avablog

What is it about them, anyway? They’re all so clean and white and have the same pictures on the walls and the same countertops and cupboards and everything else. [Read more →]

Ava seems to be doing a bit better today, though she spiked a fairly high fever last night.  This is when it really gets rough to have her in bed with us.  It’s not necessarily that we want her in bed with us, but since she’s still breastfeeding, she tends to wake up at least once a night to nurse.  We’ve gotten used to it.

But nights like last night bring us to our wits’ end.  Ava’s fever hit about 102 sometime late in the night, and the poor little thing was writhing all over the place.  She’d snuggle her hot little body up against me for comfort, then roll away almost immediately as she overheated.  We dosed her with Mortin and Tylenol on and off, and by this morning she seemed more herself.  A trip to the doctor late this morning confirmed that she’s just dealing with a little virus.  Really, it’s good she’s getting this out of the way now, because we’re heading to Decorah next weekend, and it’d be a shame for her to be sick there.

A quick note on spam.  I wish I knew more about it.  I don’t get a ton here at nicheplayer.net, but recently I’ve been getting these spam comments in my moderation holding pen that are nothing but long lists of URLs for sites in China (I dig looking at the fancy characters).  I know these are getting sent out en masse with the hope that some poor blogging patsy isn’t moderating his/her comments, but really, who would be inspired to click these links in any case?  There has to be a buck in it somewhere…I just don’t know where.

After some futzing around, the photo gallery is now back online. I haven’t added any new pictures in a couple days, though I have been taking pictures.

I’m thinking now that I’m going to archive all my photos on Flickr. This approach has a couple advantages. I have a pro account there (I jumped on the Flickr bandwagon right when it was announced and got a pro account comped for referring new users), so I can upload 2GB worth of photos every month. The annual cost is $25, which is going to scale pretty well once I get all my ~5K images uploaded.

Flickr is also a great way to share photos. If you have a Flickr account (and I’d recommend getting one if you’d like to see the Ava pictures I have set to “friends and family only”), not only can you view my photos, but you can comment on them and even leave notes on the pictures themselves. Yahoo! bought Flickr since I signed up, so you have to have a Yahoo! ID now to sign in to Flickr, but that’s not a huge hassle.

The very best thing about Flickr, though, is that there are lots and lots of very cool photographs there to browse and enjoy. If you see something you like, you can use the photo’s tags to find similar pictures or to head off in a completely different direction. Heck, you can even order prints straight from Flickr to be delivered to your house. Flickr also has all sorts of great tools for working with your pictures and integrating them into sites like this one.

If you have any questions about Flickr, drop me a line; I’m happy to bring another user to the site.

Of the three hard disk drives I have sitting around running at any one time, the one I’m most worried about dying is the one that holds my photo archive.

We had a thunderstorm last week that caused a power outage at the house.  Everything came back up just fine, except for the drive that holds my photo archive (natch).  I was absolutely flipping out, but quietly, and in such a way that Leah wouldn’t start flipping out too.  I have a CD backup of all my photos from 2002 to July 2005, but I would’ve still been missing all of last Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, our 2005 trip to Grand Marais…lots of great stuff.

Fortunately, Kevin was in town this past weekend, so I was able to bounce some ideas off him.  By the time he left on Sunday, I’d pretty much resigned myself to shelling out $100 for data recovery software to see if I could pull anything off of what I thought at the time was a flaky drive.  Before I got out my debit card, though, I took apart the enclosure that housed the troublesome drive and moved the drive to a different enclosure.  After powering up the drive, there were my missing files!  I hurried in to tell Leah, who was on the phone with a friend, and she was so excited she gave me a high five.  While I was excited too, I told her there would be no more high fiving in our house.  Ever.

