For those of you who like photos, I put a lot of them up last night.  A hundred and twenty-four to be exact.  I decided at the beginning of the month that I’d hold off putting up photos until the end of the month, rather than making lots of “heylookit new pictures!” posts every week.

There are pictures from our trip to Tampa, Florida to spend Independence Day with Stephanie’s sister and her family.  We went to the beach and Emma was OK with getting in the water this time (unlike last time).  There are also some pictures from my brother’s wedding, in which I was the best man.  Then there are some professional photos of Emma that we had made last week.  And finally, there are a bunch of Emma pictures from the last month that didn’t really go with any of the others.

Enjoy!

P.S.  I changed a lot of code on my website, but you shouldn’t visibly see any changes.  Let me know if something doesn’t seem to work like it used to.

Last night Stephanie, Emma, Stephanie’s dad, and myself were traveling to Florida to visit Stephanie’s sister.  Along the way, we stopped for gas twice: once in South Carolina and once in Georgia.  Both times, it took far too long for no good reason.  At the first gas station, for some reason, you have to go inside and prepay for gas, even if you are paying at the pump.  This makes no sense.  The only reason to require someone to go inside and prepay is if they are paying cash, because you are afraid they will drive away.  When you pay at the pump, the gas station has already ensured that you have enough funds on your credit card to cover the gas.  The second time we stopped, an attendant walked up to us after we pulled up beside a pump and said they were changing shifts inside and the pumps were going to be off for about ten-to-fifteen minutes.  (Also, he was smoking at the time.)  Really?  It takes fifteen minutes to balance the books when you change shifts??  And again, we were paying at the pump, which means we didn’t need to pay the guy at the register anything, so why couldn’t they at least leave the pumps open for people paying there?

Anyway, I just thought I’d share.  Enjoy your Independence Day everyone!

Last night I added a bunch of pictures from last week’s beach trip.  I also added a set of miscellaneous pictures which I titled “Emma in June.”  (The first three pictures in that set were moved from the “Emma continues to grow” set, but the rest are new.)

Some interesting tidbits-

• Emma did not care for the ocean (compare and contrast her facial expressions before and after touching the water).

• Emma’s second-cousin Clara, who is five and a half weeks her elder, was at the beach too.  At one point, Kaylor (Clara’s mother, who is my cousin) was holding Clara, and Scott (my brother) was with them, while some Asian family with a screaming baby was nearby (they were at a restaurant at the time).  Some moron—who must not have looked closely enough at Clara to realize Scott was definitely not the father—said to Kaylor, “That’s what this country needs: more good, white babies.”  Of course, Clara is only half white.  I think the guy just walked away after that (I wasn’t there).  Like I’ve said before on this blog, I’m always surprised that there are still truly racist people out there who are under the age of seventy.  I mean, if you were, let’s say, over 25 years old in 1960, maybe you were already set in your ways before we as a society figured out that racism is a Bad Thing, so you’ve at least got a bad excuse for your behavior.  For anyone younger than that:  really? seriously? there are still people that ignorant?  (Also, I can assure this guy that white babies are quite capable of screaming very loudly.)

• Emma likes riding on my shoulders.  But I think this is mainly because she likes running her hands through my hair.

Part of our Christmas gift from Stephanie’s parents this year was some time at a timeshare.  We decided we would use the time before the baby gets here, and so we spent the last weekend in Atlanta.  While we were there we visited Zoo Atlanta and the Georgia Aquarium.  I have put up photos from this trip for any who are interested.  A lot of the pictures from the aquarium turned out much better than I had expected.

A few comments

• The elephant will hold a paint brush in its nose and create elephant art.  That was interesting to watch.

• Apparently dried up Christmas trees are a part of the wallaby’s natural habtat?  Actually they had these in several of the exhibits, I guess some kind of recycling program or something.

• The zoo had a baby panda, possibly God’s cutest creation.  The adult pandas must not appreciate this because they won’t breed even to save their species.

• I have determined that Bowser King of the Koopa is in fact not a Koopa at all, but an alligator snapping turtle.  Apparently some Wikipedia editor agrees with me.

• In the aquarium, they had this huge wall that was filled with jellyfish that was incredibly relaxing to look at.  It was kind of like a giant screensaver, only not annoying.

• There were a couple of tanks that arced over head, and one tank that had a glass tube running through the bottom of it.  This allowed you a few places where you could look up and see sea creatures flying overhead.

• The pictures of the sea turtle turned out surprisingly well.  I guess there was just plenty of light in the area.

Michael: Hey dude. I just got back from Jamaica.
Packer: Big whoop! I was in HOTlanta. That whole town is whack!

I just got back from my first ever business trip.  My company sent me to Seattle (technically Everett, WA) this week to visit our good friends at Boeing.  You may have heard, they are a little behind schedule.  But I can’t say too much about the business purpose of my trip here.  Fortunately I wasn’t flying solo, there were several others from my company (two others from the Charlotte office).  I was the only developer there; everyone else was support.  In any case, here are a few highlights in convenient bulleted form:

• The area is pretty.  Unless you happen to hate evergreen trees, in which I guess you wouldn’t care for it.  Because there are lots of evergreens.  When you look out the window of the plane, it looks kind of like you are about to land in a Christmas tree farm.

• The Boeing plant is big.  Really big.  The biggest building in the world by volume, as a matter of fact.  If you imagine a garage where you might get your oil changed, with about six garage doors in the building, it’s kind of like that.  Except the garage doors are big enough to hold full-sized airplanes.

• Security is tight there.  Since they couldn’t confirm that I was a US Citizen, I got a temporary badge requiring an escort anywhere other than the conference room.  Including the bathroom.  So I had to act like a five-year-old and ask people to take me to the bathroom.

