Ewan James Strider Humphries was born on 5:44am on April, 20^th 2009. It was good timing because my parents were already in town to attend a grandparents’ day at Will’s school on that very day. Around 11:30pm Sunday night, Malin started to have contractions, and we headed to the hospital.

It was an even shorter labor than with Will – which is typical from what I understand (meaning that labor for second child is typically shorter than first).

I suppose it was lucky that it passed quickly because Malin had the horrible misfortune of getting a complete a-hole anesthesiologist. He was not very personable. He was short with us and mildly derisive, too. Malin had just been given Stadol (a pain-killer that doped her up solid) and was irritated that she was having trouble sitting straight up (which was due to the aforementioned medication). Then he f’ed up the epidural. After it was obvious that the epidural was ineffective (several hours with noticable lack of pain relief), he then insisted that the epidural catheter was properly placed (which it wasn’t) and decided not to re-do it. Several nurses and the nurse anesthetist were witness to it and said they would put in a complaint. Prior to being discharged from the hospital, Malin retold the story to the midwife, who was sure to get the doctor’s name to put in another complaint. (He may not have a job at the hospital for long…)

What followed was a heroic endurance of labor pain on Malin’s part. At 5:44am, the doctor showed up just in time to catch the baby as he was finally ejected from the womb. Ewan was free at last.

Mercifully, Malin’s medication-less labor was at its end – the product of which was a healthy-sized 9 lb. 3.2 oz. baby boy that measured 21.5 inches long.

The nurses cleaned him up and gave him the usual quick inspection:

And then they handed him to mom and dad:

The nurses took Ewan up to the nursery to give him a bath. Shortly after that, he started to breath faster than newborns usually do. After a few hours, his respiration appeared to slow to normal and his oxygen-saturation was okay, so the nurses decided he could finally leave the nursery and come to our room in the hospital.

While Grandma and Grandpa Humphries were hanging out with Will at grandparent’s day, Ewan’s other grandmother, Annie, came over for a visit:

And shortly after that, the other grandparents made it over:

Ann returned with Will in tow, and he seemed to take to his new little brother pretty well:

Will, hamming it up as usual:

Will was a little bit sheepish at first, as he often is. When Ewan cried for the first time, Will got scared, covered his ears, and ran for the door to get away!

After everyone left, Malin, Ewan, and I tried to take a nap. During this time, we noticed Ewan’s breathing seemed to be labored. He was breathing very quickly and heavily, and his nostrils were flaring. We called the nurse, who took him to the nursery to examine him.

Unfortunately, he was then sent to the NICU because his oxygen saturation was lower than they like to see. All sorts of scary possibilities were presented; but, even early on, the doctor thought it was probably bad reflux: stomach acid made it far enough up Ewan’s esophagus to get into his lungs and cause the distressed respiration.

We had been through the NICU experience before with Will. This time was a little easier because the symptoms were not nearly as severe as Will’s extremely low platelet count. Nevertheless, it was not easy to have to visit the NICU in order to see the new boy and to see him hooked up to to so much (machines that monitored his breathing, pulse, and oxygen saturation; oxygen supplied to his nostrils; and an IV drip to provide him fluids).

Luckily, some of the scarier sounding possibilities (like cardiac/heart condition and pneumonia) were slowly stricken from the list as results from tests rolled in. Ewan’s breathing was quite intense and difficult during his first night as he recovered from his earlier breathing troubles. He also got a little bit of congestion in his nose and sinuses, which doesn’t help at all since newborn’s only know how to breath through their nose (except when they are crying).

After that, he seemed to recover quickly. The nurses and the doctor continued to see signs of severe reflux though. The NICU doctor is great – very thorough and extremely protective of all of the babies that end up in his care. But apparently Malin and I seemed like a responsible couple, so he made a deal with us: we follow all of his instructions to the letter, and he would let Ewan go home. We finally left the hospital with Ewan on Wednesday, 4/22.

We have been struggling to follow the doctor’s orders because they require putting Ewan on a strict feeding schedule that is timed compatibly with his medication times. We are still figuring it out. Ewan occasionally appears to have reflux symptoms – wincing and swallowing an hour or so after feeding – but there have been no severe episodes, and hopefully there will be none. His medicines, Reglan and Zantac, seem to be helping.

So we’re finally all at home, and there is a great measure of comfort for all of us in that. Thanks to everyone for all of the well wishes during these past few days. We will no doubt be getting even more pictures of the little guy and will post them here soon!

We’ve had a lot of other stuff going on lately, too.

My mother-in-law got re-married to a very nice guy. She’s just got a buyer for her house, and tomorrow will be a fun day of moving furniture. Luckily not for me. Movers will be picking stuff up from her house and moving some of it in with us and the rest in her new house where she lives with her new husband. Malin will be dealing with that since she knows where all of the furniture is going, and I have to work…

Malin is still pregnant – but just barely. She’s about to burst, so she’s not likely to be in this state for very long. Due date is in one week. I will be taking three weeks off from work when the new one arrives. I am kind of looking forward to that since my current project at work has been up and down and a little high stress lately.

