The Bumbo Seat was an invaluable tool for us as parent of infants. It kept both Sabrina and Tessa secure, strengthened their sitting muscles, and allowed them to be wherever we were without the fear of getting into things they shouldn’t be getting into.

It was one of Tessa’s first hand-me-down’s from Sabrina.

Michelle took this video when Tessa was about 2.5 months old because she had recently discovered her own voice and was squawking and squealing on a regular basis. That is, of course, until we turned the camera on (kids have an amazing ability to NOT do what you want when you are filming them).

Another video found during the backup process.

We went back home to Pittsburgh for Sabrina’s first birthday so we could celebrate with the whole family. My mother had a cake for Sabrina, and she wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. She’d never even seen a cake before, so she had no idea that it was sugary deliciousness.

Well, after some initial investigation, she decided that cake was pretty darn good…

While we were in the process of adopting Sabrina, Michelle had the wonderful opportunity to live in Antigua for 3 months and be Sabrina’s foster mother. We rented a nice house for them that was right next to the jungle (not kidding), it had some lime trees and other fruit-bearing plants in the back courtyard, a private laundry… it was nice.

The one thing that wasn’t nice was that the street on which it was located was one of the main ways to get into town, so you constantly heard the thundering roar of, what is endearingly called, Chickenbuses. The air then, for 10 minutes, reeks of diesel fuel.

These buses had three distinguishing characteristics:

1. They were always painted vibrantly with a myriad of colors
2. They were always packed with Guatemalans
3. They left a cloud of diesel fumes in their wake

I was lucky enough to have my camera on me when one was driving by the street Michelle lived on.

I’m in the process of backing everything I own to a massive external drive in preparation for my soon-to-be-delivered Windows 7 Professional.

In the process, I came across this video from when me and some old friends went to Corolla, NC. We went crab fishing with all the kids and after we captured a bucket full, we decided to release them back into the wild.

Nothing too exciting, but one of them refused to back down and you can hear the kids squealing in the background.

Back when we were planning on how we could implement a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) at work, we had many special consideration to take into account. While we are far from having a final solution, we did come up with at least a game plan and some initial services.

I stumbled across this diagram that I created to explain to others how the final system might look at a high level. This would look slightly different today if I created it from scratch as we’ve had some maturation of some of our processes and technologies, but the overall flow would be the same.