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

A Tour, And Some News

Posted on by Jordan

First up, here is the video as promised:

And, for those who haven’t heard via other channels… We are expecting a child!

We just have to wait until December 26 🙂

You have no idea how hard it has been to come up with posts that didn’t involve tails of coping with first trimester woe etc.

Now that the news embargo is over, I suppose the prospect of parenthood and everything that goes with it will be a frequent topic around here 😀

-Jordan

Magnets Are Still Amazing

Posted on by Jordan

We take a break from news about moving into the condo to present this public service announcement:

Magnets are really cool!

After having seen the video above, some friends and I started talking about buying supplies to try this ourselves… and found out that there are people selling kits, and that they are kind of pricy: Teacher Source

It’s amazing enough I am still tempted. It may be that I would eventually tire of watching the magnet try and hover, but there is really only one way to find out. 🙂

-Jordan

An Old Knot, Revisited

Posted on by Jordan

It turns out I tie my shoes wrong.

You would think that somebody who, was an Eagle Scout, and is currently working with Scouts would know the basic knots. That’s what I thought anyway.

Then I saw this

The first thing that hit me was “Hey, I have a pair of running shoes with round nylon laces that will not stay tied!” So, I tried the ‘proper’ way to tie the knot for the past two weeks. I can tell you the strong form of the basic shoelace knot is MUCH better than the one I was using before.

I had read about, and sometimes used a technique where you tie the double-knot inverted. That works really well, probably better than the inverted basic bow demonstrated in the video. The downside to that is that the second knot works against the first to tighten each other and the end result can be very hard to untie. For that reason I almost never use the inverted double knot, and now… I don’t have any reason to!

Even after a week I have to stop and think about it every time I tie my shoes, but it is starting to come naturally, so maybe in a few weeks I won’t even know I am doing it!

-Jordan

Deep Thoughts… Or Something

Posted on by Jordan

Over the weekend, Heather and I drove out to western Nebraska for a wedding.

But before that, let me setup my frame of mind…

First I saw this video:

And then, the Internet being what it is, the remix video:

So, back to my drive out west. The song was kind of stuck in my head, and at the same time I was driving into an awe inspiring lightning show. I mean a really incredible storm! Clearly I all to easily forget how intense a storm can be.  I was really enjoying the lightning show, and started thinking about the guy in the video.

Now, I am afraid he may have been under the effects of some mind-altering chemicals at the time of that filming, but I don’t think that means he was wrong really. Rainbows, storms, all the other things you see outside… they are so amazing and I kind of take them for granted too often.

I actually have started investigating some ways to force myself to get outside, and outside of city limits, but I won’t post any details until I actually get something going. For now lets just leave it at enjoying the amazing show weather patterns in the Midwest can produce, and in awe of the splendor God has built around us.

-Jordan

Things From The Internet

Posted on by Jordan

I had a sort of backlog of links I had been meaning to post…

First off, a clever add for a mini-van I don’t know if it will sell a lot of Sinnas, but I thought it was pretty slick.

The second link is actually a collection of links, all galleries from the volcano. I am just amazed at the pictures people were able to get. Just looking at the pictures is enough to be somewhat terifying, never mind the havoc that it caused for most of Europe.

In no particular order:

Enjoy!

-Jordan

Chicago, The Video

Posted on by Jordan

Our “get out of Des Moines because we are tired of the snow” Chicago trip was the first trip Heather and I have taken with a video camera. I don’t know if the results are really amazing, but we had fun shooting it at least.

For the most part it is video of us… and I guess if you want to see Chicago, I am sure there are plenty of pictures and videos done with more professional equipment you could look at. This video should at the very least provide something fun to look back on.

I wonder if youtube will be around, with a full archive by the time we have grand kids running around? I did save a local copy, but I am sure there will be challenges in keeping that playable over time.

One final note, there is footage of a bridge being lowered… you can also hear Heather laughing at me in the background… suffice to say I was fascinated, all the bridges are suppose to be able to raise and lower, but I get the impression that they don’t do so all that often. I was really excited to see one moving!

post production notes:

Virtual Dub proved to be a fairly painless way to trim out the garbage on the beginning and end of each of the videos. The only challenge was getting the video into a format it liked, but I figured that out when I did the cooking video a few weeks back.

I may need to come up with a more aggressive means of compression for these videos, the Chicago clip is eating 500 megs on disk! If only MPG4 was a more open and free standard /sigh.

-Jordan