We’ve had all sorts of fun dealing with unreliable contractors lately. The roofers finally put a new roof on the house – before Malin went into labor luckily. Crummy weather for the past several weeks did not help this effort. They were supposed to be back tomorrow to put up the new siding but called today to let us know they may not be able to find a match for our type of siding. If they can’t, they’ll have to work with insurance to potentially re-side the entire house (!?!?!) so that we don’t have one exterior wall of the house that looks different from the rest… Soon our hail damage saga will be behind us. I can’t wait for that day.

I’ve been brewing like mad (3 batches in 3.5 weeks). I have to get it out of my system since I may not have an opportunity to do so for a while after the baby comes.

That’s about all that’s been shaking ’round these parts since I last posted (about a month ago). Hopefully I’ll be prompt with pictures after the new guy arrives.

Will turned four on Sunday, January 11^th. My parents were here, so we were also able to wish my dad a happy birthday that same day. My dad drove all the way down here to Fayette county to have a Darth Vader cake for his birthday.

Will had been asking for Darth Vader on a cake for quite some time. His patience was finally rewarded. Okay, just kidding – he really has no patience.

On his actual birthday, we just threw a very small party for him – immediate family only. He received a few cool gifts: two DVDs (Horton Hears a Hoo and Kung-Fu Panda) and a voice-activated R2-D2 robot:

R2 is about 18 inches tall and responds to the sound of your voice… usually. He occasionally acts up (i.e. stops working properly), but can usually brought back into shape (worst case: hard reboot is necessary). Will likes to have R2 watch him play Wii. R2 has motion detectors so he can actually follow objects with his “eye”, so it can be a little surreal to see R2 watching him and turning from the TV to Will and back as if he’s actually paying attention.

Will’s Birthday Party

The following Saturday, the 17^th, we let Will have an actual party. He invited his friends from school to come out to Dixieland Fun Park:

The kids got to play for an hours in the “play maze” and then ride on a small indoor ferris wheel. After that, we were locked in a “party room” where we were forced to eat pizza.

After pizza was more Darth Vader cake. Due to a lame restriction of the venue, it could not be a homemade cake. So we brought a Publix cake that was decorated to be a Darth Vader cake:

And, of course, after cake it was time to open gifts. You can see that some of his friends were more than welcome to help open the packages:

Most of his friends (or friends’ parents at least) knew of his obsession with Star Wars, so he received several cool Star Wars-related gifts – like a sticker book and some little action figures. The coolest gift, however, was not Star Wars-related. I don’t think Will thinks it’s as cool as I do, but it is neato. It’s a magnifying digital video recorder. It magnifies up to 400x and records to a USB thumb drive. It is an inexpensive toy camera, but is still pretty cool for getting a look under the microscope so to speak – everything from denim to human skin all looks cooler blown up 400 times bigger than usual. The gift that he least understood at the time but has ultimately come to appreciate the most was a gift card for IKEA: we took him up there, and he picked out a new night light and a stuffed animal octopus that he now insists on sleeping with every night.

Charcuterie

One of the gifts that my mom bought my wife for Christmas was a really great cookbook on making charcuterie at home. We were so giddy about it that the first thing we did after getting the book was to buy a meat grinder and a sausage stuffer. We made a country paté for New Year’s Eve dinner:

Note, the off-color of the meat is from a bunch of parsley ground into it – nothing sinister here. This recipe was basically a fancy meatloaf: plenty of pork fat, salty, serve cold. The pink ground meat in the bottom of the bowl is coarsely ground pork shoulder (aka pork butt or Boston butt). Since most of the meat was only ground coarsely, the texture of the final forcemeat is not as smooth or refined – thus it is “country” paté.

The day after Will’s birthday party we found ourselves in Decatur and found a butcher shop there that sells “pink salt” (sodium nitrite) and natural sausage casings (hog casings at least). The following Saturday, the 24^th, we made knackwurst.

Here’s a pic of “water sausage” as I rinsed out the casings after soaking them for a bit in water:

And here is our wonderful finished product:

We’ve eaten some at various points over the past couple of weeks, most notably as hors d’œuvres on our Super Bowl evening.

Malin snapped a few shots of our mixer (aka meat grinder and sausage stuffer) afterwards. We call these Aftermath:

Auntie K and Uncle Cass

The day after we made the sausage, my sister and brother-in-law rolled into our neck of the woods. They had been on the east coast for the prior week, visiting family and friends all over. Since we lived relatively close to the airport, we were their final destination.

Usually Will prefers to ham things up in front of the camera, like so:

But lately he has been enjoying being behind the camera, too. Observe:

Kristie, a bit surprised by the wee photographer:

Cass, perhaps more prepared for portraiture:

Among other things, we dragged K and Cass up to our most recently-discovered chow-spot: The Porter Beer Bar in Little Five Points. Good times were had by all.

