Four weeks old

Today is Reed's four week birthday. Since I've been given a hard time for not updating our website very often, I thought I'd point out that I have uploaded a ton of pictures of Reed. These were taken by our good friend Jenn Olson, who also put them on her blog. Jenn does a fantastic job getting really creative shots, and I would highly recommend her.

Andrea and I have been keeping very busy with Reed and Jacob, who is now almost two years old. He's starting to string more words together in his speech. This morning, he told Andrea something to the effect of, "Grab the hose. Turn it on. Spray the fire down." Maybe he'll be a third generation CWFD firefighter.

Ryan and I have been keeping busy with work, enlisting Becca for marketing and advertising Your Pictures Are Ready.com. We've also got another project almost ready for prime time.

Other than work, Babbage, and family time, I've been doing some reading. I'm over half done with Physics of the Impossible, and I have a couple (1, 2) I just got from Amazon that I'm going to work on soon. We also recently hit up REI's Scratch & Dent the other day, getting some really nice deals on some equipment.

As if that wasn't enough, I'm still contemplating going back to school. I discussed the likelihood with my boss today of taking some statistics and regression courses for statistical modeling work. Unfortunately (or fortunately??), I'm the kind of person that is never fully satisfied and thinks everything is interesting. It would be neat to take other, non-work-related classes if/when I go back. Just a few classes off the top of my head that I'd like to try: artificial intelligence (evolutionary computing, neural networks, and so on), philosophy, psychology and Japanese history/language.

Needless to say, live has been busy and shows few signs of letting up!

Reed Samuel, born May 28 @ 17:43

Reed Samuel Shirey was born yesterday at 5:43pm, weighing 3.4kg and measuring 48cm (7lb8oz, 19"). Andrea pushed for only 14 minutes, and his one and five minute Apgar scores were 8 and 9, respectively.

The pictures I've taken are available online now, though I'm sure I'll add more before too long.

I'll be heading back to the hospital shortly to stay the night, and we'll check out tomorrow and come home. Mom and baby are doing very well.

Picking flowers is strictly prohibited

The three of us met the Day family at Munsinger so Krista and I could take some pictures, which I've not been very good at doing lately. This is one of my better shots of flowers, using a fast aperture setting to get a solid focus on the fore tulip and blur everything farther back.

A few of the shots I particularly like among the whole group are:

• Jacob pointing out the fountain
• A lone tulip (a bit more plain than today's shot)
• That same tulip from above. That's Krista's signature flower shot. Credit where it's due.
• A neat looking flower, though I don't know what it is
• Belly shot
• Me helping Jake touch the water
• The Day family
• Jacob playing with pinecones

A new batch has begun

Today we started our fourth batch of beer, though it's actually referred to as wine more frequently than beer. That is, we've begun the process of making mead, or honey wine. Unlike our three previous brews of beer, the mead is being done completely from scratch (viz., no kit with specific instructions). Because of this, I had to figure out how the heck we were going to brew it. It's more risky, but hopefully it'll work. And, as many great ideas usually start, we begun with some scribbled notes on the back of an envelope. The basic recipe we used is:

• A gallon of honey ($20, from Josh's parents)
• Four gallons of water
• One packet of D-47 yeast ($1, from Minnco)
• 1/8 tsp of Potassium Metabisulphite (though it seems Metabisulfite is the more common spelling)

The last ingredient is used to inhibit wild yeast that may be in the honey, but it doesn't inhibit the cultured yeast we're adding (D-47) -- basically, eliminating any competition for ours.

Unfortunately, a good mead should take at least six months and preferably a year to brew. We're timing this so it'll be ready for Josh and Becca's wedding. With a little luck, things will work out well for this batch. Currently, the bucket is sitting in Doug's fairly cool basement.

Tomorrow, Krista and I are going to take some pictures over at Munsinger. I'll see what I can get and will post the results!

Getting Ready for Baby Reed

It's getting close to that time. Reed is due the end of this month, though Andrea's appointment with her new doctor is leading us all to think it'll be sooner than that. We've made up the nursery again -- the cradle is setup, the crib is on its highest setting (to be used as a changing station), newborn clothes are stocked in the cabinet and we even have an outfit selected in which we'll bring him home. A few days ago, we finally got around to installing a ceiling fan in his room for air flow.

