Sure don’t want to jinx anything, but it looks like the three of us might actually be healthy. We’ve had a strange few months where we’ve alternately have been sick with either colds or the flu. Axel had a pretty rough time a couple of weeks ago with a bad stomach virus of one flavor or another. One where he seemed to be better after a day or so, only to get a lot worse the next day. We ended up taking him to the doctor who prescribed some nausea medication. Of course, Maren and I caught some diluted form of whatever he had the following weekend.

We do seem to be on the mend now though and Axel is back to his happy self.

I recently bought him a Thomas the Tank Engine play set. This may have been a mistake as he’s fairly engrossed in his trains now. This morning after getting up, I handed him over to Maren, who he usually wants immediately in the morning, but after a second or two he wanted down and sprinted into the play room to find his trains.

A bunch more pictures have been added to the gallery.

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Wow.. 4 posts in all of 2006. I knew it was bad, but I didn’t think it was that bad. At least Maren has decided that she wants to know how to post stuff herself, so maybe there will be more frequent updating of the site this year.

So, what’s happened since last August. Well, in September we had Axel’s first birthday party, which was a lot of fun. Many of our friends and family came out to the new house to celebrate. Axel had fun being the center of attention and actually did finally eat some of his apple cupcake we made for him.

The holidays were good this year. Thanksgiving was at our house, which may be becoming an annual event. I actually don’t mind cooking Thanksgiving dinner and this year the turkey came out about as well as it could. We initially only had my parents coming down, but quickly added my sister and her husband Paul, and then Maren’s mom and her new husband Andy came too. No one could stay around too long, but it was still good to have everyone visit.

We did Christmas in two parts. My parents came over to our place around the 17th of December and that was fun. Axel got some fun new toys and I got to cook for everyone, which I enjoy. The only bad thing was that the stomach virus that has been going around all over the place got to me and Maren later that week.

We all headed up to the Philadelphia area to stay with Maren’s sister for the weekend of Christmas. We made the decision to leave in the evening in the hopes that Axel would sleep most of the way. Luckily, this worked as planned, and also took less time because we avoided a lot of traffic. We had a nice, relaxing holiday and got to see all of our family up there. I think Axel also had a really good time.

When we got home from Philadelphia, I had the rest of the week off and I spent a couple of days with Axel, which I hadn’t had to do for a while and when I did, it was usually because he wasn’t feeling well, so it was good to have non-sick time with him. That week, Jan 2nd was declared a Federal holiday, so Maren got an extra day off, thus we packed up and headed to Charlotte, NC to stay with my sister for New Years. It was good to get away and not spend the last days of 2006 doing our same old routine.

So now it’s 2007. All caught up? Currently Maren and I are back to work and we’re currently in the process of replacing our aging Saturn. Axel is a year and a half old and his new fun thing to do is to throw stuff. It’s fun because he likes to throw a ball and is learning to catch one too, but it’s not quite that much fun when he decides to throw his dinner or the TV remote at the dog.

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The theme for this update is moving.

On June 12th we moved into our new house. Sounds pretty simple doesn’t it? No move is easy, something always seems to happen to make it interesting. In this move we hadn’t completely inventoried the stuff in the attic, which was a mistake. Additionally, the movers weren’t insured for accessing a pull-down attic. Something that would have been good to know when their guy was out to do the estimate. The movers agreed to help, for a fee of course. We still needed the help of our neighbors to finish packing a bunch of loose things that were left. One thing is certain, pack everything. No matter how big or small, or strangely shaped, it needs to go into a box of some kind. Otherwise movers get confused. Luckily, there were no issues on the move into the new house. The closings went well with no snags and before we knew it, we were moved in.

We’re really enjoying the new house. I think the best room in it is the bonus room above the garage that is now Axel’s play room. He’s having a lot of fun in there and sometime in June, he started walking by pushing a toy. We had the toy out for a while, but one day I was sitting there and he got up behind it and pushed it over to me all by himself. He’s since moved up to walking while holding our hands.

The last two weeks of July we all went on vacation up to Door County, WI. We had to rent a cottage because the family cottage had a small bat issue. As far as I know, no one ever asked about the total number of bats in the walls, but it sounded like a lot. Eventually someone came to take care of them. It’s kind of strange, but this guy, working out of WI, has flown to various places to help with bat problems, ironically, even Michael Keaton’s place in Montana.

