Fun moments with the baby..

So the last 7 weeks have shown Camila and I that having a baby doesn't mean the end of life as we know it. We've actually had several fun outings and moments with our baby. Here are some of them.

Two weeks ago we were Mary, Joseph, and Jesus, in a presentation for the kids in our church.

We pulled together our costumes using blankets, table runners, and scarves borrowed from a neighbor. I wasn't much of a Joseph, but Camila made a great Mary.






The week before that, in Church, we blessed Giovana. That's a religious ordinance in which the baby receives its name and a special blessing. Giovana was dressed in a special white dress, and looked like a little angel.





Later that afternoon, mom and baby got in a nap. Dad was too busy taking pictures..




Here are some fun faces of Giovana..
















This weekend we took Giovana to a ceramic shop and painted a coupla mugs. I managed to get Giovana's foot print in the bottom of my ice cream bowl. We also got her hands painted on the outsides.








For more pictures, click here.

2:30am Fire alarm

At 2:30 in the morning, I discovered that while this can't put out a fire...

.. it does an excellent job of putting out fire alarms!




For some reason I couldn't wrangle the cover off to stop it, so I just put it out of its misery..

Yup, more cuteness..

I'm now that guy, the one who thinks everything their new-born does is blog-worthy. Couldn't help throwing this one up... she's so dawgon adorable! Credit to Gramma who took it, she's visiting with us for the week to help out.

Sleeping like a baby

I can't remember the last time I slept like this.. Of course, my spine is not that flexible any more. But I'm talking about the restfull part.

My scariest cut

I've cut a lot of things over the years, with a lot of different types of saws. I've used various big saws to remodel my kitchen.










I used my mighty 17" reciprocating miter saw to cut my grandpa's casket lid in half (for more on that click here).











I used a scroll saw to make the drawer and closet handles for Giovana's room.














But yesterday I made the scariest, most nerve-wracking cut in my cutting-history...




I used this

to cut these






off of this




Never been more nervous about a cut in my life! Fortunately all went well, and baby and fingers are fine. Dad is a little spent, though.

We had our baby!!!

8 lbs 9 oz, 20 inches long, and 3 count 'em 3 hours of pushing!

All of it, of course, worth the effort. She was born yesterday (Monday the 2nd) at 7:48am. She was born 2 weeks prior to our official due date, but has no signs whatsoever of being a preemie. Er, the 8lbs 9oz says it all. Camila's new least-favorite word? "Push!!!"

From Giovana's Birth

We weren't supposed to deliver until the 17th, but Sunday we hadn't felt the baby kick so we headed to the hospital to check it out. I remember our conversation on the drive to the hospital. It went something like this:

"You know, we should probably finish packing our hospital bags so we're ready when this thing happens for real."

"I agree. Let's do that after we get home this afternoon."


Well, when we got there the doctor diagnosed Camila with Preeclampsia which is a very serious condition that can only be cured by child-birth. Also serious because the mother feels fine, until symptoms like seizures and death happen. So they admitted Camila immediately and started her on labor-inducing procedures. So much for packing hospital bags. By 3am, Camila's water broke and she was in full labor. At 5am we started pushing. At 7:48 our baby was born. And at 8am our OB showed up to deliver our placenta. Wasn't that nice of him?


Here's some footage of some of mom's first moments with our new Baby.




And here's Dad and baby...





We're all doing fine at the moment. Dad is a bit of a zombie. As of this writing we're crashed at the hospital, all 3 of us wiped out from a night of delivery. We're sooooooooo grateful to all the support, text, calls, and emails we've gotten from our family and friends.

Thank you!!

Released from my calling

I remember when I got called to teach the Sunbeams (3-year olds) at church, my reaction was, and I quote:

"Uhg... Are you serious?"

I think I only said that inside my head. But I did say it. And I'll be honest, the first coupla weeks were a difficult adjustment. I had 9 kids in my class, and all I saw at first were 9 little babysitting responsibilities. My heart was not in the right place.

