Ohio & Wabash - number 2

Yum.

Ohio & Wabash - post 1

For starters... I'm supposed to be on a diet. Oops....

Business Intelligence in Chicago...

So, I'm in Chicago at a BI conference being put on by Gartner.  I'm excited to be here... but the trip getting here was exciting!   The flight was very bumpy and the landing was a bit of a doosy with the plane swaying this way and that!  I'm staying in a great Hotel just down the street from Pizzeria Uno's and those of you that know Leann and I know that we can't pass up an Uno's if we have an opportunity go to one.  So that's where I'm headed for dinner. 

The hotel room has a great view of the river and is right down town so I've got some great views!  I've posted some of the pictures of the hotel room and the view here. 

Grass Hopper...

CIMG0857.JPG
Originally uploaded by Supercork

Today Ethan played in the grass for the first time! He has been having a rough week, but today he was feeling MUCH better. I took him outside around 6:45 and it was so nice out. It was pretty breezy and he looked interested in what all the green stuff was on the ground so I first had him walk a bit in it (with Dad's help obviously) and then I sat him down so he could play a bit on his own. As you can see from the photo, he has pretty much gotten the hang of sitting up on his own with out falling over. He still does fall over every now and then but for the most part, he does a good job at it.

Testing out some new gadgets...

So I'm using "Windows Live Writer" to write this blog post.  It's a desktop app that I got from Microsoft when I downloaded and installed Windows Live Gallery so I could upload a lot of my photos to Flickr.  This seems pretty cool as it is spellchecking on the fly.  I also have buttons to the right for inserting pictures, tables, maps, tags, videos, and hyperlinks.  It also looks like it supports other Plug-ins as well.  Pretty interesting.

Here's a picture that I've posted:

I now see that I have lots of options for this picture... in an advanced tab where I can set certain effects on the picture like black and white etc...  Pretty cool stuff!

Speaking of Flickr (okay, I mentioned it only briefly above), I've spent a bunch of time with my pictures today because of that darn website!  I like it a lot... but I'm now forced to rething my photos.  I've been spending the last hour or so tagging all my photos.  I successfully have tagged all my dog photos and stored them into individual shots (tagged with their name) as well as a generic category titled "dogs".  Hopefully I keep this up.  .... although, now thinking about it.  I'll have to tag them in Flickr from now on as most of them will be uploaded automatically because I'm using EyeFi.. hmmm interesting... my Flickr images will be tagged but the local copies will not if I do decide to do that.... hmm.  I guess that's something to noodle on while I sleep tonight.  Anywho, it just occured to me that I've not posted before using this tool and if I don't stop typing soon I could have a whole lot of content that I can't post on my hands ;)

So until next time!

Laters Gators

A trying week….

Wow, this has been one of those weeks! Ethan had been fussy all weekend but mom took care of things because Dad was down and out with the flu. Then on Monday when Dad started feeling better Ethan's teething kicked into high gear. He really started fussing a lot and Leann called the doctor's office. They told him that if he doesn't respond well to baby Tylenol on the gums and/or we see him rubbing an ear a lot to bring him in as it may be an ear infection. By the time Wednesday rolled around the Tylenol on the gums thing was pretty ineffective and he started to get a persistent fever. Off to the doctor's office we went! After some serous crying as the doctor was getting mass amounts of wax out of his ears she deemed the issue an ear ache indeed. On Thursday night we began giving him his prescribed dosage of Amoxicillin… which is bright pink and seems to be an exceedingly large amount for his tiny mouth. Needless to say Ethan is not a fan of Amoxicillin… and now I understand why my mom use to always claim I was allergic to it when the doctors suggested it :). Anywho, the crazytrain at work wasn't stopping for either of us as we both had tons of stuff to do at work as well as a little emergency / crisis on Pop's website for his business that I was helping to resolve Monday through Wednesday. Thankfully for me Leann volunteered to stay at home with Ethan for two days and work from home while he pushed through his fever. I was very thankful because it seemed like I had a barrage of non stop face to face meetings that I was required to be in. By the time Friday rolled around we were both exhausted… I was working late at night on block watch and HOA stuff as well as work stuff for my face to face meetings. Ethan was only sleeping 2 or maybe 3 hours at a time and Leann was taking on the brunt of it (meaning sleep deprivation).

To top things off the pink die from Ethan's Amoxicillin (remember I mentioned that it was bright pink above) seemed to move through his body and directly to his hiney and turned it bright red! That's right… by Friday Ethan had a raging diaper rash and now wanted to cry in both a sitting and standing position! Changing time is no longer fun for him… he's in a ton of pain when we wipe his bottom and he lets us know it! Luckily Leann is a superhero in the field of dealing with unhappy baby's and their sleepy fathers. She has been doing so awesome taking care of him as well as me without getting sick (thank goodness). I don't know how she does it… but I'm so thankful for her strength and ability in this area!

We are looking forward to a visit from Granny Sweetpea in a little over a week. Ethan has been talking to us a lot lately and I image that he's telling us how excited he is as asking us how much longer till we granny gets here. To which we reply "4 more miles" :)

Anywho, that's the skinny for now.
Until next time, take care!