Long week so far - meetings, dead hard drives in servers, no motivation - dealing with a lot on my plate here.
Found out also that pretty much everything I'd been planning as far as major projects go like replacing our servers with a VM/SAN setup is pretty much up in the air now. Budgets here are awful. Well, scratch that, ours was doing really well in our School at USC until they switched budget models back to the old one.
Used to be arbitrary budgets and then they went to Value Centered Management (VCM) because the University of Michgan (U of Awesome) did it successfully. Of course that's because they actually took input from faculty, staff and students first. Here we just said butts in the seats equals money and we'll tax you for all infrastructure things.
So, the School adjusts it's approach, starts some undergraduate programs, increases enrollment and bam - $1.5 million in the black again finally after years of struggling. Then the University switches back to the old model and takes it all. So, we have no idea how much we actually have this budget year yet. Pathetic.
Met Janna and Lisa at Flying Saucer for happy hour around 3:30 or so on Friday, been meaning to take some annual leave and get out of the office early one week anyway and this was a great week for it for all of us - seriously...
The not-so-fun part about staying out drinking on Friday evening is that Janna twisted my arm to show up at the dam and run Saturday morning. Too much beer and not enough sleep does not make for a very good run.
Funny that it ended up being a really nice run. It was nice and cool at 7:30am, a great breeze coming off the lake, felt great at the pace she set for the first 1.5 miles - then I pretty much was done. That's the part that just pisses me off. The dam is 1.8 miles each way and I had to walk most the way back. At least she showed up at 6:45am and had already run an out and back - supergirl that she is - so I didn't ruin most of her workout. Hopefully someday I'll get to the point where I can do that, but since early June it's been slow going on running.
I've been sticking to my 1.5 mile run to our community pool and back and I've yet to be able to run that without stopping. While what I can do has improved a lot in almost two months of running, it feels like baby steps.
This is a link to the sad result of that run Saturday morning:
So while I was running before walking at the very end it was around an 11 min/mile pace which is pretty bad. And the best I've set so far is a 10:42 pace. Supposedly from what I vaguely remember and what Randall said (who has a better memory than me) I used to run high 6's in high school for the mile. Now that was just for 1 mile, times go up for muliple miles of course - but still. haha.
Regardless, it was a really great way to spend a morning, it's a damn shame I hate mornings as much as I do... we'll see how it goes in the future.
Evan's been fun this weekend too, he's perfected the trick that he learned last weekend which is climbing up on the furniture. The number of places we have to put stuff where he can't get to it are slowly disappearing:
Thankfully much better than the first go-round when Evan brought it home from daycare last time. We all got very, very, very sick that time.
The last couple days have just been close to being really sick - knots in my stomach and just miserable.
So... what better time to try to break Evan of bottles, right? Yeah, that didn't go so well. He'll drink water and juice from a sippy cup real well and he'll drink milk or milk/formula mix from a bottle no problem - but noooo, heaven forbid he drinks milk from the sippy cup. Lots of crying, fussing, etc. Eventually just ended up giving him one bottle late in the afternoon so he at least gets something in him.
Not sure where that'll leave him for this upcoming week. We'll probably just bring bottles to daycare tomorrow and let them know how the first round of switching over went and see if they have any suggestions.
Had my best run so far tonight since I started back in early June and sadly it was the first time I've broken only the 11 min/mile mark. Have a long ways to go still before I'll be able to get that pace to something more decent. Going to have to get better about not having to stop a few times so that I can start going longer distances too.
Needed it after the day/week I've had - just way too much going on at work and not enough sleep to deal with it all. Amazing how getting 5 hours of sleep can make everything the next day that much more annoying.
Still, going to try to stick with the running for a while at least - I've dropped around 15-16 pounds since say late March, early April and I've got at least another 15-20 to go really.
Also, Evan discovered his tongue tonight - goofball.
Post #666 to my blog over the last 7+ years - should I just skip it?
Nah, superstitions are ridiculous anyway.
Was going to add to the end of the last big update about Evan's 1 year checkup but forgot. Everything went well and looked great, well visits sure beat sick visits and the last thing we need is yet another ear infection or something like that. In fact, if he has one more ear infection, esp. over the summer months, we're probably going to look at him getting tubes. Our pediatrician said 6 used to be the magic number but now it's more arbitrary. Since Evan was in daycare and not home and really young during the "worst" months of winter, his 7 or 8 he's had total (a couple were double ear infections at once) isn't crazy abnormal I guess. However this time of the year he shouldn't be getting them anymore really and he had one in mid-June again - so, one more and it's tube time.
Four shots from the nurse, 20 seconds of crying and an A+ checkup later, he's got the following specs right now:
Weight 21.38 lbs/29th %, Length 29.5"/42nd %, Head 18.25"/50th %. Little on the light side for weight but then again I saw 21.6lbs on the scale today so I'm not sure why they recorded 21.38.
