Out of the blue, got an email from Case Saturday morning that he was in town. So we made plans and met up with him and his family (Jenny and Sylvia) and their friends they were staying with up at Great Seas Restaurant on Lawrence. Great to see him, catch up a little. Funny to actually see an old friend, can't even remember the last time we saw each other in person, but now we have wives and kids. Crazy. Would have been crazier if we somehow managed to meet up in my parents basement. That would have been a trip. Friday not too exciting, made our weekly trip down to Paciugo Gelato for our fix. I got an affogato, Tracy got her new favorite, black sesame. Good stuff. I spent the weekend watching Lucy since Tracy was working. The verdict on the back only sleeping a week in? Ok. Getting better, sometimes, other times not so much. Saturday she slept for 2 hours in the morning, and maybe a couple 30 minute naps in the afternoon, but Sunday only 30 minute, maybe one 1 hour nap at one point. Trying to do some sleep training, tried the whole 1-2 hours of wakefulness only today, and that worked ok. She's still sleeping through most of the night, only getting up for 1 or at most 2 feedings. 4am seems to be a fairly regular wake up time for her. Been watching Warehouse 13 and Eureka via the Apple TV. Haven't really watched cable TV in a while. Kind of nice. Gets annoying going through commercials when I do. Actually going in to work tomorrow, and then have a baptism class in the evening. Weather's been pretty nice, haven't used our AC in the last couple of days, just opening up front and back doors to get nice airflow through the condo.

For those readers that have always wanted comments, well, you kind of have it. You can comment on prn.eric.abando.com, my storytlr site. I should probably back populate with Daily Doses and Musings. More stuff to talk about. Looking forward to hearing from the 2 of you. Going to work was interesting. They did construction in the office last week, so now it's a bunch of cubicles. Rather interesting cubicles too, not I guess cubes, but like triangular pods, with 2 people to a side. Should get nice and loud in there, with everyone on phones. Nice to see the people that are still around. Even met a couple new people. Didn't get to eat all the food I want to eat when I head down there, just McDonald's for breakfast and a chicken parmesan sandwich from Rivers To Go for lunch. No Cupcake Counter, Dunkin Donuts, or Specialty's. Thinking I might head down again next week to get my fill. Went to the baptism prep class at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel. Enlightening. Still have to pick a date though. Have to coordinate with the godparents. Class took a little longer than we expected, so we grabbed a quick bite at Chipotle before picking up Lucy from Grandma's and putting her to bed at home. I'm on night duty this week since Tracy's got the early shift.

So Lucy slept through the night last night. Guess who didn't? This guy. She started making some noise like she was going to wake up around 1am. So I sort of waited it out in bed, checking every 5 minutes or so when I thought I heard some movement. Around 1:30am I figured she was gonna get up soon, so might as well prep and give Tracy some peace and quiet, so I turned off the monitor, and went out to the living room to use her laptop to monitor and also to get the bottle ready. 2am, movement, but Lucy never opens her eyes. I'm still expecting her to get up. I finally call it quits at 3am, because even if she did move her arms, or grunt a little, or suck on her fingers, she didn't wake up. Until 7am. And she was all cute and cuddly and quiet when she woke up. No grumpy, cranky, crying for a bottle. Just chill. So weird. Like a completely different baby. Of course she was back to her normal self when I picked her up this evening. It was croissants day, so picked some up from Treasure Island for breakfast, along with a bunch of movies from Redbox. Been reading a bunch of Star Wars comics from a torrent I downloaded a long time ago, using CloudReader on the iPad. Plowed through the Thrawn Trilogy and Dark Empire and Dark Empire II. Found out I need to read Empire End to finish that trilogy. Comics on the iPad are great.

