Andrews Family

When we tell people that we have some big news, it usually only takes one guess for them to figure it out. So we thought we’d be a little sneaky and drop a hint on our blog before we came out with our latest news. We alluded to something being “Out of the Ordinary after we updated our blog. If you want one last chance to figure it out, you better stop reading as I am about to spill the beans! Look in the header (blue box at the top of the page) and read the description closely . . . do you see it? Yep, that’s no typo, we have received another blessing and there is a new “one to be named later” to be added to the family around Sept. 2nd (that makes us 13 weeks pregnant now and the new baby due two weeks after Molly’s 1st birthday). We’re really excited about our growing family! Needless to say, being pregnant, nursing & chasing a 2-year-old have slowed me down a bit (okay a lot) and the “extras” (like blogging) are not getting done. I hope to get an update on each of the girls up soon, though, as they are both really entertaining lately.

Some of you might consider me all the way crazy, but they only call it a half marathon because it’s only 13.1 miles. In case you hadn’t heard, this year I trained to run the 3M Half Marathon here in Austin. I started seriously training in October and  worked up to the mileage. I found a cool training program tool at online which I highly recommend. My main concern was my knees. I had been having some knee pain on my long runs but my training plan seemed to work pretty well giving me some recovery days. I also found that my knees didn’t hurt on my speed workout days which led me to a brilliant plan. Run fast. I figured the faster I run the less it will hurt. My slightly more detailed plan was to take it easy the first mile and just navigate the crowd; then settle into 8:30 minute miles for the first half; then see if I couldn’t crank it up the second half; then see if I couldn’t run fast enough to make myself puke in the last mile.

The race was Sunday morning on January 27 and I could barely sleep the night before because I was so excited. That morning was perfect weather. It was a little chilly so I wore a garbage bag as a disposable warmup. When the horn blew and the mob started shuffling towards the starting line I did have to wonder if I was really going to do it but at that point there was no turning back. Since this was my first half marathon, I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect but the crowd thinned out pretty quickly and I felt pretty good. They had markers every mile but with the help of my GPS running watch, which Jenny got me for Christmas, I could tell exactly how fast I was running and how far I had gone. I was running faster than I had planned but with all the adrenaline I figured I’d see how long it would last. I still had plenty of time to back off and recover if I needed. Along the course there were a few people I knew who cheered me on, but my big fan club was camped out at about mile 4. They have their race morning routine of Starbucks and donuts down now. Jenny even had the camcorder set up on the tripod. Livy cheered and waved as I run up waving (I’m sure that will look great on the video). After I ran on past, I could hear Livy crying for me. It was a priceless “Dad” moment I won’t forget.

The girls gave me a boost but that was only a 1/3 of the way. At about mile 6 I started to have a some knee pain. It lasted for about a mile until I decided that maybe I should suck it up and get back to the plan. I was half way so I cranked it up a bit. There was also a relay where a team of two people could each run half, so there were some fresh runners on the course which added some motivation to keep up with them. But I had a pretty good pace going so the main competition was against myself to keep it up. The knee pain went away and everything felt good. Every thing seemed like it was downhill; OK so maybe it was downhill. Maybe it was the energy gel packet I ate but the adrenaline hadn’t seemed to wear off. Before I knew it I was at that last mile. I decided to save my kick for the last half mile just in case so that I didn’t crash and burn. I ran through the finish line and there were my girls waiting to congratulate me. Livy seemed to like the medal I got. Yeah, everyone who finishes gets a medal, but I think finishing 13.1 miles at any time deserves a medal. So how did I do? The official result was 1:43:17. I ran the first half at 8:03 min/mile and sped up to 7:44 min/mile for an average of 7:53 min/mile. That was way faster than I had expected so I was pretty excited. I still felt like I had a few more miles in me but I wasn’t so sure about turning around and running all the way back to make it a full marathon. That is going to take some more training. It isn’t all about me though. The beneficiary of this years 3M Half Marathon was the very worth Any Baby Can.