But after almost a year of teaching these 9 kids, my attitude has changed 180 degrees. Now I only see 9 little bundles of love and goodness.. Sounds cheezy and cliche I know, and I never imagined myself feeling that way in the beginning. But these kids grew on me quickly.

Two weeks ago I was released from my calling. Yesterday was my last time teaching them, and I have to say, I was a bit choked up when I got them all together to take this picture.

I think I grew more than they did!

A bloggable weekend

Our weekend has inspired me to want to start blogging again. I miss posting updates. This weekend gave me some good material to work with.

It started with a baby shower for Giovana, thrown by some of the women in our ward. Way to go ladies! They showered Camila (and Giovana) with gifts, goodies, and made her feel special. We both appreciate all the hard work that went into it!

Giovana's baby shower

From Our notable Weekend

Then Saturday morning we were joined for breakfast by this little friend. I'm assuming she's an early arrival for our halloween party next weekend. Up close she's very scary. I broke out the camera and had some fun shooting her. She seemed to enjoy the attention.



These pictures are intense. You should click on them to see them in a larger resolution. Be sure to use the zoom feature (look for a magnifying glass) to see the details.






Here she's demostrating how eerie she can look crawling over the edge of something. We talked about giving her a feature role in our spook alley. But I'm concerned she'll get stepped on..




Click on any of these amazing pictures to be able to zoom. The clarity and detail are incredible. My camera does an amazing job with the macro setting.








Okay okay. So spider photo shoots is fortunately NOT the most exciting thing we do in a weekend. We sometimes go out (emphasis on 'sometimes'). This weekend we joined our good friend Kraig Hiersche for a night at the Dublin pub to listen to live music by the Sessions, with guests 'the Betties'. Two hot bands, I loved it. I haven't been out for live music in a loong time. These guys seriously rocked!




A great weekend.

We're pregnant!

So first let me appologize for my long web absence.. I haven't dropped off the earth. To the contrary, I've been sort of glued to it more than I'd like these days. But midst all that's going on, Camila and I have some most excellent news...


We're pregnant!!



We're thrilled, as you can imagine. We're 12 weeks along and had our first OB appt on Monday. They don't usually do ultrasounds that early, but the doctor couldn't get a heartbeat on the audio so he broke out the ultrasound and gave us a quick peek at our little organism. I was surprised at how much it moved around. Of course at this point there is a lot of room in there so Camila isn't feeling any of the comotion.

Here are the first peeks at our little "squishy".

Here he looks like he's just laying in the sun soaking up some rays...

From Our baby

Here the doc got a face pic, and if you ask me our squishy looks like donald duck!

Cool wearable technology

I don't usually blog about new technologies but this one had me cheering. Definitely worth your 8 minutes to watch..

Violence, violence, violence

I'm a huge fan of 24, so believe me when I say I'm not judging anyone with this post. I'm just concerned. My TV watching habits aren't as controlled as you DVR-ers who record everything and watch what you want, when you want. I usually end up taking in an hour, maybe two, of whatever is on when I have time for TV.

Last night, between 24 and Medium, in 2 hours I saw 2 count 'em 2 people get their throat slit, one was a young girl. I saw a stabbing. I saw lots of people get shot, one was an innocent man, at point blank, in the head. I saw the gooey remains of an innocent family that had been dissolved by acid in an industrial kitchen so the killer could hide the fact that he had kidnapped their teen daughter for a sex toy.


Uh, dude.



There are a myriad of crime shows on TV, and they try to one-up each other, and even themselves, with new, twisted, even-grosser-than-last-week violence. I've heard people say that TV is a reflection of reality. Is that true? Do you agree with that?

