Humphrelia

This blog has been down for some time now. We had problems with our ISP – despite the fact that we had an agreement for a fixed IP address, their NOC group (Network Operations Center) has decided that all residential customers will have port 80 blocked (which is the HTTP port – i.e. our web-server is blocked).

We were quite upset and discussed our options with them. Shortly after our troubles, we moved Malin’s photography site to TextDrive servers. We were able to do this because a colleague of mine at work has available bandwidth for his account there. I have been in discussions with another colleague of mine regarding SliceHost hosting. So we will likely move our web-site there in the near future. At that time – if not sooner – this blog will be operational again.

In the meantime, no one can read this post except me :(

Despite the fact that no one can access this blog now, I decided to begin writing posts again to make sure our lives are suitably documented.

As far as the news of the past many weeks:

• I’ve been to Ireland. I visited Belfast and Dublin and had a pretty decent time, despite the fact that I was there for business.
• My parents invited Malin, Will, and me to Savannah, GA (Tybee Beach in particular). We joined them for several days there. Will loved the beach, and we all had fun. I got to go shark-fishing with my dad (which, unfortunately, was a little slow due to less-than-stellar guides), Malin and I got to visit some of our old haunts, and Will got to have fun playing in the sand at the beach. Will also has a mark on his head even to this day – he fell and hit/cut his head on the corner of a table. That was a particularly crappy/scary morning. But when we realized that his injury did not require stitches or any other need for a doctor we all made it through the day a-otay.
• Malin got a new camera. All photos posted to her photo-blog since May 25^th have been with a super-swank Nikon D200 with a very nice lens (vs. her D50 for which she has one decent lens and one inexpensive “kit” lens). She swears that the camera was worth it because of the phenomenal pictures it takes. I trust her.
• We had a couple of friends over for Memorial Day. Little Will thinks that my friend Scott’s name is “Rupaul”. He also thinks that playing car racing games on the X-Box (Need for Speed: Carbon) is synonymous with “fast women”. Thanks for that one, Rupaul.

Whenever this site is back up, then you can all read the wonderful things I’ll be writing. Hopefully we’ll get this site up and running on the TextDrive servers soon.

This past Sunday was Easter Sunday. The weather for the whole weekend was unseasonably cold and nasty.

Saturday was Malin’s “Karate in the Park” promotion. She was photographing several local karate students in a nearby park – the parents of the students paid only a small fee and received a complimentary 8×12 of their child, posed for combat (complete with props – swords, daggers, staffs, and the like).

While she was photographing, Will was napping, and I was hanging out around the house, playing in the basement mostly.

The next day was Easter Sunday. My parents weren’t able to make it, so it started off with just us three. Malin’s mom had been having some serious difficulty with her television (she used to have a cat that sprayed the back of the television – which has recently caused enough corrosion to ruin the television). So we went over to her place to get her situated with another television. The fun part was hooking everything up, having to battle what seemed like miles of speaker wire and satellite cable to do so. After that, we returned home. I cooked up a batch of beer (a Belgian White Beer), Malin cooked Easter dinner (authentic, southern-Italian pasta dishes: Roasted Green Beans with Balsamic Vinegar and Fettucini Bolognese), and Will banged on his latest love, the drums (with some help from his momma):

Once the sun came out, it was warm enough to color and then hide boiled eggs and have Will go look for them. Will had a fun time helping color the eggs. We had to take his shirt off because he was a bit careless with splashing the wonderful, vinegar-smelling dye:

That was about the peak of excitement, although things got exciting when Will ate his first Cadbury Egg, too:

All in all it was a good weekend – though we didn’t do much celebration regarding Jesus’s rising from the grave (sorry, Jesus). Hopefully everyone else’s Easter weekend was similarly enjoyable.

I’ve been so insanely busy with work for the last week that I’m getting quite sick of it.

Two people on my team will be going to Ireland next week to deliver our first round of stuff. Which is supposed to be our last round of stuff, but we are behind and will need at least one more release to actually finish…

Even though I haven’t posted to this site in a few days, I have been doing some stuff around the site. Particularly, I moved some of the content out – posts and parts of posts that were solely about my homebrew hobby have been moved to my other site.

Malin has been busy lately, too. We have all been feeling much better – thank goodness.

That is about it… not much else new. Is this a boring post or what! I’ll write more when we have more to talk about.

Will had quite a bout with illness this past weekend.

We left Thursday from Atlanta on our way to Durham, NC for the weekend. We were going to a wedding and going to visit friends we have in that area. We were planning on stopping in Greenville, SC (the mid-point) for the night and then driving the rest of the way Friday morning.

Unfortunately, on the car ride to Greenville, small red spots began to form on Will. Malin noticed them on his arms. We pulled over and inspected him to discouragingly find spots all over his body. They weren’t horrible looking, but they were everywhere. We phoned a nurse at his pediatrician’s office. She suggested Benadryl in case it was an allergic reaction.

The spots had grown by the time we arrived in Greenville. We were staying at my parents’ house in Greenville, and had dinner with them. When it was Will’s bath time that night, we found that things had gotten much, much worse. The spots had turned into hives: there were large, irregularly-shaped, red patches all over – covering most of his back and the right side of his chest. So we went to the emergency room at Saint Francis Hospital in Greenville. The bad rash helped us to get through triage quickly. Apparently the folks there were nervous about his condition being contagious.

When we finally saw the doctor, he told us that, despite having been vaccinated, Will had chicken pox (also known as “Varicella” or “HHV-3”). My mom said she’d never seen chicken pox look like that, but we all figured that the doctor knew what he was talking about. So we were prepared for a tough weekend. That evening was miserable. Will’s rash began to bother him quite a bit, and it was very, very itchy. He finally fell asleep around 4am. Friday we notified family and friends that we couldn’t make it to Durham, canceled our hotel reservations, and then got on the road driving back to Atlanta.

