walkah: family

Happy New Year, everyone! I'd thought I'd do one of those popular 2007 recap / 2008 resolution posts... largely for my own future interest.

2007 was a big year for me (again). I left Bryght (the company I co-founded in 2004) and a few months later happily joined Lullabot (my absolute favourite job to date). My divorce finalized and I moved. I sold a car and a house. I spent a lot of time working on OpenID (particularly getting it into core for Drupal 6). I traveled to Vancouver, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Barcelona, Providence and Boston. Camryn turned 5, Andrew turned 10, and I turned 30. *Phew*

I'm really looking forward to 2008. I have very high hopes. Work is busy, exciting and looks like it should be a very successful year. I'm happy, healthy and loving life. I want to drink more water, sleep more, see more of the world and meet more people. With day #1 of the year just finished, I'm off to a good start and ready for more.

Bring it on, 2008. I'm ready :)

unbelievable, my daughter is three years old today - and she's my *baby*! i'm mostly in shock... the baby days are getting further and further behind us. we went out yesterday and ordered her big girl bed, and in a few short days she'll start her parent and tot class at school.

*sob*

happy birthday, camryn. i love you.

do you know where walkah is right now? chances are you probably don't that's 'cause late last week, Sandi and I decided to head back to my mom's place in rockport, MA. why? well, kinda just 'cause we can. we were without obligations for the week at home, and feeling like we hadn't quite gotten enough R&R. So we boarded mango (oh yeah, did i mention we have a puppy?) and hopped in the car on Sunday.

spontaneous? well, not so much i guess. we spent a couple days preparing and arranging. i think mostly it's a testament to how bad we've been at "just doing stuff" as a family, but this is as close as we've gotten in a lot of years - something we need to change.

the more interesting part is that - without my explicitly saying anything - none of my co-workers / clients / etc. have any way to tell. i'm still in the same time zone, and i have a reliable internet connection. add in my powerbook and cell phone - and my office location is really irrelevant.

the coolest part? this office has windows and is a 3 minute walk to the beach :)

been a while since i've done a 'family' post... so much happens, that i need to either write a novel here or just gloss over it for the nuggets that might have mass-web appeal. so here's one:

when the Boris was in town last weekend, he got sucked into doing chalk drawings on the driveway (one of camryn's favourite pastimes). after running out of things - he ended up doing a drawing of trogdor, the burninator. (those of you who don't know strongbad are missing a seriously important part of the internet).

well, andrew thought "trodgor" was hilarious - and has been drawing an "S" followed by a "more different 'S'" ever since. here's his latest:

the cutest part was definitely "dad, how do you spell 'burninator'?". for whatever reason, the drawings of ligers didn't catch on in the same way...

tags: strongbad, andrew, trogdor, drawing

haven't done a "family" post in a while... but it looks like our four is soon to be five. we've spent a long time talking about it and mulling it over, but it looks like we're gonna get a dog. the kids are *really* eager to get a pet, and camryn spends a lot of time to be a dog.

after lots of reading, and emails to breeders we've settled on a breed (vizsla) and looks like we may even have found a breeder. so saturday, we drove out to rockwood ontario to meet the newborn (2 week old) puppies. here's our current favourite (temporarily known as "blue"):

um, yeah, they're cute. like *real* cute.

tags: vizsla, puppy

for those of you that don't know, my brother chad (the brains behind sudden thoughts) is currently in Paris (yeah, like France) attending the American University in Paris. before he left, he mentioned that he wanted to blog about his experience there. since he also joined the mac ghetto shortly before leaving, i told him i could hook him up with the dynamic combo of drupal + ecto. the result:

chad says ribbit

it's been a good holiday. in addition to getting some much needed downtime and adding a few pounds around my midsection, i also got quite a few geek toys for christmas. prior to christmas, i made a point of updating my amazon wishlist for those of my non-technical family members (i.e. all of them) who find me difficult to buy for. it turned out to work quite well - although the funny part was none of my family members actually bought things from amazon - they checked out list and wandered off to local bricks and mortar type establishments.

nevertheless, it resulted in an overwhelming amount of toys... here's a quick recap:

• Griffin iTrip FM Audio Transmitter for 3G Apple iPods - while, ideally i'd prefer to never drive... i do actually spend a fair bit of time in the car, because when i do drive it tends to be a trip to downtown toronto - which is a good 45 minutes away (at least!). this will be excellent to have since, well, most radio stinks.
• "Linksys WRT54G Wireless-G Router" - i've wanted one of these for a long time. my current wireless setup is only 80211.b - which means i miss out on a lot of speed for my powerbook. also, i've been dying to hack the linux
• Apple iSight - oh yeah. you know you want one too.
• as if that weren't enough... my darling wife heard my subtle hints for a new, smaller, faster digital camera. so, i am now (after some research and exchanging) the *very* proud owner of a canon sd200. first impressions - this is an awesome little camera, and exactly the kind of thing i was looking for - more later.

the stockings are hung, we're up to our ears in snow, the cookies are baked, and it's just two more sleeps!

so to all of those that i might not see or otherwise communicate with over the next two days:

have a very happy holiday! be safe, and enjoy!

-walkah

so, according to some family members, i'm difficult to buy for. apparently everything i really like is really expensive, or folks don't know which gadget i really want. well, in an effort to help people out, here's a link to my amazon wishlist.

of course, if you're not related, but still feel i've been good this year... feel free to be generous.

shameless, i know.

the walkah clan officially kicked off our holiday season this past weekend, with our annual head out and cut down a tree family event on saturday. as is our custom (well, really it's my in-laws custom, i've just adopted it), we gorged ourselves on my mother-in-law's homemade chili for most of the rest of the day saturday. we kept the spirit going yesterday by actually setting up the tree, getting it decorated, and i even finally got around to putting up our lights outside - since it was a beautiful day.

pictures? you want pictures? well, sadly, i forgot to charge my camera first, so you're gonna have to wait until i get a CD full of sandi's pictures. (those of you looking for instant gratification and feeling generous, I'd recommend getting her a Nikon D70 ;) ).