Life has been moving fast. In a half-assed attempt to catch up, this post is a review of our lives over the past couple of years.

I sort of wonder if anyone will see it. I know a few folks had this blog in their RSS feeds, but it’s been inactive for so long, it would not surprise me if those followers have since moved on. Posts used to show up on my Facebook profile as “notes”. But Facebook has since left that feature by the wayside. So perhaps it’s just for my own neurosis — an itch to put something here after noticing that my last post was nearly 18 months ago(!).

We didn’t share even a single post for the entire year of 2011. So sad…

2009

Even though we’ve posted since 2009, the last couple of posts (one in late 2009 and another in 2010) were just my personal ramblings and didn’t have any family news. The last family post was the wild and somewhat terrible tale told by Malin about her emergency gall bladder removal surgery. That was shortly after the birth of our second (and final) child, little Ewan.

Later that year, Willem caught his first fish (two of them). My dad, the true angler of our family, took him fishing in local lakes around Peachtree City. He finally hooked a tiny (no, seriously, really tiny) fish swimming just off the shore of Lake Peachtree, just behind the Peachtree City Public Library.

Malin and I celebrated our 7th anniversary with a trip to Bacchanalia, and it was awesome.

My brother Jake not only left Boston (where he was working for Harvard), he left the country. He got a permanent resident visa for Australia and then moved down undah.

2010

Willem turned 5 and Ewan turned 1 in 2010 — fantastic birthday parties were thrown for both of these events.

Early in the year, I helped Malin put together a new arm of her photography business: Moirai Software. It began life as actions that she put together to speed up proofing in her daily photography work. Back in 2008, I helped her put together a script for creating storyboards. In February of 2010, she released the newest (and best yet) incarnation of the script for sale as moirai Compositor. It sold pretty well, which was a nice source of income for 2010 which, sadly, declined significantly in 2011 (though, thankfully, the well has not yet completely dried).

2010 saw me entering my beers into homebrew contests for the first time. I did pretty well! I was in the top 5 at an informal non-AHA event up in Atlanta and won a gift certificate to Octane Espresso as a prize. I received honorable mention for a barleywine that I submitted to the Peach State Brew Off (statewide AHA-sanctioned event in Georgia). The icing on the cake was winning a red (2nd place) and yellow (3rd place) ribbon in the first round of the National Homebrew Contest. The red ribbon was for a Specialty category beer (a black double IPA), the yellow for a dry stout.

Malin and I celebrated our 8th anniversary at The Iberian Pig in Decatur. It did not disappoint — excellence for sooth.

I had some interesting experiences at work. The company I worked for, Ventyx, was acquired by ABB in June. Around that same time, my team took on a grand experiment — no, not prohibition — Scrum (an agile method of engineering project management). It was an interesting time at work. We were very busy. In most respects, the experiment introduced positive changes in our process. Things went well for awhile. But I was slowly getting burned out (yes, this is foreshadowing).

Will started guitar lessons in August of 2010. That has had its ups and downs, but we’re hoping it will be good for him in the long run.

After a few bad experiences with our VW Passat wagon, we traded it in — and traded up for a vehicle with more seating. The troubles we had were, luckily, covered under the warranty (we bought it “certified” used, so it came with decent coverage). But I was not looking forward to paying for repairs out of my own pocket, so we got rid of it before it came to that. We had enough bad luck with it, that I felt it was risky to hang onto it after that warranty expired. The vehicle we replaced it with was a used Saturn Outlook — a variant of the GMC Acadia. It has three rows of seats and accommodates 7. It gets bad mileage (it’s EPA ratings are respectable, but we’ve never seen mileage that high with our driving, even during an all-highway road trip to Florida). Despite the poor fuel economy, it’s been a good ride — quite comfortable and very functional. Malin has even covered the rear with her business logo, so it’s multi-functional.

2011

Both Malin and I had some rather serious goings-on in 2011 with respect to work.

After working what was effectively the same job for over 11 years (through numerous acquisitions and various company names), I finally gave my notice. It was definitely a hard thing to do — the hardest decision I’ve ever made. I had a lot of great experiences and had a lot of awesome colleagues that I would certainly miss. But I was starting to get burnt out in the role I was in and decided a change was in order. So I quit the job at Ventyx, an ABB Company, and started a new path at Google. The acute may recall the subtle link I put in an old post back in 2007. I had interviewed with Google over three years earlier. At that earlier time, they were not hiring at their Atlanta office, so I flew to Seattle for an onsite interview (and took the whole family in order to make a vacation of it and to get a feel for the area in the event that they made me an offer). Well, this time they contacted me, they were hiring in Atlanta (which is important since I really like it here). I started the new gig at Google in April of 2011.

