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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 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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Some of you may know that I’m a huge fan of LOST (thanks to Katie).  If you don’t, you do now.  I was sitting here trying to figure out a quick way to blog about the month of December as I know I don’t have time to blog as much as I should and I realized that numbers are pretty much a representation of how this month is for me.  So here comes the explanations:

• 2: The number of years Katie and I have been married (as of December 2, 2008).
• 12: The number of hours I am trying to work on average each day to earn some savings for possible unemployment come January 1, 2009.
• 15: Paisley’s age in months currently.
• 20: Katie’s age in years currently.
• 26: My age in years (as of yesterday).
• 75: The number of lightbulbs we replaced on our Candy Land tree in order to get one of the two missing strands of lights to work again this year.

I’ll take a quick moment to go over some of these in more details.  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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Katie has spent a lot of time teaching Paisley what “loves” (or “luvs” as I think of them due to some diaper company marketing I’m sure) are over the past several months.  “Luvs” are when we kiss Paisley on the cheek and then she returns the favor by leaning towards our cheek with a wide-open mouth so as to distribute as much slobber as possible amongst maximum surface-area on our face. Read the rest of this entry »

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