A New Year

Posted on by Jordan

Hey look, it’s a new year already!

It’s funny how often I think “hey I should work up a post on this,” and (as you may have noticed) how seldom that actually happens.

After lots of reflection on this, I think part of my reluctance is related to my reluctance to over-share about my child. Less because I am worried about those details being a problem as that I cannot help but feeling extra super narcissistic writing up a blog post about the thing she is doing that nearly every child goes through.

On the other hand, I suppose having a personal blog already puts me way over that line so maybe I shouldn’t worry about it.

That being said, I have a few goals for the aforementioned new year:

  1. Write a post a week
  2. Only have a Hannah post about once a month

With those goals in mind, what will I post about… There may be an abundance of cooking post, or maybe a few play-by-plays of the computer repair/upgrade I have planned. Although, if that goes poorly I would be reduced to posting from a phone… might lead to shorter blog posts 🙂

Despite the lack of posts, 2013 was a rather good year for the Nelson household. I don’t know what the proper level of sharing is, but we did manage to produce roughly 20 gigs of new pictures! That has to count for something right?

-Jordan

Fun At Home, Or “Why You Shouldn’t Play Hide And Seek With A Phone”

Posted on by Jordan

Here was the plan for our weekend:

Sleep in Saturday, then Heather would go take some pictures for friends, and Hannah and I would hang out during the morning. The afternoon would be open for whatever, and then we didn’t have any plans beyond Church Sunday.

Let me tell you how things actually went:

2:00AM Hannah wakes up screaming, she was unable to explain why. One bottle and lots of rocking later, she is peacefully sleeping again. Veteran parents may have developed a system wherein both parents aren’t completely disrupted by this kind of thing. Heather and I haven’t really gotten that down. Or maybe we just forgot already. When Hannah woke up every night, we had some sort of system and I think we both felt we were sleeping ok, but now that a middle of the night wake-up is so rare we both end up being disrupted.

5:00AM The On-Call phone rings (thanks to some changes at work I am back on the roster for on-call) and a key system is throwing errors the front-line support guy doesn’t know what to do with. I did a little digging (three cheers for being able to VPN into our systems from home) and talked to the help desk guy and we decided there was a chance this was being caused because some elements of the system weren’t up from their overnight maintenance mode yet. Had I done a little more due diligence prior to heading home from work I may have been quicker to realize what was going on, but my on-call skills are a little rusty. 🙂 Back to bed by 5:45ish

6:00AM Heather and I agree that we are probably done sleeping. Somehow we have lost the sleeping in skill. I start on the traditional Saturday pancakes… right after starting a large pot of coffee. Hannah wakes up a few minutes later, and we have a little family breakfast!

6:30AM Help desk guy calls back, things are still broken. Armed with coffee, I review the error logs again and realize this must be due to an upgrade performed the night before. Queue two hours of phone calls and e-mails working to coordinate a least-downtime solution.

11ish AM Heather is taking pictures and Hannah and I are keeping busy around the house. Hannah by finding everything her little arms can reach while on her tipsy-toes and grabbing it, me by looking for quick-hit chores I can do while keeping her occupied. Wash the sheets! That’s an easy one, I will pile the blankets over here, and as an added intensive to stay out of trouble I will let Hannah play with my phone on top of the pile of blankets. That should about be her ideal distraction for a few minutes.

So, I started the wash, and sat down to see what kind of games Hannah and I could improvise. But wait, somehow Hannah managed to bury my phone deep in these blankets… Nope not in the blankets… maybe under the … nope. Not to worry I have SeekDroid setup on my phone I will just cause it to ring and know what she did with it…. “Unable to contact device” Up to this point I had been a little foggy I suppose, between the short night and the post-crisis-rush feeling I wasn’t anywhere near my sharpest. And yet, it really didn’t take too long to realize where my phone was!

You may have heard of someone who dropped their phone in some water and was able to dry it out with a bag of rice or some similar approach. Those techniques may in fact be effective, but I am willing to bet not on phones that were placed at the bottom of a running washing machine for several minutes!

