Author Archives: Derek

Caroline Grace

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I’ve received about a zillion requests for pictures of Caroline Grace so I’ve managed to get some time during the day to get them off the camera and upload them to the website.

The pictures from the ER were taken by the Larry the anesthesiologist. The nurse let us know before hand that Larry liked to commandeer the camera and take pictures so I would have to worry about. Thankfully he was able to keep with his anesthesiologist duties and take pictures at the same time. The first time Larry came in to work on Jen he looked at her and said, “your a swimmer”. After 15 years of working on peoples backs he’s apparently acquired the skill of back type interpretation.

The whole procedure seemed to take a lot longer then I remember it taking with Andrew. Once they had Caroline out they took her over to the baby table, cleaned her up, examined her, then they let us hang out for a while with Jen before we went off to the nursery.

Later in the day Pat brought Alex and Andrew up to the hospital to see their new sister and I think they were both very excited. Andrew was intrigued by the fact that she was now out of Jen’s tummy and he was very excited that she would now be able to go running again. Now we just have to convince him it’s going to be a while before that can happen.

Enjoy the pictures.

God’s House

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When I was dropping off Andrew at school this morning we pulled into the parking lot and drove past the chapel when he said,

“That’s God’s house.” pause, pause, pause, “It has lots of chairs in it.”

Fruit Loops, Fruitie Loops.

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Alex was getting his and Andrew’s breakfast cereal this morning, two bowls of Fruit Loops, and Andrew was walking around the kitchen singing,

“Fruit Loops, Fruitie Loops, I’m eating Fruitie Loops.”

Alex was having some problems pouring the cereal so I helped him finish it out, get them both some Orange Juice, and get it to the table. I went back to the fridge, got the milk out and came back to the table to find out who wanted milk in their cereal. (More often then not Alex doesn’t take milk in his cereal and Andrew has started picking up the habit.) Andrew took one bit of his Fruit Loops and yelled and made a big production out of,

“I didn’t want this, I wanted Life cereal.”

Bob Zimmer

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Andrew came in the other day all dressed up and announced,

“I’m Bob Zimmer and I’m here to work!”

Apparently he has some alter ego we don’t know about.

Snow Day

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I guess it would be more correct to say that it’s more of an Ice Day then a Snow Day.  Yesterday it rained/drizzled most of the afternoon and into the night and then the temperatures dropped below freezing so everything is covered in ice now.  When I woke up this morning the temperature was 24° F (-4° C) and the schools were closed for the day.  I think the boys are really upset they can’t go this morning.  I haven’t been able to go to work yet since the car door is frozen shut.

Alex Looses Another Tooth

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Alex lost his second front tooth and he’s now sporting the two missing front teeth look.  It was only a couple of days ago that it started getting loose and when he woke up this morning he was playing with it in bed and it fell out.

Alex with his two front teeth missing.

Rough Night with Wonder Pets from the Twlight Zone

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It was a rough night last night. Alex had a friend over and they were playing board games in the front room and I was keeping Andrew occupied and we sitting at the kitchen table with my computer looking at on line videos from Nick Jr. and the Disney.

We watched a full episode of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse but before that we watched a number of shorter videos on the “Wonder Pets“. Andrew’s a fan of the Wonder Pets and with the right amound of coaxing will even sing the theme song. For those not familiar with the show there are three classroom pets Linny the guinea pig, Turtle Tuck, and Ming-Ming the duckling who travel around on a makeshift toy sailboat and help out other baby animals that have gotten thenself in trouble.

In just about every video they played some portion of the theme song,

“Wonder Pets! Wonder Pets! We’re on our way
To help a baby elephant (or whatever bably animal they are saving that day) and save the day!”

“We’re not too big.”

“And we’re not too tough.”

“But when we all work together we’ve got the right stuff!
Go, Wonder Pets! Yay!”

It all seemed very innocent until it turned out the that I had the theme song going through my head over and over all night long. I woke up at least a half a dozen times from a restless sleep and all I could remember dreaming about was the song with Linny, Tuck, and Ming-Ming, flying through the air in the flyboat. I couldn’t get that dream out of my head all night and work up feeling tired and just a little freaked out this morning.

Here’s to hoping Linny leaves me alone tonight so I can get a decent sleep.

Joke of the Day

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A pirate walks into a bar wearing a paper towel on his head. He sits down at the bar and orders some dirty rum. The bartender asks, “Why are you wearing a paper towel?”

“Arrr…” says the pirate. “I’ve got a bounty on me head!”

2008 Year in Numbers

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Some useless numbers and statistics to sum up 2008.

mfdc in numbers
It was a record year for web site traffic this year with 79,870 hits from 1,803 unique visitors. In the overall scheme of web site volume 79,000 visitors isn’t all that many but the target audience for this site is meant to be small and this still works out to 218 hits a day which is fine. When I include all the auto crawlers from seach engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc, we had a total of 108,858 hits.

By month the trend looks like this:

I would have assumed that the huge tickup in traffic in November would have come around the time I posted the Disney vacation pictures but after looking at the traffic that wasn’t the case. Someone from France (see below) pretty much went through the entire site in about 10 minutes so it was probably some type of automated collector even though the browser type doesn’t indicate that’s what it was.

Top visitors to the site came from addresses ending in .net, followed by a chunk of unknown, then .com. The next three largest groups came from France (1,961 – 857 being the suspected automated web site crawler from above), Poland (827), and Mexico (772). You Canadian visitors came in 7th with 744 hits.

Excluding the home page, blog home page and rss feeds the most popular page was the January trip to Great Wolf Lodge, Christmas pictures from 2007, and Alex’s Matisse.

The top browsers used to visit the site were Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari (mainly mac users), and Opera. There were 23 hits from a Lynx user which surprises me since Lynx is a text based and out site is pretty much graphics driven. (Then again it was only 23 hits, only for the home page, but it spanned from January to September so whoever it was kept coming back.)

Blog Posts
Compared to previous years I managed to get out a couple more blog posts then years past with 70 items. That accounts for 24% of all posts and I’ve been posting on or off since July of 2004. It’s hard to beleive that it’s been that it’s been that long which got me thinking how long I’ve had this site up. Looking at the WHOIS record I’ve owned mfdc since October of 2001. Holy cow, 2001. I remember I got the site while Jen was pregant with Alex as a good way to share pictures with the family. (And now she’s pregant again….cue twilight zone music.)

Swim Numbers
Ever since I was in high school I’ve more or less kept track of all my workouts. It’s a habit one of my old coaches got me into and it’s been impossible to break. It doesn’t feel like a complete workout until I’ve written it down and recorded the yardage.

This year I swam 290,600 yards which works out to about 165 miles (265 km). February and March were really down months since I took them off due to surgery so I’m relatively pleased with how far I went. The thing that’s aways a little surprising to me is that it was only 165 miles for the whole year since it sure feels like way longer while I’m in the pool. On a map 165 miles doesn’t look all that impressive and depending on which way I go from our house it doesn’t even get me out of the state.

So instead of ploting how far I’ve gone horizontally how about looking at it vertically. According to Google Earth this is what the view of our house would look like from 165 miles up. More impressive if you ask me.

Netflix
According to Netflix we rented 61 movies last year and I wactched 1 online using the “Watch Now” feature. That works out to more movies then remember watching in previous years and now that I know how many it is I feel like I’m getting my money’s worth even if I’m not one of those 260+ movies a year type person.

There you go, the 2008 ocd numbers summary.