Last year Camila and I spent 3 days in Rome, walking the grounds of what was once the greatest and bloodiest empires in the world. The theme that kept coming up in discussions with tour guides and literature, was the insane blood-lust of the people. They gave us gladiators and the Colosseum. I remember being appalled at some of the stories we heard, wondering what it takes for a civilization to crave that kind of violence.

Then last night, after 2 hours of television, I asked myself how much different we are from them. Oh sure, we just watch fake murder, rape, torture, you-name-it on TV. We wouldn't ever be so de-sensitized to actually do those things.

Right?


Perhaps not individually. But when you consider our society as a whole, the answer changes.

For example, moments after Medium ended, I caught the 30-second intro to the nightly news before turning off the TV and heading to bed. Guess what? Top stories were about, you guessed it: rape, murder, a gang-beating of a girl by other girls, a crack-mother killed her daughter. Two guys caught for murdering an elderly man in his home for money. Another sex offender violated parole by exposing himself to some school kids. All right here in Portland.


So even though I'm not going to go melt a family and steal their daughter for a sex toy, I live in and walk the streets of a society that seems to be keeping pace with the level of violence on TV.

THAT folks, is my cause for concern.

Worth a laugh..

Okay you want comedy? This is pretty funny, it's me attempting a jump at Timberline ski resort yesterday. My buddy Peter was kind enough to film this "for posterity sake" he said.

Green remodel - day 34

So, it turns out that removing a wall takes longer than I thought. (Don't those sound like famous last words???)

I sized up the wall and estimated it would take about 3 days to get it out and the new schtuff framed in..


HA! ..what was I thinking?


Well here I am 3 weeks later on day 35 of the remodel, and the new wall is taking shape. There is still more work before it is declared done, but we're close now. And we're only into it $680. At the end of the post is a list of our expenses.

At the end of my last kitchen post, I showed these two pictures to give you an idea of what was next:





Well, here is a photo-rama that shows our progress as it took place. And when I say "our", I mean Camila helped too. Turns out she enjoys demolition work, and she did all the bullnose corners on the new sheetrock!


First we demo'd out the wall, removing the sheetrock, and rerouting the electrical that was in the wall.







I then strung new headers, supported by the two pillars that will come up out of the island. This wall was load-bearing so I had to make sure the headers were both strong enough for the load, and met code. I made the headers out of 2 2x8's separated by 1/2-inch plywood, all glued together with liquid nails, and then secured with 3 1/2-inch nails.

Believe it or not, all the 2x4s that came out of this wall were re-used in the construction of the new one. I didn't have to buy a single piece of lumber except for the header and arches, and I don't have a single left-over 2x4.




Here I hired two professional models to pose as if they were actually doing work, so that I could take some construction-in-action shots.




Next I cut out the arches from plywood. I was really impressed that I was actually able to use my Google Sketchup design to figure out the radius of the curves, to within 3/4ths of an inch. Pretty impressive. After I got the radius, I created a makeshift compass using a chewing gum wrapper. Okay, maybe not that McGuiver-ish, but close..











After we got everything framed in, we tackled my least favorite part: SHEETROCK!! Those bullnose corners are all the work of my very-handy wife.





Even worse than sheetrock, is mudding sheetrock. The upside is that you can hide all your horrible mistakes that you made hanging the sheetrock.





Of course the best part of sheetrocking is being done with it all!! Which we almost are. Next is finishing the island, countertops, and flooring.

To wrap it up, here are two images to compare. How do you think it's coming?






This is a current list of expenses that is up-to-date as of today.

My new job

I started my new job this week, and am pretty excited about it. Day 1 was a thumbs up.

I've gone back to work at a company I worked for 3 years ago, Corillian. That was their name when I worked there before. They've since been purchased by a competitor named CheckFree, who was then purchased by a big industry conglomerate named Fiserv ("FI" is an acronym for "financial institution". These companies all provide services and software to support the banking industry.)


So get this.. In orientation yesterday it was explained to me thusly:

I work for Checkfree.