And really, after that the weekend was fairly uneventful. 🙂

-Jordan

 

Nine And A Half Months

Posted on by Jordan

Give or take a week, and the Hannah has been breathing air about the same amount of time she was waiting to be born.

It’s really hard to wrap my mind around that. She has gone from being a cute little lump to being quite mobile. Not quite walking, but starting to think about it.

The noteworthy thing that got me to start this post to begin with was I wanted to record this week’s novel thing: Pillows.

I managed to entertain Hannah for a good ten minutes (an eternity in infant time!) by making a pile of pillows, and letting her crawl her way up, over and around them. I don’t imagine the novelty will last long, but we had fun today 🙂

-Jordan

First Cold Of Fall

Posted on by Jordan

That’s a milestone right?

Hannah picked out a great one at daycare, and then carefully cultivated it before lovingly sharing it with mom and dad.

On the one hand, she wanted to cuddle, and that is rare these days, on the other hand she was unhappy, and holding her didn’t soothe her as much as she would have liked.

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That picture was taken before the cold really hit Heather or I. Two weeks and a prescription for antibiotics each, and Heather and I are almost back to normal. Somehow Hannah kicked this thing much faster than we did. 🙂

-Jordan

P.S I suppose I am obligated to admit that I am aware that I haven’t posted in like two months, and that this post is a little light on the word count, so um… noted 😉 I can’t say if this is a trend I will be able to reverse or not.

Photo Sync… Again

Posted on by Jordan

Back in the early days of this blog, shortly after the wedding in fact, I talked about the problem of keeping picture collections in sync. At the time I settled on SyncToy, a little utility released by Microsoft. It has worked fairly well over the years, but not without some shortcomings.

The two that have continually tripped me up are first the fact that it needs to be run as a scheduled task, and some how the power management on the laptop always walks on my schedule, and two, Picasa gets a little cute with hidden files and “unsaved changes” being tucked away in different folders.

The first problem is fixable, except I have fought with it off and on for years, and find it tedious at this point.

The second could perhaps be solved by letting SyncToy grab the hidden files along with the remaining pictures, but after a few really messy “edit on both machines then wipe out one set of changes” problems I don’t think letting those kinds of things resolve in an overnight batch environment is a good idea.

With that in mind, I was rather excited to hear a discussion of BitTorrent Sync in a recent Security Now podcast. It may not actually be the ideal solution, but I don’t feel that I have time to really research my options right now, and it has been really fun to setup and play with! The tool is built to keep folders in sync anywhere on the web, but works just fine inside a local network.

The configuration is perhaps a little more technical than I would like, but after a few missteps I think I have something that will work, and work within seconds of changes happening on one machine. Given the “magic” that Picasa does using hidden files and folders, what I appear to have created is an instance where Picasa acts like a single installation across both machines. Albums, favorites, and edits are mirrored immediately to the second machine. It may lead to a terrible disaster were we ever to attempt to use the application in both places at the same time, but I don’t see that as a significant risk.

Hannah’s First Baseball Game

Posted on by Jordan

Thanks to a work event Heather was a part of, we got to go to a baseball game in Des Moines.

Hannah was amazing at the game! She was content hanging out with everyone at the pregame picnic.

 

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We had time to check out the fountains before the game got underway:

 

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Initially she was excited about the prospect of the game:

 

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But she didn’t last that long:

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She was wonderfully cooperative basically the entire game. The vendor shouting “POPCORN! PEANUTS!” as he walked right next to us was a little much, giving her a chance to exercise her lower lip and there may have been some crying at that point too.

All in all it was far better than we were expecting for our first major outdoor outing!

I would love to write more, but Hannah seems to want my help with something…

Until next time!

-Jordan

 

Hannah Month 4

Posted on by Jordan

Every Saturday now that Hannah is more or less in a routine, we have a sort of tradition, where I make breakfast and Heather reads from a baby book so we can learn what phase of development Hannah is in, or something like that.

A few weeks back the book said “she will probably start making raspberry sounds this week” within hours, Hannah was happily sputtering away! It became her favorite sound to make for the entire weekend, so I captured a little of it:

After that weekend she has lost some of her affinity for the raspberry sound, and has moved onto some great shrill squeals of excitement, while still throwing in the occasional raspberry.