So what about the aftermath you might be wondering. My legs weren’t even sore the next day. Unfortately I did do something to my achilles tendon and my heel was a little stiff. I thought it was just sore and tried to run through it. After a week I decided I better get it looked at and I went to a sports doctor. They confirmed that I had injured my achilles and I’ve been doing weekly physical therapy and exercises on my own in between. Rehab is coming along nicely, athough I still haven’t been cleared to start running yet. This has jeopardized the next phase of my plan. I said “halfway” in the title because I had hoped to do the Lincoln Marathon in May as one last crazy thing before I turn 30. The doctor says that is optimistic, but hasn’t ruled it out. So we’ll see - I may just do the half; two halves make a whole right? I had been saying that I wanted to do the full just to be able to say I had done one. That is still true, but everyone I know who has done one says that your body can’t maintain training for that distance. However, the half marathon is a really good distance so I think I’ll be doing a few more.

It’s nothing personal, nor political, but seriously you need to be quiet. While Jenny started Livy’s bath I had been browsing the web and came across a video of the Cobert Report covering Ron Paul in a recent debate. Well, without going into detail let’s just say that there was an emergency in the bath. So as a good husband, I paused my video and went to Jenny’s aid. We got everything handled and the girls went to bed. Molly has been camping out in the office lately and later in the evening we heard an unusual crying from the office. Apparently Ron Paul figured out how to unpause his video and he was letting Molly have it about why we had no reason to be in Iraq. Now I know I called you a “whackjob” recently, but really Ron, lay off the kid it isn’t her fault.

but we’re back. We put up November and December photo albums to tide you over until we can get an udpate on the blog. I also updated the software here on drozmonkey.com which I anticipated being a major ordeal but everything went smoothly. If you look closely you might find a few things different around here so let us know if you see anything “out of the ordinary”.

After 12 days of Christmas in Nebraska, we are back home in Austin. The girls enjoyed being spoiled rotten by their grandparents, aunts & uncles and I have begun the detox with regard to caffeine, sugar, & TV (that goes for all of us), let alone the constant holding & entertaining the girls enjoyed! We had great fun spending time with the baby girl cousins on the Kane side and the big kid cousins on the Andrews side. I wouldn’t trade those moments for anything. We are already talking about our next visit in May when “Uncle Dack” (Zach) graduates from high school. Thanks to all who welcomed us into your homes and those who came to see us. We are truly blessed!

And now we work on getting back to life as usual. JR started back to work and the girls & I are trying to figure out how we will accomodate the countless toys, books & other gifts we brought back with us. There is also a mountain of laundry to do (it didn’t help any that both girls are transitioning sizes right now) and we still need to restock the refrigerator. We’ll see how it goes, but we may just have hamburger helper for supper . . . all week!

We had the girls’ well-checks last week and both girls are doing great. Molly is healthy as a little horse - she’s 25 inches “tall” (75th percentile) and 15.5 lbs. (90th percentile). Dr. Guerrero looked up Olivia’s stats at her 4 mo. check up and she was the same height as Molly, but a whole pound and a half lighter! Rumor is that Molly is currently bigger than her cousin Addison, who is 4 months older!! We don’t mind, though - our little cherub is healthy & happy. She is full of smiles and giggles, especially for her big sister who dotes on her with one of her new sentences, “I love you, baby.” It really is adorable. Molly isn’t rolling over regularly yet, and I think part of that is my fault because I rarely lay her on a blanket on the floor due to her sister’s tendancy to wrestle her. Dr. Guerrero said we should work on that - I bet there are plenty of folks in NE anxious to help us in a few days! The most common question I get is whether or not Molly sleeps through the night and the answer is no. We’re working on that, too! It’s a bit more challenging as the girls are sharing a room and I am trying to keep them from waking each other. Hopefully, we will get the hang of it shortly after we return from NE.