• I got to visit my friend from the Amazon.  It was nice to catch up with you.

• Due to a layover in Phoenix, I got to see the Grand Canyon from the sky.  I think it was the Grand Canyon anyway.  In any case, it was a large canyon somewhere north-northwest of Phoenix.

• On the flights to Seattle, I got to experience first-class flight for my first time.  I didn’t think it was that great, until I flew coach on the way back.  Then I remembered what coach was like.

• Most of our nation is a barren wasteland.  That’s the impression I get from thirty thousand feet.

• It was my observation that there are no black people in Seattle.  Some quick internet searching seems to support this: only 8.44% of the population in Seattle versus 32.72% of the population in Charlotte.  That’s a pretty big difference.  And in Everett it is only 3.35%.  That was a little weird.

• There is some kind of circular farming that they do in the flat states, where they just don’t use 21.5% of the land in a square plot.  See many examples here.  This isn’t the first time I’ve noticed this but I thought I’d mention it.  I’m not sure how it is cost effective to waste so much of your land, but since there is so much of it done I’m assuming it must be more than 21.5% more efficient for some crops than traditional farming techniques.

• They still like grunge rock in Seattle.  At least the station I was listening to does.  In four half-hour drives (two trips to and from Peter’s house), I think I heard: 4 Nirvana songs, 3 Pearl Jam songs, 4 Foo Fighters songs, 2 Alice In Chains songs.  And then some new stuff like that terrible Finger Eleven song about clubbing.  I really hate that song.

• It didn’t rain all week.  Garrison had the same experience when he visited.  I’m beginning to think that “it always rains in Seattle” is just a myth.

• No signs of Sasquatch.  That also might be a myth.  But if so, then how do beef jerky enthusiasts mess with them?

I guess that’s all I’ve got to share.

Last week we went to visit Stephanie’s older sister Emily and her family, including our seven-month-old niece, in Tampa, Florida.  A few things to mention:

Riley loves the ukulele!  She was completely fascinated by it.  She would just stare at it when I played, looking back and forth trying to figure out which hand she wanted to look at.  I tried to let her play, and she would kind of strum, but she mainly wanted to grab the strings and pull on them.  Fortunately this was a ukulele, which has nylon strings, so she can’t really hurt herself doing that.  If it were a guitar, I’d be afraid she’d cut her hands pulling like that on the smaller strings.

We went to Busch Gardens, where we rode The Sheikra.  I’ve built this type of roller coaster in Roller Coaster Tycoon, but I had never been to a real park that had one until this weekend.  This has to be one of the coolest rides I’ve ever ridden.  At the top of that hill they stop the car, facing nearly straight down.  Then you drop on the track that is straight down.  It was the most intense feeling I’ve ever felt on a roller coaster.  Later on there is another hill like that, although it’s not as tall and they don’t bring you to a complete stop before dropping you.  I would highly recommend this ride to anyone who likes roller coasters.

I put up a collection of photos from our trip, if you’re interested.

We spent Thanksgiving in Williamsburg, Virginia with Stephanie’s family, and I just put some pictures up.  Most are either our new niece, Riley, or some kinda artsy pictures from Colonial Williamsburg like the one that can be seen to your left.

This weekend Stephanie’s parents came up and we spent most of the day Saturday at the Renaissance Festival.  It was the first time I had ever gone, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but it was a lot of fun.  There were a lot of people there in costume (i.e. not just the people that work there), which I was a little surprised to see.  I guess I just don’t get the whole costume-wearing thing.  I know some people really like to wear costumes, and they come to things like Renaissance Festival, Star Wars conventions, Rocky Horror Picture Show, comic book conventions, football games, etc.  I’m sure psychologists would tell you there is some reason like “my father didn’t hug me enough” behind it.  But I just don’t get it.. but hey, it’s not bothering me, so.. ya know.. whatever floats your boat.

Something else that kinda surprised me was the content of some of the shows.  I mean, it wasn’t anything that you wouldn’t see or hear on primetime TV, but something about it being live with little kids present, in a place that is also considered somewhat educational, made it seem a little unusual.  Of course, they mark those shows in the program as LC (“Loose Cannon”), meaning parental discretion is advised, so it’s not like there was no warning.  I guess it was the Tortuga Twins’ tights that bothered me the most; that should be considered indecent exposure.  I mean, let’s just say that if it were on Survivor they would have to blur it out.

I brought my camera but didn’t end up taking too many pictures, even though there was lots of neat looking decoration.  I guess we just spent too much time running from show to show, since there were many things to see.

For Labor Day weekend, Stephanie and I went to Lake Lure, NC with her parents.  We took a bunch of pictures while we were there, mostly of Chimney Rock.  Check them out!

You may notice when viewing my photos that it looks a little different.  I tried to make the text small enough that you see very little header before the photo, hopefully reducing the amount of scrolling you have to do if you aren’t running at a high resolution.  I also moved the timestamp down below the image, since most people probably don’t care about it.  It was a bit tricky to come up with an algorithm for determining the color of the header based on the color of the background, but I think I’ve come up with one that works fairly well.

If you have any comments about the new photos view, feel free to let me know.

On Saturday we got back from our week on the beach in Oak Island, NC.  Today when I got to work I had 162 unread e-mails and someone had moved one of the PCs out from under my desk and unplugged my keyboard.  So I’m kinda busy today.

On Monday I made a fairly decent sand castle.  Unfortunately it started raining as I was finishing the fences, so I didn’t get to do as much as I had wanted to.  I did manage to snap a few pictures.  I really liked the bridge.

Sadly, after the coming of high tide, it would have been impossible for a team of the greatest archeologists of all time, using the most sophisticated tools ever devised, to determine that a castle ever existed on that spot.  The kingdom was completely leveled by tsunami.