Happy Birthday Savannah!

January 17, 2009

Well, technically it was yesterday, but today being Saturday, we are doing most of the celebration activities today. More on that later…

Yesterday the kids had a half day of school and their 1st Semester awards program. Both kids received honor roll once again with Sean earning a 4.96 grade point and Savannah earning a 3.79 average. Pretty good!

Savannah has been watching a lot of cooking shows lately on the Food Channel and decided she wants to be a chef. She has been at my side for years now helping me cook. One of her favorite Food Channel shows is the Challenge Show where folks make really, really outlandish and beautiful cakes. So yesterday, she decided she wanted to make her own birthday show cake – and she wanted minimal help from me or Suzanne.

She actually went as far as making molding chocolate and fondant, as well as cakes/brownies. Keep in mind, she just turned 11, but you can see the result of her hard work below. As you can probably see, she went with a breakfast in a skillet theme. Pretty darn good job! She is already itching to make more.

To help celebrate her Birthday today, we will head in to town. She received a bit of money from some relatives for her Birthday and wants to stop by the mall and shop (oh boy). Then she wants to see a movie. The movie she wants to see is Mall Cop. I fear we have seen all the funny parts in the ads on TV, but its here choice.

After the movie, we will grab some dinner. She has in mind this shish-ka-bob place for dinner. I have never eaten there, but she is itching for some Oriental shish-ka-bob. After dinner, we will likely return home and have some cake (yes, its edible) and finish opening her presents. Depending on the time, we may even partake in a family boardgame.

Where’s Mr Papa?

January 13, 2009

Okay, time for one of these posts again as its been a while since I have posted. The New Year has kept me hopping both at work and at home.

On the home front, over the holidays and to a lesser extent afterwards, we have had renewed energy on family game night. During the holidays, we wrote down a lot of the games we wanted to play and threw them in a hat (okay, urn). We would randomly draw which game to play. We were playing one or two games a day. Very much fun. Since the holidays, we have been playing on the weekends and usually once during the week. Fun times!

On New Years Eve, my friend and I released the next major version of the Simple:Press Forum plugin for WordPress that we develop. Its open source software provided for free to the community. Many, many man months of effort went into this major release. Its been a fun time doing the development, but with a release comes the flood of support requests and the occasional bug that slipped through our testing. Answering those questions and squashing the bugs has had me busy at night. They have slowed down somewhat now, so we can begin thinking on what we want to add to the software next.

I have also been doing a bunch of contemplating about work. A lot of the activities that I have been doing for the last few years either wound down at the end of last year or will be finished in the first quarter. I have been in essentially the same job for a while now, so I figured it was time to see what else there was out there. I don’t mean at a new company, but within my current company.

Luckily, there was quite a few opportunities and folks that were anxious for me to come work with them. It was a tough decision though and I took my time meeting with them and the respective VPs in the organization. Today, I finally announced that I was moving on to another job in a different organization. Like I said, it’s still with the same company and even in the same business unit, just a different organization within it. I have spent around 15 or 16 years out of my 22 years with the company in the same organization. It will be tough to leave, but the timing seems right and the opportunity certainly is. I will continue to support them a little bit in my new job too. Unfortunately, there is no increase in pay

So, with that decision behind me, I can now concentrate on bigger and better things, like this blog!

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