But, because they will soon be absorbed into their new parent company FIserv, we identify ourselves as Check-free-now-a-part-of-Fiserv. And that's how I have to answer the phone.


But, my paychecks and taxes etc are all handled through Corillian.


So go figure.


I'm just excited that I have a job that I enjoy. When I left Corillian 3 years ago I was transitioning my career away from QA, which I had done for over 12 years, into a new area of technology called "configuration management" aka "release management" aka "build automation engineering".

It's weird going back to an old employer. I've only done it one other time at Nike. But Nike is so huge that I didn't go back to anything familiar, I worked in a completely different part of the company. But when I started talking with Corillian-now-Checkfree-now-a-part-of-FIserv about the position, it felt like a perfect fit for me. They brought me in to fill a much-needed role in my new area of expertise.

My title is Software Configuration Manager.


With all the bad news about the economy and all the lay-offs happening right now, I feel very blessed to have found such a great job.

Green remodel - day 14

We've been trying to get as much done as possible before I start work tomorrow, so I haven't had time to keep my blog current. We've been working 12+ hour days on this for the last week or more. Here's a little photo update though.

First I finished moving all our cabinets into their new places, and building some that we needed. Then I turned our entire kitchen into a huge paint booth, and donned my spray-paint gear.





The sprayer was borrowed from a buddy of mine. There's nothing special about it, in fact when I picked it up I was.. 'surprised' by how simple it was. I thought it would be more, well, heavy duty. But it did an amazing job. I had to add water to the paint to get it to spray smoothly. The finished product exceded my expectations.


Here's Camila (in her lounge-around-on-Sunday clothes) breaking in our new kitchen. Of course by "new" I mean what's done so far. There's still the floor, walls, ceiling, and counter-tops left to do. And where are all the cabinet doors you don't see?? They're drying an extra day before I hang them.



We went with my buddy Will's suggestion to swap the stove and the dishwasher locations in my Sketchup model to keep the "working triangle" smaller. It was less work for me, since the dishwasher didn't have to move. Also the stove has a small amount of counter space on both sides, as you can see in the photo above. If I had put the stove where the dishwasher is, it wouldn't have had any counter-space on the right side.

..and FYI, moving the stove to it's new location 10' away was not cheap. I had to run a whole new circuit to the breaker box in the garage because the old circuit used aluminum 3-wire (no longer code). I spent $67 on new copper 4-wire. Then of course I had to upgrade the outlet and pigtail to accomodate the new wire configuration: another $35. So.....

New stove wiring: $67
New outlet and pigtail: $35
Wife loving the layout of her new kitchen?

You guessed it... "priceless"



Here's another angle of the kitchen, that shows where our "breakfast nook" used to be. The window trim has been updated to match the style we've done in other parts of the house. And if you look at the cabinet on the right, next to the stove, we actually bought that at the Rebuilding Center for $10. The doors match our doors and it was a perfect fit for that side of the stove!




I added crown molding to the tops of all the cabinets as you can see below. For you home do-it-yourselfers who want to install crown molding, rather than waste time twisting your molding around in the air trying to figure out how to cut the correct angle on your miter saw, click here and follow Dewalt's instructions. They have a great article on how to cut crown molding.





And since I'm way into aesthetics, I added outlets above all the cabinets, and tied them to a light switch on either end of the kitchen. That way I could plug low voltage lights into them and have some cool mood lighting. This was something I couldn't do when the soffets were still in place.. (evil soffets!)





And finally just a note, since I'm sorta proud of myself on this one.....

I made yes made these cabinets. The doors were reused from other cabinets that I removed. The one on the left side came from a corner cabinet that we removed (where the stove is now), and the one on the right was a wall cabinet in its previous life. As mentioned above I had to make some cabinets, these are them.





So what's next?
Now that we've removed all the cabinets and appliances from this wall that currently divides the kitchen from the living room, we can remove it and install the cabinets you see there as an island. I've pasted the before and after pics so you can visualize with me..