There's hope he'll end up taller than his Daddy perhaps.
Like I said in my last post, life's felt really busy - but if I look back, we're still finding time to do things here and there. Biggest life type updates is that I've finally gotten a 4th person hired for our group at work so that's been a huge difference in workload there. It's really nice having an extra body around to take some of the issues that come in and it lets me worry about some of the stuff my real position should be handling now.
Even bigger on the work newsfront is that Christina now stays home all day, every day. No, no lottery winnings though I'm sure she feels about that lucky. One of her 3 groups that had 20% of her time hired her full time with the intention of her working completely from home. So, she owns my office now and is absolutely loving it. Not just being able to work from home but also the type of work she does for the group - it's pretty much strictly graphics design and web stuff, the fun stuff.
I still leave the house in the morning telling her to "Have a good day at home" - done out of pure jealousy, trust me! Biggest drawback to her working from home though is she's not downtown to go to lunch with the rest of us anymore.
Which means she's also missed out on going to the shooting range, something new that I've started doing occasionally. Dave had asked me a few times in the gym about going shooting and it sounded fun but we never got on the same page. Glad that Janna acted as the catalyst by wanting to go to cause it sure is fun. And after a 9mm, .38, .40, and .45 I have to say I like my co-worker Scott's .45 the best. Really hard trigger pull because it hasn't been used much, but my aim is much better with it than the others. Did take a couple pics the first time we went but now we're just more worried about shooting and getting better really:
I'm grouping pretty well at closer distances, but still not shooting anywhere near as well as Dave, though like he said he's probably gone through 10,000 rounds in his life now so it'll get better as we go.
So, it's late and there are bottles to be made for tomorrow. Rest will have to wait for the evil to subside and post #667 to get here.
We successfully raised a child from birth to 1-year-old. haha. Easier said than done, though we know we're very lucky with how good of a baby and how easy of a baby Evan has been this last year.
So, I guess this could be a semi-long update post, after all, I haven't really written anything about what's going on in quite some time. Few new photos and videos to link to along the way too of course. I think the biggest thing holding back this blog lately is that it takes a lot more effort to update this medium than facebook and of course having to pay for photo hosting too. Of course, it has its pros too which is why I've tried to continue it during the last year or so - easier to go back and read archives, able to post more details in a journal style than quick hits of short status updates, and the photo hosting doesn't compress the crap out of the images and take away the colors and sharpness like facebook does.
Of course, that means I have to find time to do this stuff and after a year you kind of get burned out somewhat - its not that we don't have some free time, he crashes at 6:30-7:00pm and has slept through the night for more than the last 6 months now VERY reliably. Just always seems like there's something else going on or by the time he finally does crash there's just no ambition to do much, haha.
But, the last couple months have been pretty active. Last I posted Evan was just starting to take some first steps and about a week after that he basically started running everywhere. He's climbing on the couches, standing up in his bouncy chair, runs around in the yard and has just been wild in general since. He is going to be quite the kid to keep up with in the years to come - all go and all energy.
Probably best to just start with a photo gallery - here's a good number of images from Evan's 10th and 11th months:
We've been trying to keep him occupied, I'm pretty sure he gets bored from time to time still hanging out in just our living room with his toys. We gated off the fun stuff and gated off the foyer and kitchen so he's in a pretty safe space for him to run but we still try to bring him out to do things. Got him a kiddy pool, we take him to our community pool, run around the yard and anywhere there are lots of people like the mall.
Also took him out for the first (and only, he's hard to keep up with) time on the boat:
Trip out there was kind of short - it has been a very hot summer so far here and he's a lot to keep up with - definitely not a sit still type of kid no matter where he's at it seems, even with a rockin' boat.
I know one of my Mom's staple sayings growing up was "Don't wish your life away", so when I say that I can't wait for Evan to be a little older (3-4 years old) so that we can go out and do more don't assume we're not enjoying what we have now. Every day is a riot lately - I seriously think Evan has laughed more in his life already than many kids do in their whole childhood. We've always got him rolling and belly laughing. He's just such a goofy, funny kid.
For instance, the other night, he got the biggest kick out of tipping over the ottoman in the living room. By the time I set up the camera and got him to do it again, he was laughing maybe half as hard as before, he was completely losing it at first:
Now that video was just from a few days ago, so I got a bit ahead of myself, it's just way too much fun to watch, lol. Have a good number of addtional videos of him too...
Getting his teeth brushed for the first time:
We figured now that he could walk we'd give him something to do and play with, so we brought down an exercise ball:
Of course who needs real toys when there are diaper boxes to play with:
A few weeks ago he also started learning to kiss things, trying to say "mwah":
I think I'll save more photo galleries and other stuff more about what Christina and I have been up to lately for another post later, been at this one for way too long as it is... maybe it won't even take a month or two this time, haha.
