Fiona, Kaisa & Nathan Judd

One of the many little funny conversations we have at the dinner table.

I pour the rest of the water from the pitcher into my glass.

Kaisa: All gah! (all gone)

Me: Thanks.  It’s nice to have someone to tell me when things are all gone.

Nathan: Yeah, you’re our little barometer of emptiness!

Kaisa: Yeah!

Shortly after this hilarious moment, we decided to count how many words Kaisa knows. Here’s what we came up with:

Mom, Dad, Grandma, Grandpa, Hi, Bye-Bye, Yeah, No, More, Please, Thank You, Happy, Pretty, Baby, Puppy, Blankie, Zebra, Bath, Water (Wa-Wa), Kitty, Hair, Eyes, Ears, Nose, Mouth, Eat, Outside, Up, Down, Ashes (sounds like something else!), Let Go, Look, Knock, Sticky, Stuck, Body, Melodie, All Done, All Gone, Go, Stop It, Hot, Push, Shoes, Book, Diaper, O.K., Mine, Shirt, Kaisa, Snack, Beep, Milk, Drink, Juice, Stairs, Yogurt, Cheese, Swimming (Wooshee)

59 words! There are probably more I can’t think of.  Keep in mind these are only words that she says voluntarily.  She understands and will say a lot more if asked.  That also doesn’t include animal sounds.  Isn’t she a smartie pants?

For those who may not have heard via text or word of mouth, we are having a boy!  We are all very excited and can’t wait to have our little boy here with us!  He is doing very well and everything looks normal.  He measured only two days bigger, so they won’t change my due date.  Now I just need to collect some little boy blankets & clothes!  Oh, and the biggest chore of all…Nathan and I have to agree on a boy’s name!  Wish us luck, we’re going to need it!

I can’t believe it’s finally here!  This week we are moving into our new townhome!

Tomorrow afternoon, we close on both of our contracts.  Then, on Tuesday, we will be painting our new house and moving lots of boxes that we have been packing.  I still have a lot of packing to do, too.  It’s amazing how much stuff fits in a small condo!  We also find out the gender of our sweet baby on Tuesday morning, so we’ll let everyone know via text and/or blog.  We also plan to buy a new washing machine on Tuesday.  Yay!

Wednesday, we will continue moving boxes and smaller things.  On Thursday afternoon/evening, we’ll have a rental truck and move all of our furniture and big stuff.  Thanks to our wonderful ward, we had 8 guys sign up to help us in church today!  It’s fun to move and stay in the same ward, then you don’t feel like you are asking a huge favor of people you’ll never see again. :)

I just want to say quickly that I am so appreciative of all of our friends and family who are helping us out this week.  I am super-stressed, but it really eases that stress knowing I don’t have to do this by myself.  I also want to tell those of our friends who are going through trials right now that we are praying for you and love you so much!

Kaisa and I got to take a trip to the Hogle Zoo (first time for both of us!) this morning, thanks to an amazing friend who scored us free passes!  (I have such a great group of friends in my ward that all have young kids Kaisa’s age.  We love to get together and do fun stuff!)  Here are some fun pictures of the trip.  Enjoy!

This lepoard was just pacing the glass over and over, watching the kids.  Here you see Kaisa’s little ponytail sticking up…she thought he was pretty cool.

I love the giraffes!  (It reminded me of the amazingly hot giraffe print handbag I recently ordered online that is on its way to my home right now!!)  Kaisa’s not sure what to think of them.

Their elephant exhibit was really quite nice!  I think it’s the best view of an elephant I’ve ever had at a zoo.  It probably helped that is was feeding time on a cool morning.

Here’s the really cool albino croc that Hogle Zoo prides itself on.  It was neat!

Kaisa stopped to check out the little baby croc.  Can you see it?

For the grand finale, Kaisa even got to take her first carousel ride!  I was so pleased with her…she was a little scared at first, but as soon as the horsey started going up and down, she was having all kinds of fun and shouting “wheee!”  Unfortunately, when I stepped away from her to take this picture, her fear returned, and as a result she doesn’t look too happy!

Overall, it was a fun-filled morning for all of us!