Lego Army

As mentioned above, Will has been making a habit of taking pictures lately. His favorite subject, by far, is his Lego army. I mentioned in a previous post how one of Will’s favorite hobbies is to mix and match all of the Lego-men pieces (heads, helmets, upper bodies, lower bodies) to build Frankenstein figures. Well, now his second favorite hobby is to photograph the fruits of this labor:

Here is a big panoramic shot. If it looks like several pictures all stitched together – well, that’s because it is. (If you bothered to notice little details like that, you have too much time on your hands!)

The Monday before Christmas, we did our celebrations and exchanged gifts with Malin’s mom and Randy. They would be with Randy’s family on Christmas morning, so came over to celebrate with us a little early.

Will loves opening gifts.

Especially when they contain anything related to Star Wars, Indiana Jones, or Batman…

My parents and my brother arrived on Christmas Eve. The next morning we all awoke to see Santa’s handiwork. After making short work of ripping through Santa’s presents, we moved on to the general exchange, during which Will made out with even more loot.

His grandparents got him a really wicked Darth Vader action figure – complete with battle damage (but no hole into which you could pour motor oil or grapefruit juice, no dispensor fist…). They also gave him a video game to which he has been addicted ever since: Lego Batman for the Wii.

Malin got him a Yoda action figure. After all, every plastic figure villain needs a plastic figure hero upon which to whoop ass, n’est-ce pas?

Malin and I also bought Will this Georgia Tech baseball cap to match mine:

The three things that Will asked Santa Claus for this year were a bicycle, “knight” Legos (more formally known as Castle Legos), and a knight costume. Here you can see him trying out the bicycle:

Santa brought him the Legos, too, but the costume was actually a gift from Malin’s mom.

Who knew that one of his favorite hobbies would be mixing and matching the heads, helmets, bodies, legs, and accessories of the Star Wars and Castle Legos? It’s a fun hobby yielding memorable characters like the evil jousting goblin that wears a stormtrooper helmet (I’ll have to get a picture of that guy and post it here, won’t I?).

After exchanging gifts, we ate breakfast: a French Toast casserole, scrambled eggs, and sausage links. Ann made it over for breakfast, and Randy came by after finishing Christmas with his family. They joined us, along with Jake and my parents, for Christmas dinner.

Dinner this year consisted of three courses:

1. Carrot Soup
2. Fresh hand-made fettucine with a brown butter demi-glace sauce, shitake mushrooms, and pearl onions
3. Roast leg of lamb with potato croquettes

Sick Weekend

We were supposed to drive to Greenville, SC the weekend following Christmas. My parents and brother retreated to Greenville the day after Christmas. In addition to visiting with them some more, we were hoping to see our friends Audra and Jon and their young daughter Madelyn.

The night after Christmas, Malin, Will, and I went to see The Tale of Despereaux. The movie was decent – better than I expected.

The following morning when were to get ready to leave, we ended up not being able to make the trip. Malin wasn’t feeling very well, Will’s never-ending cough was a little worse, and I felt like complete garbage: a bad cold resulting in a sinus infection – complete with a sore throat and ear ache.

So we stayed home that weekend, trying to recover. Unfortunately, I felt like crap for pretty much an entire week. I finally started to feel better just yesterday (Sunday the 4^th). Sorry everyone. We really wanted to visit with everyone, but just weren’t up for the car ride, and probably wouldn’t have been much fun in the shape we were in.

The Empire Struck Back

The next Tuesday – December 30^th – Malin was feeling rather gracious. Despite her hesitance to let Will see the first Star Wars movie (she was quite upset at me when she found out that we had watched it one night after she went out), she allowed the viewing of the sequel: The Empire Strikes Back – arguably the best movie out of all six that were made (I would argue that anyway…)

Will was bedazzled by the plot twist. The realization that Darth Vader was Luke’s father – that Anakin and Vader were one – was a total head game. Okay, perhaps I’m putting words into his mouth. But he enjoyed it immensely. Until bedtime…

That night and the following night, he kept us up for hours. He would begin screeching and crying in his sleep. He would wake up from the nightmares and come wake us up. Malin was up with him between midnight and 3am the first night, consoling him and doing anything to get him to fall asleep. The next night, it didn’t begin until about 4:45am, and I was up until close to 7 trying to get him to fall asleep.

The morning after he saw the movie, we asked him what his dreams were about. He answered, “I was dreaming about Darth Vader cutting off Anakin’s hand.”

“You mean Luke’s hand.”

“Yeah. And about Darth Vader freezing Anakin.”

“You mean freezing Han Solo.”

“Yeah.”

It’s kind of funny how he calls everyone Anakin. When he first heard of Indiana Jones this past Spring/Summer, he kept calling him Anakin Jones. I guess he really likes the name Anakin… It’s a good thing Will doesn’t get to name the new baby.

