60!
2/22/2008

 On February 22, my mother turned 60.
We surprised her with a Wizard of Oz themed surprise party, which is her favorite movie. Ok, really only my sister’s kids dressed up, but it was definitely a surprise ..which was hard to pull off.
My sister did a great job of getting all her friends to the restaurant without ever spilling the beans. Even some old friends she hadn’t seen in a long time and friends from the east coast made it to the party.
Happy Birthday Mom!

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Brothers
1/26/2008

 Connor got to meet Logan for the first time today.
Despite how the picture looks, Connor was actually very happy to meet his little brother. He kept saying "Brother is sleeping" and was trying to help Mommy put Logan back into the crib.
When the nurse had to take Logan out of the room, Connor chased after her yelling "Logan, Logan!!". It was very cute to watch and I think Connor is going to make a great big brother.

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Baby Logan
1/25/2008

 Logan Nicolas Blake was born at 1:25pm today after a rollercoaster labor for Bernadette.
We arrived at the hospital at 2:30am and at about 6am, Bernadette was given medicine to strengthen her contractions and move things along. The medicine made her contractions stronger and more painful, but only helped her to dilate from 3mm to 3.3mm from 6am to 12:30pm. When the doctor checked her again a little after 1pm, she was a full 10mm and there was no time for an epidural or pain medicine, Bernadette just had to start pushing.
Bernadette was great, no yelling, no screaming, no crying …she just pushed through the pain and got the baby out in almost no time at all (though she says it felt like hours).

Bernadette, Connor and I are all happy to have the newest addition to our family; another happy, healthy baby boy.

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Hot Air
1/15/2008

 Much to the delight of the hordes of Apple Fanboys (pictured top), Apple unveiled their MacBook Air. The latest laptop offering really illustrate Apple’s superiority in the realm of hardware. It is small and it is light, which is really what I look for in a laptop. The only problem I have with it is that it doesn’t come loaded with Vista. (please spare me the “But you can run Parallels or BootCamp” arguments).
Personally, I don’t see Apple ever digging themselves out of the hole they’ve created for themselves by trying too hard to control all aspects of their existence. But it is amazing to me that with seemingly endless OEM PC manufacturers out there that NOBOY can come up with hardware for the Windows platform that is superior to Apple’s offerings. What gives?
Sony is my pick for favorite innovator, but they can never seem to keep themselves from inventing proprietary formats that are doomed …despite being better (speaking of this I just bought an AVCHD camera).
Anyway …you can’t argue that it is pretty …and that Apple Fanboys are idiots.

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Happy New Year
1/1/2008

 This year, New Year’s Eve was unfortunately spent in the ER due to a high temperature that Connor has had for the past few days. He’s been pretty miserable and napping most of the day, only waking up to eat some more Jell-O and go back to sleep. He’s been on a tight Tylenol and Motrin rotation to keep the fever under control, but it has been bouncing between 101 and 104 since Saturday.
Unfortunately, Daddy is not doing very well either.

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Christmas 2007
12/26/2007

 I Hope everybody had a great Christmas. Bernadette, Connor, and I had a fun day of visiting with family on both sides, eating a lot and opening a lot of gifts (Connor made out pretty good this year).
It’s getting tougher each year making it to both sets of parents and I don’t know what we are going to do next year since Bernadette and I both want Connor to be home in the morning.
At least the family is still close enough to make it possible.

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New Baby, New Job & New House
12/21/2007

 Bernadette and I have put a deposit down on a new home in Tustin.
We have been looking, but we were not planning on buying anything just yet. Then, I was home sick from work and got to surfing the Interwebs for houses and came back to houses that we had looked at earlier. We had decided against these homes as there was no yard on any of the homes except for the corner lots. We have the 2 dogs, so we need at least something in the way of a yard …but of course the corners were sold out 6 months ago.
But I decided to go revisit this floor plan and see if it was how I remembered it. As it turned out, one of the buyers of the corners failed to qualify and I had my chance to grab it. So I put down a deposit.
I told Bernadette it is going to be her Christmas present.

