Archive of <July> <2010> [reverse chronological]

9:42 PM Thursday, July 1, 2010
Feels like a Friday. Tracy's off tomorrow, so that's part of the reason why. Also picked up strawberry cream cheese croissants and chocolate frosted donuts for breakfast from Treasure Island after dropping Lucy off is morning. Feel like that's a Friday thing to do. Otherwise, working away. A little tired since I was on night feeding duty. Lucy took almost a full four ounces. Also, when she gets one of her arms free from the SwaddleMe, I tucked it back in. Seemed to work to keep her sleeping. Had a good meeting at work. Always nice to have one of those. Decided to go ahead and buy Eureka Season Pass for the upcoming fourth season and started picking up the remaining season 3 episodes I didn't have already. Also been buying and reading eComics. Right now using Comics for Kick-Ass and Wanted, Marvel for Runaways, DC for Sandman finally, even though Case raved about it in high school, and IDW for G.I. Joe. Been trying to hold myself back go only new issues once a week. But it's awesome. Wish I could get me some Scott Pilgrim. Think I might be spending a bit too much rough the iTunes Store.
10:53 PM Monday, July 5, 2010
I don't know how single parents do it. I was in charge of Lucy all weekend days while Tracy was working. I don't know how my mom does it. It's really hard. And tiring. Although me staying up late to rewire the AV Rack probably doesn't help any. But Lucy seems to be eating more, and interacting more, when she isn't eating or sleeping or crying about not eating and sleeping. So there's like 30 minutes or so there where she responds to stuff. Very cute. And something I should be getting on video. Tracy's much better at making the baby talk. I, of course, am much more reserved. Should strike a nice balance between the two of us. Saw the Cases this weekend, in town for Lisa's sister's graduation party. They came out on Friday afternoon/night, hang out with Lucy and Tracy who had the day off. Got to grill for the second time this year, and first time bringing out the sofa cushions for the deck. That was nice. And there's still so many spiders up there. It's seriously crazy. Like Arachnophobia the movie crazy. Went to dinner with them and Jespy and Missy and Espy's sister and family for Jespy's combined birthdays. Got to see my first iPhone 4. Couldn't check out FaceTime because no WiFi in the restaurant, and couldn't really browse to any websites to check the Retina Display because signal was bad in the restaurant. Also got to show off my iPad. Tit for tat. Left Lucy with the in-laws. Also saw Eclipse, and the theater wasn't even that packed. The rest of the weekend didn't leave the house. Got a Powerline ethernet adapter, which I'm using instead of Extending the network with the Airport Extreme to the living room. So much more stable. No idea if it's faster, but it never goes down. Tempted to get a couple more to use instead of the network extending I'm doing. Also, VPN to work is much more stable on my work machine, so I'm gonna try going back to that solely for work. Seems pretty solid tonight. Started rewatching Eureka from the beginning.
9:32 PM Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Really need to restock the pantry. With all the food we've been getting from my mom and others, haven't really needed to go grocery shopping at all, so now we don't even have any processed foods to eat, no dry goods, no canned meats, it's a little depressing. Healthy, but depressing. Wondering if anything's wrong with the wiring going into our condo. Landline's been on the fritz since Monday. Work's ok after resetting at the Network Interface Device, and I hope I'm not disconnecting anyone else's phone service in the building when I do that. But then it was staticky, and dropped out again. Then I could call, but the phone wouldn't ring, but I could pick it up and answer. So odd. And I misread the troubleshooting instructions and didn't bring a phone down to test from the NID. Maybe tomorrow. Otherwise, back to work. Got my mom's iPad today, and I still have to activate it and set it up to give it to her tomorrow.
TUP
10:13 PM Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Lucy's 2 month checkup went great. My mom came with, since Tracy was working, so at was nice. Lucy's a healthy 11 lbs., 3 oz and a nice long 23". So that's awesome. Everything continues to check out great. She even took her vaccines like a champ, 2 shots and one oral dose. Next up is the four month checkup in September. Only other news is that Bryan's in town for the week and crashing at the old place for a few days. Good to see him again. Only stipulation? He has to make us dinner. Including my mom. So that'll be awesome. Also looks like Tracy and I will get to go out Friday night to see Chuck at Piece. That should be rather interesting, and loud. Also supposed to go to Green City Market on Saturday with my parents. Really expecting either someone to recognize them or them to recognize a vendor since there's a few stalls out from our neck of e woods. It'll be amusing, it always is. I'm aware there's some doubling up of tweets on Lucy's website. I'd actually rather have her on a different service, as soon as I find out how to get Storytlr set back up.
