Kaija stood up from the floor for the first time on Friday. Jennifer wanted to record her efforts so that we could share the excitement with family and friends. We had been trying to get her to stand for about 10 minutes on Saturday evening, but Kaija was more interested in checking out the camera than showing off for it. At the beginning of this clip, Jennifer is shown getting up to answer a knock on the door. It was our good friends Sandy and Leon… Kaija just needed a bigger audience!

My friend Rob reserved a camp spot in Yosemite for the end of April months in advance. When the time came to go, only Matt and I were up for the trip. Who can pass up a chance to go rock climbing in one of the best climbing destinations in the world? Unfortunately we didn’t get all that much climbing in. I took a spill on the second route of the day on Saturday… one that left me quite scraped up and bruised. Due to the small toe on my right foot turning purple and sending a sharp pain up my leg with every step, I decided to take it easy in the Valley while Rob and Matt hiked up the Yosemite Falls Trail on Sunday. If you look really closely at the later shots of Yosemite Falls, you can see them at the top. Just kidding.

Sandy and Leon invited Jennifer, Kaija and I to participate in a Bay Area Orienteering Club competition at Stanford on April 4th. While I didn’t get many photos of the event, I’m happy to say Jennifer and I placed first among the 4 couples that Sandy and Leon had invited, including themselves (we placed 7th out of 35 overall on the Yellow course). It’s rather ironic that Sandy and Leon placed last, too, considering Leon attended Stanford for several years while studying for his PHD. He claims he’s only familiar with the medical campus, but I’m not sure that’s a good enough excuse!

My birthday is coming up. The big 2-9. Next year *gasp* 30! Where have my 20’s gone so quickly? It seems just a short while ago that I turned 21 (though that’s probably because according to my mom, I’m probably still 21… long story).That said, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the kind guestures that a few of my friends have made to recognize the event. My good friends Sandy and Leon treated me to dinner Wednesday night at one of my favorite Mediterranean restaurants in the area, Dish Dash. Then last night, when I went to see my friend Mike in a showing of Servent of Two Masters at Foothills College, he came out with a bunch of his acting friends before the show, gave me a piece of cake, and they sang happy birthday to me in front of everyone in the audience.So I just wanted to say thank you to the three of you. You’ve made my birthday already and it hasn’t even happened yet!

Whoo! There’s new stand-by muzak on the conference lines at work today. The new tunes sound like a mix of Enya and the Pogues. Something to look forward to during the work day!

I haven’t posted in a while, so I thought I’d give a quick update. Kaija started teething within the past few weeks and has two teeth protruding from her lower gum to show for it. Very exciting news! The down side is that she’s been very cranky in the evenings when we lay her down to sleep. We’ve started to feed her real food, too. First it was rice cereal mixed with breast milk. Then is was pureed squash. We plan to introduce her to pureed green beans next.She’s also nearly crawling! She’s much more comfortable being on her stomach than she was in the past now that her neck and arm muscles are strong enough that she can hold her head up. At this point she can push her self up onto her hands and knees – sometimes even onto her hands and feet – and proceeds to rock back and forth on them. Once she figures out how to move one of those arms, we’re done for. We haven’t even come close to baby-proofing the apartment.Yesterday she also figured out how to roll from both back-to-front and front-to-back all by herself. Our little girl is growing up so fast! The next 18 years are going to fly by so quickly.

Saturday turned out to be a pretty good day, in spite of the weather and health conditions.I managed to stub my middle toe on my left foot on the bathroom door Wednesday night before bed. It was fine during the day Thursday, but Thursday night rolled around and all of a sudden I felt a soreness when flexing my toes. After a few minutes it got to the point where it really hurt. I took of my shoe to see it swelling up. I’m not sure what caused the delayed reaction (24 hours later!), but I must have tweaked it somehow. I was hoping it would go away over night but I woke up Friday to a digit that continued to be sore and swollen. This did not bode well, as I had been planning to go climbing at Mt. Diablo on Saturday with Rob and Jeremy but I was reduced to a hobbling gimp. Continue reading →

I went rocking climbing outdoors for the first time since the summer of 2002 on Saturday. Though I climb indoors at a gym on a regular basis, for some reason I never made it out last season. This weekend I headed to the Castle Rock State Park area to do some climbing with my friends Rob and Brad. Continue reading →

Kaija has decided to break her vow of silence. Okay, so it wasn’t silence exactly, since she did cry to let us know when she was hungry, etc. But within the past few days she’s been exercising her vocal chords a little bit more than usual… so much so that she kept Jennifer up all night with her “chattering”. Fortunately I was oblivious to it all until about 6 a.m. when I awoke to loud baby noises coming from her bassinet. *sigh* Parenthood continues.

Jennifer is probably going to seriously hurt me for posting this bit, but I got such a big kick out of it that I just had to share.We recently received a video camera from our parents so that we may share the experience that is Kaija with them over the many thousands of miles that separate us. When we were done shooting the first hour of video, we transferred it to VHS and shipped them to our parents for Valentines day.Since I was home for quite a while after Kaija was born, I did much of the video work on the first tape. Now that I’m back at work, Jennifer has started to record Kaija with it.Earlier tonight, I had Kaija in the bathroom “standing” on the countertop and looking at herself in the large mirror behind the sink. Jennifer brought in the video camera and started recording because she wanted to get it on tape. Well, at one point, she turned the camera on its side. It’s one of those cameras with a flip-out LCD view screen, which she was using. I asked her what she was doing. She said that the proportions weren’t good horizontally. She couldn’t get all of Kaija standing on the screen that way, but she could if she turned the camera on its side. That might work for still photography, where you can just rotate the print or digital image, but video is a different story (unless you have the right equipment). I stared at her for a few seconds then asked her if she planned to turn the TV on its side when that part of the video came along. Her eyes got big as she realized what she was doing, then laughed but didn’t say much more.We just filled up the second tape and reviewed it tonight. Let me just say that cocking your head to the side for some shots might be okay, but it can get painful when done several minutes at a time. As it turns out, tonight wasn’t the first time she had turned the video camera sideways to get more of the subject in. There were at least 4 or 5 different occurances of substantial length sideways recordings.Oh, well. At some point when I have the time and a faster desktop machine, I’ll probably transfer all of this video to the computer, cut it up into clips, rotate the sideways segments (and crop to get the correct width/height ratio), splice them together and put them to some tear-jerking audio track. In the meantime, Kaija’s grandparents will just have to deal with stiff necks for a few days.