The vacation was good although probably a bit too long. Axel never quite got used to the 1 hour time change and routinely got up between 5:45-6:00am every morning. My parents came up for a few days to stay with us, which was fun because Axel got to hang out with them first thing every morning. We did our normal stuff up in WI, hung out on the beach and went swimming, I did a little fishing on my own and with my Dad. I took my parents up the penninsula one day and we hit some shops. Near the end of the trip we hit that heat wave happening all across the country, so even up there it was in the mid 90s. It was good to come home. Axel did great on the flights, playing during two of them and sleeping during the other two. The last flight wasn’t too good, it was late, had to stop before take off to fix something, and the RDU airport when we finally landed was crazy. I think we’ll do all of our flying in the mornings from now on.

The last move was the website. I decided it was time to get it up on a normal host rather than run it out of our house. The third computer adds a good bit of heat to the office, so it’s nice to keep it shut down. Hopefully now the site won’t be down whenever we go on trips or have a power outtage. Everything seems to be working as it did before, but feel free to email me if you find a problem. I’ll also be getting a lot of new pictures up soon.

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Okay, tons of stuff to get through. Since the last update we’ve bought a new house and sold our current house. One piece of advice, never let there be 3 months between buying/selling and closing. I’ll get back to that in a minute.

Axel is doing great. He’s been in daycare for a few months now. It’s hard to believe, but his 9-month doctor’s appointment is coming up. Maren found a great daycare facility that’s on the EPA campus out in Research Triangle Park. It’s called First Environments and it’s been really great.

He’s gone from scooting around to full-fledged crawling in about a week or two. He’s pretty fast now too, so Maren and I generally spend our time with him by following him around the house. His favorite route is to crawl from the living room into the kitchen, which isn’t really surprising as there’s not many other places for him to go yet. And that leads me back to the housing situation.

We’re moving soon, finally. The few months in between buying a new house, selling our current house and closing have been relatively quiet, but with Axel starting to move around, we’re really feeling the limited space. We loved this house and have a lot of good memories here, but it is just too small now. We had been a little concerned that our buyers were thinking about backing out, because even after the inspection and our agreement to fix certain things, they still wanted their own people to re-check the roof and the HVAC. And this was after the home warranty we agreed to purchase had begun, so what they were looking for is still a mystery to us. Then there was the chimney situation.

This, in my mind, was a complete scam. The only problem is that no one appears to have profitted off of it, other than the repair company and they had no input.? What happened was that the buyer’s inspector noted that the chimney was potentially out of spec, i.e. leaning away from the house, because there was a gap along one side. This necessitated an engineer coming out and taking some measurements. And of course, since it’s his license on the line, he recommends that the chimney’s foundation needs to be repaired because the lean was 1/4″ out of spec. The repair guys told me they tried to move the chimney closer, but couldn’t. So, it wasn’t moving, and probably hadn’t moved in 20+ years, but nothing is out there to protect a homeowner from having to do this. All it takes is a guy with a seal from the state to say it’s out of spec and you get to spend a significant amount of money to fix something that didn’t need to be fixed.

Anyway, we’re getting close to our move date, and we’re spending as much time as possible getting things packed up.? Hopefully I’ll have time to get some new pictures of Axel put up.

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Yeah, kinda behind on posting. Wish I was better at keeping things up to date, but it’s amazing how having a small person around the house makes time fly. I had no idea I hadn’t really updated pics since Halloweeen of last year.

Lots of pictures added in the gallery.

Things are going well. We’re (hopefully) in the last stages of sleep training Axel. This is one of those things (apparently) a lot of parents don’t like to talk about, either because they never did it, did it in strange ways, or just had such a horrible time they’d really rather not talk about it. Even so, we’ve had massive support from friends and family. Axel might have been a little on the young side to start this, but that’s hard to judge since he looks like he’s pushing 8 months old instead of 5. But with Maren back at work, we just couldn’t handle his waking up at night and deciding it was time to be awake for a couple of hours.

He’s falling asleep on his own now fairly regularly. We still have a little sticking point at 4am, but we’re sure he’ll get that knocked out soon.

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I know, it’s been a while since I’ve updated the website. Hopefully there’s still people out there checking up on us. As most of you are aware, our Son was born on Sept. 3rd, so things have been kinda busy here. Not stressfully busy, but there always seems to be something to do with the little guy. There’s some new pictures up and I’ll be trying to post some sort of update at least once a week or so.