So it looks like I have an enclosure with a bad FireWire port on it.  I’ve contacted the company I bought it from to see whether they’ll honor their 1-year warranty.  In the meantime, I think I’ll see if I can get the enclosure to work using the USB2.0 interface.  Needless to say, the second I got the drive running, I created a tar.gz archive of my albums folder.  Alas, it comes to something like 4.46GB, which is about .1 GB or so over the capacity of a blank DVD-R disc.  I’ll have to create a couple smaller archives and back them up separately.

As regular readers know (if there are any out there), I was hoping for good weather this past weekend for a bike ride I’d been planning on for months.  Well, I got what I wanted, sort of.  Saturday morning broke clear, a little breezy, and HOT.  Really hot.  Like, stay-inside-and-close-all-the-shades hot.  But I’ve never been one to let the prospect of heat stroke get in the way of a good time.

And a good time it was.  My brother-in-law Kevin was down from Madison for the ride, and he brought along a case of delicious New Glarus Edel Pils.  About 11:30 we were joined at the house by friends Lisa and Cabel, who were atop their tandem and looked ready to conquer the world.  We biked down to the ride’s starting point and met the rest of our group.  After we got registered and drank a couple beers to strengthen our resolve, we set off for the first beer stop 10 miles away in North Liberty.  We refueled there and then biked another 10 miles to the last beer stop on the road, which was a mere eight miles from the ride’s end.  We managed to stay at this last stop for quite a bit, just drinking water and beer and lounging in the shade.

At the end of the ride, we sat under nice green hops vines at the Millstream Brewery and enjoyed some bratwurst (with a couple more beers and more water).  I won a pair of biking socks in the drawing, and everyone appeared to head home happy.  The cool news from the ride is that they had more than twice as many people sign up this year as they had last year.  Last year, attendance had nearly doubled from the previous year, so this ride is really up and coming.  It can’t be this hot again next year…can it?

Leah and I got a babysitter last night and went out to dinner. It was really nice, after some initial turbulence. Our meals were good, and it was half-price wine night where we dined, so we got a nice bottle for not a lot of money.

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I have outdoor plans this weekend.  It’s an event I’ve been anticipating for a couple months now, so I’m hoping the weather pans out for Saturday.  As of right now, it’s supposed to be sunny and in the mid to upper 90s — perfect for a 30-mile bike ride to one of the state’s best microbreweries.

In other biking news, Leah gets her bike back today.  She had an old frame in the garage from a bike she used to ride years ago, and I had some other misc. parts lying around going to waste, so we sent the mess off to mechanic extraordinaire Kenny Lefler to have him work his magic.  I can’t wait to see what he’s come up with.  Unfortunately, Leah won’t come along on the ride this Saturday, but the bike will come in handy when she wants to come along on family rides with me and Ava to get ice cream…or whatever.

Speaking of Ava, today is swim day for the two-year-olds at day care!  Ava’s very excited.  She’s just entered the stage where she fusses when we try to leave her at “school” in the morning, but today one of the workers asked Ava if she wanted to help fill up the swimming pool, and Ava’s face exploded into a big smile (according to Leah).  “Yes!  Yes!”  Leah went inside to drop off a couple things, and when she came back out, Ava was standing at the edge of the pool with a hose in her hand, gleefully filling it up.  Leah walked toward the car and said, “Bye bye, Ava,” and Ava just looked over at her with her big smile and said, “Bye bye.  See ya!”  Well, that was easy.  Were only every day swim day.

I had to do some maintenance on the garden recently. My snap pea vines have grown much taller than the 3 feet advertised on the seed packet. It’s only mildly problematic.

I took some of the long strips of redwood left over from my trellis project and wove them vertically through the chickenwire fence where the peas are climbing. I tied a length of gardening twine between the strips about a foot from the top of the fence and then trained the gangly vines onto the twine. You can barely make out the redwood strips over to the far right of my webcam image. My only worry is that these tall vines are going to block the sun from my tomato plants, which are right next to the peas. I think the ‘maters are big enough now that I don’t have cause for concern, but those babies sure do love all the sunshine they can get!