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Luckily, Will was feeling much better come Monday morning. In fact, since Monday morning he has been sleeping in. He’s not yet gotten used to Daylight Savings Time. And we’ll be keeping him on this time to keep him staying up late and sleeping in. The main reason for that being our trip this weekend: since we’ll have to sleep in a hotel room with him in a portable crib, we won’t really be able to stay up late. So instead of us learning to go to bed at 9pm, we’ll try to get him used to staying up until 11pm. And upon our return will come the challenge of beating back his bedtime to normal hours.

Today he was definitely back to his old usual self – a monster. He’s wonderful and all, but he tries to break our spirit and bend us to his will every ounce as much as we try to do so to him. It’s tough battle of “Will” power (lame pun intended). So we are ever trying to get him to eat his dinner and behave in the evenings, and he is ever trying to make us give up and let him do whatever he wants…

Alas, it is better than him being sick with a high fever.

Tomorrow we will be heading over to the post office to get him a passport. Wish us luck!

Well, this weekend was no fun. Will woke up on Saturday with dry heaves and developed a fever in the afternoon. So we’ve been struggling all weekend to get him to drink fluids and to keep his temperature down. It seems like he has another stomach bug of some kind: his stools have been unpleasant, he had the dry heaves on Saturday morning, and he has had a fever for two days. The reason he had dry heaves – and not vomiting – was because he hasn’t been eating much. And, since Saturday morning, he’s eaten almost nothing at all. He ate some goldfish and some cheerios on Saturday. Today, all he ate was a few fries and a bite of fish.

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Today was my working-from-home day. I try to telecommute every Wednesday; it can be very productive to not be in the office, and it saves a bunch on fuel since I live pretty far from work.

Unfortunately, I did not get much work done. One reason for my staying home, other than it being Wednesday, was that I felt like crap. My seasonal allergies have flared. I recently changed my Primary Care Provider with my insurance company (yes, I have an HMO). I did so because my previous PCP was pretty far from home – it would have made for a long drive to the doctor were I to get sick. The problem is that I had not yet visited the new doctor, and they won’t write a prescription without seeing you at least once.

So I went to the doctor today. My suspicions were confirmed: I have a sinus infection thanks to what the doc called “Chronic Allergic Rhinitis” (fancy word for bad seasonal allergies). But the good news that I have seen the doctor, so he was able to write me a prescription for Flonase (a nasal steroid that, for me, was a magic bullet against bad allergies). Since I had already developed an infection, he also prescribed an antibiotic.

He told me to stop taking decongestants after today. Part of the reason being that they tend dry your body out, which could cause dehydration when combined with Diarrhea. When I pointed out that I didn’t have Diarrhea, he said, “But the antibiotic will give it to you. Make sure to drink plenty of water.” Lovely…

Luckily, Will and Malin are feeling okay.

So today was filled mostly with responding to e-mails at work. I did a couple of other things, but not much. I was actually in bed most of the day, feeling like a used Kleenex (pale, weak, and covered in snot).

The project I’m on at work is already behind. I recall mentioning in my last post how this project really sucks (a very high anxiety project manager doesn’t help). So hopefully the meds will help to prepare me for battle in the office tomorrow.

Since this site is our family blog, I’ve decided to create a different place where I can rant about beer and my homebrewing hobby: http://www.humpsbrewing.bluegosling.com. Also, the main BlueGosling.com page now has a new tile and link to this new site.

If you are interested in the brews I make or my rants about homebrewing or beer in general then you may want to bookmark it. Otherwise, just stay tuned to this site to just read about our family. And I promise I’ll try to post more pictures of us. Although if you really want pictures then you may want to subscribe to Malin’s blog, too.

On another subject, my job has really been a pain lately – a fact to which all of my co-workers could testify. We had a commiseration lunch today, giving one another an earful about how much we hate certain aspects of our jobs. Some of our discussions feel like they come right out of Dilbert cartoons…

I hope everyone is doing well.
Adiós.

The past few weeks have been really busy: first the house fell apart, then the car fell apart, and now Willem is starting to fall apart. He has turned in to a bona fide two year old, with temper tantrums that leave a trail of destruction in their wake. He broke something while in a store recently. I don’t think I have been that mortified since I had a pair of my underwear fall out of my jeans while walking across the courtyard in high school (I had taken the jeans out of a pile of dirty clothes on the floor, and the underwear – from the same pile of dirty clothes – was hiding in the pant leg). I offered to pay for the broken merchandise, but they declined. Nonetheless, I had a small breakdown inside while the whole thing unfolded. Now when we go out, he has to hold my hand at all times. It’s like wrestling a monkey – so we don’t really go out much. Right now we are lying in bed watching cartoons. He is being sweet, but I know Mr. Hyde is just below the surface, ready to destroy the peace I am currently enjoying.

On other news, I have been getting back in the swing of things with work. Spring is coming, everyone wants their decorating done for all of the parties that the warm weather brings, and I don’t blame them. I do not think I will be taking on anymore clients of the decorating variety: it has really burnt me out, and I am now looking for new horizons to conquer.

Well, Will is starting to turn into his demented alter ego, so I must leave you now. Soon we will be together again, and I shall miss you while we are apart.

To try to fix all of the stability and reliability issues we’ve been having with MySQL, I moved this whole web-site to a new server. I now have a virtual Linux server running everything. The only artifact of the move is that the Gallery page no longer works. I didn’t feeling like delving too far into fixing it this morning, but it should be back online soon.

Everything else should be the same as before – except more stable. I don’t expect to be struggling with MySQL every other day anymore… (thank goodness).

If you’re curious what is a “virtual server” then you can learn more here.