Congrats to Katie Gregory, nee Kelly, on providing the first comment. Made me go in a tweak the theme so it looks better. Speaking of which, Lucy slept through the night again. This time even earlier, from about 8pm to 5:30am. Trending? Of course we're throwing a monkey wrench into it all by taking her to Jason's wedding this weekend in Duluth. We'll see if she adjusts accordingly, or not. If so, she'll be better at taking environmental changes than her daddy. Tried to beat the storm this morning walking her over to Grandma's daycare. But got caught anyway about 3/4ths of the way there. Lucy stayed pretty dry, as the carseat/Bob combo has some pretty good hoods. Almost like a bubble. Went over for dinner as well. Oh, my mom had to go back to Woodstock for some errands, so my dad provided day care today. Did a pretty good job. Watched some Eureka tonight. Trying to do some work at night, but not really getting much done. Too tired. Had another affogato at home today for a snack. That's good stuff. But picking between that or a latte, well, I wanted both but figured that'd be a bad idea. A little too much caffeine.

Stayed up way too late last night, trying to finish up a project for work. First time actually doing ajax stuff. Current javascript libraries make it super easy. It's actually really cool. Could totally see how that simple tech makes the web a real app development arena. JQuery, in case you were wondering. Lucy slept through yet another night. That makes 3 in a row. I keep thinking it's a trick, and she's just lulling into this concept of full nights sleep, and then she'll turn around and say Gotcha, and go to up every 2 hours. I'm just waiting for that shoe to drop. I still get up anyway around 5-5:30, thinking she'll be waking up soon. I need to edit the movies that record her sleeping. It's pretty funny seeing her scoot around over the course of a night. Picked her up a little early today since my parents are jetting off to Poland for cousin Ron's wedding. And my family's getting ready for our first road trip together. Should be interesting trucking Lucy in the car all the way up to Duluth for Jason's wedding this weekend. Hopefully she won't be little miss cranky pants. Hopefully the trip won't screw up with her full nights sleeping trend. Hopefully.

Drove to Duluth on Friday for Jason's wedding on Saturday and back home on Sunday. Drove the whole thing, which actually wasn't bad at all. I even got to listen to NPR, which really is my preferred driving experience. Borrowed my dad's Lexus Hybrid SUVish, which was nice and smooth. And Lucy was a rock star on the way up, through the crazy weekend, but then not so much on the way home. I guess there's only so much she can take. She slept 5 hours before needing to make a first stop on the way up, then only 1 more about an hour out of Duluth. Ended up going straight to the rehearsal dinner at a pretty cool barn setup for those types of occasions. Tracy was a little disappointed that it wasn't an outdoor farm table dining experience. Still good food though. Tracy also matched my outfits to Lucy all weekend long. Photos coming shortly. Also Lucy got to meet her Uncle Alan for the first time at rehearsal. Thought she was going to fall off the sleeping through the night wagon, but even with the 9:30pm-10pm bedtimes, she still managed to sleep until 6:30 and 7:30 in the mornings. Of course her first night back at home, she got up at 1am and then at 6am. Oh well. And she made us stop 4 times on the way home, for feedings and changings. Duluth seems like a nice place, but it was a lot colder than I thought it'd be. Hopefully we dressed warm enough. Wedding was beautiful and Reception was fun, if a little wet from the rain. Great to see the Schanz's, and special thanks to Renee for holding Lucy so Tracy and I could have dinner at the reception. So it was a long weekend, and then Monday morning our internet's on the fritz, so Tracy has to go in to work, and I had to work late since it didn't actually come back up until 11:45 or so. Stupid Comcast. Now I'm looking at getting additional internet service just for our work machines. Trying to figure out if I can keep Comcast is we get AT&T U-Verse as well, or maybe just go cheaper with AT&T DSL.

Been pretty busy, and actually chose sleep over updating the last couple of nights. But I figure it's about time. Been having continued issues with Comcast. Tuesday it was down again, so Tracy had to go in, yet again, but a tech came out around noon, and actually found a problem: loose connection at the house junction and loose and leaky disconnected cable at the pole. After he fixed those, it was solid for the rest of the day and night. Except when I was getting ready for bed, and actually trying to update. There were more issues again, but not with the cable modem not having a signal, rather network issues somewhere upstream. But right before I went to bed, it was back up and running. When I checked in the morning while feeding Lucy, it was back to being unresponsive. And calling in to Comcast heard a message that they're doing network something that should be done by 5am; this was at 6:30am. But looking at their Network Health page and it wasn't displaying any outages. So Tracy went in again, and so did I, which was nice, because we had an all hands meeting and they provided coffee and donuts. So that was cool. And when I got home the AT&T DSL Modem had been delivered, so I set that up. So now we have a backup system, which hopefully is fast enough for us to work remotely, but at least we've finally got something. And it's a fairly low cost. So Today, Thursday, we both get to work from home, as the Comcast connection is nice and stable. But I've been pretty crazy busy with work. Lucy's still not back to sleeping through the night. We've got fruit flies again, so I've set up the trap again. Also got ants again, so put out another trap on Tracy's side of the office, and they've been eating away, so hopefully they'll all be gone by tomorrow. And I'll be in the office tomorrow and Monday. So I guess I get to eat more unhealthy stuff again.