11:21 PM Friday, July 9, 2010
Sorry, missed a day because I was too full last night. The only stipulation for Bryan crashing at the old place was that he had to cook us dinner, and that was Thursday night. He showed up around 11:30am, did prep work and cooked and cleaned, and left to run some errands around 3:30pm. Brisket was awesome. 2 hours on the grill, 4 hours to finish in the oven. A very good jicama salad, quite possible y my favorite dish of the night, and a spicy chipotle potato salad. Awesome. I still feel like my family came out ahead in this deal. Also had the Russells over, including Gavin, so that was interesting seeing how little our place is ready for a mobile baby. And of course, lots of baby related discussions going on. Very nice. Really nice. Family night. Friday i had a haircut, and my parents were nice enough to babysit Lucy for the night. So Tracy and I got to go out for a nice dinner at Feast, then over to Piece to see Chuck play. And got to see some old fiends, namely Joe Little and Kate Mazurek. Nice to see them and all the other ultimate related folks. But didn't stay out too late, since Chuck went on late, and the sound setup wasn't all that conducive to actually hearing all the parts of the band. But we ended up leaving at the same time as Chuck's family, about 2 songs in, so that's not that bad. Hitting up Green Ciy Market with my parents, and might try and make an appearance at Sandblast on Saturday. Got to use my iPad as I had inteded, RDP over VPN over 3G on the table at Piece. Super easy, fast and relatively unobtrusive. Random software rave: f.lux. It adjusts the temperature of the display based on time of day. I didn't think it would make that much of a difference. It does.
10:17 PM Monday, July 12, 2010
Saturday slept in, since Lucy was sleeping at Grandma's. Very nice. Can't wait until Lucy can sleep through the night. Hopefully sooner rather than later. Wandered down to Green City Market, but forgot a bottle for the formula we did bring to feed Lucy, so cut our stay short. We also went down pretty late, so it was picked over. Did manage to do some more work via 3G iPad And no one recognized my parents, and we didn't see any vendors from my old county. Disappointing. Stopped by Treasure Island for some foodstuffs, which Tracy didn't use until Sunday night. Managed to finish off most of the leftovers, and threw the rest that was molding out. Been watching a lot of Eureka, and some of the episodes that deal with the daughter of the sheriff, well, starts to hit a little close to home now. Sunday stayed at home, trying to get Lucy back on some semblance of a routine, but not sure if that happened. Monday back to work. Started doing my right foot exercises again since it's been acting up again in the mornings. Firure a week or two of that before I try running again. Been watching my bandwidth usage through the Comcast data usage tool. I'm actually a little worried about July, mostly I'm guessing because of the large iTunes Store purchases lately. Maybe I should hold off on the Mad Men seasonn4 HD pass. Or maybe not.
9:45 PM Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Just one of those days. Managed to figure out how to transcode movies taken with the GF1 via Handbrake to a format acceptable for iPhoto and thus syncing to the iPad and iPhones. So can finally start posting movies of Lucy too. Also finally tried to get storytlr back up and running locally so I can get Lucy.Abando.com transferred over. Will be nicer. Made a garbage and recycling run, i.e. took the bags down four flights of stairs. Good timing too since the recycling actually got picked up today. Went over to mom's for dinner, and she's making dinner tomorrow night since Tracy's on the night shift, and she also said she's making dinner on Thursday. It's really nice. And when we go over for dinner, we don't even have to do the dishes. Oh, finally got some Keen Coronado Sandals today, in black because the brindle is discontinued, and actually the style is probably discontinued as well since the official Keen site didn't even have them in rock, and sent me elsewhere. But now that I've got them, I wish I had gotten the brindles. My new favorite sandal, even though they really aren't sandals at all, more like holey shoes.