In an attempt to save ourselves another sleepless night, we put a night light in Will’s room the next day. No nightmares since. It will probably be quite some time before we allow him to see this one again. Although, naturally, the next morning when we suggested that he shouldn’t watch the movie again because it gave him such nightmares, he responded, “No, it’s good for me!”

Dirt, Dirt, and More Dirt

On New Year’s Eve, Randy graciously brought Malin a humongous truckload of nice, dark dirt for her garden. When I say big truckload, I mean it. He brought over a Dodge Ram 4500 with a hydraulic-powered bed specifically made for hauling dirt and mulch – literally.

So that afternoon was filled with shoveling a truckload of dirt onto the beds in Malin’s garden.

The next day incurred even more work, of course: tilling. I got to use our baby tiller – the “cultivator” – to re-till the beds and mix the new, dark dirt with the existing soil and clay.

While we were busy out there, we also moved our hop plant to the garden (it was previously in a natural area off the side of the house).

New Year’s

One of the gifts that my mom had gotten for Malin was an excellent cookbook named Charcuterie. Ever since pouring through its pages, we wanted to cook something from it.

So on Tuesday we went and bought a reasonably-priced meat grinder (an attachment for her Kitchen Aid mixer). We had decided to make a country pâté since all the ingredients were easily available – except for pork liver (which is really hard to find around here). We substituted chicken liver in our preparation of a Pâté de Campagne. The result is tasty – a salty, cold, meatloaf that is elevated to new heights thanks to the use of pork fat (to improve its flavor), sweet spices (think pumpkin pie spices – to make for sublime seasoning), and a small amount of liver (to smoothen the texture).

The pâté, unfortunately, was not actually consumed on New Year’s Eve. We prepared it that day/evening, but it wasn’t ready to eat until the next day.

So that night we made braised beef short ribs with some reheated potato croquettes from Christmas dinner.

We didn’t quite make it to midnight. We offered to let Will stay up with us, but he crashed around 10:30pm. We decided to toast around 11:30pm (Lindeman’s Pêche, not champagne) and then go to bed. We didn’t feel like pushing ourselves to stay up that last 30 minutes. Perhaps that’s lame, but I’d say it’s not. I’d say it’s lame to stay up late for the sake of staying up late. After all, we weren’t at a party or even around other people this year. So with Will asleep, there would be nothing interesting at midnight that we had not seen dozens of times before. Besides, we had both had crummy nights of sleep recently thanks to Will’s Darth-Vader-induced nightmares…

Tasty Tacos

This past weekend was my last weekend of vacation. I greatly enjoyed these two weeks at home, but all good things must come to an end it seems…

On Friday, we met our friends Scott and Karyn at Taqueria del Sol. We caught up, saw their baby daughter Zoe (whom I’ve seen only once before – and she had grown a lot since then), and ate some tasty tacos. We’ll be seeing them again soon because Malin is going to take some pictures of Zoe. I mentioned that we’ll bring some home-made sausages (thanks to the magical instructions and recipes in the Charcuterie book). To that, Scott replied, “As long as they’re turkey sausages.”

He is a bit disdainful of fatty indulgences like sausage. Turkey sausage – ha! I have no problems making a turkey sausage. The book even has a recipe for one. But it sure as hell will include pork fat – because turkey is far too lean to make a proper sausage by itself (as is virtually all meat except for pork shoulder and beef short rib…)

After lunch we returned home. The weekend was slow and relaxing. I brewed beer last night (Sunday). All is right with the world.

Gimpy and Grumpy made lots of mischief this year. Without further ado, here was the elves’ schedule.

December 11

The first night that the elves “came to life” was the night of December 10^th. The next morning, we found the results of their mayhem. It appeared as if they were trying to put a top on the Christmas tree. Gimpy had crawled high into the tree, and Grumpy had managed his way up to the top of the adjacent fireplace mantle. Gimpy’s outfit is naturally camouflaged amidst the tree, so you have to look hard to see her.

December 12

The next morning, the elves had started to prepare breakfast for Will. Wasn’t that nice?

December 13

The morning of the 13^th, we caught the elves trying to eat all of the freshly baked cookies Malin had made. Not so nice – shame on those elves.

December 14

The next day, Will found the elves trying to play his Wii.

December 15

We found the elves the following morning curled up under a blanket on the couch, about to watch Star Wars on the television.

December 16

That night, the elves must have consumed way too much coffee and candy. We found them stuck in the breakfast area light fixture.

December 17

On the 17^th, we found that they had brought Buzz – the Georgia Tech mascot – into their crazy games. We found the three of them playing Uno.

December 18

The next morning we found them reading a comic book that Will had recently been given. Our waitress at The Porter in Little Five thought Will was the cutest little boy, so she game him this Disney comic book. Gimpy and Grumpy thought it was a real page turner.

