Fuzzymonk

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It has been a long time, I think twitter is bad for my blogging schedule.

Well, lets recap the last lots of weeks.

Leah went to Texas with her grandma, and returned with a strong command of family relationships. We can ask her questions like who is your Mommy’s Grandma or who is Grandma’s Mommy and she will nail them. I don’t think I had that good of an understanding until I was 12. She has explained in great detail about how she went on the black airplane in the sky with <whisper> grandma </whisper>.

Shortly after that, or was it before that, Kelly went to Boston for work. I think she was gone 3 days, but it felt like weeks. I had to reconfigure the morning routine so that I could handle it. I cannot deal with the complexities of getting the kids dressed, fed and in the car first thing in the morning.

Before things settled down from the first couple trips I ran of to RailsConf in Vegas. The fun part of this trip was convincing Kelly to come join me. Vegas is a much different place when you decidedly pace your self and try to relax. I am really glad that my coworker, Scott, and his wife were able to hang out with us for the weekend. That town is just too weird to be with out friends. It was a good trip, from the sad story of Monorail Pidgin to the joy that was Bouchon.

We’ve only been back a week now but I am going to be scooting off to San Francisco for WWDC in a week — poor wife. All this travel has Leah a little out of wack and I saved my longest trip for last. You know, to rub it in.

I was just helping our graphic deigner set up Rails on his shiny new mac, and was using the built in Ruby plus MacPorts for gettext and ICU. Everything was cake until ICU didn’t install, which was because it wasn’t looking for it in /opt/local.  So to fix this:

$ sudo gem install icu -- --with-icu-dir=/opt/local/

Headed home! Need sleep!

Laurence’s Very first tummy time

Leah helps with Tummy time

Look! Eyes!

Sleeping off the tummy time.

I’ve been trying to get everything organized recently. I tend to go through waves of hyper-organization to utter disregard to keeping track of stuff. Now that work is all over the place on a consistent basis I need to be consistently organized.

My problem is I am all over the place. I use outlook and my blackberry for work stuff, and out look is running on my mac in a VM. Personal stuff I use gmail and gcal, which is nicely integrated with my wife’s calendar (which is important, b/c she normally knows when I need to be places before I do). Personal Calendar and email stuff I integrate with the iCal through CalDav, and Mail.app hearts IMAP.

Laurence is gonna be here soon. Kelly is in full nesting mode. Work is a little panicky — gonna be an adventure!

IM from Kelly: “um, so leah’s mastery of door knobs means that the pantry isn’t safe anymore and that our downstairs now smells like thyme”

Guest Post by Kelly

So, we’re all pretty tired today after being out late last night for Colin Hay and we have to get up and out early tomorrow for one of my wonderful pregnancy mandated tests so we were talking about going to bed early. We even got Little Miss down a good 30 minutes before normal and were finishing our prep for a quick exit in the morning.

But then I suspected that Chris didn’t really want to go to bed so I had to save him from himself and find a plan that would keep him up, and ideally work him up so that he wouldn’t be able to sleep even once he finished dealing with whatever scheme I came up with. So like a good wife, I thought and thought for a few minutes and then settled on a brilliant plan.

Drywall. Plumbing. Ceiling. Leaks.

What more could a guy ask for?

Currently Chris is standing on step stool, cutting holes in our ceiling and occasionally asks for more buckets or towels. You see, about a week ago we discovered that our toilet was leaking so Chris turned off the water and drained it and planned to fix it when he had a moment to breathe. Then sometime between Friday and today the water got turned back on and left on so the toilet kept on leaking. Right into our living room ceiling. We’re hoping that one sheet of drywall will be big enough to replace everything he’s tearing down right now.

So, any of you project-savvy blog readers who are just itching for a home project to work on, have we got a fun one for you!

At least we’ve scored some tupperware, a grocery bag, and some assorted crap that we found between the ceiling and flooring.

Fun times at Fort Truxion!

What happens when you have 4 engineers gather for a tasty dinner? Pyrotechnics on a micro level.

I just spent the evening with a fully geeked out nerd fest, and it was a blast.

Kelly, Danny, Chris and I built match stick rockets.

Chris took the early lead with an impressive 12′10″ flight, which he shortly topped with 13′4″ jump. Danny stuck with the more experimental designs, but his gamble didn’t pay off, he had a mere 3 flights that got him off the table. I was able to manage one or two extra-table launches, but was getting no where until Kelly said she would pledge her undying love to the winner and this was my last attempt. Well, not willing to let the mother of my child go to another Chris, I wrapped the foil extra tight and had set the launch angle extra low. No one beleived it. 19′1″ and I get to keep my Wife’s love. Huzzah!

Next up, Caps robots.