Malin had some major changes, too. We bought the Memory Cottage, a portrait studio just outside of Fayetteville whose owner, Debbie, was selling because she wanted to retire for both personal health reasons and also to take of her aging mother. So Heart is Found Photography is no longer a home-based business. Business was epic in November and December, thanks in part to buying the Memory Cottage customer database from Debbie along with the property. Remodeling at the studio, as well as very recent website updates, have ensued and consumed many a weekend since.

My old Audi A6 finally bit the dust. I had it close to 7.5 years and put over 100k miles on it. To replace it for my daily commute, I bought a used Nissan Altima Hybrid. It has been getting much better mileage than the Audi. I’ve observed fuel economy that is inline with the model’s EPA ratings (33-35 mpg).

Malin and I celebrated our 9th anniversary at Local Three. It was a fun evening, but dinner wasn’t quite up to the level of the past couple of years (admittedly, we’d set the bar pretty high).

Will turned 6 and started first grade. Yay, homework!

Ewan turned 2. Ah, yes, the terribly twos. And the miserable failed attempts at potty-training that come with them. Yay, parenthood!

And Jake finally returned to the US, albeit only for a couple of months. He came back in November, but didn’t manage to be here at Thanksgiving. But we did get to spend Christmas with him and made the most of his company.

2012 so far

Malin is nearly done getting settled in her new studio. I’ve been at work about 10 months and have been enjoying the new job (though it has been an interesting and sometimes uncomfortable transition — not due to anything at Google but just my own getting adjusted to being new and green at everything after being an expert for so long in my previous role). Google is actually a fantastic employer.

Jake returned to Australia after attending Will’s 7th birthday party. Our sister and brother-in-law from California, K and Cass, were also able to attend, so we had a very fun reunion with everyone in the same city (it had been almost 7 years, at my sister’s wedding, since the last time that happened).

I’ll be celebrating my 35th in just a couple of days, and we’ll visit with K and Cass once more as they come back through the Atlanta area on their way out and back to the west coast.

“What would compel you to post, slacker?” you might ask. Auto lust. I’ve seen images of some fantastic machines lately, and couldn’t help but compile just a few awesome pics. What else am I going to do with these pics, eh?

Aston Martin DBS Volante

Audi R8 GT

Camaro Hennessey HPE700

Porsche 911 GT3

By the way, I have a draft on this blog that dates back to early August. It’s an outline. It was an attempt to “catch up” on our lives (for those that don’t track us via Facebook). If I find some motivation, I may dig up some pictures and flesh that draft out and post it. Of course, by then, it will be months and months out of date. C’est la vie…

Is That Music From a Video Game?

I’ve mentioned in the past that almost all of my original music sounds like video game music. To be more correct, it sounds like video game music from old PC titles or from old consoles – back when video game music was all synthesized. As mentioned before, it’s because I don’t really have good software and equipment for recording actual instruments (which could only include guitar or mandolin anyway), but I do have halfway decent MIDI composition software.

Well, I’ve written a few more songs recently. I always start on my guitar. But in order to flesh out the piece and add all of the layers together (without suitable equipment and/or software for recording and overdubbing), I type it all up in MIDI Compozer.

You can rummage through the two links above to hear some of the songs I’ve posted previously. And I now have three new tracks to submit for your listening pleasure:

1. Driving Through The Storm. No, this is nothing like The Doors’ Riders in the Storm. Don’t ask me how I come up with song names. It’s often random. Something pops in my head as I listen to the tune, and – boom! – there’s the song name. Sometimes it’s an impression I get from the music, and sometimes it’s just a reference to something I’ve had in my head recently (from reading, surfing, etc…). I can’t say for certain the source of this title, so don’t focus too much on titles.
2. Helios. This is actually the most recent tune I’ve written. I’m sure Malin is tired of hearing it by now (she probably hasn’t heard the whole thing through even once, but likely heard bits of it over and over as I was composing…).
3. Starry Void. This was something I wrote years ago (2002 I think?), but just now got around to completing it in MIDI form… I wrote it when playing around with a fancy digital effects processor I borrowed from my brother. I’ve recently purchased that very same effects processor from him, so I’ve been dorking around with some of the same sounds. The main effects that influenced the writing of this tune were in from a wicked-sounding preset featuring lots of echo.

Music Less Likely To Be Heard In a Video Game

Just over a year ago, I also posted non-MIDI tracks. The only ones I have are ones I recorded in high school (with the assistance of my then-neighbor and friend Keith Groover – who happened to have a four-track tape recorder/mixer).

In that previous post, I indicated almost all of them as “Untitled”. They now have names. Here’s a recap. (Same logic – or lack thereof – behind the titles as for the MIDI songs.)

