Bummer

All I saw on TV last night were warnings about an impending blizzard and strong pleas by the ticker to not drive on the roads unless an absolute emergency.  The blizzard was to expire around noon today.

This morning – nothing more than another inch of snow.

I went to bed anticipating “working” from home today, but alas, no.  Tied to my desk again.

Sigh.

Whew

What a couple weeks that was.  I finally got a major project done that had really consumed me the last couple weeks.  I’d been working on it since March and finally launched it yesterday – although I was still squashing bugs this afternoon.  The website www.spotlightradio.net is now live (thanks Emily D. – the design looks great!)

I really had to work overtime to get it launched by this weekend since the old site was hosted on servers that were going to be turned off on Monday.  Mission accomplished.  Now on to phase 2 and all the other projects that had been neglected.  Right after some vacation…

This week was a little rough.  Alex woke up a couple of different nights the past week.  Tuesday night Sara and I split time trying to get him back to sleep, but Sara caught a cold later in the week (maybe due to lack of sleep?) and when Alex did the same thing Thursday night, I stayed up with him … for 3 hours.  We tried eating more snack to see if he was hungry.  We tried turning up the heat.  We tried turning down the heat.  We tried some children’s benadryl.  We tried nights without medicine.

The worst was he wouldn’t let me leave the room.  I’d put him back in the crib and then hang out for a while until I thought he was sleeping.  Almost immediately after I left the room, he would wake up and bawl again.  Ugh.  Thursday night I even tried sleeping on the floor next to his crib for a while – hence the 3 hour thing.  But even then when I got up, he heard me.

Last night he did sleep through the whole night.  This time we tried no long sleeve PJ top.  Maybe he gets tangled and it wakes him up.  I hope we get this thing figured out soon because I can’t keep going on 3 hours of sleep every night.

He does have a cold, so maybe that has something to do with it.  Yea, everyone in this house is sick, except me.  I’ll probably come down with it the day we arrive in Florida.  We went to the doctor’s office this morning to get some more medicine for him to see if we can clear up his sinuses and cough before our trip.  The dr. did say there was some fluid in his ears.

So that’s what’s been going on with us.  Sorry for the lack of posts.  The time after Thanksgiving to Christmas always seems to be so crazy.

Little Bits

Last Thursday a 10-point buck walked up the sidewalk at our office.  I thought it might charge the front door.  That would have been sweet.  There are a lot of forest preserves not far from our site, so I guess it wandered over here.  When I saw it, I thought of Darrell.  Who needs a deer blind?

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Our office hosted an acoustic concert last Thursday night.  Andrew Peterson performed in our studios to a small crowd of about 60 people.  It was a really cool event.  We’re launching a new program called Under The Radar which showcases little known Christian artists as well as do interviews and special in-studio recordings.  This was the first one and I look forward to more events like this.

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Everyone in our department got new laptops and they arrived last week.  Now the fun task of transfering all files and settings and programs over to the new machine.  I’ve never been a big laptop fan since I the programs I use daily take up a lot of system resources and I need a lot of screen real-estate and keyboard comfort to do my job well.  But we have docking stations and external monitors, so that’ll help at the office.

I picked up a wireless router for the house so now we’re all 21st century. I have to admit, I did enjoy having the laptop on the counter to check my fantasy football scores throughout the day without needing to run down to the basement.

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Saturday night we went out to a dinner and had to get a new babysitter for Alex since Sheryl wasn’t available.  The report was he cried for a couple minutes but then had a wonderful time with her.  That was the first babysitter we’ve ever paid (with cash).  Not bad in 2 years.

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Sunday morning at church we took Alex into the service for the music worship part and then during the offering I brought him to the nursery.  He really loves the nursery now and has no problem being handed off.  It makes things easier now that he’s more comfortable there.

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We got some snow last night.  I haven’t finished arranging the garage yet to park both cars in, so I had to brush my car off.  I think this snowfall might be enough motivation for me.

We still haven’t figured out what we’re going to do when a large snowfall descends.  Do I get a snowplow for the whole alley or trust that one of the older neighbors has a way to clear it for us all?  Ugh.  Maybe we’ll just get a winter home in Palm Springs instead.  I have a laptop.

Updates

I suppose I should write something.

Sara’s work has request she put in 10 hour days until they are caught up on the new system that was installed.  It appears to be a horrible transition and idea and now the purchasing department has to clean it up.

My work is consuming me right now, too.  Just not enough hours in a day.

We didn’t do anything for Alex’s birthday.  He’s 2.  He’s not going to remember it.  Probably have to start doing something next year, but right now we can get away without the celebration.  We sang the song to him and he clapped along, but to him it was just another diddy.  “That was nice mommy and daddy, how about ‘Wheels on the bus’ now?”

When we’re not at church meetings during the week, I’ve been over helping Andrew with his basement.  The drywallers are going there today, so progress is being made rapidly.  We’ve been slowly moving things up into the attic.  Sara’s mom flies in tonight for a long weekend and we’re hoping to get a lot done Saturday morning.  My goal for the weekend is to be able to park the van in the garage for the first time … well ever.  It’s never been in the garage since we’ve owned it.  I hope it fits.

It looks like the warm weather is going to leave us today.  It was nice while it lasted.  We went to the Wheaton zoo last weekend for a short bit.  It’s so very nice to have that not too far away.  Alex can get close to the animals for a short while and then we can leave.  Free stuff is the best kind.