When not making sound, Hannah has now discovered rolling over. She often isn’t quite sure what happened, but seems to deal with the inversion of the world fairly well.

We have introduce rice cereal into her diet, or at least into her mouth. I can’t tell if any actually made it far enough to provide any nutritional value.

one more anecdote before I go:

Heather, Hannah and I attended a wedding a few weeks ago. At the reception (a facility built to allow several concurrent receptions), we spent a surprisingly large amount of time in the hallway feeding, or changing, or just comforting Hannah. We were not alone however, many other slightly frazzled parents shared the space with us. Heather said to me “wow, I wonder if this has been going on at ever wedding we have been at and we just didn’t know about it?” It seems we have entered a whole new world thanks to Hannah! 🙂

-Jordan

Workouts

Posted on by Jordan

Subtitle: Yes we still do them!

The addition of Hannah into our lives has…. complicated getting work outs in, but Heather and I have managed to sneak in at least a little exercise despite the rather demanding schedule imposed by an infant.

Heather continues to take advantage of the treadmill in our building. I won’t say much beyond that it’s what she has been doing for a long time and covers all the bases of being enjoyable, effective stress control, and producing results.

Last winter I tried using the elliptical trainer as a way to be nicer to my knees. I never felt like I was able to challenge myself enough, and I really don’t like staring into a TV during my workout. I decided to try a more strength training oriented approach this winter. Pre-Hannah I was just doing kind of a random collection of body-weight lifts, and the occasional free-weight session. It worked ok, but I would not consider it a great success.

After the initial craziness of Hannah’s arrival I wanted to take a more structured, and hopefully efficient approach, primarily using the book “You Are Your Own Gym.” I am now a couple of months into the “basic” program, and fairly happy with it. I can’t say that I have really lost weight, but I have gotten stronger, and considering how tricky it is to sneak in workouts some days I will have to be happy with that for now.

Someday it will warm up (not today, May second and it’s been snowing for 14 solid hours!)  and I will incorporate running again, but I do think it’s noteworthy that I am over two months into a challenging workout program and haven’t had to skip a single day for knee problems or other injuries. I haven’t ever had that kind of consistency with running.

I have been really impressed that using minimal equipment, just a big dowel to place across a doorway or span over two stools and lots of different body weight lifts (think push-ups) even two months in I am still finding the workouts challenging! The downside is I probably need a pull-up bar at some point, and I have needed to adjust the occasional workout to remove jumping oriented lifts. Someday we won’t live on the 3rd floor and I can re-introduce those 🙂

-Jordan

Preparation

Posted on by Jordan

I don’t know if it’s having a new addition to our family or some other combination of life events, but I have been thinking a lot as of late about how would we handle a minor disaster and whatnot.

I remember hearing adds from the Red Cross advising people to have two weeks worth of food and water on hand. A quick check confirms that this is still their advice. The Red Cross isn’t exactly doomsday prepper propaganda, so I was starting to think maybe they had a good goal. The problem was I had no idea how to access if we were close to that. We try to keep our pantry, such as it is, more or less stocked, making me think we might be close but I wasn’t sure.

Then, a few weeks ago I saw this article in Popular Mechanics and realized something that should have been obvious a long time ago! Two things actually… One everything in our pantry has the caloric content posted on it, and two thanks to the fitness push we did last year we have a pretty good idea how many calories we consume per day. Fudging the numbers up a little to account for Hannah, and we basically arrive at 4000 calories per day.

A few minutes with a pen and paper digging through the cupboards and then a few more minutes working up an Excel spreadsheet (no project is complete without one!) and I can happily say that we have sufficient stores to  eat for two weeks! Granted, the menu might be a bit bland, but post blizzard or whatever other scenario one could dream up I don’t imagine we would complain much.

What attentive readers may have noticed is that I didn’t address water at all. The Red Cross guidelines call for one gallon per day per person, putting us near 50 gallons if you wanted to round up a little. I have some ideas how one might address that challenge, but really no solution as of yet… its just an overwhelming amount of bulk to store.

I guess we will hope it’s a blizzard and we have snow to melt 😉

-Jordan