When Ava gets home from daycare, I love to take her back to the garden so we can look at what’s new. Her first taste of the plot was a delicious, mild green bean that she chomped right through with gusto. Last evening, I picked a snap pea for her, rubbed it off a bit, and handed it to her. It was great to walk around the edge of our tiny garden with Ava on my shoulders (so she could see over the peas), pointing out all the vegetables that’re coming up while she crunched on her nice fresh pea pod.

My dad likes to tell the story of how my brother and I, in our younger years, would snap off stalks of asparagus from my mom’s garden for a snack on our way down to the woods behind our house (much to my mother’s consternation). We had a huge garden full of all manner of vegetables. Now that I have my own little spot, I’m amazed that my parents had the time to tend such a massive space. Obviously, though, eating all the vegetables was not much of a problem. It was keeping them on the vine long enough to ripen that was difficult.

Ava was off with Leah in Decorah this past weekend to have a girls weekend.  I missed them both.

When I saw Ava on Sunday afternoon, there was something different about her.  She didn’t look any taller or heavier, but the way she moved and talked made her seem somehow…older, like a little girl instead of our sweet little baby.  I figured I must be imagining it.

But the next day, Leah commented on the same thing during a phone conversation with her mom.  She and I talked briefly about it and concluded that there we weren’t crazy; Ava really had grown up a little bit in the space of two days.

After you’ve witnessed the birth of a child, I think maybe you become a bit desensitized to miracles.  And it doesn’t help that living with an infant provides an almost continuous stream of miraculous events.  That first smile.  Sitting up.  Rolling over.  First steps.  First laugh.  First hug.  Things that sound mundane and expected to anyone without a child, I know.

Our days now are punctuated with spontaneous smiles and laughter.  Last night we were all in the kitchen.  Leah, trying to get my attention, said, “Hey pops!”  She just said it once, then she proceeded to ask me some question or another.  Halfway through, a little voice piped up from somewhere below our waists.  “Hey pops!” “Hey pops!”  Aside from how insanely cute and hilarious it was to hear Ava say these words, I was taken aback, at first, by the fact that Ava was down there listening, desperate to be able to communicate with us.

I wonder how it would change a child if it could really understand how much its parents love it.

It’s a good feeling to get everything done over a weekend that you’d hoped you’d get done going in. The weekend had a couple notable highlights.

The first, not surprisingly, was the astounding meal we had on Saturday evening at Simone’s Plain and Simple. And “astounding” really isn’t much of an exaggeration. Between the gorgeous sunset over the farm valley that rolls out below Simone’s hilltop home to the mind-boggling flan she served for dessert, it was another memorable meal. Of the four pizzas we had (two of each kind), my two favorites were the eggplant, tomato, onion, and white pepper, and the Amana bacon, sweet onion, cream, and yogurt. For an appetizer we enjoyed a cold sorrel soup, which was perfect for such a muggy evening. There was also a very nice salad of tossed greens (which we watched get picked as we were eating) served as a cleansing course after the pizza and before the aforementioned flan (pictured).

I also enjoyed two very good biking days; thirty miles on Saturday morning with my brother and one of his clients, and 50 miles round trip up to Sutliff for a cold PBR on the bridge on Sunday. Yesterday’s ride was very hot (it was in the lower 90s here), but the headwind on the return trip wasn’t too bad at all (we actually enjoyed the breeze). We stopped for lunch/breakfast in North Liberty on our way up to Solon.

I also managed to get the lawn mowed and the garden taken care of, so all the items on my list for the weekend got checked off. Hopefully next weekend will be as nice as this one…or at least relatively dry for our ride in the annual Tour de Brew on Saturday.

I try not to post too much stuff like this here in deference to my sister in law, who prefers all Ava all the time.  Hopefully she’ll be able to cut me some slack just this once.

Via BoingBoing.

Leah’s taking Ava to Decorah this afternoon for a girls weekend, so I’ll be on my own until Sunday afternoon.  What to do, what to do….