December 19

Apparently elves like to play with Legos almost as much as Will does.

December 20

The next morning, we found the elves again trying to prepare breakfast for Will. They were apparently having trouble figuring out how to get the cereal out of this bizarre contraption.

December 21

Apparently that night, the elves got into the sugar cookies that Malin had just made.

December 22

That night, the elves saved Malin and I tons of trouble. They wrapped all of the gifts for us. I suppose they were sorry for eating our cookies.

December 23

We have a metal rooster on the top of our refrigerator that we call Rusty. He used to be a centerpiece of our breakfast table, but he has since retired, overseeing the whole kitchen from this high perch. We found the elves riding him as if he were a horse. Good fun!

December 24

The elves were caught getting into the candy. Will’s Advent Calendar featured a treat for each day of December leading up to Christmas – a Hershey Hug (like a Kiss, but blended with white chocolate). Gimpy and Grumpy were both gnawing on Hershey Hugs when we woke up. Will was quite upset. “They ate all the Advent candy!” he cried. We reassured him that they had not delved too deeply in the candy, and that the treats in the Calendar were still available.

December 25

Gimpy was caught trying to ride Will’s new bicycle – a gift from Mr. Clause himself. The bike was a little bit too big, of course. Grumpy was found stuck in Will’s stocking, head first with his legs sticking out. Santa brought treats – like a Chocolate Frog and Bertie Bott’s Every-Flavor Beans – and put them in the stocking. Apparently, Grumpy got hungry helping Santa.

We’ll go into more detail about Christmas and what Santa brought Will in the next post. To all of you who celebrate Christmas, we hope yours was merry.

We bought a few pumpkins while we there – for jack-o-lanterns, for pumpkin pie, and for making pumpkin beer (the lattermost, unfortunately, never came to fruition).

This year, all of us dressed up. I haven’t really dressed up since when Malin was pregnant with Will. My costume was admittedly pretty lazy and lame: khakis, leather jacket, button-down shirt, and a cheap prop hat and whip. Yes, you guessed it: Indiana Jones.

Malin spent a little more time on hers; she actually made a big cloak. Will wants her to make him one next year so he can dress up as an evil-doer like mommy.

This year, Will was a storm trooper.

We got a couple of pictures of me and Malin, too.

In this pic you can see some of the house decorations – at least the three ghosts in the front yard.

That Sunday, Will helped to make pancakes, and he wore his Halloween apron – a gift from his grandmother Frannie.

Thus concludes the photo backlog. I think I’m pretty much caught up as far as posting pictures to this blog.

Stay tuned for Christmas pictures, which will hopefully be up before the end of the year.

I hope everyone else is having a pleasant holiday season and preparing for a great 2009.

Flying West

We left on a Friday, one week after Will’s last day of school for the term and my last day of work prior to my sabbatical.

Our trip out west was on a Song aircraft, so it had the entertainment units built into each seat:

We got settled quickly after we arrived. My sister picked us up from the airport and drove us to her place. I had sent a package to her and Cass earlier that week, and the tracking info said it should arrive the very same day that we landed. When we got there, however, we discovered it was not there. The package was a box packed with many homebrews.

National History Museum

On Saturday, we had a big day out – at the museum. Kristie and Cass had gotten a zoo keeper outfit for Will when they were last at the Santa Barbara zoo, so Will wore it much of our week there. He hesitated in putting on the jacket at first – not sure why. But he wore the hat and binoculars to the museum.

There were a bunch of USC fans tailgating as the National History Museum is just outside of campus on its southern side.

The museum had two special interests that attracted us (Will): dinosaurs and spiders.

The first set of dinosaurs, aside from the display out front in the above picture, is in the main foyer. And it is quite a spectacle. It reminds me of the great room at Atlanta’s Fernbank museum – which also has a towering set of dinosaur skeletons.

Will helped Cass give a small token of appreciation to the museum. Donations are fed into the dinosaur mouth:

Our first stop, after the grand display in the foyer, was the land of spiders. Outside the main spider exhibit, they had all of the nasty, poisonous arachnids on display. Will was keen on inspecting each and every one:

The main exhibit inside was awesome. Arachnophobes need not enter. It features numerous spiders, many quite large, freely running amok in a large outdoor space. You walk under their webs, you can see them in the bushes, and you have to be careful not to walk right into some of them. No glass walls protect them from you (or you from them). I think Malin and K were a little freaked out. Cass and Will enjoyed it thoroughly. I thought it was pretty awesome, too.

Malin found the molted exoskeleton of a grasshopper among the bushes and webs:

After the spiders, we visited the halls of mammals, of which there are three at the museum.

They also had a really cool exhibit of birds, including this fellow with the ridiculously long beak:

There was a section on marine life, including some very large fish. This is a picture of an incredibly huge nautilus (> 6ft tall) that defends the entrance to that wing:

Last but not least was an exhibit about the restoration process for dinosaur bones and fossils. They had an actual restoration lab in there with windows so you could see inside and watch the people work.

