I'm continuing work on the lawn, although today was the 'normal' type of yard work. Mowing, edging, weeding the garden beds, stuff like that. I replaced my little garden box out back with a pineapple plant, and a couple bushes of apple mint and sweet basil. The pineapple plant looks really cool out back.

For the rest of the lawn, I threw in the towel and hired professionals. $800 later, the lawn will be replaced by people with the tools and the talent, and the whole process will take them less than one day. They guarantee the lawn for 60 days, and do a thorough job of treating the area to make sure it looks good. The lawn should be installed on Wednesday, just in time for Mikes 1st birthday party. All left after this is to get a load of mulch dumped around the oak tree, and put soem fresh mulch around the rest of the garden beds.

Update : Some time ago, I saw Weird Al in concert and visited the Bay Area RenFest. Pictures are finally available.

Update : Sometime ago work sent me to Ft Lauderdale for Sun training. I also managed to take some time off work to go with family to NY. Here again are the pictures.

Added pictures from two recent Disney Vacations. We had a night alone at Pop Century in April, and the family went to Animal Kingdom and EPCOT for the Flower and Garden Festival in May.

I've posted a whole bunch of pictures of Mike. They are generally from across the last three months, and in no specific order, anthough they should be roughly chronological.

Update : Some more pictures of Mike with the Arizona Legers can be found in the Arizona vacation section of the photo gallery.

Also posted picture from the Lightning Hockey game I attended with my dad, March 16th. Too bad the eventual Stanley Cup champion Tampa Bay Lightning had to lose this night. The pictures are very nice though.

A rather amazing thing happened yesterday evening. I was sitting on the floor, across from Michael, playing with him. He was about 10 feet away, playing with a building block, and I had some toy that he really likes. With a certain determination, and with not a smidge of grace, he started to lumber across the floor in a crawl. It was amazing watching him finally learn to move forward at will. He seemed rather pleased with himself when he made it the distance to me.

This will open up a new world for him, and a new cross-section of his world that will need to be baby-proofed. Time to go shopping.

Much excitement at work. Mostly personal advancement and such. We bought a few months ago some new hardware, and it sat idle waiting to return from classes and for some other machines to free up enough to switch over applications. Basically I was in a holding pattern until this week to setup the new gear. But set it up I am, and more importantly, I'm getting to exercise a number of new skills. The one that got me excited today was a technology called multipathing. Create multiple paths from your host to your storage, then when one path fails, the system can continue talking to the storage with only a brief hiccup, and no data loss. I've been wrestling with the commands and nomenclature for the last 2 days, and today it all came together, and it all worked. I'm so happy.

All the while I've been listening to Bon Jovi's It's My Life, which is causing me to think more about doing stuff outside of work, and making more of my time. I may never be famous, may never be remembered by history thus granted imortality, but I definately don't want my time on earth to be spent inefficiently. Get up and move. See things, do things, try things. And then write about them so my children and more importantly their children can remember them, learn from them, and perhaps insipre them to try it themselves.

Or maybe it's just that the song has a great two beat pause right in the middle that I can't resist pounding my desk to...