Tonight I’m going to have a little screening of International Blue Velvet, which is on loan from a friend.  I’ve never seen it before, and everyone I’ve ever heard mention it says, “you have to see it,” so, I’m seeing it.  Probably throw together some dinner with all the veggies I have from this week’s CSA share.  How much do I love cabbage?  We’ll find out.

I hope to get some biking done at some point, though it’ll have to get squeezed in between weeding the garden and mowing the lawn.  Saturday evening I’m heading out to Simone’s Plain and Simple for dinner with a group of family and friends.  I wish Ava could be along, because she’d love seeing all the goats and chickens on Simone’s farm.  Maybe next year.  If you’ve never been out to Simone’s for one of her pizza dinners before, get some friends together and GO (she does other dinners, too)!  It’s a great time.  Probably as close as you’ll get in Iowa to dining in the French countryside.  It’s BYOB, so you can tote along a bottle of your favorite wine(s) to share.

Speaking of gardening, a new lily just opened up yesterday in the back bed.  You can see it in the lower left-hand corner of the picture here.  They’re nice.  I hope they make it through the winter.  You can also see the scabiosa over on the right.  What a nasty name for such a pretty flower.

Whenever I find myself talking with someone who’s thinking about having a first child, I’m never quite sure what to say.  I tend to be encouraging in a general way, because when it’s all said and done, I do believe having a child is a worthwhile pursuit and a net gain in the happiness column.

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Whew! What a whirlwind. Where to begin?

This alliterative moment brought to you by the letters W and H.

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In the space of 13 months I went from leading the life of a confirmed bachelor with no designs on having a family to being married and fathering a little girl.  *blink, blink*

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I don’t read a lot. I know, I know. It’s terrible. Illiterate parents raise illiterate children. Fortunately, Ava will probably grow up to be semi-literate, at least, thanks to Leah (who, in addition to being a semi-voracious reader, is beautiful, sharp as a tack, funny, and the love of my life — happy now? ;)). Now that she’s deep in the throes of motherhood, Leah doesn’t have time for much more than a little New Yorker before bed and maybe some US Weekly over lunch, but she’s reading as often as she can.

I, on the other hand, tend to use books as sleep aids. I rarely get more than two pages into a book before I have to back up off of it and sit the thing down. I’m presently inching my way through a copy of Susan Sontag’s On Photography that Leah must’ve picked up for a college class years ago. Sontag has some pithy insights into the place photography holds in our lives, but the real fun is reading the comments Leah made in the margins and puzzling out what mental process she went through when she underlined various sentences. Sometimes it’s obvious (“Yes!” “I agree!”), but other times there’s nothing but a thin, wavy blue line under an otherwise undistinguished sentence.

The last fiction I read was most of Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon The Deep, which won the Hugo Award. It was real exercise, but fascinating. Vinge has a new book out now that sounds every bit as brilliantly twisted as Fire…; I can’t wait to check it out.

The Klevars always bring along loads of books on their annual summer vacation. I don’t know if having Ava along and walking this year will allow for much reading time, but I may try to pick up a copy of Rainbows End before we leave, just in case.

I try to keep track of this kind of thing.  First cicada.  First firefly.  I don’t write it down or anything, but I make a mental note.

Last night I was outside changing the oil in our car, and just at dusk I heard the familiar strains of a cicada off in the trees somewhere down the block.  I stopped for a second, wiped the oil off my hands (it was my first oil change), and listened.

I hope I can impress upon Ava how important these things are.

This is what your Daddy was listening to when he was your age.

That is one funky blind man. And those kids are loving it!

I love my daughter and will certainly go to all sorts of lengths to please her and provide for her, but I’m already learning where my limits are. And they are here.

Via Daddy Types.

This past Saturday we took Ava along to an annual neighborhood pig roast we get invited to. It’s a good time. Unfortunately, the weather didn’t cooperate, and a squall blew in and soaked everything just as the pig was coming out of the pit. It rained pretty hard for a bit, and then everyone came back outside and continued to eat, drink, and be merry.

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