Journal Entries for January 2011 January 2, 2011 - 11:28 PM (and a) Happy New Year! There goes another decade... Two thousand and eleven. Where to begin? I've toyed with the idea of comprising a list of the significant events of 2010. A significant year it certainly was, and my preliminary list might look something like this: The twins were born. Celebrated a year of marriage. Took the family to Disney World. Both our oldest girls are in grade school. There were, of course, so many other smaller milestones. It does frighten me sometimes how blurred events of the past tend to become. My memory is not the greatest at the best of times - at least where recent activity is concerned. However once an item reaches my long term, it's there for good. Names, faces, phone numbers (remember when you used to have to dial numbers by hand? Honestly now, how many of us would be absolutely lost if our cell phone phone book got erased?) I was talking to the girls the other day and chuckled at their response: "What's a cassette tape?" Yet somehow they knew what a record was... Am I that old already? I suppose I could blame the speed at which technology advances for that one, but still... I usually keep my ears tuned to satellite radio for little other reason than hatred for corporate advertising. Yet once in a while (twice or so in 2010) I flipped through the FM dial and had to cringe at what's being passed off as music these days. What happened? One of the girls will come home singing some hack-job bremake of a classic song convinced that chipmunks wrote You Spin Me Right Round and all I can do is sigh. Bitterness is not exactly the way I wanted to start off the year. Let's move on. Twins. I still don't think it's fully hit me. If not by now then perhaps it never will? Many times I've thought to myself, "This would be so easy with only one..." Of course, I'm sure the parents of triplets say the same about twins. It occurred to me the other day, with two babies exactly the same age, they'll also be turning milestones of their own at the same time. Birthdays, starting school, driver's license eligibility, graduation, etc. could, in all likliness, happen at the same time. How will we, as parents, celebrate them both individually but at the same time and in such a way that neither of them feels 'ripped off' by having to share the day with the other? Or maybe they won't care? It's still very hard to say, but no doubt these questions are coming. And how also, do we balance the newest members of our family with the existing members of our family? So far, things have been pretty good I would say, but as the twins grow and require more and more individual attention, this will demand of a pool of a finite number of minutes in a day and days in a week, which must be also shared amongst other, equally valid demands on that same time. There too, how do we balance these demands with the demands of each other, and the demands for rest and nourishment? Someone once said, The most difficult thing of all in life is to be balanced. I'm sure whoever said that was a parent. That being said, this year's Christmas week was a good one. We hosted a birthday party, visited family and friends for Christmas, hosted Christmas celebrations of our own at home, went and visited other family and friends, and also had some friends from work over for a tobogganing day which was lots of fun. A full week, to say the least, but a happy and joyous one. All that's left now is to take down the tree and the Christmas lights, and start the countdown to spring. January 8, 2011 - 8:44 AM (and a) Happy New Year! There goes another decade... A year and a half into this marriage and only now do I discover that I've been eating every meal with the wrong spoon. I guess you're never too late to learn something new. Apparently the spoons I've been using have been the soup spoons. All this time I always thought they were big, but assumed the smaller ones were for the kids and the larger ones for the adults. Naturally - I took the adult spoons. On another cutlery note, Mitch Hedberg once said, "I saw a fork lift carrying a pallet of forks and I thought to myself 'That machine is being used to it's exact specification!'" Last night it was so foggy you couldn't see the lights from the streetlights at the end of the street, and today it's so windy it's blowing the hard packed snow right off our lawn. Seems like a good day to be inside, but in a few hours I've got to drive the kids to the meeting place where their dad picks them up for his visit. We de-decorated the tree last night and today I've got to take it out to get the lights off it. So far the pines have not fallen, but I have no doubt it will do it's share of shedding while we're relocating it... All in all though, it was the best real tree I think we've ever had, and for $20 (from Ikea) not too shabby a price either. Last year we bought a tree from the Home Depot lot (I think) for $40+ and it was shedding needles by the time we got it inside the house and did not stop until we took it out. January 9, 2011 - 10:49 AM Hunkered Down It's blustery outside! It's days like this I really wish we had a fireplace in this house. When hunting, that was the one feature we both wanted but did not find in this otherwise excellent place. I suppose we could always put one it... Though not today. Today is a day for hot chocolate, blankets and