Everybody's working for the weekend

I've never thought about it before, but that line (the title of this post) could be interpreted as "everybody's working for the (money to spend on the fun to be had this) weekend". So that's how I meant it.

Got a lot done today, from recycling the Christmas tree, picking up a free changing table on Washington Street, to buying NOFX tickets, and swapping TVs with Carol so we've got this ginormous tube dominating our living room now.

Mostly I'm just writing to toss out some useful links I've come across recently...

• An airfare metasearch engine, Kayak, and another low airfare site, airfarewatchdog.com


• Two similar useful sites for converting a wide array of file types to other types, zamzar and media-convert.com

So that's that. Tomorrow's the last day of 2006 and Lola went right to sleep tonight. Thank you Dr. Ferber.

A New Year....almost

Thanks to everyone for their responses to our announcement. We are excited. I am losing (very badly) at our Rock-Paper-Scissors tournament. I lay awake in bed last night trying to come up with a new strategy.

Lola had a great Christmas. She has quite a fear of Santa, but sure enjoyed everything that he brought her. Amy, our neighbor, was here and assisted Lola in all of her opening. Lola even helped unwrap some of our gifts as she passed them out to us! When everything was open, she was still looking for more presents to open. It was a really nice time. I love Christmas.

Today, I received my first paycheck! I've done some odd jobs since I left Center for Plastic Surgery, but this one, the government got their fair share. It is nice to be able to help out. Marc has been such a great support - financially and emotionally for the past two years! I know that he is happy since there will be 'another mouth to feed.'

Marc and I celebrated our three year anniversary in November. It is amazing how much we have done together in three years and still, how quickly the time has flown by! I never would have imagined that this is where I would be, whom I would be with (I am so lucky), and how fortunate we would be with a beautiful daughter.

So on that note, I resolve to have a healthy,happy year. I wish you all the same. Happy New Year!

New stuff all around

Thanks to you adventurous folks to stepped up to the plate for email subscriptions.  Hopefully that will be a nice way for you to read my ramblings.  Speaking of new tech, prompted by Turi, I set up Google Analytics to analyze my traffic.  Consider yourself tracked!
Mostly just writing to announce some new photos in the gallery, in fact a whole album of the fun we had on Christmas.  Also a few new videos on Lola's page.

So what's everyone doing for New Year's?  I hear the hipsters don't make plans until about 11pm that night.  I think we're going to a party.

I'm at a loss for more to write.  Until next time,

Scans of scans

Forgot to load these yesterday, our first views of the baby-to-be:



also, the email option I mentioned yesterday is now available for those who don't get around to cheztiar often enough and don't do RSS.  Enter your email address in the subscription box to the right and get cheztiar updates delivered automatically!

Announcements

Let me get the important one out of the way first. Several folks know already, but it's time to let the cat fully out of the bag:

We're pregnant again!

Yes, Lola's going to have a little brother or sister towards the end of July 2007. When we can, I want to find out the gender, but Morgan doesn't. To settle that dispute, we're having a daily rock-paper-scissors game - whoever has the most wins when we're able to find out decides whether or not we will.

So one of my announcements was going to be that I was selling the truck and I was going to link to my craigslist ad, but it's so dang effective, I already sold it! Calls were coming in steadily within hours of listing it, called back a couple last night and one this morning, and this morning's call resulted in sale. Excellent.

Not really an announcement, just catching up...Turi and I attended an excellent holiday/winter beer tasting last night. 29 beers tasted in all! A couple pics on Turi's blog.

And the night before that, we saw the most Griswold-worthy light display to put Hidden Valley to shame. This video on RGJ.com gives you some idea, and it might be a bit late to see it for yourself, this being Christmas Eve and all, but definitely noteworthy.

And finally, I'm thinking of setting something up here so for you folks that don't visit too often and don't know RSS from a hole in the ground - reading cheztiar posts by email. You would sign up, and anything posted to cheztiar you'd get delivered via email rather than having to visit the site. Of course, to view photos and such, you'd still have to come here, but you'd find out that there were new items without having to remember to check back regularly. Interested? Post a comment telling me so.

Speaking of pics, I should have a bunch of new ones to post tomorrow, videos too.

Monday morning roundup

Seems like there are a few things blog-worthy floating around, so let's get right to it...

We had our first real snow on Saturday, just a few inches, but it turned streets into a rink.  We ventured out to a retirement party for Morgan's current library boss and my former boss, but opted out of a 2nd party in a far valley.  The lame-duck Toyota performed admirably in 4WD to get us there and back.  Speaking of cold weather, the thermometer this morning reads a frosty SIX degrees!  That's cold!  Fifteen below zero for you non-Fahrenheit folks!

Wellness - Little Lola is still sickly, the scare from eight days ago behind us, now just with upper respiratory issues.  Cough cough, sniffle, sneeze, buy stock in Kleenex.  Daisy has mostly recuperated from her growth-removal surgery, but reeks to high heaven with food, water, and snow getting caught in her headcone and, presumably, rotting there.
Intermission: Check out this remarkable mime performance (8 minutes).  Apparently the music is amazing too, but I had it turned down when I watched it.

Brief movie review: Watched Thank You for Smoking the other night, both thought it was great.  Definitely recommended.

Maggie is off to New York for the holidays, there's a diaper in need of changing, I'm out of time here, so that's it for now.

Comments

I installed a couple anti-spam measures, so commenting is allowed again.  Let's hope this works...

