Strip down to your skivvies

Today was Jacob's 15 month appointment, and you know what that means: shots. But before we go into that...

I met Andrea, Jake and Mandy for lunch at Chipotle today. Yum. It was a nice little break from the hectic day of working on my FCRA Enhanced project. After lunch, I went back to the salt mine to get more work done. Then a little after 2:00, I met up with Andrea again at CentraCare for Jake's appointment.

He was happy as can be. Hitting on the nurses, grabbing books and magazines, hanging out with dad. It was fun. And when he got to lose the clothes -- well that's just liberating. He wandered around the office for a while, playing mostly with the stepstool (not pictured). Dr. Kulus came in after a bit, and the first thing he did after smiling at her was reach for her stethoscope, which she gave to him. He happily played with that for the duration of her visit with us. Everything seems pretty good. He's about 91% for weight, 89% for height, and 80% for head circumference.

Then the nurses came in with bubbles. Bubbles rock, but they're a harbinger. After a few rounds of bubbles, it was down to business, and I got the short straw. (Actually, I agreed to be the bad guy and hold him down. Sorry Jacob.) He got three shots -- one for MMR, one flu shot, and one that escapes me. He did not like the shots much; in fact, he probably disliked them. A lot. But only for a few minutes -- I was pleasantly surprised by how relatively short he cried (only about 15 seconds) and was crabby (another few minutes, though not long after that I went back to work and Andrea was stuck with him). Poor kid didn't know what was coming.

On the plus side, he got to show off his bod to three women outside the family, so that was pretty cool.

Another random note: I swear he said "delicious" this evening. I don't even remember what he was eating, but I asked him if it was delicious. In my opinion, he very clearly said, "delicious." There you have it -- he's going to be a master food critic for the New York Times. It's a harbinger.

Scarecrows love popcorn balls

Jacob was a scarecrow this Halloween. He decided to not reprise his role from last year as a pumpkin (though Tobin carried the torch, albeit in a better outfit).

We went to Doug and Sarah's first (so we could meetup with Abe and Krista), then we visited Ray and Del's house where Bill and Della go every Halloween. After that, we went home and visited with my parents for a bit.

Andrea did a pretty good job on Jake's facepaint (reference), though it didn't come off completely right away.

Also of note are the few pictures we took when we carved pumpkins with Abe and Krista, Ryan and Jenn and, for a while, Becca.

Monte el burro... y un aviso!

Tonight, we went to Mexican Village for dinner with Becca and Josh -- always a treat, especially with their ever-plentiful nachos. Except when they take them away, which happened tonight. That's alright.

Immediately behind Andrea and me was this donkey with two sombreros. I assumed the donkey himself needed one and the other was for his pequeño hombre companion, so naturally, we plopped Jacob down and got a picture. Viva La Revolución!

Also, though most of our family and friends are already aware of this, Andrea is pregnant again and due early June! So we took this opportunity to ask Becca and Josh to be godparents to little Ofelia or Piedmont. (We'll know the sex in January.) We're very excited for baby #2, and I'll be sure to post relevant pictures when I can.

Y ahora, una siesta.

Brain dump

Doug, Josh and Becca stopped by last night for dinner and to hang out for a bit, as Andrea made calzones-a-plenty. Josh mentioned that he's got a 'zombie crawl' coming up at a bar in which you have to dress up and act like a zombie. (This, of course, means you're supposed to moan the word 'brains' and such.)

I've got so many and diverse projects going on for work and for Babbage that I feel like a zombie sometimes. Here's a sample (vagueness for LN projects is intentional):

• FCRA enhanced
• Model implementation and validation
• Working on improving my Python
• Learning Bayesian probabilities
• Crawling certain sites to form a corpus for spam training
• Working on RenPrinters for Windows Server 2008
• Finishing an article for RBLibrary

I've also got a few books I'd like to read for fun, but I've only been able to read two chapters in the last month. Speaking of books, if you're into reading and you're into zombies, might I suggest The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z.