On our way out, Malin noticed how cool the water fountains were. It looks like you could perform a baptism/christening in one:

On the outside, we had one last set of photos to take – of the giant tiki head, similar to the heads on Easter Island:

Olvera Street

The next day, Malin, K, and I went for a walk through an art festival in North Hollywood. It was pretty uneventful and boring, so we decided to go somewhere else. We ended up going to Olvera Street, looking at shops, and eating good Mexican food for lunch. Warning to tourists: Olvera Street restaurants are expensive. Unfortunately, Will was behaving rather poorly at lunch time, so we left in a bit of a hurry. So we weren’t able to grab a Mexican wrestler mask while there (of which there were plenty available).

The Zoo

The next day, Kristie had to work. So Cass took us to the zoo.

You can see that Will finally decided to wear the jacket that was part of his zoo keeper outfit.

One of the first animals we encountered was a meerkat, sleeping in the shade.

The zoo had all manner of animals, from alligators to lions and sea lions to ibex. Here is a quick montage. Men, try not to be too intimidated by the zebra.

Cass told us how the tallest male giraffe occasionally wanders to one side of their enclosure and does his best to feed off of a very tall tree using an amazingly prehensile tongue. While we were there, we got to see this endeavor in action.

There were also a very fair species of ungulate named Gerenuk (sound like made-up words from a viking poem, don’t they?)

What would a trip to the zoo be without apes? They had many apes, but the best photos we got were of chimpanzees:

On the way back out, the meerkat had finally woken up:

There was also a petting zoo. Before leaving, Will got to pet the goats and sheep that were there. We got one last picture – Will and Cass standing outside the petting zoo:

Unbirthday Party

The next day, Cass and I went to the UPS facility to pick up the homebrews. They had not been delivered on Monday either and were waiting for us at the facility. That evening, a friend of Cass’s came over to help us sample some of the homebrews – which was fun for me since, even though I made them all and have tasted them all before, they tasted better and new with a few months age.

During the day on Tuesday, we had an Unbirthday Party:

Ours was held at the Travel Town Museum – a large field with old steam engines and train cars in it. Will had lots of fun wandering around the trains.

After playing in the train cars, we sat down at a picnic bench and ate lunch. After lunch was the obligatory balloon animals. It is an unbirthday party after all! Instead of animals, however, we made things like helmets, swords, and small intestines:

Before the picnic was finished, we had to have cake. It is an unbirthday party after all! Will calls it “red vulva” cake. Red Velvet is how most of us might refer to it:

After the picnic and balloon-sword fencing, we took a trip around the museum on their miniature locomotive:

When the tour rode around to the back of the park, we could see a train car with a wonderful exclamation painted on it.

Before we left, we got one last picture – this one of all five of us:

Santa Monica

On Wednesday, we decided to drive to Santa Monica. Cass had some things to do, so K accompanied us and drove us about. We first hit up some shops along with way. Among other things, we got Will some cool, new, blue shoes – his LA Shoes. Unfortunately, I don’t have a picture of them when there were still new and clean, but there is what they look like today:

We went to the main pier at the Santa Monica Beach, had some ice cream, and rode on the ferris wheel.

The main point of going to the beach was for Malin to get a shot of the sunset:

Will was misbehaving on the beach, running off, not listening to us, and so forth. So he was looking pretty glum at this point.

After the beach, we went to do some more shopping and eat some dinner. We ate at a small bar/restaurant called The Library Alehouse, which served decent food and a had a nice selection of beers – from California and otherwise.

There were some cool murals on the walls in the area, too:

Sushi With Uncle Uncle

On Thursday, we went into LA to visit Little Tokyo. While there, we visited a Japanese bookstore, and we also went into a Japanese market. Will got some interesting/odd Japanese toys from the market. We also got the obligatory pack of Pocky.

That evening, continuing with the Japan theme, we had a delicious dinner at a nice sushi restaurant. Cass’s uncle came to dinner with us. Cass and K just call him “uncle”, so we figured Will could call him “uncle uncle.” So we ate dinner with uncle uncle. Will did pretty well, but eventually got quite bored. So he climbed under the bench (our table was against a bench, so half the party sat on the bench and the other half across the table in chairs) and began playing with the arrangement of rocks thereunder.

Returning to Atlanta

The next day was are trip back home. Cass and I dragged a box of stuff that wouldn’t fit into our carry-on suitcases (we never check luggage) to a shipping store to have it FedEx’ed home.

I also had a bunch of interesting and rare brews that I bought while in LA. But we didn’t have boxes and packing material on hand to safely send them on their way, so Cass offered to pack them up after we left and send them to us.

The trip home was uneventful.