Some stuff

So, this was just going to be another blogaday entry, but suddenly, there's more to say.

For starters, Day 2 of Morgan's employment was today, and Lola got to stay with neighbor Sommer and her baby Ranon. 10am-2pmish, and all went well. Hurray! On a less festive note, we had to make our first parental visit to urgent care over the weekend. Blood in the diaper makes one a bit uneasy to say the least. So far, they think it's a urinary tract/bladder infection, but the jury is still out. Her bouts of unhappiness seem less than they were on Sunday, and we're hopeful that another week of bubble-gum flavored medicine will be sucessful.
Before I digress too much, let me get the blogaday business out of the way. A funny little blog with funny little drawings on index cards to illustrate funny concepts. See: Indexed and enjoy.

News item that doesn't concern me much despite my newfound affinity for soy milk.

For a taste of culture, take a look at the newly redesigned site of our friend Erin, recently relocated to Basel, soon to come back for a holiday visit. Her first stop? The Double-Dutch battle, we're hoping to be there too.

And finally, a brief announcement - I've been bombarded by comment spam lately, so I turned off comments here. Too bad, you were all just starting to come out of the woodwork a bit.

Happy blogaday 5

And now, in honor of Morgan's first day in the library industry, something a tad more professional.   A nice lighthearted library-blog: Walking Paper.  It's not as dull as you might be thinking.  Enjoy!

Ah, a Monday

It has been so long since I have had to 'clock' into a job. I did some Endermolgie, babysitting, and some office work across the street - but today - I clock in. I have a set schedule, a supervisor, and actually had to find childcare for Lola. I know it is just 15 hours a week, but it is a little intimidating. I have had a nervous stomach for days. Today, I become a Library Aide, will receive a paycheck and the government will get their share right out of it!!

Happy blogaday 4

Time for one that's a little less categorizable. Josh Spear. Sort of about...design, culture, just "neat stuff" for lack of a better description. Check it out.

Happy blogaday 3

Sometimes history and death intersect to result in fascinating tidbits of knowledge.  Such is the case with today's blog, Corpus Obscurum.  To put it simply, it reports on the deaths of people who were big in importance but short on fame.  While that may not be completely clear now, visit the site and read through a few.  Founder of the National Hobo Foundation, first black soloist at the Met Opera, and Pope John Paul II's English tutor, to name a few recent entries.

Enjoy!

Happy blogaday 2

Another day, another blog for you to peep...

Today may I present (just in time for holiday shopping)...Tcritic, the daily T-shirt blog.  Lots of cool designs on tees here.  You too can be among the coolest in town when you sport threads like these.

Added bonus: not a blog, but another most excellent site for cool tees: Threadless, where site users vote for which shirts are the best, and those are the ones that get printed.

Happy blogaday 1

Over the next week or two, I'm going to post links, hopefully one each day, to a new blog I've discovered of late.  The old standbys have been Lifehacker, BoingBoing, and Librarian.net for quite a while, but I've recently stumbled into a ton of cool new (at least to me) blogs worth a quick visit.  Some will make it into the blogroll to the right, others just to my personalized Google page, but all are worth checking out.
Today I'm featuring Starbucks Gossip.  Just what it sounds like, a bunch of Starbucks employees, customers, fans all discussing "everyone's favorite drug dealer".  Strangely compelling reading if you patronize SB much at all.

New car and today's walk

So, yes, I've got a new set of wheels. A 2006 Kia Spectra5. Black.

As concisely as possible, here's my saga: Sold the Mini Cooper in February, planned to drive the truck for a year or two to save some dough, bought the Vespa in the summer for an alternate mode and to save gas, the truck's been doing some odd things lately, insurance renewal is coming up, so, thinking now would be a good time to at least look, we went looking. I've sort of had my eye on a Mazda3 wagon; considering cost (I thought), gas mileage, cargo, size, reliability, safety, all that, I thought it would be a great car. Then Brian alerted me to the new 2007 Suzuki SX4, a small wagon, the cheapest AWD on the market. We test drove that, but at a glance I knew it was too compact, I was already a bit hesitant that the mileage was a bit lower than most other small wagons, and the salespeople were, uh, jerks. On to Reno Mazda Kia. Turns out the Mazda3 is only affordable at the low end. A nicely equipped used 2006 model with 8000+ miles was $23K, somewhat more than I was wanting to spend. I had looked into the Kia online anyway, so looked at them. They're very similar to the Mazda, and a brand new one only cost about $17K. And they come with a 10-year, 100,000 mile warranty for the original owner. That's pretty unbeatable. So that, my friends, is what led me to own this:

I can live without AWD.


So, moving right along...took a nice walk out in the hills leading to the Steamboat ditch trail above Patagonia on the west side of town today. Photos from that in the newly added album for now. Also a video from the walk.

One neat thing...I figured out how to burn a VCD from downloaded video clips, watchable on most DVD players. Sort of a poor man's DVD burn. If you wanna hear about it, get in touch.

Updates

Finally got around to adding a new Lola video to the site.  Hope you enjoy it.  Also, while I was at it, I changed the Lola page so the "how old" part loads faster and looks much better.  Finally, made a few changes to the links page.

Dinner at 4th Street was excellent, as expected.

Started watching United 93 tonight.  So far so good, pretty intense.

Last news of the night:  I bought a new car today!  More details and maybe photos tomorrow.