avablog

It’s getting pretty exciting around here. Today’s gorgeous sun and warm temperatures were just too much for this daffodil to take, so it started to spring open. There are a couple others nearby, as well as some fern peony shoots and a bunch of thick, hearty tulip leaves that have little nibble marks all up and down their edges from the rabbits who aren’t used to seeing so much juicy greenery sitting around. As much as I love these flowers, I’m really looking forward to seeing the tiny leaves on my honeysuckle vines start to unfurl; the Hummingbirds won’t be far behind.

This morning Leah stood in line next to George Lucas at one of the local coffee shops. Turns out he’s in town to visit with University of Iowa Professor Nancy Andreasen, whose research centers mainly on the relationship between creativity and mental disorder.

One can only deduce from these facts that Nancy is trying to get to the bottom of what went wrong with Jar Jar Binks.

We had a nice weekend in IL. The two basketball games we watched weren’t very good, and George Mason’s improbable bid for a national title has ended. Too bad. So sad.

I’ve got new pictures up in the gallery, which, as it happens, has been updated to version 2.1. I’m not sure I love the theme, but it’s clean and not very offensive, so I’ll keep it until I can get my PG Theme patched. The good news is that this new version appears to be snappier than what I was working with, so that’s a plus.

Ava had a lot of fun this weekend and didn’t even get too off schedule. She was hugging and kissing everything in sight, as the images in the gallery document. She didn’t do great in the car, but then who does like sitting on her ass for three hours straight, strapped to a chair?

We were driving through Denver on the interstate recently and were passed by a truck that sported this bumpersticker. I had to have it. In fact, I had to have a number of them, and thanks to my cousin Chris (that’s him on the right in the linked pic), now I do. There’ll be one for each set of grandparents, one for Unc and Eesh, and one for anyone else I can think of.

(The bumpersticker applies, of course, to Colorado’s NHL team, the Avalanche.)

So say the tulips and daffodils pushing up through the weathered mulch in our flower beds.  And the three male Cardinals whose songs we wake up to each morning as they try to impress the lady Cardinals in the neighborhood.  And the mosquito that landed on Ava’s lapel last weekend when we walked to the bakery.

This weekend we’re driving to Chicago(land) to spend a couple days with friends and attend a Final Four party.  I’m looking forward to it.  The couple we’re staying with have two great big slobbering Yellow Labs, so Ava’s going to be in hog heaven.  They also have a new baby, so it’ll be interesting to see how Ava divides her time between the dogs and the infant.

I don’t follow college hoops at all unless there’s a big brawl on the court, a sex scandal, or a disgraced coach somewhere who accepted a pair of sneakers in exchange for skybox seats.  That’s the fun stuff.  I do admire the athleticism of a lot of the players, and I can enjoy watching a game as a temporary distraction, but all the brackets and rankings mean nothing to me.

Reminder:  Get money for tolls.

Listening to the radio on the way in to work this morning, I learned that Iowa’s largest free municipal WiFi network is now up and running for the communities of Iowa City, Coralville, and Cedar Rapids. Pretty cool. Take that, Des Moines!

Tomorrow I’m going to bring my iBook to work and head up to the top floor to see if I can get a signal. Unfortunately, our building is notorious for blocking wireless signals, so using the iBook from my desk will remain an unfulfilled dream.

PS — Now that I’ve had a chance to use one, I can objectively declare that the Apple MacBook Pro is, without argument, the coolest laptop computer in the entire world. EVAR! I will not entertain any dissenting views on the matter.

This past Saturday evening we attended a birthday party for our friend Dawn. This event is surely the highlight of the annual social calendar for our small group of friends and acquaintances. Over the years Dawn has managed to cultivate a number of interesting, smart, funny, and attractive people in her cadre of pals (thankfully, none of them can boast all those attributes; nobody likes a showoff), and her gatherings always involve lots of pithy talk, good food, and cheap booze.

