The Occasional Occurence

I have this laptop stand. It puts my laptop at a nice height when I am using it at my desk.

I have this laptop. It has the headphone and microphone jacks at the front edge of the body.

I have these headphones. They don't play nicely with the laptop when it is in the stand.

So I hacked the laptop stand with my Dremel.

Before (cameo by my fingers, holding the front edge of the laptop up)

From 2010-12-09 (by Eye-Fi)

The Problem

From 2010-12-09 (by Eye-Fi)

After

From 2010-12-09 (by Eye-Fi)

cw

PS - These macro shots reveal to the world that my desk needs to be dusted. How embarrassing!

Our family is so excited and blessed to welcome Aubrey into the world.

She was born this morning at 7:11am EST. She weighed in at 8lbs. 1oz. and is 19" long. Mom and baby are doing well. I'm doing great! :-)

cw

Just to combat the single-nerdy-mindedness of this blog lately, here is something completely different. I just told someone that I've been having a great week, but it's more than that ... here are a bunch of things that I have been enjoying ...

Our Home I've been enjoying our house. The gutters leak, the bathrooms still aren't done despite sucking up days of my life, the windows and doors are drafty, but ...

On a sunny morning I get to walk outside and revel in that. Worth it.

Family & Friends

I've also been enjoying my family. My wife and kids are the best, and we have a lot of fun together.

Even when I embarrass him during his t-ball game.

Even when I don't let him eat that granola bar he found on the ground.

Even when I take us on the scenic route on our way home from our anniversary trip.

We've been enjoying a dinner with friends and family each week since the beginning of the year. We talk, play games and just generally enjoy each others' company.

We also recently had a great visit from some friends who we hadn't seen for a while. Andy and I "Battled for Middle Earth", Jaycie and Sarah had some good "girl time" and the kids (Bella, Gwynie, Curtis and Eli) had a blast playing together.

My cousin Chris and his wife Lindsay from New Jersey also visited recently. We had some great conversations and started kindling plans for a Wyglendowski reunion. We have such a fun time when our family gets together - why wait for a wedding or a funeral?

Finally, my good friend and blogger-extraordinaire Ryan and I hung out at Panera last week. I worked on my job and he worked on his Master's stuff and we just had a good time hanging out.

The Death of a Thousand Mosquitos

That utopia of a backyard pictured above was swarming with mosquitos a few weeks ago. Thanks to a bug zapper and some helpful spiders, things are much better.

Working From Home

I have my good days and my bad days, but overall I love working from home. I get to work (remotely) with a great team on interesting projects. I work in Linux every day and write software in Python! I also get to see my wonderful family much more than I would if I was commuting somewhere.

Church

We just became official members at our Mennonite church the other day. We've never been official members of a church before, but it seemed like a good thing to do. We wanted to publicly commit ourselves to this loving, flawed, intelligent, honest group of Jesus followers called First Mennonite Church. I only hope we can give as much love and support as we have received.

Random Stuff

Coffee, Civilization 4:BTS, House Centipedes, Beer, Rice Cakes, Summertime, Ion3, Humidity, Cicadas, Grilling, Garfield Minus Garfield, Rock, Techno, NPR ...

UPDATE 1: ... the Helios screensaver, bagels ... cw

Ok, I got around to updating my Flickr photos with some family goodness. Here is a sampling...

Well, I haven't posted about the fam lately. Hopefully I can pick up the slack with this post.

Sarah is doing well. Her mom is here with us for a couple weeks and she is grateful for the extra set of hands and adult conversation during the days. She has been working hard lining up realtors to come and give us their thoughts on selling our house. We haven't been through this before, so we are trying to get a few opinions.

Curtis is a motor-mouthed little kid. He latches onto new words immediately and uses them in whatever context he cares to. He has had a blast with a visit from my parents a week and a half ago and now with Sarah's mom here. While his grandma is here, he gets to sleep on the top bunk of his bunk bed while grandma gets the bottom bunk. He has been doing really well with that. We had a big snow storm (well, 5 inches overnight) and we had a blast building a snow fort when I got home from work.

Eli is growing like crazy. He dishes out smiles all the time now. 3 months is definitely "over the hump" as far as the tough baby times go. He is almost sleeping through the night. He usually wakes up once for a 1 or 2 A.M. "snack". During the days he is also doing a lot of baby talk ("That's some good baby talk," says Curtis). He can hold his head up pretty well when he wants to now too.

I have been having fun teaching my Intro to Computers class, working with the CherryPy project and dreaming of building a boat (I have a couple books on the subject now!). I have also been applying to various job opportunities in Ohio and haggling with the company that installed our furnace to get a replacement unit installed.

We've only had it for a little over a year and it has crapped out on us a few times this winter. We had to spend a weekend away from home last month when it stopped working entirely. Anyhow, the good news is that they are supposed to be installing the new furnace tomorrow.

So there you have it. A good ol' fashioned family update. Hope you liked it.

cw