Between Lucy and work, it's been pretty crazy. She's still not back to sleeping through the night, getting up at least once, maybe between 12:30am and 3:30am, maybe 4 or 4:30, but up again by 6:30am. One thing I finally figured out Sunday morning: she only likes feeding when you hold her on the left side of your body. Otherwise, she falls asleep, or cries so much she can't eat. Crazy. Annoying. The AT&T DSL came in handy when it looked like Comcast went down again, and Tracy was working on Sunday, so just switched her over to it. Worked pretty well, wasn't noticeably slower for her, so already worth it. Just have to set it up so we can just plug Comcast vs. AT&T easily. For the office anyway. The ant problem near the office seems to have gone away, guess the trap/bait did it's work. Also, Apple Cider vinegar for the fruit fly trap works like a charm, and haven't seen many of those anymore. Just the odd straggler. Being in the office is interesting. Not too shabby. However, I just got my work at home VPN issues worked out, so I'm missing having those dual screens, instead of the MacBook screen I'm working with now. Had Jespy over for the Air and Water show on Saturday. Ended up getting delivery ribs because we talked about it. After today, should be back at home for a while.

Wow, a whole week passes. So went in to work on Monday. And seems like I've been working a lot this past week, not to mention the previous weekend. And again probably this Sunday anyway. Combined with Lucy not sleeping through the night yet, it's been, well, a weird week. A couple times this week I'd get up for the nightime feeding and be unable to get back to bed, so start working at 4am. Seriously, crazy. I did finally upload photos from Jason & Wendy's wedding in Duluth to Lucy's Flickr finally. And might have talked Tracy into letting me get a new computer, strictly for photos. RAW processing on an underpowered machine over Remote Desktop is painfully slow. To the point that I don't look forward to it at all. FlickrStackr is a pretty good tool for Flickr uploading from the iPad, but then I can't get them over to the iPhone. And I have to use a different interface to get them to MobileMe. Tracy doesn't want another screen in the house, so she doesn't want an iMac, and would rather have me get a MacBook Pro. Since it'd be for photos, I'd only be happy with at least the 15", and I wouldn't want the 17" because it's too big. But I'd rather have a 21" iMac. So I made a cardboard size mockup so we could try and find a spot for it in the house. And we're hitting up an Apple Store this weekend so I can play with both to see if I could live with a bigger laptop instead. I could see how it could be in handy, but then again, that's one of my reasons for getting the iPad. Comcast finally seems pretty stable. We've had the "office" on DSL all week and it's been nice and rock solid, but I've missed my 20/4. Would be hard to give that up when switching to something else. Oh, joined Netflix again. Started Watching instantly, looking forward to watching via the Wii. It's really pretty useful. Oh, also tried setting up an additional Netgear Powerline AV Ethernet Adapter Kit XAVB101 set. But not working all that well on the master bedroom side of the condo. Seriously? I can't wait until I can run Cat 5e or 6 or fiber, just nice fat cable runs to all locations a real house. Been reading Scott Pilgrim, released as an eComic finally. Very cool.

