Aaaaah! I Love Vacation!!

This very instant marks roughly the 792,000,000th millisecond I've been on vacation. During that time, I've been to the grand canyon of the northeast, crossed a 30ft precipice via a fallen tree, been to 6 holiday parties, watched 9 movies (one of them 4 times... I LOVE Iron Man!!), watched 12 television shows, shot 3 hours of home video footage, edited 2 photos of lovely ladies, packed for two vacations, been winter camping, gone sledding, been to the bank twice, played 3 hours of video games, slept A LOT, and played with my daughter often.

For the next ~259,200,000ms, I'll be enjoying a Shaker village, hiking Mt Greylock (map: http://tiny.cc/greylock), and enjoying a jacuzzi with my ladies.

The time has been refreshing and I have more than a few new friends to show for it. W00t!

Now for a few short stories:
Annabelle is getting used to having me around. Every day, we play for hours, inside and out. After the winter camping trip, it's hard to keep her inside. She always wants to be outside, roaming the paths, bathing random objects in light with our gigantic MagLite. A MagLite is more than a flashlight... it's daytime in a can. You turn the thing on, and POOF you can see everything... and the people on the receiving end of the beam are blind... Needless to say, with a 1 year old handling the flashlight, I've been on the receiving end more than a few times. :D

I'm keeping active. It's not for the sake of being active... it's just a habit I haven't bothered to kick. ;) While winter camping, I took a 7 mile hike up and down the wall of the Grand Canyon of the northeast. This hike involved a multitude of small pleasures, including a 3 mile run down a very narrow, winding trail, jumping across small creeks, climbing a 30', nearly vertical hill, standing 4 feet from a waterfall's edge with no railing between me and the 100' drop, a little tree climbing, and a LOT OF FRIGGIN GEESE. I'll probably post some of the footage over the next 6 months.

I have a new toy! It rocks. Period. Here's something I put together with my new toy, about my new toy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mAi2hsFx0A&fmt=6

The new year is here! This is the first year I've kept a budget. Hitting the end of the year and seeing where all the money went and knowing that there was plenty left over was a spectacular feeling!! My car needed a few hundred dollars worth of work last month. Normally, I would just have taken the money out of an account buffer that was already running perilously low, but not this time. This time I had the money saved specifically for car work, and the bill didn't affect my normal spending one bit. My debts (all good debt) are dropping like flies. Keeping a budget feels like pulling money out of thin air. *happy sigh*

We went to Curtis' place for the new year. What a party! We talked MOBOs, Kentsfield vs Wolfdales, watched movies, and had a whooping good time. Getting to and from the party was insane though. There were high winds, and the corolla has a very tall profile for a compact. We were headed down the road at a very moderate pace (40mph) approaching the 104 bridge in webster. Some of the other cars near us weren't nearly as conservative... until they got a few feet onto the bridge where they were no longer shielded from the spectacular crosswind... The SUV in front of me shifted nearly 4 feet sideways into my lane. I slowed further as the cars to the left and right of me suddenly slowed and started sliding. I narrowly avoided an accident, as did the rest of the pack.... it was harrowing. As we continued down the highway, was saw pile after pile of snow pushed up where cars had spun off the road into ditches and guard rails. The road before Curtis' was completely flooded. I think someone must have hit a fire hydrant as there were several feet of water in the ditch and across the road, but fortunately, it hadn't seeped onto the street we needed. Getting home was a similar experience.

Looking back over my last 6 months of posts, it seems like no one is commenting anymore. Is anyone still reading this? Have I gone boring? Say it's not sooo! Agh!

All I Need is a Mugging

Today, I came in to work and noticed that my drawer was open. Someone had ruffled through my desk drawers and found my small cash-stash ($50 in ten dollar bills and quarters) that I keep around for pizza lunches on Fridays.

The list of theft's that I've been a victim of now include:

• Cash ($50) from desk at work
• MP3 player ($20) from coat pocket while playing indoor soccer
• Wallet, glasses and keys ($130) from church while attending a potluck
• Bicycle & snowboard ($970) from apartment (they ripped the door off)
• Backpack (Wallet, Thomson Portfolio, MP3 player, reading glasses, portable game system - $430) from my car's trunk while packing up from a LAN gaming party
• Ironman watch ($40) from pants pocket at gym

I'm averaging a theft every 10 months for the last 5 years.

How about you? Any stories?

The Johnsons Set Up a Christmas Tree!