1. Forward In Reverse – Take 1. Apologies in advance for the very poor recording quality. The backmasked voice is courtesy of Keith Groover. I think he’s saying something like “Drink milk. It’s good for you”…
2. Forward In Reverse – Take 2. No voice. Different guitar sound. Better recording quality, but less interesting performance.
3. This Saturday. The intro is slightly plagiarized. I’d give proper credits, but I can’t remember the guy’s name (he was in a guitar class of mine my senior year in high school). The vast majority of the tune, however, is all original.

And now – previously unreleased recordings! These first four are old (from high school, like all of my other recordings). Pretty much all of the original music I wrote in high school was hard rock / progressive metal (okay, maybe “progressive” is a little pretentious and arguably untrue). These songs are no exception.

1. The Conqueror Worm
2. The Ancient Mariner
3. Resonance
   
4. Long, Dark March

These next and final three were recorded with fellow musicians (a band per se) and played by a DJ at a “Casino Night” holiday party where I worked (at the time we were NewEnergy Associates, A Siemens Company). No, it’s not my voice. No, I do not play all of the instruments (unlike all of the other recordings above). Our band called itself many things. The NewEnergy Rockers might have been the most suitable name, but Artie Fufkin and The Dictator-Tots was always my favorite.

1. Siemens L3 Waffle House Club Band – sung to the tune of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
2. Jesse Davis – sung to the tune of Weezer’s Buddy Holly. Jesse Davis was the name of the President and CEO of NewEnergy when I started and when we recorded this. We had some other fun tunes that celebrated the CEO – like Rick Springfield’s Jesse’s Girl and Rock Me, Jesse Davis sung to the tune of Falco’s Rock Me, Amadeus. I’m still working on getting some video posted to YouTube of the NewEnergy Rockers’ live performances – which include these latter two JD tunes.
3. Cleveland Rocks (Daugherty, Humphries, and McNeil too) – sung to the tune of The Presidents of The United States of America’s Cleveland Rocks.

I want to say something positive because sometimes I can be a real downer. The Jell-o was not bad!

On Tuesday morning at 2:55am. I awoke to what I thought was back pain.  took three ibuprofen and waited for it to take effect. I cat-napped for 30 minutes. I awoke to even more pain, but it had now crept around to my chest ,and I thought, “Oh this must be some really bad reflux.” So I took some Prilosec. The next four hours were some of the most painful of my life, and I have been through natural child birth (still need to tell you that whole story).

I tried to wait for my doctor’s office to open, but it was taking too long. Then we tried to find an urgent care facility. That is when my mother arrived. I had called her at 6:30 to see if she could swing by to help me figure out what was going on, at which time she suggested I drink some chamomile tea – to which I gently offered, “TO HELL WITH TEA!” She was a little freaked when she came in my bedroom as I was crouching on the floor rocking back and forth like a traumatized child.

My husband asked what he should do, and I did something I hardly ever do: I told him he needed to make my decisions for me because I was no longer capable, and to please do it RIGHT NOW. We got in the car and he took me to the ER.

Let me just say that you know it is bad when you fill out the ER paper work, under your name it asks if you are having chest pains or shortness of breath, and you answer YES! They start moving fast! I was whisked into the back and needles started being stuck in me and blood being drawn and an onslaught of questions (which I could barely answer because of the insurmountable amount of pain and the confusion that comes with it).

I was taken to a small room where I was treated by a doctor that did not wear a white coat but instead opted for a red and blue plaid Polo button down. He gave me very good drugs so I let his fashion choices go. This is about the time that they inserted another IV into my other arm. My veins had started shrinking so they put this one in the crook of my arm like the other one. I did not know at the time that this was the last time I would bend either arm for the next five days.

The pain was to return though, as I was trying to still nurse Ewan and I wanted to not have any drugs that would impede that. They offered morphine, which is fine for nursing mothers, but it brought little to no relief. The unfortunate thing about finding that out was the timing: I had been strapped down and placed in a large metal machine. The pain started to build before I even got in, but they said drugs would interfere with the test, and I was all “I can do it!” Sadly, I was mistaken. By the time I was in the machine for 30 of the 90 min that was required, I was crying and pleading for “it” to stop, screaming to be saved from the torture. This is when I finally got some drugs – 4 mg of morphine were shot in my veins, dope-fiend style. My eyes did not roll back in my head, and I did not fall to the bathroom floor with the syringe still in my arm. Instead I was still screaming in pain.

I was taken back to my room to moan and groan far away from other patients’ ears. After an hour of wailing, the pain started to ease to where I could sit down. I asked husband to rub my back. Thankfully, he did until all the pain just melted away.

The test still needed to be finished, so I asked if we could hurry it along before the pain came back. Lucky for me, a new kind of drug was waiting for me when I got back to my room – dilaudid. If I ever become a drug user, this may be my drug of choice. It made me crazy, wired, tired, and dizzy, and it even made me slur my words, but it took the pain away.