Post-Trip Activities

The day after we got back was Saturday. That evening, friends of mine from college visited us: Desmond, his wife Jessica, and their one-year-old daughter Alexis. They left the next morning to the airport to go on their own sort of vacation in Florida.

The following week, we drove through the Carolinas. We spent a couple of nights with my parents in Greenville, SC. We also visited Durham, NC to see our friend Audra and her husband Jon. They had just had a newborn baby daughter named Madelyn. Finally, we had a stop in Charlotte, NC to visit with some of Malin’s relatives and to see Desmond and company yet again.

Our night at Desmond and Jessica’s house was fun. We played Rock Band 2 on their PS3, and Will had a lot of fun banging on the drums. Surprisingly, as much fun as he had at Desmond’s and again at Best Buy playing Rock Band, he has yet to ask for a copy. But we won’t be surprised when he does.

Stay tuned for the next and final chapter of the photo backlog – Halloween. It will be a much shorter post than this one, so it should go up pretty soon.

One thing I immediately associate with the US holiday that is Independence Day is the lake – any large, calm body of water will do. Boats help. The second thing that comes to mind is crisp, summer brew. Perhaps one like this:

This past year we spent the summer holiday at Malin’s mother’s lake-front double-wide on Lake Sinclair. There is a jet-ski there, a pontoon boat, and a nice boat-house:

A view from the dock, looking down at the water:

My folks have a lake house, too, but the Georgia drought has been decidedly unfriendly to Lake Lanier. I hear that Sinclair levels stay high despite of the lack of precipitation because it is upstream of a nuclear facility. If something bad happens downstream, they’ll empty the reservoir to cool the reactors… That was actually a rumor I just heard this past weekend. A guy standing in line behind us, while waiting in a long line at Lennox Mall for Will to see Mr. Clause, told us that one. I don’t know if it’s complete BS or not. I’ve done no fact-checking. Leave a comment if you know one way or another. In any event, when the moisture returns to the Southeast, we’ll take pictures of Lake Lanier – perhaps of Will on his first sailing trip (or, failing that, of me miserably bungling an attempt to sail).

The dogs were with us, too, this past summer as you can plainly see:

Here’s another view of Marla, begging Malin for some treats while out for a ride on the boat:

And here’s the converse view – Marla looking up at Malin:

One of the nicest things about Ann’s lakehouse (Ann is my mother-in-law) is the view. It is right on a main causeway of the lake, with a beautiful view of the water and of the sky overhead (see picture at right).

This past fourth of July was like any other day at the lake. We woke up and cooked breakfast. Then we boated around. Will took turns on the jet-ski, first with his mom and then with me. We waded in the water by the house and let the dogs swim around. And then we went for a boat ride and took lunch with us. Lunch typically consists of simple sandwiches or food cooked on the charcoal grill on the back porch of the double-wide. When we returned, it was time for naps and then to venture forth to watch fireworks.

After the sun began to do down, we broke out the sparklers.

Malin was playing around with long-exposure shots, which made for some cool images:

We also had some firecrackers, which made for excellent subjects of the long-exposure images, too:

After a brief fireworks routine on the deck, we hopped on the boat to see the big show on the lake. You can kind of see in this dimly-lit picture that a lot of boats come out to watch. Sometimes it feels so crowded that you could almost walk from one shore to the other by simply hopping from boat to boat.

It was tough to get good shots of the fireworks, so here’s the best we captured. Forgive the blurriness and lack of vivid color…

And now we must end this second chapter of photo fun. Back-to-back days of blogging – can you believe it?! Sometimes I amaze even myself. We’ll see if I can keep it up. The next post will be a short one, so I should be able to continue the trend and have it up here tomorrow. Stay tuned.

But when I was collecting photos to post with those write-ups, I found some other stuff that could go on this blog. So this is part 1 of 5. These posts will be mostly in chronological order – so the oldest photos are found below. There will actually be a part 6, but I’m hoping that won’t be backlog. By that point in time, we’ll have finally found ourselves caught up and will be posting recent photos – like the adventures of Gimpy and Grumpy the elves.

This post really contains the miscellaneous photos that weren’t associated with any particular event – around the house, here and there, this and that… That means there aren’t as many words associated with these pictures. There isn’t really a story to tell or a trip or other tale to recount. So this might be the shortest in this series – which is probably good since it mainly consists of all of our funny-looking mugs, which some of you may be tired of looking at :)

This image is one that Malin took of herself over a year ago:

More recently, she needed a self-portrait to use with press releases. The two below weren’t actually used in print, but I thought they were good. I actually clicked the button on the camera. But aside from that most mundane of actions, I had nothing to do with the photography. Malin setup the lighting, the camera, and the idea in advance and just needed my help actually capturing it:

Speaking of Malin’s photography, this is a cool picture that she snapped from our front yard after a rainstorm – a wicked-looking double rainbow:

Here’s another photo that she took of Will last Fall. He helped her draw the angel wings on the pavement with sidewalk chalk – kind of like a “rock’n'roll” angel, eh?