Link: http://www.youtube.com/v/1aOYi-4loIE&fmt=6

With the scent of freshly baked cookies hanging heavily in the air after an afternoon of baking, we set out to put up our christmas tree. Pandora Radio set the mood with hits from the "Rockin Holiday" station: http://pandora.com/stations/574a57ea7384db17645cedeeb33c1e25425ba2910f7abf8b. I marched box after box of tree trimmings, decorations and other such flair up the entry stairwell from the garage under the approving eye of my 14 month old daughter. With each box came an inquisitive look followed by a pointed exclamation and bubbling laughter. Annabelle was getting quite excited!

I opened the first box, and immediately Annabelle was touring the contents. Each item was observed, moved, poked then discarded for the next item. We started to assemble the tree. When I unfurled the lower branches, Annabelle didn't quite know what to make of the bouncing branches, and stared for a few seconds til Cheryl asked her what she thought of that. As you saw in the video, Annabelle promptly did an interpretive dance to display the awkward excitement of the event.

Soon after, came lights, ribbon and ornaments. Annabelle put up the plastic ornaments near the bottom, while Cheryl and I adorned the upper sections of the tree. When the angel topper came out, Annabelle lept into my arms, ready to assist in its placement.

The tree was finished, so we tossed the boxes back into the garage then laughed, played tag, and danced around in the living room til we were all exhausted enough to hit the sack. What an excellent Sunday!!

Productivity and Curiousity

I'm a curious guy. When a thread piques my interest, watch out!!

What happens in between topics of interest? Laa dee da dee da, skipping around, eyes wandering in a lackadaisical fashion... dee dee doooo... Cheryl to David, "Honey, why does salt make ice melt?" *Poof, alert, interested* "Hmmm... I don't know" *gears revving, BAM!!, sonic boom, David flies through wikipedia and google scholar to related links, topics and visualizations* *crack-azapers* *the yellow brick road bursts into a million pieces as David's wake follows him past Oz...* "Aha!! ..."

I tend to drift while I'm between topics of interest, but when I'm interested, I fly. Time seems to do the same, passing slowly when I'm bored and cheating ahead when I'm interested.

Topics that caught my eye this weekend: 

• .NET and C#'s amazing catch-up to Java (including multi-platform runtime, open source support for projects like xStream, Spring, JUnit, and the frickin amazing new & free Web Developer Studio by Microsoft... http://www.microsoft.com/express/download/default.aspx)
• Java EE design patterns, security approaches, scalability concerns...
• NetLibrary's stunning varienty of technical refferences
• The drama involved in crowning Solomon king of Israel and Judea.
  
• The relationship between water phase changes and solutes
• Mind mapping tools as a solution for writing technical documents, authoring presentations, composing emails, keeping track of work... (see FreeMind: http://freemind.sourceforge.net)

What did you find interesting this week? Pique my interest with something cool!! I'll love you for it. :)

The Content of My Blog

Here's a visualization of my last six months of blog posts:

http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/334931/Untitled

Moments with Annabelle 8-10 Months

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrg4wDAaNlA&fmt=6

All the Small Things

I love my life. :)

Yesterday, Cheryl was out with some old friends. I started the day with an hour face-to-face chat with my brother via Skype. (P.S. If you have a skype account, email or facebook me your skype account sn so I can talk to you too...)

Allan's friggin brilliant and proving it at school. I love hearing about the ridiculously awesome things he's up to.

After our chat, I watched a B-movie on the sci-fi channel, then drove over to North Ponds park, strapped on my roller blades and went for a five mile jaunt up the path.

After that, a trip to wegmans, another B movie, some video games... It was a very relaxing day.

The beautiful thing about being me though, is that even with such an uneventful, relaxing day, I learned a lot and honed my existing skills...

My average day activities are what I love so much about my life. Right after waking up, I played blocks with Annabelle, had a delicious breakfast, danced around the apartment to the foo fighters, muse, blink and system of a down, juggled, stretched out, did hand stands, practiced balancing on one hand... The things that are novel to me include my trip to Wegmans where I visited each isle 1 or 0 times... the research I did on wood-working and how to build the shelves for our garage... the whitepaper I read on agile data management... the design patterns I investigated... service oriented architecture approaches.

All that's a heck of a lot of fun to do and learn, but it certainly doesn't make for good lunch-time conversation. I'm making headway in so many ways!! I've got our finances under control. I have a new method of approaching difficult topics with Cheryl and we're closer because of it. I've got a system for preparing great meals on a regular basis. They're all fantastic things!!! But how much of that is interesting to blog about? Believe me friends, my lack of blog posts recently doesn't mean that my life is slowing down... I'm simply filtering out the stuff that's not of general interest.

P.S. Here's the photo gallery of the Johnson-Herring annual apple picking trip: http://picasaweb.google.com/ultimadj/BerryPicking2008