Tao Of Foo

Ben and I went to the drag races yesterday with Pa Pa Bobby. We had a blast (no pun intended). Even with the headphones I think the first couple of rounds startled Ben. We met up with a coworker of mine and his daughter. She and Ben had a great time watching the races and walking around the cars. We were able to get relatively close to a few cars and the paint jobs were incredible. I think Ben’s favorite was the one painted like an alligator.

I took a few pictures with my phone. I apologize for the bad quality.

We ended up leaving a bit earlier than planned because there was a nasty wreck near the end of the last Pro Mod session. An ‘06 GTO rolled near the end of his run. It was getting late and we decided that if we left now we would be able to miss all the traffic and get home at a reasonable hour. Ben was asleep before we got on the highway. The only time he’s stopped talking about his race cars all weekend has been to play with the rabbits.

Did I mention that Amy got 3 rabbits? She’s scheduling Easter/Spring photo sessions right now and we are “temporarily” housing some rabbits for the photos. If you are interested get a hold of her soon. She keeps telling me that we’ll get rid of them as soon as she’s done but I have a sneaking suspicion that one or more of them will be permanent residents of the Anderson household. She’s given them names. Ugh.

This weekend Ben rode his new bike a little over 2 miles. That’s pretty impressive for a 3 year old. And when we got home he wanted to keep riding. I think it’s only a matter of time before I take off the training wheels. The funniest part is that our driveway and sidewalk are covered with little skid marks. He rides really fast, hits the brakes and looks behind himself to see how long the skid mark is. What a typical little boy.

And to top off the joy, Amy won the 2005 Woman of the Year award in HCWIB

Another year has come and gone, and with it Ben has grown up quite a bit. I can’t say the same for myself or Amy, but at least one of us is maturing. He’s become quite polite with “yes please”, or “um, no thank you”. And when he does start to get a little cantankerous I ask “what does wining get you?” to which he’ll reply “nothing.” (Thanks for that one Windy.) Christmas day was nice, but quiet (half the family was sick), and he received lots of goodies and had a total blast opening presents. Sparklers for New Years were a big hit but our severe drought brought us an aerial fireworks ban so there weren’t any shows around us. He’s pottying almost all by himself now and starts a Mothers Day Out program later this week. I can’t believe he’s almost 3. Crazy.

Amy’s business nearly trippled this year. I heep telling her that I’m ready to retire and become her assistant whenever Shutter-Happy gets big enough.

Work is great, the company is growing by leaps and bounds. And the project I’ve been working on for a little over 5 years now has seriously grown and matured. In 2005 we completely rearchitected it and it’s awesome to be working on code that isn’t ages old crappy code. There’s still a lot of work to be done as every step forward illuminates 2 more steps you need to take. The thing I love the most about this job is the constant stream of new projects and challenges that lay ahead.

It was 86º today, I wore shorts and a t-shirt. And we bought a Christmas tree. I have lived in South Texas my entire life and this still amuses me on some level. I think we have started an unofficial tradition no by going to the Pipe Creek Christmas Tree Farm to cut our own tree for the second year in a row.

Thanksgiving at my parents in Fort Worth (actually Azle) was tons of fun. Amy had lots of work (photoshoots, client visits etc) so she couldn’t be up there the entire time, but she was there for Thanksgiving day. Ben had fun playing with his cousin Jayden, paddling in my parents new canoe, visiting the Fort Worth Zoo and chasing the cat around the “rain forest”.

My Dad had a lot of fun playing with his new toy, a Nikon D70.

This summer was filled with lots of fun activities. We made several trips to the beach and camped there once. We went camping at Garner State Park and had a great time. We didn’t camp nearly as much this year as we usually do though, mostly because of Shutter-Happy keeping Amy so busy. She’s averaging several photo shoots per week now and has lots of clients visiting the house for slide shows and proofs. She has been mostly taking portraits (families, couples, kids and infants) and small events and also covered a large Rackspace Customer Event

And for the record, I think after 30 my body is starting to fall apart. In the last few weeks I got a cold, then the flu, then needed a root canal.

I got tired of the default WordPress theme and found a simple one that I liked. I also setup automatic posting from my del.icio.us bookmarks.

I have finally moved my blog to WordPress. As easy as it was to get PostNuke up and running the way I wanted back in the day, I really don’t like PostNuke as a platform. At the expense of code cleanliness they supposedly enabled a stable API. Um, not quite. The reality of what you end up with is ugly, slow, unstable code. Just personal preference. I just needed something lighter and leaner. I’ll eventually get my photo gallery and wiki back, and maybe I’ll move some of the family sites over to it too.

WordPress absolutely rocks. Both the code and the database schema are structured very well. I imagine I will be contributing some modification and/or plugins. I’d really like to plug the gallery directly in and/or the wiki as well. Although I had originally planned on opening the wiki up but I may keep it as more of a personal note taking system. WordPress offers some great general document writing capabilities, so I may just use that instead of a public wiki.

Lots going on around here these days. Amy’s business, Shutter Happy Photography is really taking off. She’s been super busy lately with all the photo shoots and image processing. Her TPPA Conference last month in Kerrville was awesome. She came back with so many ideas for the business side of the business (as opposed to the photography side). Our spare bedroom / study / office is now officially just an office. With a few more finishing touches it’s going to look nice.

The playset is nearly done. Now it just needs a roof, especially in this 102 degree heat. I’ll get to that in a few weeks. I have been working on a complete writeup of the design and build process. All in all it was probably a little more expensive than I originally thought it would be, but it’s still drastically cheaper than it would have been had we bought one. Plus I really enjoyed designing and building it myself. A full writeup and more pics coming soon.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who was able to make it last night. Even though I knew something was up I was still surprised at the number of people who came. I think I counted close to 30 family, friends and coworkers at one point. We probably had enough food and beer for 60 though. On the grill we had pork ribs, chicken fajitas, 4 kinds of sausage, hot dogs, vegies (red and yellow onions, portabella mushrooms, red, yellow and orange bell peppers and asparagus) and pineapple. I had to do 3 rotations of meat and 2 of veggies. There were more side dishes than I could count and then desserts on top of all that (cookies, brownies, a cake roll and roasted apples). We may have eaten a little late but we certainly didn’t starve.

Amy, thank you again for organizing everything. I love you more than you can imagine. I couldn’t have asked for a better 30th birthday.

I have posted some pictures.

Lesson learned: Either start cooking earlier or get a bigger grill. I think most guys on the planet will opt for the latter.

This is officially the last day of my life I can say that I am in my 20’s. I realized last night that turning 30 isn’t bothering me at all. In fact I have hardly thought about it much. Nothing big planned, maybe a small BBQ.

I have been listening to The Mars Volta a lot lately. Thanks Mark, now I’m totally hooked. When I told him how much I like them he made a commend about how I was more warped that he had realized.

Bens playset is really coming along nicely. Check out the pictures for updates. I’m starting to work on a short writeup on now I built it. There aren’t too many good Open Source carpentry plans out there. Maybe I’ll start a trend. Food for thought.

Amy got a Nikon D2X a few weeks ago. Damn!!!!! It’s incredible. Simply incredible. 12.4 megapixels and FAST, 5 frames per second.

We have begun potty training. Ben loves sitting on his potty, but he’s not doing anything yet. He’s peed once but that was weeks ago. He loved reading up there though.

Wow. I knew I was a bit nerdy but….

I think it was a few of the famous scientists and the physics/chemistry ones that did me in. I even beat out spoonix and Dirk.