Pictures!

First of all, you’ll be happy to know that Mommy, Becca, and the kids arrived safely at our home on Wednesday evening, just in time for Becca to get a good night’s sleep and then take off (with her mother) for home in Wyoming. Mommy and the kids, on the other hand, get a few days with Daddy before I (Daddy) take off for a three-day teaching gig in Frankfort, Kentucky—so we get to miss each other again. :-P

Secondly—and more to the point of this post—I’ve discovered how incredibly integrated iPhoto ’09 is, with Facebook. Thus, following the runaway success of moving the blog here, I’ve decided to launch Photos.Drakelings.com. I’ll be uploading the old photos bit by bit, but the site already features all Drakelings photos from Q2 2009. How’s that for an improvement?

Hope you enjoy it!

A Lone Man in Indiana

Today is day two of me being alone in the house. Becca’s home from Wyoming for a few more days, and since Beryle isn’t currently up to going with her, Anna decided to pack up the kids and accompany her kid sister to visit family in West Virginia. I really wish I could have gone along, but there’s just no way. We were in New Jersey for Great-Grandma’s funeral, in May; in West Virginia to visit these same family members, in June; I’ll be in California for the FileMaker Developers’ Conference, in August; and we’ll all be back in New Jersey for Grandma and Pop’s retirement party—plus a much-needed vacation—in September. I mean, seriously…. How much more work can I miss? Being my own boss is great, but there comes a time when I have to really be my own boss and put my own foot down, else there’s no way we’ll be able to live!

The nice thing about being home alone is that it’s given me lots of extra time to work on some long-overdue projects (e.g. cleaning up the iPhoto Libraries), and I can even get a good night’s sleep! The bad thing about being home alone is that I really miss my wife and kids.

Solitude is fun, to a point, but I thank goodness they’ll be home, tomorrow! ☺

Thoughts for the Day…

It’s only 7:38 AM, and already the kids have made me laugh, several times!

There’s a song that Primary kids in our Church sing, about faith. In fact, the name of the song may actually be Faith, and I’m guessing it even predates this one. The song begins with the lines: “Faith is knowing the sun will rise / Lighting each new day.” Well, faith also tells me that once the sun has risen, Leah will eventually wake up and yell, “Daaaa-dee, it’s good morning time! Daaaa-dee, it’s good morning time!” ad infinitum, until I get to her.

Well, this morning was a little different: both kids woke up at 6:00 AM—almost on the dot—and wanted to come into bed with us. We allowed them to do so, so by the time we were actually getting up, Leah had noticed that it was particularly lighter, outside. She asked me to open the blinds, which I did. She gasped, smiled fro ear to ear, and declared, “It’s starting to get morninged!”

* * * * *

David, on the other hand, is going two very contradictory stages: an empathy stage and a hitting stage. Thankfully, the hitting stage hasn’t reared its ugly head, this morning. The empathy stage, however, was quite apparent when I came back downstairs from getting a coin to flip (more on that, in a moment) and I banged my foot on the gate, at the bottom of the stairs. As soon as he realized I was in pain, he asked if I wanted him to kiss it—just like Mommy and Daddy do, for his boo-boos. What a great kid!

So back to the coin flip: when Leah and David both want to do the same thing, but only one person can do it, I’ve started flipping a coin. This morning, I let David call it:☺ “Heads or tails?” I asked him, to which he replied, matter of factly, “Heads.” (As it happens, it came up tails, so Leah got to say our prayer, at breakfast.) The more important part, though, is that David seemed to have missed the point of what we were doing: as soon as we were moving on from the coin flip to our prayer, he looked at me, rather hurt, and said, “Daddy, want head!” ^_^

(Even now, I’m not sure what kind of head he thought I was going to give him, but of course we had a little talk, reminding him what “heads or tails” means.)

I’m So Glad…

Sorry for the lack of a picture on this one, but I’m still busy merging my iPhoto libraries and can’t get to one. Soon enough, soon enough.

I just wanted to mention an experience I had with Leah, this morning: I was sitting in my office, hard at work, when she came into the room. She ran up alongside me and, having gotten my attention, looked up into my eyes and said, “I’m so glad you adopted me!” The smile on her face said it all, and I grabbed her and held her tight. “I’m glad we adopted you, too,” I responded, and let her down. With that, she ran away, back to whatever she’d been doing.

Do I have a great daughter, or what?

