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So… I think that Katie loves me. This past summer she made me an embroidered note expressing her love for me. Throughout the past three years she has always done randomly cute things and been insanely supportive of me. She’s been willing to move out east and leave her family in Arizona to help us work towards saving up to buy a house, and many other countless things I won’t list to save on time.

The one thing I will bother to list is that she gets to show me just how much she loves me for the next little while before life gets back to normal. For you see Katie is:

This means that for the next 9+ months she’ll need to remember just how much she loves me to off-set her remembering that I caused the morning sickness, food cravings, insanely heightened sense of smell (like seriously - super hero levels!), and random crying (Katie just doesn’t cry except when she’s pregnant).

We didn’t exactly expect it to happen in our first month of trying, so it kind of appears that Paisley is going to have a little brother or sister with a birthday almost the same time as hers (my iPhone apps predict a due date of 24 Sep. 2010 and Paisley’s birthdate was 25 Sep. 2007). Yay for close siblings!

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Katie left for Springfield, MO yesterday to go visit her friends at Red Velvet Art. I hope she comes back with lots of pictures!!! She ended up traveling on my favorite kind of planes (the small ones!):

Here’s a snapshot from FlightTrack when she was flying to her connection in Ohio:

Paisley didn’t cry the whole way home from the airport like she did when I left, but I think it helped that we walked Katie to security and had a chance to go back and forth a lot of times on the walking escalators (for lack of knowing what to actually call them). Distractions are a life saver with kids I swear. It has helped a lot this trip that Paisley already knows that “on a plane” means we’ll be back eventually. I’m sure Katie went through much more difficulty with Paisley than I did - so far she’s been pretty much normal for me (phew).

After dropping Katie off at the airport I started working on my weekend project: cleaning the house as much as possible. Unfortunately I was only able to get a few projects in before my body just shut down. Pretty sure I’ve got a little flu/cold going on this weekend :(

I was able to take Paisley out for dinner last night. We went to Hana Japanese Cuisine (one of my favorite local sushi shops). Paisley ate almost all of her miso soup (I was SO proud of her!):

And I devoured my sushi (as well as my seafood fried rice):

I woke up insanely exhausted and pretty much done nothing all day today. It took all my energy just to get outside so Paisley could play in the snow for her first time (and I’ll have you know that I _love_ snow - my Burton tattoo on my foot serves as proof). I don’t even think I’d go snowboarding today if I had the opportunity to go for free - I just feel crappy :(

On that note, to keep this short so I can put P down for a nap and probably take one myself, here’s the pictures from Paisley’s first time in the snow :)

And just some photos from throughout the day:

And a few special ones Paisley and I did just for Katie cause we miss her:

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Katie has had a busy week.  She’s had to deal with a financial roller coaster from a publisher, creating several felt fruit projects, mentally prepare for turning 21, take care of a very emotionally uncertain 17-month old, and discovered that her font was actually published along with her layout.  We also got to take some time and do things together as a family including a fun walk around the neighborhood. Read the rest of this entry »

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I thought that it might be time to give an update.  I have been very busy over with the agile evangelists at Integrum Technologies and have been loving every minute of all the things I’ve managed to absorb in the past few months.  My conversion to Rails has been drastically better than my past experience of learning other languages.  Within weeks I felt confident enough to start my own side projects and dive head-first into things that I used to wait months to fully understand how to do with previous conversions.

I have come to gain a very solid appreciation of AJAX, as long as it is done unobtrusively. I’ve also come to love the purpose and structure that a good MVC framework can provide.  I’ve come to swear by TextMate.  I can’t imagine managing a web project again without it.  I’ve found that pair programming provides amazing benefits that can never be guessed at until you’ve tried it yourself. I’ve found that my errors and refactoring due to pair programming have been exponentially improved and that my development style in general has become more efficent, more detailed, and more well-thought than in the past (in much less time).  I’ve also found that agile methodology as a method of software development just makes sense (for me at least).  Software (especially web based applications or sites) are constantly changing in their requirements, goals, needs, and acceptence criteria.  Agile methodology ties in perfectly with this dynamic lifestyle of software growth.

As to the other things that I’ve been up to, well I’ve started at least three side-projects Read the rest of this entry »

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As I woke up yesterday morning I was greeted to a loving wife who looked at me and said, “I’ll get her, you sleep in.  It’s Father’s Day.”  I had completely forgotten the occasion and was too tired (as I always am) to argue.  I gratefully rolled over and slept for another few hours while Katie took care of Paisley and let me sleep.

Katie made me a beautiful Father’s Day card from Paisley that was adorable.  I never could decide what I wanted for Father’s Day (seeing how the iPhone 3G doesn’t come out until July 11th).  Read the rest of this entry »

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