What post of portraits would be complete without one of yours truly? I think we have lots of pictures like this since I am often the guinea pig for Malin’s test shots. If she’s playing around with some new setting on her camera, a new idea for lighting effects, or a new lens, I am usually the subject. I don’t know if there was actually any photographic experimentation going on for this pic though.

This recent one shows me beating Castlevania for Will. He occasionally likes to play the game, but he prefers to watch since he gets frustrated with his own still-developing levels of fine motor control. Having said that, he’s gotten pretty good at his latest video game acquisition (Lego Indiana Jones).

And last, but certainly not least, are some images of Will’s toys. My brother-in-law Cass got him a Super Grover construction set when we were in Los Angeles this year. The set comes with extra pieces, and you can assemble everything to look like Super Grover or in crazy ways to look something else.

This was Will’s favorite creation: Darth Grover.

This might be his second-favorite: R2-Grover.

More recently, I bought him a Snap-Tite model of a Star Wars spaceship. As it turns out, he isn’t quite ready to build these. I didn’t realize just how small some of the pieces were and how much manual dexterity in your hands was needed to snap all of the pieces together. I knew he wouldn’t have the patience or reading ability to follow the instructions, so I was prepared to help out a lot. I think the age recommendation of 8 years old is a bit old, however. He’ll probably be putting these together himself by age 6. So he helped me sort out the pieces, and I let him help with some of the snap-together assembly where I thought he could. He mostly played with the plastic Jedi figure that came with it while I assembled.

The finished product, sitting on our space-age carpet – designed to resemble the lunar surface of Kashyyyk:

That wraps up this episode of the photo backlog.

Please stay tuned for the next episode: Independence Day 2008.

And now, you’re moment of zen:

My brother flew in from Boston for the long weekend, and my parents came, too. My mother-in-law was also in attendance. We ate Cornish Hens instead of Turkey – because Malin was our chef du jour and she would rather both cook and eat the wee chicks vs. a large turkey. All of the other fair was fairly standard Turkey-day fare: ham, macaroni & cheese, stuffing, deviled eggs, biscuits, and sweet potato casserole. We had some other less traditional menu items as well: broccoli & craisin salad and brussel sprouts.

My mom brought Wall-E on DVD for Will. He has now watched the movie three times already since Thanksgiving.

On Friday, all the men (including Will) went out to shop for Black Friday deals. We had four places to visit. None of the things on our lists were critical, so we let ourselves sleep in. Due to our late departure, we struck out on all but the last.

• Staples did not have the 24″ widescreen LCD monitor on sale in Peachtree City (it was ~$100 off in Greenville, SC per an ad that my dad brought with him).
• Wolf Camera had long since run out of the free 4GB x 3 memory cards. Yes, that’s right – buy three 4GB memory cards (SD or CompactFlash – and good memory, too: SanDisk Extreme III) for $20 each and get $60 back via mail-in rebate. No wonder they went quickly.
• K-Mart had run out of $179 Sony Blu-Ray players ($120 off) by the time we arrived.

The one deal we were able to take advantage of: $7.99 for a 50-pack of DVD-Rs at Best Buy. Only three packs were left; I bought two of them. I also snagged a copy of Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels on DVD as it was on sale for only $3.

While at Best Buy, Will and I introduced my brother Jake to Rock Band. Will and I had first played this at my friend Desmond’s in North Carolina last month. They had the full ensemble set up on their demo Xbox 360 system. We let Jake warm up with a simple tune first: Eye of the Tiger. We then decided to play one last one before heading out: Peace Sells But Who’s Buying. It was an entertaining moment at the PTC Best Buy…

Luckily, online stores were participating in Black Friday sales this year which means I got nearly of the deals I originally was hoping to score – just not from a retail, brick’n'mortar store. Gotta love Frys.com and Amazon.com!

On Saturday, out in the soaking rain, I again attempted to brew a batch of holiday beer (I tried cooking up a batch last weekend but failed miserably). The weather was less than stellar. I will not be brewing beer in the rain again anytime soon. Despite the foul precipitation and several aggravating missteps (including the depressing breakage of my thermometer calibrator), brew day went admittedly more smoothly than last week’s attempt.

Tonight, I’ve finally removed some nasty spyware from my computer. One of the guests here for Thanksgiving was browsing/surfing and apparently inadvertently installed a nasty one onto my machine: go.google redirects, security sites blocked, and Windows Firewall automatically disabling itself. And the whole canniving thing secured itself from removal via a TDSS rootkit. I may have to create a Virtual Machine specifically for guest internet browsing to prevent this sort of “innocent” infestation again…

I’m still compiling some photos from our trip to LA. I know, I know – it’s been nearly two months since we got back, and nary an image or paragraph detailing the trip on this blog. I’m also working on pictures from Halloween (the whole family dressed up to go trick-or-treating!). Stay tuned…