Some Highly Technical Stuff

First of all, a disclaimer: this blog is about my kids. The fact that I am about to go off on a rather technical rant should in no way be construed to mean that this blog is no longer about my kids. It’s an aberration, but one that I think certain readers deserve, being that the old web site has now gone over four months without an update. If you don’t care, feel free to skip this one. I won’t mind. ;-)

For the long-time reader, it probably shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that I haven’t updated things, in a while; I’ve never been particularly good at it. However, the astute reader may remember that, as of March 2, I was completely up to date and had rededicated myself to keeping it that way. And almost immediately thereafter, it happened.

It was a hard drive failure, which really shouldn’t have been a big deal. (Note: here comes the technical stuff!) My main computer—the one I use for just about everything—is stocked to the max, with hard drives. The system and applications are on a RAID-1 set, the files are on a second RAID 1 with a hot spare, and each RAID is backed up to a separate Firewire drive. LIkewise, our dedicated iServer—which stores all of our iLife stuff—has a RAID 1 for the system, a RAID 1 for the files, and a Firewire backup for the files. (The system is so basic, I’ve never bothered to back it up beyond the RAID.) So when one of my main machine’s drives failed, it really wasn’t a big deal. In fact, it was nice to have an excuse to upgrade the system drives, which I did by removing the old 500GB RAID from the iServer and replacing it (and its associated backup) with a brand new, 1500GB RAID 1 and Firewire backup. All I had to do was transfer the files, and I’d be set.

Or so I thought.

I’m not sure how or when this happened, but at some point, the header block on the iRAID had become corrupt. What’s more, since I was doing block-level backups, the backup was corrupted, too! I can’t even tell you how much time I spent, repeatedly repairing the header block and combing the three drives for every last bit of information. Thankfully, I think I got all of the kid stuff, and since I regularly share photos with my parents, a lot of them are on their machine, too. But now I’m left with dozens of iPhoto libraries and am in the long, drawn-out process of trying to merge them all. (Thank goodness for iPhoto Library Manager and Duplicate Annihilator!)

So there’s my equally long and drawn-out excuse for not updating everything, in a timely fashion. Thankfully, I’ve finally given in and decided to use this site instead of iWeb, and the next step is to move all the photos and movies (new ones first!) to a more streamlined web experience (probably Facebook or Flickr, since they’re completely integrated with iPhoto ’09, anyway). In the meantime, though, I’ve learned a couple of very important lessons about hard drive maintenance:

1) Don’t do a block-level backup unless you absolutely need to (e.g. the drive has a functional system on it, and you’d like to have a bootable backup).

2) Run Disk Utility’s Repair Disk feature (or something similar) on all of your drives, on a regular basis. The early stages of corruption are still reparable; the later stages are not.

3) Don’t knock offsite backups. Sure, they’re annoying, but wow are they nice, if you need one! ☺

I shall now step down from my soapbox and allow iPhoto Library Manager to continue creating a brand new library, while I get back to bed (which is really where I belong, atm). Next time on Drakelings, back to the kids! ☺

The New Drakelings blog

Welcome to the inaugural post of the new Drakelings blog. I’m hoping I’ll be able to upload some of the older posts, but basically, I’m doing this for one reason: simplicity. For years, I’ve been trying to create my kids’ entire site in iWeb, and it just isn’t working. Granted, iWeb ’09 has an essential new feature—you no longer need a .Mac account to upload only the changes to your site, instead of the whole thing—but the site is still absolutely huge, what with all the pictures and stuff. (To give you an idea, our iPhoto library is up around 80GB, these days!)

So I guess I’ll start by telling a story about last night. Leah’s friend Miranda and her little brother Jacob (who is sort of David’s friend, except for the whole “I’m only eight months old” thing) were over for a while, and we went out back, so they could play on the new swing set. As they were playing, I started talking with them about what an absolutely beautiful day it was. (I don’t remember the last time July was so comfortable—as of right now, 9:50 AM, it’s still only 67˚F! But I digress….) The following conversation ensued:

Me: “What do those clouds look like, Leah?”

Leah: “I dunno” (her favorite phrase, atm).

Me: “Well, what do you think they look like?”

Leah: “I don’t know!”

Me: “Please don’t yell. Just look. What do any of the clouds look like?”

Leah: “I… don’t… kn—oh, that one looks like a horse!” ^_^

David, on the other hand, has recently started speaking a lot more clearly: forming complete sentences, expressing what he really means, etc.. A couple of days ago, I was leaving the room after putting him down for his nap. He absolutely loves it when I sing to him before he goes to sleep, and generally requests one last song, just as I’m going out the door. On Sunday, however, he had an extremely different request:

David: “Daddy?”

Me: “Yes?”

David: (says something unintelligibly softly)

Me: “What was that?”

David: (says ostensibly the same thing, unintelligibly softly)

Me: “What do you need, bud?”

David (smiling): “Nuffin.”

…and that was that.