Jake's first haircut

I had planned on doing it on his first birthday, but tonight was Jake's first haircut. He sat very nicely in the chair, drinking his milk and playing with the glow-in-the-dark necklace I got from Friday's night golf outing through work. There's a good before and after.

This week, we'll be working on Jacob's swingset (tomorrow evening), and I'll be spending plenty of time on two projects for Babbage. I'm also thinking about getting into (for one of these projects) adaptive spam filtering, which is a big task to jump into.

Back from guys' weekend

I got back today from guys' weekend up at the cabin. (Pictures from the weekend here.) Dad, Doug, Abe, Josh and I went up north to do a little fishing and have a little beer.

On Friday, we setup the telescope, looked at the moon and I took a few long exposures, though we probably had more fun using Doug's laser pointer than anything else.

I particularly like this picture of the lake and this one of Dad, Doug and Josh, though the latter is a bit blurry.

This post's picture is of the moon from the dock on Friday evening, not of the sun during the day. The foreground object is the boat lift's crank. It's still a bit blurry, as the dock isn't incredibly solid (at least not for purposes of photography).

Cue tired old Uranus joke

I did a bit of night photography tonight with Doug, as he setup his telescope for some stargazing. (Pictures here.)

I need to get an adapter so I can take good shots through the telescope. Until then, I'll do it the cheapo way and hold the camera up to the scope. I did this for shots of Jupiter and four of its moons and a number of shots of the moon. I also did a couple random shots, including an overexposed shot that was supposed to be a time lapse (like this one). Better luck next time.

Tomorrow I head to Minneapolis for a meeting with our modeling team. I hope to learn a bit about how our SAS code is written and how our modelers do their end of model validation, and hopefully I can convince them to change how they do their development to alleviate problems with our conversion of SAS to ECL.

Finger painting turns delicious

Jacob is getting to the age, I think, where he can start getting artistic. So in anticipation having a child with art that will someday be displayed at the MoMA, we got him started on finger painting with ketchup and mustard. As everything inevitably does, though, it all went to the mouth, and pretty quick he was moving the red and yellow to his face. Of course, I was there with camera in hand.

We made a discovery this evening -- Jake appears to have a molar that's already mostly in place. That will help with all the rocks he so enjoys to chew.

This one goes out to our beloved Republican conventioneers

A couple weeks ago as I was driving home from work, Rockin 101 had one of those be-the-eleventh-caller-and-win-Rage-Against-The-Machine-tickets things. You know those things. Anyways, to make a short story shorter, I won tickets, and as much as Andrea loves Rage, she decided she would not go. Instead, Luke and I went together, and we quite enjoyed it.

Anti-Flag opened, and they were pretty okay, I guess, but I was more interested in Rage, and they did a good job. Unfortunately, my pictures didn't really turn out (blame it on the camera phone), though you can see how much respect these guys have for the RNC.

Nothing too interesting happened. Oh yeah, other than the 102 people arrested after the concert. But Luke and I took off after their first set (before the encore) so we could beat the crowd out and avoid getting beat-down with a baton. There were probably 200-300 riot-gear-equipped police surrounding the Target Center.

Fun times were had by all.

Life jackets: nature's perfect sleep aid

We spent last night and this morning up at my parents' cabin, and while the place isn't perfectly baby-proofed, it at least isn't treacherous. Nate and Lonnea made it up there as well, so it was the seven of us (plus four dogs).

We stopped by a liquor store in Baxter on our way to the cabin, and I partially succeeded in my long-running mission to find Andrea a drink that she likes and is easier to mix than her favorite Vodka Collins: raspberry vodka + lemonade mix. I also happened to find a nice little bottle of nigori sake that Dad, Nate and I hit up. Yum.

This afternoon, we went on a pontoon ride around the lake. Jake missed his morning nap, so he was pretty tired, and between the sound of the boat motor, the gentle chopping of the waves, the light breeze in his face and cuddling with the lifejacket on in Grandpa's arms, he fell right asleep. As an amusing sidenote, Jake's been carrying around a little toothbrush lately, chewing on it as he goes. He brought it along with him and was clutching it as he slept on the boat. Too bad this picture doesn't include it.