Aside from baby stuff, we've been keeping quite busy. We're about ready to start our garden again; between the dandelions, giant anthills and dead patches of grass, our yard needs some attention. We washed and waxed my car and need to do the same to Andrea's. The third stall of the garage needed to be cleaned up badly, so we moved some winter and otherwise unused things up into the attic and brought down spring/summer tools. And so on.

Tonight, though, we went to my parents' place for dinner. Jacob has lately been getting excited over tractors, trucks, buses and motorcycles. Luckily, Grandpa can help in that area, so the two of them went on a tractor ride. They dug a few holes in the field just south of the house. (Jake's getting pretty good at using the hydraulics for the bucket.)

I expect this week will continue to be busy. I hope to give blood; Andrea's next appointment is this Thursday; the garden should be tilled by week's end; and maybe we can get Jacob's sandbox figured out as well.

I could really use a $7 machete

Jacob and I spent a good deal of time together today. While Andrea went to her water rescue drill out at Warner Lake, he and I played outside, went to Denny and Mary Lou's house, dropped off some mail in St. Cloud, stopped at the bank, picked up a brake light for Andrea's car, visited all the firefighters, visited Sarah and Becca, and went home for a snack and a nap.

Unfortunately, I was under the impression that Andrea brought her grandma's computer back to her, so when I got to their house, I was unable to setup their computer because it was still in my basement. Oops.

Not to be content with a busy morning, the three of us went to St. Cloud with Doug and Sarah to see what killer deals Sportsman's Warehouse had for their store closing (answer: few, if any), to burn up a five year old Gander Mountain gift card (hello, new 6 qt dutch oven), to have dinner at Leann Chin, to setup Mary Lou's computer, and then to see if I could make use of a $50 Scheels gift card (which I couldn't).

This is one of a handful of pictures I took today at Warner Lake. While it was rather cold out, Jake never seems to mind it and is always happy toddling about.

1270 light years is pretty far

Tonight I was FINALLY able to use the mounting adapter Doug and Sarah bought me for Christmas to mount my Canon Rebel XTi DSLR to Doug's Orion telescope. We took a few shots, and while many of them were of poor quality (due to light pollution, moisture in the atmosphere, and less than stellar tracking), we did get a few that looked okay.

This picture is of the Orion Nebula, which is 1270 light years away, roughly 7.46*10¹⁵ (7.4 quadrillion) miles away. The light we saw tonight left this nebula about 500 years before Dogen Zenji established the Soto sect of Zen Buddhism and about 250 years before Leif Ericson landed in North America.

Happy Pi Day, Toby!

Today is Pi Day, which is one of the coolest days to have a birthday. Lucky Tobin got to celebrate his first birthday today, while several of us celebrated for him with some apple pie liqueuer.

Not only was today Tobin's first birthday, but it was also an awesome announcement by Becca and Josh -- they're engaged! They went out for date night yesterday and he proposed. We're very excited for them and look forward to their wedding.

I haven't posted in quite some time, partially because I'm quite lazy and partially because I've been super busy with other things. (Seems like a contradiction that I'm both lazy and busy, huh?) I've been working pretty intensely at LN for a back-office project that should be done in a couple weeks. It's been going on for coming up on a year now, so I'm getting ready to be finished with it.

The verdict is in. It's a....

We had our ultrasound today to see how Baby Shirey #2 is doing, and not only is it doing well, but we know that we're having another boy! We're told everything checks out okay, though they did schedule an ultrasound for week 24 (see below).

Our amusing story of the day: During the ultrasound, he was squirming around. A lot. So much so that they couldn't clearly see the four chambers of the heart and had to schedule another appointment. (We're told everything's fine, so I'm not worried.) After a bit of work, the ultrasound tech gave Andrea a bio-break, and when they started the ultrasound again, baby was sawing logs. He's definitely his father's son in that regard.

We've all but solidified our name for this little one: Reed Samuel Shirey. The due date has been slightly modified from June 1 to May 31, and they estimate his weight at 13oz.