Archive for category Family
Guess who just turned 1?
Ella was born not all that long after midnight a year ago today. We celebrated her birthday party yesterday, in a big get-together that was well-attended by our friends and families. Ella, of course, didn’t really have the first clue as to why 40 or so extra people were in the house that afternoon, but she got over her initial apprehension pretty quickly and ended up having a rollicking good time being doted upon by…well…everyone.
The cake was also a hit, though it took her a few minutes to warm up to it as well. We think the icing was throwing her off, but by the end of the day she was more than happy to devour even the slightest crumb of cake. Here she is diving into it — or, rather, sharing a piece with someone just off-camera. Ella is a very good sharer, you see.
Tonight, for her actual birthday, we’re serving her spaghetti. I’ll be sure to post a picture of the ensuing mess, which I am sure will be epic.
Update: No picture of the ensuing mess will be posted. We opted to let Ella have at the “pasketti” wearing just her diaper, and we’ve got a standing policy against posting “bare baby” pictures to the Intertubes.
Towers!
Ella will not suffer any stacked objects to remain…well…stacked.
She’s just about a year old now, and has been walking for about a month. She’s gotten pretty good at it too, and can even remain upright after breaking into a run…some of the time.
Yes, stuff is still happening!
In fact, quite a lot is happening. Apropos of the previous post, Ella now has seven (almost eight) teeth, and is really quite happy to make use of them; she has basically rejected “mushed up” fruit in favour of “the real thing,” as evidenced by this video:
Yes, that’s a nectarine. And yes, she did eat pretty much all of it.
For an eight month-old, that’s pretty impressive.
I hope to be updating the site a) soon and b) a lot more frequently in the days and weeks to come, so please be patient with me!
Ella has a tooth!
Grace just informed me yesterday that Ella’s first tooth just came in, with the second on the way.
Being in Wyoming at present, I haven’t had the chance to see this for myself, but it’s exciting news all the same. We’ll be able to start her on solid foods soon!
Baby pictures!
Plus many, many more in the gallery!
It’s a girl!
Grace and I would like to announce the birth of our daughter, Ella Rose. She was born this morning (Sunday, October 26th) at 12:39 AM, at a weight of 7 pounds, 7 ounces. Grace and Ella are still at the hospital, where Grace is recuperating from the delivery, catching up on her sleep, and regaining her strength. She did…she did excellently, I have to say.
She’s doing very well, but please do offer your prayers for her healing, that it may be expedient and complete.
Also, please feel free to use the contact form to send congratulatory or encouraging notes to Grace, who — next to God — deserves all the credit and recognition for this event. She has approached this whole experience with courage, determination, and boundless love.
I’ve got a few pictures of both Mom and baby, and I’ll be posting them soon-ish. For now, though, we’re just going to take some time to welcome Ella into the world, and will get around to pictures, and introductions to friends and family, in due time. So if you’ve called, emailed, or otherwise sent in a word to see how things are going…thank you for your care, and we will get back to you in a bit. But please just give us some time to ourselves, that we might rest and that Grace might heal.
Oh, yeah: for those family members who registered a guess in the baby pool, we would just like to say that nobody won, in that nobody actually guessed the correct date. Guesses ranged from about the 17th to the 31st, and covered almost every day in between…but nobody picked the 26th. A couple people did guess the exact birth weight, however.
Thank you, Grandma and Grandpa!
My grandparents just dropped me an email letting me know that they had taken the liberty of registering Grace and me with the Happy Nappy Diaper Service for a three-month term of diaper coverage.
Thank you so much, you two!
The ultrasound went very well
Grace went for her ultrasound appointment recently, which went very well indeed. By all appearances, we have a healthy little baby on the way. And active! So active…our little one barely stopped moving long enough for the ultrasound technician to grab this picture and a couple others.
Two legs, two arms, four chambers in a little heart…and a lot of attitude, apparently. Proof positive that this really is our kid. 
And this would be why DVD camcorders are inferior
Posted by Kenneth in Ken, Photos, Wedding News on November 26th, 2007
So I asked my friend — and fellow Rover — to record the wedding on his camcorder, a Samsung SC-DC164 DVD camcorder. And he did exactly that, and also recorded quite a lot of the reception as well. I’m thankful that he did, because its nice to see those memories played out on the screen again.
There’s just one problem.
Something happened to the first disc, and as a result it wasn’t finalized. What finalization does, in DVD camcorder parlance, is “closes off” the disc and readies it for playback in a home DVD player or computer DVD-ROM drive. It’s a common step to omit when one is filming something like a wedding — you should theoretically just be able to swap a disc out after it fills up and finish recording the event, and then go back later and finalize all the discs you used and be done with it.
That’s not what happened with the wedding video, unfortunately — something went wrong, and the unfinalized disc, while quite obviously full of data, doesn’t recognize more than the first 10 minutes of footage as being present when played back in the DVD camcorder used for the recording.
That’s bad.
What’s worse, of course, is that the disc isn’t finalized — that makes it unreadable in most DVD-ROM drives, which means that even manually extracting the data isn’t feasible.
Or is it?
Enter ISO Buster.
This handy utility is saving my butt. Not only does it enable my work PC to read the contents of the DVD, but it has actually found and extracted most of the lost video segments. There’s about…well, I would guess there’s another 10 minutes of footage that I have to recover, some of which could theoretically be left if it had to be. Some of it absolutely needs to be pulled off the disc if at all possible…although at least I was able to recover the exchange of the rings (the vows will hopefully be recovered in the last two files I have to pull off the disc).
I’m not out of the woods just yet as far as getting this video back is concerned, but I just wanted to stop and mention, in brief, a handy utility for salvaging data off of corrupted and damaged DVDs. Not exactly the sort of thing everyone has a pressing need for…but hey, if it helps someone out of dire straits, it’s worth mentioning on that possibility alone.
Still, this is going to be a lesson for me. Next time I need to tape anything, I’ll go and buy one of these.