Ms. Olivia Grace and I have decided that when you’re two, it’s nobody’s business if you’re chubby, so you won’t see any discussion of her height & weight here! She is actually thinning out some and looking more grown up with her long hair and big girl clothes. We also weaned her of her pacifier recently so there are less reminders of her baby days. Livy is getting really good at recognizing colors and usually guesses yellow or green. She is full of great lines lately like “Daddy’s funny” and “I sorry baby” and “I help Mommy.” My favorite is “I love you, Mama” (said multiple times a day, but always when I put on her PJ’s and accompanied by a big hug around the neck). She chatters all day about all sorts of things and with her interpreter (Mama) she can communicate just about anything. She’s even got her own nicknames for Molly - she calls her “puddin’ baby” and we don’t know why. She also thinks her sister’s name is “baby Monny.” Red is quickly learning to follow Livy’s commands - much to Livy’s delight. Her favorite command is “Red, speak!” She also thinks she’s grown up enough to use the computer on her own and after a couple of close calls, we set the desktop to lock automatically when not in use. She definitely noticed and was not pleased. One thing I’ve found really fascinating is that she can spot Baby Jesus from a mile away. I have a collection of Nativities so there are a lot of Baby Jesus’ around the house this month, but everywhere we go she is looking for Baby Jesus and Mother Mary. Last Sunday, I told her that Baby Jesus lives at Church and she was quite impressed. However, when we got inside and he was nowhere to be found, she questioned my sources!

We recently saw a new “Get a Mac” TV commercial that made Jenny and I look at each other and say, huh? It was their “Misprint” ad where ‘PC’ is calling PC World magazine to correct the fact that in a recent article they said that the MacBook Pro was the fastest laptop that they have tested running Microsoft Vista. Yes, that is correct, you can run Vista (or XP) on Mac hardware using Bootcamp.

We weren’t sure we even heard the commercial correctly so I did some research. First the hardware. PC World said that the laptop configuration they tested cost $2949, but if you go to the online Apple store and configure the same thing it costs $3499. Turns out RAM is VERY expensive from Apple and the upgrade to 4 GB costs $700! Come on Apple, $700 for 4 GB of RAM, get real. I’ll cut PC World a break and assume they bought their RAM from someone else for $150 to get to their price. But they are still forgetting to add $220, which is the retail cost of Windows Vista that you have to pay to run it on your Mac. That makes the cost $3169. WOW, that’s one heck of a laptop and if I’m paying that much it better be fast no matter what OS I’m running.

But what is Apple trying to say? That isn’t a rhetorical question; I’m really not sure. Are they saying that Apple makes better hardware than Microsoft? That’s easy since Microsoft doesn’t sell hardware. Are they saying that Mac OS X is better, faster, easier then Vista? Well, then why would you make claims about how fast Vista is on your hardware? Are they trying to convince you to buy their hardware and run Windows on it? That doesn’t sound so bad for Microsoft since they don’t sell hardware and that would be a full retail version of Windows. I’m pretty sure their margins are pretty good on manufacturing those DVDs. I give up, I just don’t get this commercial.

I’m not done yet though. While on Apple’s website I found their list of “Thinking about upgrading to Vista? Even more reasons to get a Mac.”

1. No upgrade nightmares. Basically they say that Mac OS X runs on seven year old Mac hardware so you won’t need to upgrade your hardware. But this is supposed to be people thinking about upgrading to Vista, who I would assume would be PC users, and you can’t run Mac OS X on a PC. So that guy probably doesn’t have a seven year old Mac laying around that isn’t made into a MacQuarium. (Lisa, please can we make yours into a Macquarium for the kids.)
2. You can even run Windows. That is #2? You can buy both? So basically they are saying that it’s hard to survive in the world dominated by Windows. That doesn’t make me want to switch to Mac too badly if I still have to deal with Windows.
3. It’s simpler. No complaints here. This is actually a valid reason.
4. You don’t have to buy new stuff. They say that all your hardware (printer, camera, cellphone) will work with a Mac. True that most stuff does work these days, but this a deficiency that they have improved recently. Microsoft is still the dominant platform and has a high compatiblity rate. For example, my logitech webcam isn’t supported on Mac.
5. Know iTunes? You know Mac. Maybe if I used it I’d be more impressed.
6. Macs run Microsoft Office. A second item on the list that would generate revenue for Microsoft. And it’s Office 2004 by the way which is soon to be 4 years old. How about a nod to something like OpenOffice that is free? That’s what I recommend on Windows systems.
7. You can take it with you. I’m fuzzy on this one too since it sounds like they are saying they can do what everyone else can do, not how they are better. They talk about how Apple has adopted computing standards for things like files and they give the example of Microsoft Office files working on the Mac. Really, I didn’t know that the Office format was a standard other than being the de facto.