Dawn and her husband Jim — with the assistance of their friend Camino — put together a mouthwatering paella for dinner. There was also a delicious green salad and a lemon sorbet that Jim whipped up. Simple and fun. Jim had purchased a 12 pack of Miller High Life for those in the mood for a beer (there was also Newcastle), and the small kitchen table absolutely bristled with bottles of red wine. The corner of the table was dominated by a big stewpot full of sangria. Champagne was served with the cake and sorbet, and Jim was just firing up a batch of chocolate martinis when Leah and I had to say goodnight.

Now it’s another whole year before Dawn has another birthday. The minutes will pass like hours. Happy Birthday, Dawnie B!

Rachel, you can stop reading now.

I’ve been working with our family friend Judy to set her up with a new computer. We’ve been telling her for years that she needs to dump her pokey old Windows laptop and come on up to the Mac, but she only recently broke down. Her budget for the upgrade enabled her to go with one of Apple’s new MacBook Pro laptops, which we’ll outfit with a 1GB RAM upgrade and a new Canon PIXMA MP500 printer. I got an e-mail from Apple this past weekend letting me know that the computer has shipped. When it arrives at the house this week, I’ll install some apps for her and get the printer drivers installed. I’m looking forward to playing with Apple’s latest and greatest.

One major disappointment has been the Canon printer. It prints beautifully, but it doesn’t support network printing. I spent a good part of yesterday futzing around trying to print to it via samba from my iBook, with only limited success. I’ve since learned that Brother is the only company out there that provides CUPS drivers with its printers. Shows how much I know.

I suppose I’ll be getting some pictures of the new unit once I get it unpacked, just to have around for motivation.

Leah, Ava, and I went to a birthday party yesterday for the son of a friend of ours. The festivities took place at the Iowa Children’s Museum, a place I’d seen a number of times but never ventured into. Turns out the have special birthday rooms there that you can rent out for your party, and that’s where we hung out.

Ava didn’t seem to want to nap all day, and in fact just went down at 5 p.m. It was pretty hectic around here this afternoon. We’re thinking we may have made a mistake taking her out to the party, but it would’ve been a shame to miss our her friend’s special day.

Anyway, that children’s museum was a complete zoo, as I suppose a reasonable person might expect it to be on a Saturday afternoon. My favorite episode took place in the four-and-under room, where Ava and I went to run around for a bit after the party. There was a little girl (she looked pretty close to the four-year age limit to me) running all over the place, pushing a little toy lawnmower in front of her. She was really moving. She was dodging and weaving between all the adults and the other kids in the room and having a grand old time.

Enter her dad and little brother.  Dad made the mistake of setting the little fella down on the floor (he wasn’t even old enough to crawl), and it wasn’t long before sis came along and plowed straight over him.  I have to hand it to the kid, though; he didn’t really cry for long at all.  In fact after one or two good wails, dad picked him up and sat him on his lap, and he quieted right down.

Lesson learned:  Watch your back at the children’s museum.

You ever have one of those meals that just sticks in your memory?

Before we left for our vacation, a colleague of Leah’s clued her in to a restaurant in Winter Park where his brother used to dine when he lived there.  We were looking for a place to eat one evening, and Deno’s Mountain Bistro got the nod.

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How’s that for technicalese?!

Standing on the shoulders of giants, I got the FAlbum plugin working under WordPress. What’s it do? Well, see that instance of “flickr” over there in the menu on the right? Click it. It’ll take you to a page hosted at this site that is populated with images from my flickr account. There’s lots of junk there and literally hundreds of images I haven’t had time to get into sets yet. What you won’t see, I’m afraid, are any pictures of Ava. For that, you’ll have to register an account on our gallery.

What I’d really like to have, eventually, is a way to present images here within the blog that take advantage of the very cool “note” system used at flickr. It allows you to add notes to an image that are viewable on mouseover. It works a little something like this.

Get it?  “Roll?”  Like a day-old bakery item or a slow pedal down a backcountry road?

OK.  Fine.  Anyway, I know I don’t brag on this woman nearly as much as I could.  Fact is, she makes me look bad!  How’d you like to be a 35-year-old man in good health whose 63-year-old mother can outbike you without breaking a sweat?  To add insult to injury, she gets more done before noon on a typical day than I can manage to accomplish in a good month.

As she would say, “harumph.”  I am proud of you, Mom.  And I’m glad Ava has you around to learn from.

