Another Week Flies By

Dada exploring the
construction site

The last week seemed to just fly by. We didn't do anything particularly noteable but I started waking up sometime around 5:00 a.m. every morning--not that I wanted to--which tended to make for early evenings. However, I did discover that you can get a lot done in those early morning hours when the Precious Bundle of Joy is asleep and you're not wanting to drop in front of the T.V. Or you could if you actually did something, rather than just surfing the net and reveling in a whole hour or two of unrestricted time in front of your home computer. Woo hoo. I know, I'm a sad, sad man.

What passes for excitement came in the form of a failing Internet firewall--one of the antique network cards on the ancient laptop we use as our home network firewall stopped working and I had to deal with that, which would have been an easy task of just buying a new card and sticking it in except that the version of Linux on that machine was so old that the drivers for the card wouldn't compile and I couldn't upgrade to a newer Linux version without an Internet connection and blah blah blah. Boring story slightly less boring, I finally got a new machine up and running as a firewall yesterday after a couple of late nights and early mornings (geek tip: Ubuntu Live will not run on a 486 with only 128 Megabytes but the SmoothWall Linux firewall distribution works great). So now we're back on the Net and Julie can check her email and read the blogs and I can post more.

House activity continues apace: they're preparing to pour the concrete for the various porches and landings around the exterior and the drywall guys just about have it all taped and floated. The exterior stonework is proceeding slowly but steadily.



Dada seems to be continuing her growth spurt, eating constantly. She's had a little bit of a cough and a sinus infection the last few days so she's not feeling her best but she's still bursting with energy.

We've also had to contend with the fact that as of yesterday the moon didn't rise until after her bed time, which was a cause for some sadness--we'd started a practice of going outside to say goodbye to the moon at bed time and anytime we're outside she asks "boo"? and makes what passes for the sign for moon (the sign is good because otherwise it would be hard to distinguish her rendering of "moon" from her word for her Grandmother Peggy ("boo"). I think there are slight phonetic differences that I can hear (maybe) but having the hand sign makes it clear. We also spend a lot of time looking at the family pictures hanging in the hall. She can identify all of her grandparents in the pictures and I'm trying to teach her to recognize her cousins. She also likes to look at pictures of herself.

Today we head to Houston for Thanksgiving--I'll be working from a coffee shop and Julie and Dada and Boo will be no doubt shopping.