that Christi is going to come see us in March! Of course I had to open my big mouth and suggest she come the weekend of my run (March 15.) What was I thinking?! Of course, it will be nice to have her here for that…and Meredith will love to get to spend time with Aunt Christi!

Gosh it’s been a long time since I posted, hasn’t it? Not a lot is going on, but a lot of little things, I guess, mostly dealing with the Divine Miss M.

Firstly, Esmerelda is working out really well! We like her a lot and she seems to adore Meredith and Aurora. I was especially impressed when she showed up Tuesday with a guitar! Fun!

Meredith seems to be cooling it on popping out the teeth — I think she is working on only one right now. (Thank goodness!) In the meantime, she is putting the new ones to good use, chewing all sorts of things, including her first big girl sandwich!

She is also learning and mimicking new words quickly — astoundingly so. Kevin was amazed the other night when she was attempting to shove him out of the way in order to go (fall) down the stairs. He said, “Say ‘move, please’”. And she immediately said “Moo plee”. THE CUTENESS IS PARALYZING. We’ve also been reading her flip book a lot that teaches about parts of the body: her newest one is ‘elbow’. She now knows ear, eye, tongue, hands, elbow, BELLYBUTTON (favorite), leg and foot. AND, amazingly, she is able to not only point it out on herself, but tonight she was pointing out MY foot and eye. Wow! It’s like she’s a person!

And then she goes and does something like pooping in the tub on Monday, the first time she’s EVER done that. Guess she just had to do it once.

Daddy bought her three pairs of shoes today at the consignment store, since her current ones are getting a little short for her. Here’s the current pair. I’m not exactly keen on the pattern, but they’re like new and they fit: what more can you ask?

Kevin has a phone interview coming up with Cray, which makes enormous super-computers like HAL from 2001. Kevin’s job would be, of course, to keep them from going insane and killing people. He couldn’t keep back a grin when telling me about the interview: let’s just say that the nerd-factor of interviewing there is extremely high.

My job is going really well — I’m doing cool work that is challenging to me, which is GREAT. Better than twiddling my thumbs! I’m working on a component that will allow people to login to the University of Phoenix site in order to leave comments on posted articles (kind of like you can do on our blog here.) But there are nifty form switching things and I’m working closely with another guy that’s writing the back-end stuff. It’s all very cool.

I’m also still keeping up with my running program. I’m up to 30 minutes at a time (this is week 8 of 9) and hating every minute of it. No, not really — just the last 29 minutes. I can honestly say, though, that, so far, I haven’t once slacked off and walked when I should be running. I may run so slow I might as well be going backwards, but it’s running, not walking. Go me! I’m trying to incorporate a few hills here and there, because the 5k I’m doing on March [mumble mumble] (15, I think?) has some long, LONG hills. Ack. I think I’ll be walking.

Devi is hanging in there — she comes running with me, although for her it’s a fast trot and she probably wishes I would either go faster or walk so she can sniff all the interesting things going by…

If you’re wondering what we did for Valentine’s Day, the answer is NOTHING. Well, not technically: Kevin made a yummy dinner and CHEESECAKE for dessert. That’s a perfectly fine V-Day for me!

We are going to dinner at our neighbors’ (Raja and Lipika) house on Saturday night! Apparently, Lipika has also been laid off from her job, so we’ll have lots to talk about… Then Sunday are the Oscars, of course: I’ll be watching, even though I haven’t seen any of the movies. Kevin will be otherwise occupied playing D&D into the wee hours of the night. (Maybe.)

There, how’s that for an update?