This morning I helped Ava on with her shoes and then sat on the couch for a bit and watched her toddle around the living room (though “toddle” is increasingly becoming an inadequate verb to describe what she’s doing; it’s walking, let’s face it).

Fat beams of sunlight were streaming through our east windows, and they lit up Ava’s golden curls each time she walked through one of them.  At one point she stopped and took notice of a couple tiny bits of dust floating slowly in the light, and she reached out her hand and curled her fingers again and again to try to get the particle to come her way.  She pushed up on her tiptoes and babbled something only she and the dust would understand (I think maybe she thought she was looking at a bug).  There was a look of wonder on her face.

After a minute or so I caught myself staring at her with my mouth hanging open in a big smile.  It was such a great moment; I wish it could’ve lasted forever.

Leah sent along a pretty fascinating article (NYT: soul-sucking registration required) today about Bedouins in Israel whose centuries-old practice of intra-family marriage is now yielding some rather horrific birth defects.

My spirit really stumbled when I read about the father who, himself a victim of the mutations so common among his people, chose to marry outside his family and fathered two healthy children.  Children he’ll never see, as he was born with no eyes.

This was one of those moments when you become acutely aware of being a parent.  I’ve been trying, but I can’t even imagine what it  must be like to never see your children.  It’s amazing to consider a life without sight, to never have seen anything at all.  No sun.  No sky.  No dry leaves blowing across a parched desert landscape.  To never see your children, then, must simply be like never seeing all the other people in your life you’ve never seen.  Your parents, neighbors, wife.

I don’t want to contemplate what my life would be like if I could never see Ava again.  If I could never see at all again.  To live for 34 years before seeing the most gorgeous thing in the world, only to have it disappear, would be too much to bear.

We walked out of the elevator at our hotel in downtown Denver the other morning and were stopped by Ava, who was pointing up on the wall and saying, “Unc?  Eesh?”  That’s what she calls her Uncle Kevin and Aunt Rachel.  Leah and I knew they weren’t around anywhere, but we were mightily amused to see what Ava was pointing at.  Those of you who know what Unc and Eesh look like will probably be amused as well.

…”I’m on my hands and knees, kissing the driveway.”

As we drove into Grand Island under a steady drizzle night before last, I thought to myself, “Man, if it were a couple degrees cooler, this would be a real mess.”

Guess what?  Yesterday we woke up and pulled the shades back in our tidy Holiday Express room to reveal four inches of blown snow on the ground, with another 16 inches expected before dark.   SIXTEEN.  I was eager to get on the road and get out from under the storm before it got any worse, but Leah wasn’t so sure.

Having driven that very same stretch of road under the very same conditions before, I knew that if one could just punch through for 50 miles or so — even if it meant going 35 on the interstate — you could usually find some dry road.  Sure enough, by the time we got to Lincoln, the roads were much better (though it was still snowing).  The snow didn’t let up completely until just east of Omaha, and then it was clear sailing all the way home.

Other than the weather, the drive was uneventful.  Ava did a great job.  Actually, I think she now considers the Volvo as an extra, portable room of our house.

Well, there was one exciting event on the way home.  About 60 miles west of Des Moines, I noticed a pillar of black smoke rising into the sky just off the interstate.  My first thought was that a car had caught fire, and my suspicions were confirmed as we drew closer to the source of the smoke and saw a motor home engulfed in flames on the shoulder of the westbound lanes.  What I assumed was the driver was standing behind the vehicle, talking on his cell phone.  I made a mental note at that point that this was a perfect example of a good time to have a cell phone.

I added a couple more pictures to the gallery last night, including some fun ones of two bikini-clad snowbunnies frolicking in a hot tub (well, I restricted access to those two, to be honest).  More posts to come as I unpack my brain.

Leah and I went out for dinner last night while Rachel and Kevin watched Ava. The name of the place is Devil’s Thumb Ranch, and it has a gorgeous view out over a wide mountain valley.

Rachel and Kevin had dined there the night before, and they were lucky enough to get a nice clear sky that showed off not only a fantastic sunset but a beautiful full moon.

