Here are some pictures of the family together. We had so much fun doing these! Our photographer was Spencer Hall, he lives in our neighborhood. Let me know if you would like his information!
We had some family pictures taken on my birthday. We went with someone different this time to save a bit of money. He did great! We took these down at the BYU Arboretum, where the duck pond is. Kaisa loved feeding the ducks (until they got too close!) and running around with mommy and daddy. She is such a fun, energetic child and we love having her in our family!
…for a baby name, what did you think we were talking about? Fiona and I knew we would have a hard time choosing a boy name. We’re now 3 months away and barely closer to choosing a name than we were 6 months ago. So we’re opening it up to you, dear readers, to give us some feedback on a “short list” of names. We’re still open to other names with the following exceptions: Steven, Paul, Heath, Matthew, Linus (I know…I like it too, Fiona shot it down), Timothy, and Gabriel — which have all been shot down hard for various reasons. Leave other ideas in the comments.
There’s a poll on the right. You can choose up to two names. ‘Danger’ is under consideration for a middle name only and as such is not on the poll list. If you have strong feelings in this vote then it is in your best interest to encourage other like-minded people to vote as well. This poll is by no means final but it will hold a certain amount of sway in our thinking. Ok, maybe just my thinking. There may be another poll as we start to narrow down the choices.
This poll is scheduled to close at midnight November 30th. Thanks for your participation in Decision ‘08! Vote Early, Vote Often! Oh, and remember to vote in that other election too.
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. 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!
The most I can say right now is that I’m an aspiring early riser. I’m torn between the soft comfort of my bed and seeing the sun rise over the mountains (which I’m doing right now) and getting a jump on the day. Does anyone else have this dilemma? Did you resign yourself to one or the other? A couple months ago I committed to a morning routine…and it went really well, for about a week.
Today was a happy exception. Fiona’s pregnant and not feeling well, (no, that’s not the happy exception!) and woke me up early this morning (that’s not it either). She promptly went back to sleep. I got up, did a variation of that morning routine from oh so long ago, and made myself an omelet and a smoothie with so many strawberries that I tastes like I used half a bottle of grenadine. That’s a good thing.
Bloggers like Steve Pavlina, Leo Babauta, and Dumb Little Man have helped me a bit with the early rising but I’ve still got a ways to go. If you are one of those consistent early risers, what made you decide to do it? How did you commit? Or are you one of those people that naturally pop out of bed at civil twilight perky and productive? (We hate you). Thanks for your comments!
Many of you may have noticed that we were baby-free on Sunday at church. Actually, we were baby free most of the weekend! We took the weekend “off” from parenting and spent some quality time together as husband and wife for Mother’s Day.
A few months ago, we attended a timeshare sales presentation, and after listening to their shpeal for a few hours and saying no several times, they finally let us leave with our promised incentive…a certificate to spend a night for free at the Anniversary Inn. I put in a few date requests and we heard back that we would be staying on Mother’s Day. They booked us in one of their least popular suites, Jackson Hole, but our certificate said we could call the morning of the reservation and change to any available room, so we planned on trying our luck with that.
Saturday night we celebrated Mother’s Day at Nathan’s parents and had a nice dinner, cooked by the husbands. We opened gifts and played games, and left Kaisa there. Sunday morning I slept in and enjoyed the luxury of getting ready for church without any interruptions. I shaved my legs, painted my fingernails, and even curled my hair. It was wonderful! We were also able to call and change our room to the Presidential Suite, with a balcony overlooking SLC, a King-size Intelli-Gel bed, and a fireplace! We were pretty excited!
After church, we quickly grabbed dinner and packed, watched the Jazz win game #4, and headed for Salt Lake. We spent a wonderful, romantic evening together and reconnected with one another. It was fabulous!
On the way home Monday morning, Nathan says to me “we should do this once a quarter.” I thoroughly agree. I think it is so important for husbands and wives to take time for each other, away from the children, on a regular basis. We felt so invigorated and close to one another and I came into this week with a LOT more energy to take care of Kaisa and do all of the other things that are demanded of me. Thanks, babe, for a wonderful weekend!
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