Blast From The Past

I ran across this the other day while I was looking through our DVDs for videos to encode. It's one of my projects from a video production class I took in college. It was around 1996 I think. Wow, that was a long time ago!

On The Road

It's been pretty busy at work. My team is getting out of the office and planning visits to many of the colleges and universities that use our program. It's our way of checking in to make sure that things are going well and that each campus has what it needs from us. We just started this about two weeks ago. There are 103 campuses to visit between now and the end of May. When you break it down by major city, it's about 35 separate trips.

Now I'm lucky because I have a great team and won't be making all of these visits. But I will be making quite a few. I thought it would be interesting to keep track of the number of campuses I'm on during the next two months. I've started a tracker in the right hand column. Check it out and come back periodically to see where in the world I've been.

Upside Down Day

We desperately needed to go grocery shopping a couple of weekends ago. It got to be Sunday afternoon, and we still hadn't made it to the store. It was dinner time, and we needed a plan. Susie had the idea that we should have breakfast for dinner. So we had Upside Down Day! Mmmm. There's pretty much no better comfort food than pancakes, scrambled eggs, and sausage. Perhaps the most fun was that Andrew helped us make dinner...er, breakfast. You know what I mean.

It's hard to tell, but he's helping me crack eggs in these last two pictures.

"You look tired."

Someone I work with said this to me the other day. Now is there a worse comment you can make to someone? Isn't this basically the equivalent of telling someone they look awful. This probably wouldn't have bothered me if I actually had been tired, but I didn't feel tired at all that day. And it wasn't even the morning either so it's not like I was still walking around through a "morning daze". So I said, "No. I don't feel tired at all." Then I went and got some coffee.

Escalators at Target

After dinner last night, we made a trip to Target to buy Pinocchio on DVD. The Target by our house is a big store with a parking lot under the store. It’s basically a single level parking garage. There is an escalator from the lower level up into the store. I usually park down there because Andrew loves riding the escalator. Plus, the outside lot is small, and I don’t like people parking near my car. Last night Andrew held my hand and ran on up to the start of the escalator. He stepped right where two of the steps split so I had to catch him to readjust. About halfway up, he got really excited and started talking loudly and bouncing up and down. As we got near the top, I told him to get ready, and he held his foot up until the steps flattened out. Then he scurried off the escalator into the store. The people behind us thought it was great fun. After we bought Pinocchio, light bulbs, a couple of Cars cars (The King and Fillmore for anyone keeping score), and other random items, Andrew and Susie rode the escalator some more. In fact, they rode it down, back up, and then finally down one last time out of the store. Escalators are so much more fun than the elevator.

Building Blocks

Andrew developed a strong interest in Mega Blocks. For those who don't know, these are the big "lego" type blocks. He really likes building towers. We built several towers over the weekend, and as you can see by their height, he has gotten pretty good at it. And what's just as much fun is watching him dump the whole giant bag of blocks on the floor before getting down to the business of building.

Let's Go Blues!

Andrew went to his first hockey game on Friday night - Blues vs. Blackhawks. We had excellent seats, and everything (except for food) was free because the seats were from the owner of my company. Andrew really seemed to enjoy himself, although I'm pretty sure it wasn't because he was watching the game. He loved clapping and yelling along with the crowd. Had fun watching the "giant TV" hanging above the rink. Climbed up and down the seat about thirty times. Played "gimme five" with the guy behind us. Danced in the aisle. Watched the Dish Network blimp flying through the arena. We had a lot of fun and even ended up on the Jumbotron during a shot of the crowd.
Check out the feast of chicken tenders, fries, and chocolate milk. Now that's a healthy dinner. In case anyone is curious, Andrew isn't even heavy enough to hold down the seat bottom. We had to hold it down with our knees so he could sit or stand (he did that a lot too!)

This is a picture from our seats between the first and second periods.

Blackhawks vs. Blues. No, not really. These kids were so little. Look how tall the referee is compared to them. Andrew could be out there in a couple of years.

Blackhawks vs. Blues - for real this time. The Blues won 1-0 with a goal in the third period. We didn't see it because we left at the end of the second period because Andrew was tired. In case you were wondering, Andrew seemed to cheer for both teams. Really he cheered whenever the crowd cheered. Susie, on the other hand, cheered for the Blues. (Sorry, Chicagoans!) She also cheered for the Cardinals during the 2006 World Series and for the Colts during Super Bowl XLI.

Susie's self portrait on the ride home. There's Andrew in the back too!

Random Phone Photos

Hello all! Here are a few pictures that I've taken on my phone during the last week. Usually these end up just living on my phone (or get uploaded to Facebook because that'e easy), but I decided to put some up here for fun. The quality won't be the greatest, but I hope you enjoy!
Andrew and I went grocery shopping on Saturday. They have one (maybe two) of these car carts, and we were lucky enough to get one. He had lots of fun. It's hard to tell, but he's clinging to an insert from a DVD. I think it's an ad for Burger King that was included with one of the Shrek DVDs. He's been playing with our DVD cases lately and pulled it out of one. He carried it with him to the grocery store and "read" through it like it was a book. He does the same things with the DVDs. Silly little man!

Here's Andrew in front of the house after we got home from the grocery store. He must have been wiped because the store is less than 10 minutes from our house. Of course, he woke up when I carried him into the house. If there's a trick to keeping kids asleep during the car to house tranfer, I haven't figured it out yet.

Andrew is relaxing and chilling on the bed. I think he was watching Sesame Street one morning in our room before we left the house. I thought it was hilarious that he had his arms up behind his head. I had never seen him do that before. Then today I caught myself putting my hands up behind my head during a meeting at work. Hmm...

Here's the bowling scoreboard from a work outing on Tuesday night. My 147 was second place for this round of games. My skills at Wii Bowling just do not transfer over to the real thing. No matter what Nintendo would have you believe.

Here's a pic from Wednesday night. Susie was doing a DVD yoga routine. Andrew decided to participate too. There were a couple of funnier moments that unfortunately were not captured - like Andrew trying to climb up on Susie's back and Andrew trying to hand Susie a toy car while she was in the middle of a pose. Fun stuff!

Like Father, Like Son

People say to me that Andrew looks just like me. Family. Friends. Random people at Target. I'll be honest that I have always had hard time seeing it. He definitely has my nose, but I have always thought he looks a lot like Susie. Especially his eyes. But check out these pictures my mom sent me a couple of weeks ago. They are from January 1978 - "the Blizzard of 78". In these pictures, I can really see Andrew. I think it's because I see him make the exact same faces and expressions that are in these pictures. Isn't it weird how that's even possible? I don't know, but I do love these pictures. I just wish there was one of my mom (who's behind the camera) all bundled up too.

Happy Birthday Susie!

It's been a busy couple of weeks. I've been the most consumed with plans for Susie's 30th Birthday. The big day itself was yesterday, but the event was actually this past Saturday. It was a surprise party. I had never planned a surprise party before so I had no idea about the degree of difficulty. It was complicated/stressful/crazy, but it was well worth it because Susie was so surprised. You see most of our friends and family live out of town, and I'm not sure it ever crossed her mind that everyone would make the trip here. So a very special thank you to everyone for coming, helping me decorate, helping me with food, and helping me keep my sanity, especially after I accidentally emailed the evite to Susie. (Thank you, Jessica, for calling me five minutes later so I could hack into her email and delete it!) The next surprise party I plan will be after I've forgotten about losing my mind while pulling this one together. That probably won't be very long though as I bask in the glory of this one. Haha! :) Enjoy a few pictures.