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13 June 2005
I'm back, after a long hiatus. As one might expect, a lot of things have taken place over the last eleven months (talk about lazy!). The biggest news is that our second daughter Mia was born on 20 March 2005. Unlike Amy, she's a hefty baby; she's not yet three months old, and already her weight is over half of Amy's (11.5 lbs vs 22 lbs). She had her first smile a few weeks ago (23 May) and since then is smiling regularly, usually in response to someone else smiling. Amy loves her sister dearly, but it was hard for her at first to get used to sharing Mommy. She's gotten more used to it now, although she still gets upset from time to time.
Meanwhile, Amy's speech has improved greatly. Although she's still behind for her age, she seems at least equal to some of the other kids in her Gymboree class. She's getting the hang of stringing together 4-5 word sentences, knows most of the alphabet (recognizes the letters), and can even count to ten.
Taking care of two kids is a lot harder than one. Mia doesn't get anywhere near the amount of attention that Amy did at that age, and Amy's not getting anywhere near the amount of attention that she's used to, and it's hard not to feel guilty about either of those, but what can you do.
The other big news is that after five long years, I've left Zentropy for a similar position much closer to home, at Homestore.com. Today is actually my first day and as might be expected, there isn't much for me to do, so here I am writing on the blog. It's a much larger company than ZP, with a really big tech department, so it's going to take a lot of getting used to being a small fish in a big pond. I'm also working on product development instead of client services, which is different, although code is essentially code, no matter where it goes.
25 July 2004
So I had taken two weeks off at the beginning of July, and I still didn't get around to writing anything in this blog. That's because I spent my entire vacation at home, working on the re-vamped JETAASC site. That work is still ongoing, and I'll get to it in a bit, but first the big news:
Amy said her first word! That's right, it was last night, and it was "Mama". She had been making the "ma" sounds for a bit, going "mamamamamama", but last night she made the sign for "Mommy" and then said distinctly, "Mama". It was pretty darn cool. Her first word was a little late compared to most babies, but she's apparently pretty advanced in other areas (she understands a lot of commands, is pretty good with a spoon for self-feeding), so it all evens out. Not that I was worried, since she was communicating just fine with us using signs and babbling different sounds ("dup" and "putt" were pretty common). We did schedule her to see an occupational therapist, however, since our pediatrician recommended it (her speech delays were more than 3 months behind) and my insurance was going to pay for it anyway, so we figured we might as well do it.
Besides speaking, she's been a social butterfly recently, going to a lot of birthday parties (six in six weeks). All of the other kids in her playgroup are older, turning two right about now, and in the younger playgroup, all the babies are right about one, so she kind of fits right in the middle. I'm not sure how much she enjoys the parties anyway because she's pretty shy and not a real mingler. So far at all the parties we just end up in a corner by ourselves while the other kids play, but she will probably get more social as she gets older.
Nancy is starting to organize herself for applying to CSU Channel Islands (in Camarillo) for a teaching credential. There's an informational session next week to get the details, but she's worried she'll have to take the GRE again, even though she already has a Master's degree. We'll see how that all goes.
So about the JETAASC site. I coded this thing four years ago as my very first dynamic PHP site, and they had been talking about getting a new design, but I just hadn't been able to do any work for them, having been swamped at work for the last few months. Fortunately for them, work on the Microsoft project trickled down in mid-June, so I was able to spare some time to start this (this still hasn't launched yet). My plan was to whack this thing out while I had the time, so I started that and worked through my vacation. At the office, work hasn't picked up yet, so I've been able to devote about half my time there to this thing. I'm redoing the entire site, including part of the database. One of the barriers to me working on the site before (in addition to the schedule) was that I just didn't want to deal with such crappy code. So I'm starting from near-scratch, just because I can, and because it will make my life easier when I have to do further upgrades in the future.
15 June 2004
We just had our first earthquake in the office building, and it was definitely a weird experience. Seeing as how we are in a "high-rise" (it's only 6 stories but apparently it's a few feet over the threshold to qualify), the building sits on rollers, so there's no sharp jerky motions, but instead a slow, undulating movement, not unlike being on a boat. Not so great for people who get seasick easily, however.
10 June 2004
Yeah, I know I don't have many readers of this blog, but I add an RSS feed, just because. I've been using SharpReader, a free RSS aggregator, and have been getting hooked on using it to read news feeds. I'm always rather disappointed when a blog I read doesn't have an RSS feed now (that means you, Josh Marshall).14 May 2004
As it turns out, working 7-4 makes it rather difficult to add to my blog. I'm busy at work and when I'm at home, I'm busy with Amy. The only time I've turned on the computer at home recently was to do this year's Camp Keepsake brochure for the Cancer Hope Foundation, which is still in progress. But the hours have worked out really well. It's very nice driving without traffic (at least on the way in), and I get a lot of stuff done in the morning before anyone can bother me, and I'm out the door while the sun's still up.
Amy walks about 90% of the time now. It's pretty funny when she gets near her destination and she doesn't slow down, but instead just runs into the wall/furniture/me to stop. At the last pediatrician's visit, we've discovered she gained over a pound and is now 17 lbs 9 oz, which is still below the third percentile for her age. Fifteen-and-a-half months and she's still wearing her size 6-9 month clothes.
She has become rather good at non-verbal communication (still hasn't said her first word yet) and she understands a lot of what we say to her, showing a remarkable capacity for learning new words. She recognizes some of the cats by name and even knows a few colors. It seems her brain development just grows by leaps and bounds every week.
Work-wise, we recently launched my GM Local Marketing Group (LMG) project. This is a set of almost 30 web sites for GM's dealer groups (e.g., Southern California Cadillac). The sites themselves are not particularly impressive (there's only 5-6 pages to each one) but there's a big administrative site (inaccessible to the public) that controls all the different LMG sites.
Right now, I'm in the middle of a big thing for Microsoft that we inherited from ZP-Minneapolis that's extremely complex and has a short delivery schedule, so we have almost the entire tech team on it plus a guy from Mpls. here in our office helping out. More news on this after we launch...