Right now there’s not much to report. He weighed 9lbs. 9oz. at birth and after losing a little more than half a pound, he was already going back up by day 3. He’s starting to be a little less erratic with his schedule and recently let Maren and I sleep a good bit last night.

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After much planning with finance people and contracting types, we were ultimately doomed by the appraiser. An appraisal was needed by the Credit Union so they could determine how much they could lend us (under their building loan policy). However, this appraisal came in significantly lower than they expected. Frankly, their expectations were too high and they should probably have been warning us that it could be a close thing, but instead they were speaking as if this was a no-brainer and we “shouldn’t have any problem at all”.

Anyway, the house addition project has been shelved indefinately. The new project is remodeling the master bathroom. This is also going to be a tricky project as our master bathroom has a cathedral ceiling. When the house was built, they must have decided that a skylight in the bathroom would be nice (and it is), but that means the ceiling goes all the way to the roof of the house. That wouldn’t seem like that much of a hurdle except that the bathroom is completely wallpapered. In fact, it has the appearance of being wallpapered before most of the bathroom fittings were installed. In this case, it’s original nature helps us out as 20 years in a steamy bathroom has made it very easy to remove…. so far.

We had just planned on removing the paper, repainting and new counters and sinks, but with the addition no longer happening, I think we’re going to take the time to rip out the shower and tub and replace that with a new shower system. It’ll depend on how much we get gouged, er, I mean charged for having that done.

Other than the home improvement stuff, everything else is going fine. Maren is okay, although I caught a cold during some recent travel and promptly gave it to her and it’s taking her a lot longer to get rid of it than I did. The baby is fine as well, kicking like a tiny madman and moving all over the place. We’re coming down the stretch, Maren has about another 10 weeks to go.

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Okay, it’s been a while, time to let some cats out of some bags, spill some beans, something.

First of all, Maren has been through the level II ultrasound, and the fetal echo, both were fine and no problems have been detected. She and the baby are doing very well.

Our real problem child has been our dog Molly. For the last year she had been mopey and generally lethargic, but it seemed to be getting worse. First she stopped being able to jump up on the bed, then get into the car, and finally she couldn’t even jump up onto my lap when I was sitting at the computer and she had always been able to do that. We took her to the vet and in the process of them doing blood work in preparation to sedate her for x-rays, they discovered her thyroid was signficantly low. And on top of that, the x-rays showed a bladder stone that we were told may need to be surgically removed.

After a few weeks on thyroid medication, she has returned to the dog of old, energetic and playful. She can jump up on the bed again and is doing much better. Then we took her to get groomed and the groomer cleaned a patch off of her back that went all the way to the skin, which is when we discovered she had a minor skin infection. So, back to medication and weekly shampooings, and her skin is looking better. This morning she kept shaking her head and scratching her ears. Fortunately she had a check up scheduled for this morning and we were told she had an infection in her ear and we had extra steps now to do during her bath, mainly making sure her ears get dried out.

As you can see, she’s been pretty high maintenance for the past few months.

The other big thing going on is that we are having an addition put on the house. It took longer to get started than I thought, but we finally have a builder and we should be signing a contract for that next week. We’re hoping he can get started right when we get back from vacation. The plan is to add a single-car garage and a second floor bonus room. We’re going to hope it’ll be completed before the baby comes. At the very least all the major stuff will be done by the end of the summer.

Speaking of which, we’ll be heading to Wisconsin for the first time in a few years. It’ll be nice to get out of NC for a little while.

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Tried to do some updates on the linux box and things are acting strangely.

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Maybe some of you didn’t fully grasp the scope of my geekery (geekness? geekdom?), but trust me, I’m pretty darn geeky. I’ve been told a number of people have been traipsing through the latest photo album which chronicles my latest computer building project. Glad you enjoyed it. I probably should have taken even more pictures. I might still do that as there’s more work to be done. This time around I really do want to get back inside that computer and get things more tidied up.

The problem with putting a computer together is that once you get it up and running, drivers updated, operating system updated, security systems put back in place, etc., etc., you finally get some games reinstalled, and suddenly all interest in getting the little things finished seems to evaporate and you’re back using the computer satisfied that you’re done building it.

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