My wife just flipped me off. 
We were talking about ‘finger talking’ as my mother puts it and she thought of the Larry the Cable Guy joke about the typist who has Tourette’s. 
So as many of you know, liz4jc4ever and I are expecting our first child next month. Wow … ‘next’ month. Less than 6 weeks. I’m looking forward to it though. I’ve even started ‘practicing’ holding our cats… okay, I did that before too, but I’m enjoying it more now because I’m picturing myself several weeks from now holding a creation that’s part Liz and part me and all about love. I’m sure I won’t be ready for it. I’ve been told nobody is. But I’m not sure I can think of anything I’ve looked forward to more.
We don’t know gender yet. I think Thumper will be a girl. Liz thinks Thumper will be a boy. Hopefully one of us will be right! 
The cats won’t know what to make of her. Hopefully she won’t abuse them too badly when she starts moving around (of course the cats should be smart enough to get out of reach on their condo).
I guess you could say I’m ‘quietly expectant’, since I don’t really say much about it and contemplate my impending fatherhood (not ‘doom’ as some have put it). I enjoy feeling the movements (and seeing them for that matter). We recorded a video of the belly the other night. If I can compress it without loosing too much quality, I might post it online for friends’ viewing (if Liz consents of course … it is her tummy after all).
This weekend is our first baby shower. It sounds like I will get to go golfing with the father-in-law while the wife parties. I’ve never been golfing. She’s never been the center of attention at a baby shower. Firsts for both of us I guess. It’s also likely the last time we’ll be more than an hour from home until July. We’re not inclined to travel far in the last few weeks.
I’ve been thinking I need to host another geek’s night sometime in the near future. I’ll post again if we decide to go ahead with that. For now, goodnight.
Archive for May 15th, 2007
I haven’t posted in a while so I thought I’d drop a line. Work has been interesting. We’re gearing up to do a Xythos (Digital Locker?) implementation. I’ve been told that at some point I will be the manager of this application but I feel curiously out-of-the-loop considering that. I have a notion what’s going on but it feels like I’m missing something, which is odd because I can’t really identify what it is that I think I should be aware of.
So my annual review is being done this week. I had a short meeting with my manager last week to go over how the process is supposed to work and the more complete review meeting is happening on Thursday. I’m not sure how to feel about it since it’s probably the first proper review I’ve had. Some of you may know my manager (initials M.A.M.) and may have even had her for a course, but I never did. I’m supposed to go over my review sheet from my last review and write down how I think I did at my job. On the plus side, I can’t be doing too poorly since said manager told me in no uncertain terms that I should not apply for this job, including a promise to write a ‘poor letter of recommendation.’
As far as other excitement at work, we had a scheduled power outage this weekend to replace a power transformer. Thankfully I didn’t have to go in for it, but checked some stuff from home when asked and went in early Monday morning to handle any early problems. There have been a couple of power-related problems, including a few computers that got left plugged in/on and apparently got killed by something (likely power-related).
Today was one of those days with some frustrating problems. I installed a new version of our task management software two weeks ago and it appears that we can’t add new agents to it. I’ve done a little back-and-forth with support, but no real progress so far. I also had the ‘opportunity’ to deal with some printing problems over in the publications office. Haven’t solved those yet either. 
I also got some additional confusion yesterday regarding a major software suite. A few weeks ago, one of the speech & theatre professors indicated he thought he had secured funding to upgrade 8 copies in one lab to a recently released version. Yesterday a different professor in the same department indicated he thought we were upgrading this software in both the computer labs it’s located in. I should probably re-visit that issue tomorrow.