Talk about stress though, no w we have a baby coming in February, I’m starting a new position, we have a house to sell ASAP and a new home that is due to be finished in April to move into.

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Happy 2nd Birthday Connor!
12/7/2007

 Today Connor is two years old!
It’s amazing to see how he’s grown and how he’s developing into his own person. Connor is very clear in what he wants and he’s not afraid to tell you. He’s very opinionated; he likes something or he doesn’t like it and there is no changing his mind about that.
Cake? Not for Connor, he wanted to eat grapes on his birthday …and that was that!
He did like it when everybody sang “Happy Birthday”, he was all smiles from ear to ear.

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Happy Birthday Bernadette!
11/30/2007

 Today is Bernadette’s 33rd …er …I mean, 29th Birthday!!
Hooray!! Let’s hear it for Bernadette and her 29th Birthday!!
Unfortunately there will be no Birthday cake for Bernadette as she has been diagnosed with gestational diabetes, which means she’s got to watch the diet until the baby is born.
I guess that leaves more cake for Connor and I though ….Mmmm ..I’m thinking that we should get us a Mint-Chocolate-Chip Ice-cream Cake!! (Bernadette’s favorite ;)
Happy Birthday!!

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The Weekend & The Whiplash
11/20/2007

 This past weekend was a lot of fun. Saturday was spent at Disney Land and on Sunday we went to a Hawaiian Luau in celebration of little Ollie’s first birthday. Connor had a great time at the party and played the entire time with the other kids. He did take time out to watch the dancers and he really liked the drums.

So now it’s Tuesday and the work week is back in full effect. It’s been better this week then the past few weeks, but just went things were looking up I got rear-ended on the way into work this morning. There is nothing that will wreck (no pun intended) your morning commute more then somebody paying more attention to their cell phone then to the traffic.
At least I have a truck and it can take a good hit.

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V2.0 is online
11/17/2007

 When I was making a new site for Connor, I got the crazy idea to build it into the backend of this site. Of course, I made Connor's new site different and so I then had to remake this site and merge all the data into what became an entirely NEW backend database.
So anyway, to make a long story short, this site and Connor's site are now running off the same backend and are now easier to update.

Basically it was a 3 hour project that turned into a 3 day project between various work disasters.

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A Day at Disneyland
10/25/2007

 Yesterday I took a day off work to take Connor to Disneyland.
It turned out to be a better idea then I had first though when I scheduled it as a lot of stress has crept into this week. We had the fires, a faild inspection in the La Jolla branch (do to a small error on the blueprints that needed to be redrawn) and a mad dash to get the network switches in Century City updated. In the middle of all this, it was nice to take a personal day with the family.
Connor LOVES Disneyland. His favorite rides are the Autopia and the rockets, though Bernadette and I had more fun on the Buzz Lightyear ride where we get to shoot at the aliens and compete for the highest score (and of course I always win).
The best part of the day had to be as we were walking out and ran into Pluto. Connor yelled ""Hi doggy"" and then got really excited when he got to pet Pluto. As we were walking away he softly said ""Bye-bye doggy"" and then put his head down and closed his eyes.

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Happy B-Day Carl III
10/19/2007

 Happy Birthday wishes go out to my brother Carl who turns 32 today!

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Back from NY
10/13/2007

 I'm back from a work trip to NY, but the four days out of the office were a bit too much. Today is Saturday and I'm here in the office catching up on a few things while it is raining outside. on top of that, my sleeping is all out of whack.
Oh well, at least I got a good trip out of it.

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Cox Wedding
10/6/2007

 Today our friends Judith and Keith were married in front of friends and family from all around the globe. It was a beautiful ceremony filled with a lot of love, followed by a very lively reception.
It was great to see Judith and Keith tie the knot (finally). Bernadette and I got to see some friends we haven't seen in a while and meet some new ones. It was a blast. I only wish that we could have made the after-party as I'm sure it got even crazier.
Way to go Mr. & Mrs. Cox, enjoy the honeymoon!

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