I’m not trying to debate which OS is technically superior here, just taking a look at the marketing campaign. So come on Apple. You’ve got so many loyal fans whom you’ve inspired (and who are probably ready to let me have it in the comments), but this is what you try to convince me with?

A couple of months ago a buddy got his new iMac delieved to work. He let us watch as he unboxed it and booted it for the first time. Apple knows what they are doing when it comes to the initial user experience. It automatically tried to detect the wireless mouse and keyboard and when it couldn’t it gave nice visual directions showing how to insert the batteries and it all just worked. It was a seemless user experience that anyone could have completed. Now as most people know, I’m not a Mac guy. It’s not because they aren’t great computers, it’s because they are so expensive. The point, however, is that most PC’s don’t have the same intial user experience. In fact, I would say that setting up your new PC is usually pretty frustrating. You have to uninstall all of the unwanted programs, tweak other programs so they don’t startup automatically, install programs that it didn’t come with, and then tweak Windows settings. Setting up one of my Black Friday computers took the cake. It was a Compaq brand Desktop and it’s a pretty nice dual core machine with a 17″ widescreen LCD that came as a bundled deal. This is a picture of the screen I got when I powered it up for the first time.

 

Oh, how nice of Compaq to thank me and tell me about how they are going to help me get set up. But wait, what do I do now? There aren’t any buttons, I press a few keys, click the mouse, hit Esc and nothing happens. Then I notice that a portion of the a button is barely visible and if I mouse over it, it highlights red so I’m pretty sure it’s a button but I have no clue what it does. All I can see is “B” and the rest of the button is off the screen and you can’t move the window over. What could that mean? Begin?

Well, without any other options I clicked the button and I was able to continue and get to Windows where I immediately started uninstalling everything, beginning with the Compaq software which was so extremely helpful. Now it wasn’t all the software’s fault (although I would still consider that poor UI design). It turns out that I had to go into the LCD’s menu and tell it to auto-adjust for it to fit the screen correctly. This took me several minutes to figure out so I can only imagine how long it takes less experienced users. I’m not letting them off the hook as easy as saying it was a minor hardware issue either. This was a complete computer purchased as a bundle. From my user perspective, the experience should have been the same as what you get with a Mac. Then again, you get what you pay for and a Mac would’ve cost a heck of a lot more. 

In case you haven’t been watching our photo albums closely, I figured I’d embed the video we made of us putting up our Christmas tree this year. Since we are always up in Nebraska for Christmas it doesn’t make much sense to have a live tree so we went ahead and got an artificial one this year. We used the time-lapse video mode on our new camera (which takes a picture every two seconds) to make the video of the assembly. You can really tell that Livy is in charge watching it at that speed.

Quack-Quack is one of Livy’s favorite friends (thanks, Aunt Jo). Quack-Quack runs around chasing Red with his flappy rubber feet as Livy giggles uncontrollably. Unfortunatey, he has a hard time staying out of the way. This is the third time that ’someone’ in the house (who has the agility of a clydesdale) has stepped on him and broken his handle. Each time the handle has been fixed by making it a little shorter. The first two times made him just about the right height for Livy, but now he is down to the right height for Molly. Since she isn’t quite ready for him yet, I think he’s going to need a new dowel. It is pretty cute to see Livy’s face as she looks at him and says, “Poor Quack-Quack”.