Monday. First day of the week. And already it's pretty rough. Lucy's still not back to sleeping through the night. I'm wondering if she'll ever get back to that one week before we screwed it all up. She's eating more though, so maybe a full belly will keep her down for the night. Fingers crossed. So Saturday went to Oakbrook Center for some shopping, and stopped by the Apple Store to check out iMac and Macbook Pros, and it was crazy busy. I had to go in alone, couldn't bring in Tracy and Lucy in the stroller. Super crazy busy. Finally got Tracy an office chair for work. Put that together Sunday morning. Finally watched Avatar Saturday night. Also got the Netflix Wii Play instantly disc. That is amazing. Streaming video on demand? The future. It's here. Sunday went out to Orland Park for more shopping and to visit the in-laws, since they're leaving to visit Baniella for a while. Walked around the mall with Lucy in the Baby K'tan, which she loved. Much better than a carseat/stroller. She even managed a nap for a bit. That Apple Store was a little quieter, and managed to show Tracy that the 21" iMac wasn't that big, so she agreed, and I ordered it this morning. So hopefully that means quicker posting of videos and photos. On the ride back in yesterday Lucy cried the whole time. I'm guessing she's done with the carseat for a while. We need to give her a break from that.

So the other day, Tracy got invited to play Words with Friends by Lisa. Then I got it. And then I got hooked. And then I lost to Tracy 4 games in a row. Then I found a scrabble cheater website, and then I won the 5th game, and now I won't use the website again. And now I'm playing games against April and Lisa. Not cheating in those games either. And started doing crosswords again. Which is funny because I'm horrible at word games of any kind. So I fully expect to keep losing as long as I'm not cheating. Lucy still not sleeping through the night. Found out you get a return fee for bringing back Oberweis milk bottles back to Treasure Island. Also had a glass of chocolate milk with lunch. Made myself an english muffin ham, egg & cheese breakfast sandwich. Went over to my mom's for dinner (chicken, risotto, asparagus). Watched Eureka, My Boys, and some Netflix Coupling. When I update 2 days in a row, I run out of things to say.

New iMac (Mid 2010) shipped tonight. Yay. Last desktop Mac that was actually used as a desktop and not a server? I think a Cube. Seriously. Laptops ever since. Got my Twelve South Compass iPad Mobile Stand today. Really really useful. Got one for my mom too. More useful around the house than the Apple iPad Case. Tracy had the day off, so she took care of Lucy all day. They went to Green City Market and took a long walk back through the zoo and the parks. Ate leftovers for meals today. Tracy's working this weekend, so I've got Lucy duty all weekend. For work been playing with jQuery, which is pretty freakin' awesome. Seriously. Very very nice and smooth development. Very polished. Was working on it last night, and only wanted to nap on the couch, but ended up sleeping there for the night. Whoops.

So Lucy didn't get up for a feeding last night. I did get up multiple times to put get her pacifier back in her mouth, which seemed to quiet her down and put her back to sleep. Not sure if that was good or bad. Good for no feeding, bad because of the pacifier. Fingers crossed for tonight. I also ended up sleeping in the recliner in her room, and turning off the baby monitor and letting Tracy sleep some since she had Lucy all day. But otherwise, just another Thursday. Breakfast, lunch, dinner at mom's, working from home.

Seriously, work and Lucy are keeping me busy. Seriously busy. Even my internet consumption is decreasing. And that's really something. So my internet production is way off as well. Biggest news? We seriously started sleep training Lucy. Which means extinction. Which works. Saturday night she cried for 54 minutes. But then she pretty much slept through the night. Work up around 10pm and again around 12am, but no getting, just fuss a little, then back to sleeping. Sunday night only 28 minutes of crying, and sleeping through the night until 4am, and a little crying, sleeping, crying, sleeping. She seems pretty happy when we go get her in the morning, so she doesn't hate us. So that's good. Also we're putting her down around 6:30pm, instead of 8pm like before. But of course we did all these changes at the same time, so not sure what's the most effective change. Oh, and she's been getting up around 7am too. So that's plenty of sleep. Not that I took advantage of it at all this weekend. I stayed up working. Fun stuff, but still working. Loving Netflix Watch Instantly via the Wii. Plowing through Coupling and finished off Season 1 of Better Off Ted. Saturday night I stayed in and watched the sleeping baby and made cookies while Tracy went to a April's brother's homecoming party. Oh, I was on daddy daycare all weekend too. Managed to give Lucy a bath all by myself both days. She's turning into quite the splasher. Also made some fresh pasta for dinner on Saturday night. I think before I was using too much water. This time the dough was almost too dry to work with, but a couple times through the rollers and it worked out. Tracy made a nice fresh mushroom/butter/wine sauce. And we managed to eat dinner together.