Olivia wants lasagna – ALL of the lasagna!
At lunchtime, I got out some frozen veggies for Olivia and decided she could have some of the leftover lasagna with it. I steamed the veggies in the microwave and heated up the lasagna and brought it all over to the table. The vegetables were too hot for her, so I started cutting up the lasagna and giving her little bites. She hadn’t had lasagna before and appeared to be a big fan (little did I know how big!). After she ate the lasagna, I put her veggies on her high chair tray and went to the kitchen to reheat a piece of lasagna for myself while Livy happily ate her veggies. When I brought my plate of lasagna back to the table, she eyed it carefully. When I put the first bite in my mouth, she screamed hysterically. I wasn’t really sure what was wrong so I tried a few different things and she calmed down and started eating veggies again. Then I put the second bite in my mouth and she totally lost it. Apparently that was HER lasagna and I had totally stepped over the line making some for myself! Sure enough, I tried eating a couple more bites and she screamed and turned bright red and had huge tears running down her face each time. So I gave in and gave her a bite and then ate one myself and that’s how we finished lunch. She watched me like a hawk to make sure I was not having more than “my share” and seemed pretty proud of herself for maintaining control of the situation. Our little munchkin is really starting to show some personality!!
Vista: Standard Features
In Vista, Microsoft has bundled some ‘new’ applications for common tasks. To start, they’ve basically included the capabilities of Microsoft Outlook in Vista. Windows Mail is a new application for all of your email tasks and it is very similar to Outlook. It has everything I’m looking for in an email client and since it isn’t very different from Outlook, I won’t spend much time on it.
Windows Calendar, another new application, fills the role of keeping your schedule. Again it is very similar to Outlook’s calendar but it does have a few new features. One nice thing is that it allows for multiple calendars which is useful since most homes have the same Windows user for everyone. Now each person can have their own seperate calendar, but you can see them all overlayed together. For example, I set up seperate calendars for Jenny and I as well as another calendar for family activities. That way I can put things like my dentist appointment on my calendar and family vacation days on the family calendar and I can look at all of the activites that I am included on together by showing both of those calendars. Another new feature is the ability to subscribe to other calendars through the iCal protocol. I went out and found a calendar for Nebraska football which I subscribed to. Now all of the Husker games are on my calendar and it automatically updates the game time and TV station.
Vista also handles your contacts for you with Windows Contacts. Each contact is a seperate file (*.contact) so it is more of a new built-in file type rather than an application, but it handles everything well.
The thing I think is really cool about all of these things being included in Vista, is that you no longer need Microsoft Outlook. Outlook was really the only piece of software which a typical user needed for which there wasn’t a good open-source (free) solution. Open Office is an excellent replacement for the rest of Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, and Powerpoint) and its free. So that will save you some money.
Next time we’ll take a look at some of the multi-media features they’ve included with Vista.
Insights from Dilbert
Most people who work in an office setting find the comic of Dilbert to be humorous and sometimes very insightful into our own work environments. Well, you might think Dilbert’s creator Scott Adams is even more insightful after reading his book Dilbert and the Way of the Weasels. I haven’t read the book but I did read this article about it which talks about his ‘Unified Theory of Everything Financial’ which is the following 9 point plan:
- Make a will
- Pay off your credit cards
- Get term life insurance if you have a family to support
- Fund your 401k to the maximum
- Fund your IRA to the maximum
- Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it
- Put six months worth of expenses in a money-market account
- Take whatever money is left over and invest 70% in a stock index fund and 30% in a bond fund through any discount broker and never touch it until retirement
- If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issues), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges a percentage of your portfolio
For a guy who draws comics, that is pretty good financial advice especially for the young professionals. For more insights into office life you’ll just have to subscribe to Dilbert’s RSS feed.
Our very own Prince Charming!
According to Wikipedia, Prince Charming is the prince who comes to the rescue of the damsel in distress, and typically must engage in a quest to liberate her from an evil spell or dragon (or in our case a 60 lb. Pit Bull).
This morning I took Olivia and Cecilia out to blow bubbles on the front porch since it is raining today and we can’t really play outside. After a little while, a large black Pit Bull without tags or collar came right up to us and though he wasn’t exactly showing signs of aggression (no barking or biting), he certainly made all of us VERY uncomfortable. He has been around our neighborhood for awhile and surprised us once when we were out for a walk and wouldn’t leave us alone. After that incident, JR bought me some Animal Deterrent Spray (it uses citronella) to clip to the stroller in case we have that trouble again. Rather than mess with the spray this morning, we hurried inside and called Animal Control. I must have called them half a dozen times in the past two months about this dog and requested that they come pick him up off our street. They say that they drive by and don’t see him so there’s nothing they can do. They suggested we catch him and then they would come pick him up. So we called JR to come to our rescue. He came right home and started to work to locate the dog and then lure him into our backyard with hot dogs and then keep guard while I called Animal Control to tell them the dog was captured and they could come get him. JR stayed with us until they arrived and then hurried back to work to finish the day’s work there! Thank you, Prince Charming!