coziness. I've been watching the snow tossing and turning out the windows. It looks so beautiful (from the comfort of the inside of the window with a mug of hot chocolate in my hand.) Kristi's going to head out to Chapters in a few minutes to see if she can find the next book in her book club's series. I'm guessing that's her plan for the day. I went out to start her van and despite the wind, it didn't feel all that cold to me. It could have been the tummy full of hot chocolate, or perhaps the woolies within Sorel boots - but whatever the why, I did not feel quite as cold as I thought I would coming back in. Maybe it's the knowledge that I only have to be out there for a few minutes that makes bearing the cold easier. It almost felt refreshing. Of course, I'll have to drive across town to pick up the girls this evening, but I'll deal with that when I come to it. In the mean time, some work on Venturii - which is nearing the next major phase of it's existence. Venturii is a little project I've been working on over the past couple of years which has developed and grown into a fairly decent sized hobby. With all the different technologies out there for things like security, building management, automation, lighting control, multimedia control - all these things exist separately and rarely do they actually talk with one another, though the benefits that could be realized if they did are enormous. The problem that I've seen in this industry is that whenever a particular vendor decides to integrate with a product from another category, they usually only write one interface that talks to one specific system only and that's it. Or, they might create an API for their software, but then leave it up to others to write their own integration into their product and the result is usually another one-off approach. With Venturii I've tried to take a different approach: Create a platform with integration at the heart of it's existence. Using a flexible system for connecting to various classes of devices or systems, it then becomes trivial to have intelligent interaction between them. For example, let's say you have a burglar alarm system in your house, and also have some controllable lights (Insteon, X10, Lutron, etc.) You arm your burglar alarm whenever you leave the house, but often we all forget to turn off lights in the house, especially bedrooms or basement lights which you cannot see as you're preparing to leave. What if, as soon as you armed your burlar alarm system it automatically turned the lights in the house off for you? It's simple ideas like this that have lead to the development of Venturii. Making dissimmilar systems become functional together and operate as one, large system - fully integrated. January 12, 2011 - 8:07 PM This Is It! (If ever there was an occasion to wear woolies...) Shiver. Crunchy feet. Grey breath puffs. Icicles on my moustache. Smoke rising from every chimney. Oh wait, I see a picture. Good thing I always have my camera! I just came in from outside and it is COLD out there. Having a warm house to come into is something I know I, for one, take for granted a lot. Of course, we've learned to be a little bit more appreciative of the heat in our house after a number of, what we in the local inventing community like to refer to as glitches in Venturii left the furnace off no matter how loudly the thermostat calls for heat. It's these sorts of things that can remind us just how blessed we are. Speaking of blessings, I know everyone wants to see more pictures of the twins. They're getting bigger and funnier every day. The other day the little man had made his way (he can't crawl yet so I'm not entirely sure how he managed this,) underneath the ottoman. Which wouldn't have been such a feat except he managed to do it backwards! That is, feet in, head out. And there he sat, happily scratching and banging on the side of the ottoman while I snapped picture after picture of one of his first accomplishments in movement. The other perched nearby, smiling so big one would think she could burst of joy right there on the carpet... Sitting up, unassisted, is another accomplishment made in the last week or so. Each attempt yields longer results. I can't believe how big they're both getting! ? Someone once said, There are two things in life you can never truly prepare for: Twins. Ours got their first taste of beets a few nights ago. The food went down without a hitch, but not before leaving it's mark! January 22, 2011 - 10:01 PM What makes a man? (Do something unthinkable) Sometimes a person you know dies. Death is inevitable, for as surely as we are born, so shall we die. The devil, it seems, is in the details. Today I learned of the death of a man whose path had crossed mine many years ago. For a time, Craig Gilbertson was the principal at Heritage Christian School (now Academy) when I attended there. And while I hadn't thought of him in years, when I heard he had died I suddenly felt a surge of regret. I wouldn't say I was a stranger to his office. I would say that I often did not make his job as principal easier. I would say that I did not show or give him the respect he deserved. I would say that I chose to dislike him for no tangible reason. I would say that I took advantage of his soft spoken nature. And today, if he were still here I would telll him I am sorry. Mr. Gilbertson, I'm sorry. BACK to Journal Index