7:53 PM Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Didn't drop off Lucy this morning, instead got to pick her up and dinner from my mom's. Otherwise another Wednesday. I think I know why they discontinued the Keen Coronado Sandal, it rubs my left pinky toe knuckle raw. Figure I just need to callus up, and have no problems. Kind of hot out today. Played movies in the background while working. Different than when Tracy listens to the radio. Started with Predator, Real Genius, then moved to Running Man because of Arnold, then over to Demolition Man keeping in the theme of distopian futures. And plowing through more Eureka episodes. Made affogato today. Forgot how good plain vanilla ice cream can be. Oh, also got notice that AT&T U-verse is now available for us. Priced it out and cones out roughly equivalent to what we pay now, but probably slower internet service, maybe only upload though. Total Home DVR sounds pretty cool. But waiting and seeing on it for a bit. A little difficult to schedule a service switch since we both work from home.
10:05 PM Thursday, July 15, 2010
At some point since I started my Eureka marathon, Tracy got sucked in. She was slightly annoyed that I had started watching an episode without her. Kind of nice that she likes it now though. Slightly worried about my data usage for Comcast. Right now hallway through the month, we're about halfway through our 250 GB allotment. Which seems crazy, but I did get a bunch of HD episodes of Eureka and Mad Men on sale, and theres the $4.99 iTunes Store movie deals. Enough to make me contemplate AT&T U-verse since they supposedly don't have caps. And the crazy thing? All of it is data that I've purchased legally. So I'll be annoyed if they throttle us or something. Apple is having some sort of press conference tomorrow about the iPhone 4. Most people think it's about the antenna and signal issues, I'm actually hoping they pull a John Galt and withdraw from the market. What would we have if not for Apple and the iPhone? Every phone has a physical keyboard of some kind, and still using java applets. And maybe Android is the market leader, instead of appearing to be a follower. Maybe they'll have a lineup of current cell phones on the market and show how to hold all of them wrong. But just have to wait and see. How about FaceTime standard adoption? FaceTime client for Android? Managed to get storytlr up and running again. Need to figure out dns before rolling it out. Dinner at my mom's tonight. And on daddy duty for nighttime feedings last night and tonight, because of Traxy's work schedule. Now gotta update the iPad to 3.2.1 and the iPhone to 4.0.1.
9:05 PM Friday, July 16, 2010
Yay. Weekend. Another day working from home. Brought Lucy over to Grandma's. Totally spaced this morning though. I did the nightly feeding, and Tracy worked early this morning, so when I awoke and didn't see Tracy in bed, and Lucy crying a little in the baby monitor, I was a little out of it. Had another ham, egg & cheese English muffin for breakfast. Leftover lumpia and a meatloaf sandwich for lunch. Took off a little early from work to pick up Lucy and hit up Paciugo Gelato. Feels like it's been a while. Good stuff. Wish I could have lots of it, just go through like 2-3 piccolos, just getting up and getting another after finishing one. Tracy made pork and beans, at least her version of it: pork chops, caramelized onions, and green beans. Switched over DNS for abando.com to DynDNS. Means more control. Which is exciting. And probably need to look into cloud hosting again. Maybe EC2 again? But new lucy.abando.com should be going up shortly. Just have to make it look pretty. Hitting up Green City Market tomorrow, gonna try and go early. Maybe hit up Target too. Tracy works Sunday so I'm on Daddy duty. Thinking of making a Crisp run.
10:42 PM Monday, July 19, 2010
Back to the Green City Market Saturday morning. Didn't get my preferred parking spot in front of delightful pastries, but did get a spot on the magical stretch of Lincoln that is free, as far as we could tell. Went to delightful for breakfast and pastries, and didn't even realize I had left my man bag there when we went to the market until Tracy wanted to take some photos of Lucy. But they had it behind the counter, so no worries. Saw my first up close and personal viewing of aniPad in public; the lady at the next table over had one in an Apple case reading with breakfast. Went to Target afterwards and saw Megan and Tony there, because that's how we roll now. Leftovers for eating mostly. Walked down to Crisp with Lucy on Sunday afternoon to pick up some Seoul Sassy chicken. Yum. Otherwise hung out on daddy duty. Took a nice nap with Lucy on the recliner in her roon. Got storytlr all set up, you can check it out at prn.eric.abando.com, and will be switching lucy.abando.com to it as soon as I make it pretty enough. Also planning on posting some videos to YouTube via Lucy's account. Getting more footage since she's starting to smile, giggle, and laugh, and going and cooing too. Very very cool. Lucy hung out most of today as well on Tracy's day off, so that was nice while I was working.