I suffered from a computer problem. No, I’m not talking about Computer Users anonymous (although if there was such a thing Fiona would freely admit me), I’m talking about the BSOD, Blue Screen of Death! I had a wake up call that could have been a lot more serious than it was. Don’t get me wrong, there were still casualties that couldn’t be recovered — Cousin Niki, I had 4 Gigs of video from your wedding that are still in a zip file on my backup drive that I haven’t been able to recover…I’m really, really sorry…and ‘Melodious NeverSeeYouAnymore-ious’, gone are your your TV recordings of So You Think You Can Dance and The Notebook…I didn’t try very hard to save them…sorry, but to a lesser extent.

My “backup” external hard drive wasn’t exempt from the BSOD fury either. I say ‘backup’ because I commited a cardinal sin of having a backup drive and fell prey to the vast tracts of space that it offered and used those tracts for my recorded TV shows. I ended up saving what I could, wiping the rest, reinstalling Windows, and then taking it in to the nice people at Computer Lane (crummy website, good service) to discover it was actually my RAM that had failed, but that it had obvious effects on the hard drives. Great excuse to get a new 1GB stick of RAM (and Best Buy was the cheapest, what will this world come to next?)

Here are some things that anyone with a computer should be do.

1. Run CheckDisk and Defrag often
2. Have multiple backups
3. Have an off-site backup

1 — Run checkdisk and defrag often. Okay, I’m really not sure that this will help a whole lot, but it definitely can’t hurt the overall health of your hard drive. Vista has an option to schedule defrag built in. With XP I’m told you can put defrag in a scheduler and have it done that way. I usually run it 2-4 times a month.

2 — Have multiple backups, especially of non-replaceable data like home videos, photos, and school/work projects. Those were the first things that made me sick to my stomach– wedding/birth/family videos, pictures of family (like grandparents not alive), and old photographs that have been scanned and digitized and I may have the only digital copies. Multiple means at least two, preferably 3 or even 4 isn’t neccesarily overdoing it. With as reletively cheap as hard drives are, external and otherwise, there’s no reason not to have at least one. Keeping it connected to the computer is okay too for automated backups. But what if the worst happens and the computer is detroyed in a fire or flood?

3 — Have an off-site backup. This never really crossed my mind because, being fairly young, I’m still invincible and that invincibility is obviously passed on to my electronics, rights? Maybe not. There’s several options here and more if you have nerdy friends that want to back up your stuff in exchange for backup up theirs. Although I do have very nerdy friends (thanks for the loan of one of your many extra hard drives Mark) I’ve been looking at Mozy and Carbonite. Both have pros and cons but I think I’ll end up going with Mozy for many reasons: I’ve heard great things about them, they’re local (in Utah, awesome billboard), they offer 2GB free storage (and I like companies that do stuff like that), I can pay monthly, and they have a ’set it and forget it’ mentality to data backup. Carbonite looks like an excellent choice as well and is quite comparable and slightly cheaper, but I don’t want my data to suffer possible hibernation sickness. Mozy and Carbonite are $60 and $50 a year respectively with slight price breaks with Mozy for paying upfront for a year.

And for the record…even with my limited backups, it’s taken well over a week to get things up and going again. What do you do to backup? Share your experiences!

I had a very strange thing happen to me last night.

I was sleeping deeply last night, and even dreaming, when I was awakened in the middle of the night to hearing my name called.  I literally heard someone shout “Fiona!” in a really urgent tone.  I lay wide awake and couldn’t shake the thought that I needed to go and check to make sure the doors and windows were shut.  I was a little scared at this point, and almost woke Nathan up to do it, but I bucked it up and went.  The back sliding door was shut and locked, but the kitchen window was slightly open.  I shut it, kicked on the AC (I was hot) and went back to bed.

I have no idea why that happened or if it was a prompting from the Holy Ghost (though I really felt at the time that it was).  I kept listening to see if there was someone lurking outside, but I didn’t hear much.  Just a few bumps here and there.  I figured it was the people above us.  But it’s nice to know that if we were in danger, the Holy Ghost was looking out for our family.