By the end of the testing they had stuck me in every machine the hospital had to offer and finally came up with what was ailing me. I had a gall bladder full of stones. One stone had escaped and clogged my common bile duct, causing bile to back up into my liver. And I also had a blood clot in my lung.

Now we had two major problems – one that must be dealt with immediately and one that has long term implications. I was immediately put on high doses of heparin to start treating the clot. Once that was under control they dove into the other more immediate problem. I had an endoscopic procedure done where they removed the stone from blocking the common bile duct and also opened the duct up so if anything else came tumbling down it would fall out instead of blocking the bile – mostly so my liver could start healing. The next day, which was Friday, I had a laparoscopic surgery where they removed my gall bladder and its trove of stones.

The pain from the stones is gone and in its place is pain from surgery – but I will take that any day. The blood clot is something I now have to deal with by taking serious blood thinners for now and then find a good hematologist in the ATL area to deal with my on-going care (chime in if you are one or know one).

I am now back home and steadily recovering from the surgeries. I am not, however, getting back to life yet. Hopefully that will start to happen by the end of this week. I did however lose all my baby weight while in the hospital, and I look forward to trying on my jeans when I can put pants on again. There is also something to be said for making it through this very creepy week alive when so many in the public eye have not.

I did not eat or drink for four days and when I was finally allowed to put something inside me besides air, they brought me green lime jell-o. It was the best damn jell-o I had ever tasted.

He’s nearly the size that Will was when Will was three months old. He’s wearing Will’s hand-me-down “3-6M” onesies already. He weighs over 11 lbs. He’s already really good at moving that head around – goodbye, floppy neck syndrome.

We have more pictures. I know I’ve been bad about posting any of them, but I will post more soon. Now that I’ve returned to week, free time seems more and more scarce.

Sorry for the lame “filler” post. I’ll post again soon (hopefully) with pictures and more text to describe all that has gone on in the past month here.

We hope everyone is doing well!

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!

Just thought I would drop in and let everyone know we are still waiting around for this baby. He seems to be pretty happy where he is even though I have issued an eviction notice.

Yesterday we did eggs and bunny baskets. Will got a HUGE bag of gummy worms and completely freaked out. You would have thought it was Christmas.  He was on a sugar high most of the day and ended up crashing pretty hard last night.

In other news, I think Will is official an in-doors kids after these past few weeks: he has been attacked by ants resulting in about 13 bites on his hands, and on Friday he got a tick. Josh pulled it out, but part of the head broke off and was stuck. I had no idea how important it was to remove the head immediately until I google’d it, and we had fun getting it out last night before bed. I was just glad he did not throw up from getting all worked up.

Tomorrow I go for what will hopefully be my last OB visit. Wednesday is the due date, so hopefully we can get this show on the road 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.

• The Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton, 12/24/2004. This was our first experience of this kind – a chef’s tasting menu at a very highly-rated restaurant. We were addicted.
• Quinones, 07/29/2006. Our first experience at Quinones (the best restaurant in Atlanta).
• Quinones, 12/16/2006
• The Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton, 12/22/2007
• Quinones, 07/26/2008

In July of 2005, we had a fine meal at Seeger’s (which has since closed), but failed to get a copy of the menu…

In June 2006 we took a weekend trip to New York to eat our way around the big apple. The most memorable food experiences were at Le Bernadin (though not as great as we had hoped) and Babbo (un-freakin-believable). Unfortunately, we didn’t think to snag copies of the menus there either…

We did get a few photos from this trip though:

La Pizza Martha at Luzzo’s:

My college friend and New York local, Bob:

Malin during lunch at Les Halles:

Also on the list that weekend were visits to Pommes Frites (dozens of interesting condiments available including curries and flavored mayos) and the Brooklyn Brewery.

You can see the dogs, curiously sniffing what appear to be alien space rocks:

And here are the two really big hail stones that Malin and Will decided to save:

We still have them in our freezer today, although the defrost cycle in there has shrunk them down a bit.

So we had to make a home-owner’s claim because we have dings in our roof and a lot of cracks and pops in the siding. Lovely. And wouldn’t you know it: the day the adjustor comes to inspect everything is the day after a wintry blizzard, so there is nothing they can do until later in the week (after the snow melts).

I don’t have any pictures of the snow unfortunately. We got a heck of a lot, and had lots of accumulation – even on the asphalt. I worked from home Monday because I could see patches of black ice on the road around my house and the traffic report on the news indicated several ice-related accidents: a patch of ice on GA-400 causing problems and all lanes of I-20 closed due to a jack-knifed tractor trailer. I decided it was wiser to wait until everything melted away, which it did that day. All that was left this morning consisted of small patches of snow in the yard that were shaded, protected from the sun’s rays.

If you want to see pictures of what it looked like, you can use the pictures from last year to get a decent idea.