9:08 PM Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Apparently time to go back on a diet/exercise/weight loss program. Tracy's getting serious, so time for me to support her in this endeavor. And it's something I should be doing anyway. So here comes some hunger induced irritability, some whining of soreness from exercise, and a decrease in talk about breakfast pastries and trips to Paciugo Gelato. Ugh. Not looking forward to it. I'm in for overnight Lucy feedings for the second night in a row. So after this means bedtime for me. I've been slacking on the Lucy website too, not quite keeping up with the updates or timely photo uploads, I'll blame the photo uploads on the fact that I can't upload RAW from the iPad after using the Apple Camera Connector Kit. of course, maybe I should start shooting RAW+JPEG, if all I'm looking for is speed of sharing, and I'm not even tinkering with the photos right now. I'd just get annoyed with the dupes on import to iPhoto. Oh well, guess I'll give it a shot. Next up for the new Lucy website is handling video. Gotta find an iOS friendly embed, then pick a service. Probably just go with YouTube.
11:05 PM Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Pointed lucy.abando.com to the storytlr version. I like it because it's actually timeline based on when things happened, like when Flickr photos were taken, not posted. Also going with Youtube for video posts, mostly because I found out how to make it iOS friendly. Which was necessary. I'd rather have gone with Vimeo, but embed didn't work automatically for iPhones and iPads. Next up is actually posting some videos, which requires some work in iMovie to edit some clips. Gonna be interesting to try it out via Remote Desktop. Would be nice if I had a fast and pretty iMac to do photo and video work on. Oh well. Tried out a new method for sleeping for Lucy, which didn't work out at all. Trying to get away from the SwaddleMe, but it just works. Maybe try over the weekend? Mom made dinner again, country ribs. Watched another episode of Eureka, and now I think anything we watch will be new for me.
9:57 PM Thursday, July 22, 2010
storytlr isn't updating via launchd on the Mac mini. That's annoying. Having to figure out what the problem is, making sure it's available, worrying about security issues. All annoying. But probably isn't a service out there that'll take care of those things yet allow unfettered accesss to the box. But if there was, I wonder what the pricing would be on it. Took a long lunch today and met up with Russell at Duke of Perth. I like that place, especially the quiet on a Thursday afternoon. Rode my bike down, and in a show of how out of shape I am, my legs are sore because of it. That's just sad. Picked up Lucy after work, stopped by Treasure Island, of which I am the foursquare mayor. Got to do the bedtime routine with Lucy, except she wasn't really into it at all. But she still falls asleep by 9. So we got that going for us. Skipped dinner because of the late and big lunch.
9:47 PM Monday, July 26, 2010
Go figure, I'm actually typing this up on my MacBook. Tracy's been using the iPad, or poop machine as we like to call it, to play games. Current addiction is Harbor Master. Wondering when she'll actually ask for her own. Starting to get so used to f.lux that I'm wishing the iPad had it too. It's super nice. Almost makes me sleeping working on the computers. Friday met up with David Morse for lunch down at Xoco. Good to see him. Brought back some churros for Tracy. Also was really hot out that day. Got some supplies from Amazon, 3 different shipments, 2 of coffee for the Keurig, 1 of stage 2 Born Free nipples. I think it was 2 different UPS trucks and 1 FedEx truck in the morning. All free shipment. And ordered on Wednesday. There was also that giant storm, really loud rain. Figured Green City Market would be muddy, and didn't want to drag Lucy though the rain and mud, so just walked down to Nettlehorst French Market. Weather cooperated, so ventured down Broadway, stopping at Radio Shack, Threadless and World Market before settling in at Wilde for lunch. Yummy Irish Breakfast. Just had leftovers for dinner. Sunday ventured out to the 'burbs for a BBQ at the in-laws. Wanted to do some shopping on the way out except Lucy wasn't very happy about it, so just ran in and got things at Babies 'R Us (Large SwaddleMe), Home Depot (keychain garage door opener), Dominick's (bread for bruschetta), and White Castle (lunch). Also been trying to figure out how to transcode the GF1 videos to a universal format for iPhone and iPad. Hasn't been easy. Very annoying even. I want to keep the home movies in iPhoto, which I think causes the problem, because the same movies imported to iTunes, sync and play no problem, but throw the "movie could not be played" error when synced through iPhoto. I probably should just edit them in iMovie, but it would be nice to have a quick little process to get them on the iOS devices for quick sharing. Finally vacuumed today. Been procrastinating on that for a while, but when we got home last night and Tracy immediately started sneezing and oozing snot, I figured it was time.