Green remodel - day 4

Today I tackled more electrical hibby-jib, and I got sheet rock over the holes left where I removed the sauffets. I hate the electrical work, it means being up in the attic. But on the bright side (no pun intended), I got my light switches done for the kitchen area. Including an extra set for outlets above the cabinets, which I installed, where we'll plug in low-voltage lighting. There are still a few more (annoying) tasks to be completely done with electrical, most notably the stove. Uhg...

I also moved two recessed lights further away from the cabinets. I installed them last year and they were well placed before I moved the cabinets. Now though, they are too close to the cabinets and cast shadows I don't like. So I moved them, which of course means that I get to cap the holes... Uhg.



Over the next few days I'm going to focus on getting the cabinets ready to paint, so we can move Camila back into her kitchen.

Green remodel - day 3

No pics today. Spent the better part of 10 hours working in the attic to install new wiring, and reroute existing wiring out of the walls that will be removed. 10 minutes in that attic is a huge pain in the butTOCKS, let alone 10 hours. Hated it! This was one of those experiences that I've blogged about before, here, where something I didn't foresee took over my whole day, chewed me up, spit me out, and made some demeaning comment about my momma.

Doug if you're reading this, thanks for taking my many calls and your very helpful "technical support"!

Green remodel - day 2

Day 2, still demolition, was more arduous than I anticipated and I accomplished about 1/3rd of what I wanted to do. But I conquered (yes I said conquered) the sauffets in the kitchen. The "arduous" part was because I discovered that they were actual structures of the ceiling. I thought they were built after the ceiling and attached to it, and would be relatively easy to remove. But as you can see below, they left behind some gaping holes. Thank goodness for sledge hammers!!




I also started working on a new set of floor cabinets for next to the fridge. I'm making them from other cabinets that I won't be using. For example, in the picture below you see what used to be the lazy suzan corner cabinet in our U-shaped kitchen. I've stripped down all but the facia and the sides, and will fashion a new cabinet from it. Using that plus what used to be a wall-mounted one (sitting in the background of the pic), I'll have 42 inches of cabinets for next to the fridge.

We ripped this corner cabinet out because Camila hates the little garage thingy at the bottom. I'm going to cut it off and reinstall the upper portion of the cabinet. This cabinet sits next to the sink, and you can see that over the years, water that got on the countertops has already started to rot the wood, so this was a good move.

Kitchen remodel expenses

This spreadsheet keeps a running total of my expenses relating to the remodel. I've chosen to exclude tool purchases, since I'll use them on future projects. However, I will include tool incidentals, like blades or bits, etc.

Green remodel - day 1

Day one involved yanking the cabinets that are either going to be moved, or simply removed, and putting them in their new locations. The kitchen is now destroyed, but believe it or not, still functional. Everything works, it's all just a little hard to get to. And all the counterspace is still available too, just most of it is now moveable. That was part of the plan, to do the remodel in such a way that, except for dust, there would be very little interruption to kitchen usage.

This image shows the wall that will be removed, now missing most of its cabinets.




The cabinets shown above have been relocated to the wall here at the end of the kitchen. I can't tell you how much I enjoyed ripping down that smug little banister railing at the top of the cabinets above the fridge!!







I'm even reusing the screws from the original cabinet installation. So far my $$ investment is zero. Of course I haven't done much yet. Tomorrow I'll be installing the electrical and water hookups into the wall where the fridge is going. I'll also try to get the ceiling lights and their respective switches relocated. The lights were centered over the area that now has cabinets. With the cabinets in place they cast large shadows (which you can see in the picture above) and need to be moved toward the center of the kitchen. The switches now sit on the wall that will be removed, so they need to be located on the other side of the kitchen entry. If I have time after all that I'll shoot to remove the sauffets over the sink, and start tearing into the sheetrock that covers the wall that will be removed.