Leah and I weren’t quite so lucky with the weather. In fact, we debated whether or not we should even make the six-mile drive to the restaurant, as the snow was blowing so hard we could barely make out the road in front of the cabin. But at last we figured we may as well try it so, we set off.

There’s a stretch of Hwy. 40 outside Fraser that crosses an area known as the Fraser Flats.  There’s a stream system flowing through the area that’s home to an endangered species of frog.  Seemingly unimportant information, until you realize that the local roads division won’t sand or salt Hwy. 40 when the road becomes dangerous.  Last night, the road became dangerous.  The couple-mile stretch we had to traverse to the turn off for the restaurant was a sheet of glare ice.  Fortunately, it was a straight stretch; if there had been any curve at all in that road, we’d have been in the ditch.

Fortunately, the dinner was worth the risk.  I had a Texas-raised antelope dish that was fantastic.  For starters I ordered a bison and cabbage stew that was probably about the most perfect accompaniment I could imagine to the scenery we enjoyed outside the window.  Dessert was a lemon tart on an oatmeal crust.  It was OK.  The oatmeal flavor eclipsed the lemon pretty handily, which was a shame.  I like lemon.

If you ever get a chance to visit this area, I’d recommend Devil’s Thumb Ranch.  Just go on a clear evening.

We’re having a great time up here in the mountains. There’s been lots of snow. Kevin is off snowboarding for a half day at Mary Jane right now, as a matter of fact. He and I went snowmobiling for a bit the day we got here, which was a lot of fun (except for the part where we had to pull the snowmobile out of waist-deep snow).

I’ve uploaded a number of new pictures to the gallery, both to Ava’s gallery and the March ’06 dailies. Enjoy!

When you have a new baby in the house, it’s easy to get caught up in the wonder of it all (you probably hadn’t noticed from reading this blog).

Since Ava was born — really, since I’ve been married — I haven’t found myself missing the single life.  Yes, now and then I’ll reflect on how nice it would be to take an unannounced afternoon to hang out with old friends at one of the area watering holes, but by and large, family life has been very good to me.  I suppose I’d recommend it.

I’m surprised every day by Ava.  The other night, she, Leah, and I were lying in bed, reading books and feeding Ava Cheerios before she went to sleep.  In a pause between books, Ava rolled over and gave me a kiss, then rolled to her other side and gave Leah a kiss.  Then she took a drink from her bottle and snuggled into the comforter to prepare to hear me read the next book.

I take dozens of pictures of Ava each week and write these blog posts to try to capture some impression of what it’s like to have her around, but I’ll never be able to save the magic I feel when I get one of those impromptu kisses.  If you’re the kind of person who keeps an eye out for life’s perfect moments, that’s one of them.  There is no pretense or dishonesty in that simple little demonstration of affection.  The beauty of what to Ava must seem like an almost reflex action nearly stops my heart.

While I wasn’t there, I’m told Ava’s appointment went very well today.  She’s not 20 pounds yet, which is the bad news.  The good news is that she’s moving up the height charts, which helps explain why she isn’t packing on the pounds.    I’m glad to hear it.  I’m 6’1″, and Leah’s 5’3″ when she wears 3″ heels, so I was a little worried Ava was going to end up tiny (not that there’s anything wrong with that).  If she continues at her current pace, she’ll end up long and lean.  Maybe.

Ava also got shots today, but she won’t have any more until she’s four.  I wish she was able to understand what happy news that is for her.

Grandma Georgie is here to visit overnight, and Ava’s having a lot of fun with her.  Much to Georgie’s dismay, I’ve taught Ava to call grandma “G.G.”  Georgie was using the restroom this evening, and I told Ava to go knock on the door.  It was hilarious to hear Ava knocking and calling out, “G.G.!  G.G.!”  Grandma wasn’t so amused.

Tomorrow evening Aunt Rachel and Uncle Kevin arrive to prepare for the trip to Colorado.  The pediatrician has given us permission to turn Ava around in her car seat, which is great news.  Tomorrow after work I’ll get that all set up so we’re ready to hit the road Saturday morning.  Depending on connectivity from the road, I may or may not be posting from North Platte on Saturday evening.