11:53 PM Tuesday, July 27, 2010
So we implemented a back only sleeping policy for Lucy, which mostly applies to Grandma's daycare, but also to ourselves. Apparently something we should have been enforcing all along. Especially hard because of how well she used to sleep on her tummy at Grandma's. Well, after laying down the rule on Monday morning, she really hasn't been sleeping much during the day, instead of the sleeping all the time like before. So besides trying to get her used to sleeping on her back again consistently, we're also starting to sleep train, or at least try to. Which we've been trying, or at least paying some attention to for a month or so. We try and have her last meal as close to bedtime as possible, which we think is currently 9pm. Last night she went down then and didn't wake up until 5am, which led to an actual argument between Tracy and I. Tracy thought I should have put Lucy back down after her feeding as if it was a night feeding, while I thought Lucy was done sleeping for the night, and it was her wake up time. Could go either way, especially since Lucy isn't all that scheduled right now. But Lucy's definitely looks more tired, seems crankier, fussier. Although it also seems like she's growing, longer. She actually feels like she's getting a little leaner. I've also taken to putting socks on her when her feet get cold. And the new SwaddleMe is still a little too big, so it's just as easy to get her arms free at some point in the night. Besides baby stuff, rented Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief and Hot Tub Time Machine from Redbox. First time in a while for that. Worked a lot today too, well into the night. Trying to also be a little better on snacking, and eating healthier. Helps there's no desserts in the house.
9:56 PM Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Spent pretty much all day thinking it was Thursday. But it wasn't. Didn't have to do nighttime feedings, or even morning feeding, since Tracy had the day off. So I got to sleep in, but because I didn't get to sleep until late, well, kind of wasted that bonus. Whoops. Summer's just flying by, when I realize that July ends this weekend. Crazy. Changed my haircut appointment to Friday instead of Sunday. Returned movies to Redbox. Didn't get a snack or a cookie or anything. I do get to have pastries for breakfast tomorrow. It's our once a week treat. Missing sweets a bit. Oh, installed Flipboard on the iPad today. Even though I don't have it personalized with Facebook and Twitter, it's still one of the coolest things ever. Seriously like living in the future. Magazine from online sources. From multiple online sources. Very slick. Something I'd actually want to pay for. Watched My Boys and Eureka. Both great shows. The flashbacks to NU dorm life? Funny stuff. Matches up with my timeline pretty well. Spot on. Tiny little backpack indeed. Also noticed I got defriended by Meghan on Facebook. That's funny. Amusing. No idea when that happened. Reminds me that I was also defriended by high school Rebecca. Odd that it was also timed with having kids. Weird. Not that I interact on Facebook at all. I just lurk there. That might be why. Oh well.
8:26 PM Thursday, July 29, 2010
Falling back into the bad habits of working better at night than during the day. Great for productivity, but don't think I'm supposed to be doing that. Love getting warm blueberry cream cheese croissants from Treasure Island. So good. Best I've had? Possibly. The ones from Specialty's, which I might have to get when I go in to work on Monday, those are more like danishes. Still good, but different. Random observation: I was a slow walker. I meander. Take my time. But after Lucy was born, I tend to be more direct, faster, purpose driven in my walking. It's odd. As far as I can tell having a child was the reason. I wonder why? Speaking of Lucy, she's getting marginally better at napping on her back. Up to 25 minutes even. On pillows in the play pen area. Looking forward to the unofficial weigh-in tomorrow, because she's definitely getting bigger. As for videos of her, I've decided to screw it and just make 2 copies, one for iPhones and one for iPads. Better than spending my time trying to figure out all the different x264 options to send to Handbrake to make it look good. And space is still relatively cheap. Also posted Lucy's first Youtube video. Shows up on her website according to date/time posted, not actual date/time of the video. So I'll have to adjust that after they get imported to Storytlr. Ended up just using iMovie to post it. Might do some editing to post others, but that takes effort. Had an affogato today at home. Good stuff. In-laws came in to scout out where they'll do the substitute daycare when my parents are out of town. Had dinner over there. Of course, didn't take any photos.
Archive of <July> <2010> [reverse chronological]