Ten Terrific Months!
Olivia Grace is now ten months old! Time flies when you’re having fun – and especially when you’re chasing a little one around! Olivia crawls confidently and easily gets from standing to sitting to lying down. She pulls up on EVERYTHING and has even let go and stood on her own a few times. She has just started moving along furniture, and since she is getting more and more comfortable standing, I’m guessing she’ll be walking some before her birthday. She has no trouble feeding herself finger foods and has started practicing with silverware if we help her get the food on her fork or spoon. What she really wants, though, is to eat whatever we’re eating and she has been sampling more and more table food. She never really turns down food and sometimes we wonder where she puts it all!
Livy is quite the chatterbox and talks to herself while playing in the sweetest little gibberish. She pays a lot more attention when we talk, too, and is getting close to telling us her first word. It might be "light" as she is always happy to point out the lights in every room we enter and she can already make those sounds. It might also be "hi" since we tell her to tell everyone "hi" and then get her to wave when we see people. We are both enjoying our Kindermusik Sign & Sing class. She gets really excited to hear the songs we’ve learned like "The bear went over the mountain . . ." or "Olivia knows the colors of the rainbow . . ." or "Three little ducks that I once knew . . ."
We are blessed with a very sweet, cheerful little girl who is spoiling us by being so good tempered. We are constantly getting compliments on how pleasant she is and though we can’t take much of the credit, it sure makes us proud to hear it!
Introducing . . . Ms. Cecilia!
I have started watching our little neighbor, Cecilia , a couple days a week while her parents are working (from 8:30 to 3:30). She is about 18 months older than Olivia (that makes her 2.5 yrs) and it has been fun to see them play together. Cecilia is the youngest (her brother, Nikolas is 6) so she thinks it’s fun to be the big girl and, of course, Olivia is more than happy to let Cecilia bring her things and entertain her. I thought it would be a good time in our life to try watching someone else’s child to see if that’s something I’d like to do if I ever need or want a part-time job. It’s been fun to get a check at the end of the week and educational to have a toddler in the house! This is our fourth week and we’re getting the hang of it pretty well by now. She still cries when her dad leaves her in the morning, but we can usually get her interested in something pretty quickly – usually helping me pick out Olivia’s clothes for the day. She likes it when they wear the same color (usually pink). This morning she was playing "kitchen" while Olivia was taking her morning nap and was sweetly stirring her pot and serving Red whatever she had made! I tried to catch her on our video camera but she got shy when she saw the camera. She enjoys playing with Red as much as Olivia, I think. We’ll have to get a picture of the girls up so you can see how cute they are together.
High-Tech Farming
Back in my day, we had to actually drive the tractors ourselves. Not anymore, check out the new intelligent Total Equipment Control (iTEC) system from John Deere. It uses GPS, probably RTK GPS, and integrated systems in the tractor to know exactly where the tractor is and it controls the entire system. That means driving the tractor (including turning at the end) as well as operating the implement controls. It sounds like a pretty impressive system technologically speaking. Hey Galen, does this mean your new tractors are going to start coming standard with DVD players?
I particularly liked how they listed "reduces operator fatigue" as one of the benefits. My dad had a much cheaper solution. He would send me out to disc with the tractor without a cab that had a worn out seat with a screw sticking out of the back rest. Any time you got a little tired and leaned back you got a little ‘encouragement’.
Inbox for the Web
Asked anyone if they’ve sent you email today? Probably not because you would’ve seen it in your inbox. So why do you go to websites to check if they’ve been updated when RSS is like an ‘inbox’ for the web. That’s right, another post on RSS. If you haven’t caught on by now, I think you should be using RSS. For all of the details on RSS you can refer back to my original post on RSS. Now I realize that in order for you to try it if you aren’t already using it, it has to be easy to get started and easy to use. My previous post’s main suggestion was a desktop RSS reader and lacked a suggestion for a good on-line RSS reader. An on-line aggregator has some attractive points. You don’t have to install anything and you can access it from anywhere such as work and home.
Well, Google has come through again, this time with its on-line RSS reader called Google Reader. I had tried it out at the time of my previous post and I didn’t think it was ready for prime-time yet. Last week it got an update and I’ve been test driving it and really like it for an on-line RSS reader. I’ll let you go and take a tour of it yourself, but it now has folders showing unread feeds just like most desktop readers. In order to get you jump-started here are links to all of our feeds:
- Blog Posts: http://www.drozmonkey.com/feed/
- Blog Comments: http://www.drozmonkey.com/comments/feed/
- Photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/base/user/drozmonkey?kind=album&alt=rss&hl=en_US&access=public
- JR’s Shared Items in Google Reader (as seen in the sidebar widget on the right): http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/13604510482216828753/state/com.google/broadcast
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