oops, i did it again.

Man oh man, I should just try to set aside 10 minutes every couple of days and just babble with this freakin' thing. All too often I go weeks and weeks without updating this.

Summer has been busy -- some of it good busy. We're about to go to Maine for our 3rd week-long vacation of the season (my job doesn't pay super competitively, especially for the niche I'm in, but the benefits are pretty good; 4 weeks' paid vaca is pretty sweet, especially since I've only been here 3.5 years). No Internet access for 10 days... and that's OK. Books, BBQ, beer... and of course, the baby boy. :-)

Max is crawling! :-) He was a bit of a slug for the longest time, yet in the past 3 or 4 weeks, he's come a long way. He started sitting up on his own (from prone on his back to sitting on his butt). then started crawling a couple of days later. Now he's crawling (hands and knees, but more often, hands and feet!) He can truck across the living room and study in about 30 seconds, which, I figure, is pretty good for a newbie. He's also standing with assistance (tables, sofa, etc.), and just this morning managed to almost-nosedive into the bathtub (Daddy managed to snag him before he could damage his little head). It's at the point now where he either needs to be plopped into his playpen for those times when you need to perform various distracting tasks (dishes, laundry, etc.), or he needs to be hog-tied into his little Fisher-Price seat against his will (sorry, kiddo). I'll bet he'll be walking come October or thereabouts. Ah, locomotion... all he needs now are language and peers, and the Three Stages of Betrayal are complete. But it's all quite exciting.

Our house is coming along. The electrician finished the 'rough-in' wiring, meaning he pulled new wire runs from the kitchen to the panel in the basement. The carpenter is slated to re-do the ceiling and walls (new sheetrock and skim-coating), and the floor (repair the rotten floorboards and re-surface the hardwood. This he's planning on doing while we're on vacation next week, meaning that if all goes as planned (knock on wood), we'll come home just before Labor Day to a shiny new kitchen, or at least a shiny new box of a room lacking cabinetry and appliances. But what a change from just a couple of weeks ago. I need to take pictures of the work that's been done lately (not only by the electrician, but also by us, and our friends Bill and Dave as well), as a before-and-after comparison thing. Pretty cool.

Work is work. I've been mired in network management and monitoring hell, which is mostly boring. And I've decided to put the Cisco CCIE certification on hold, at least for now: I'm simply going for a CCNP recertification, which will be easier to achieve and will afford me another three years to procras--... er, to prepare for the CCIE. :-)


Straw Man

Not much to report in the political rant arena, save for the fact that Dubya's happy little middle eastern quagmire is slowly etching away at his approval ratings. Now he's saying that we need to (as his Daddy famously said) stay the course over in Iraq, if for no other reason than to honor the sacrifices of all the servicepeople who've gone over there and lost their lives for this quagmire in the first place. All that bullshit about WMD, freedom for all Iraqis, the emergence of democracy, yadda yadda yadda -- it's just that: bullshit. And of course, remaining over there for years, fighting a stateless enemy that obeys no rules... this will "help protect 'Murka." What a crock.