The election is over and while I don’t have anything to add about politics, I do have to express my amazement in the technology that was used in this campaign.  Obama used technology very well to advance his campaign from using Facebook and other social networks for promotion.  On Dish network at least there was a special channel just for his infomercial.  Anytime a commercial appeared on another station, the little info box would pop up and remind you to switch to that channel to learn more about his policies.

And then there was election night.  There was a channel called Current that I’d never heard of before, but they had a cool mash-up of internet and tv that displayed constant updates from Twitter and Digg as well as user-submitted videos.  A very neat idea.  And of course the hot thing to have at all the major networks was the touch screen monitors.  The best part was watching the analysts struggling to use them, though.

The most interesting technology was CNN’s “holograms.” (view it here)  Although they weren’t true holograms – which is an image projected into space.  Technically, these were tomograms according to this article.  The image was not before Wolf as the audience was made to believe, but rather superimposed using tv magic and Wolf was just talking at empty space (not much different than any other time)

It was interesting, but not Star Wars just yet.

Monday

After that busy week, this past Monday didn’t let up.  We started by doing CPR/AED training from 8:30 until 1:30.  Then I had a lunch meeting from 1:30 until 3:30.  Then we had a department meeting until the end of the day.  It was crazy.  I had a few 5 and 10 minute breaks inbetween things, but not very much time to catch my breath.

The cool thing though is that I’m now trained in CPR – something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.  I’ve had a big fear of not knowing what to do if Alex was choking.  I still have the fear that I’ll freeze up (me too, Lins), but I do have more confidence now after spending several hours practicing on manequins.  Good times.

Looking forward to adding another laminated card to my wallet.

Updates

Ever been so busy that you don’t want to do anything.  Me too … so I’ll blog instead.

Things have been so busy lately – at home and work.  Maybe that’s why I’m grinding and clenching my teeth so much while I sleep.  I need to see a dentist asap to get that looked at.  I’m waking up with pain in my jaw.

Let’s see … what have I been up to?  I finished the floor in the attic.  I’m especially proud of replacing the wall that supports the west dormer without having the dormer collapse on me.  Now we can start moving things out of the garage.  It’s been over two years since we’ve parked in our garage, so it’s time.  And with the bit of snowfall we got yesterday, it’s time to do it now.

Now we just need to find a weekend where we’re not swamped that we can do that.  The past few I’ve been helping Andrew prep his basement for contracters to come in.  We’ve been framing walls and boxing around pipes and such so the electrician and drywallers can come in and do their work in the unfinished areas.  They need to get that done quickly so they can put the house on the market soon.

This past Sunday we did have our annual pumpkin carving party at their house, so we took a break from the work to drink beer, eat pizza, and use knives.  Alex got to draw on his pumpkin this year.  We’re not ready to give him knives.

Then of course I was at that Internet Ministry Conference in Grand Rapids all last week.  Actually, I started out late last Monday.  Alex wasn’t feeling well – he had a fever the night before, so I opted to stay home in the morning.  Sara came home at about 1:30 and then I left.  It worked out well, because other than a bit of networking and team meeting, I didn’t miss out on anything.  I made it in time for the official kick-off dinner and opening keynote.

We were there until Thursday afternoon with almost our whole team (7 of us), so it was a good time.  The sessions were mediocre.  I gleamed some info from a couple here and there, but for the most part I felt like I could teach these sessions.  I should be careful what I say because this was the last year of this conference as the organization that puts it on is dissolving, so my boss is considering picking up the conference aspect.  There is a good market for it.  I don’t know of any other confernce that focuses soley on doing ministry on the internet.

We are already taking one of the other properties that Gospel Communications had: the reformed Christian blog ThinkChristian.net.  We’re going through all the logistics of that transition this week.  This is a site that already gets considerable more dailly traffic than any of our other sites, so the move has to be smooth.

So other than bland sessions, we did have great team building meetings every night.  Okay, we went out for drinks a lot – but business usually does get discussed to some point when you go out with coworkers.

Let’s see.  Closer to home, Alex did pretty well while I was away.  He’s getting more talkative and creative.  It’s fun to watch.  Here he was playing in the dining room on Sara’s old cell phone.

And he’s still a big copycat.

This past Sunday Cathi gave him an early birthday present.  She’s the devil.  (Darrell will be proud)

I’m not sure what’s he’s saying there.  Is it “beat?”  “box?”

He is starting to stick his tongue out a lot when he’s thinking hard.

He is also way into the movie “Over the Hedge” so in this last movie when he says “animals” he’s saying he wants to watch that movie.  I’ve tried to get him to watch a Disney film like “Finding Nemo”, but he’s not into that just yet.  He likes the variety of talking animals in this particular movie (raccoon, opossums, porcupines, squirrel, turtle, skunk, cats, dogs, and a bear)  It’s fun to watch him laugh at the jokes (usually the physical comedy), but he also wants to watch it way too much, so we often have to say no and distract him with something else.

It’s a fine line.  Sometimes it’s great for him to be able to sit still for a few minutes while we get something done (finish getting ready in the morning, clean up dinner, etc) instead of worrying what’s he’s getting into and breaking.  But at the same time, I don’t want the tv to be a babysitter.  Fortunately, he still has a healthy desire to go outside often – even when dad doesn’t want to because it’s so cold.