OK, so "tomorrow" turned into "five days from now". Sorry about that. Things have been a little busy the last couple of weeks. Let's turn back the clock and see what I've been up to:

November 9 - 12: Weekend Outing My dad and his wife came out to Seattle to stay with Sofia while Nicole and I went to San Diego for the weekend. The two of us hadn't taken a trip by ourselves since our honeymoon, so we were long overdue.

We stayed at the Hotel Del Coronado, which you might recognize as the hotel used in the film Some Like It Hot, (a fact that they will not let you forget - it plays on the hotel TV network every two hours. Luckily, it's a brilliant movie.)

We got a lot of great suggestions from people about what to do in San Diego, which we happily ignored. We had a good time just relaxing. We walked around and looked at the shops, went for a bike ride around the island, and ate a three-hour dinner in their actually-very-good restaurant (1500 Ocean). Oh, and we saw Borat right before we had to go to the airport on the way home. A weekend without rain and we get to see a movie? It hardly seemed possible.

It was interesting to travel without the munchkin. We missed her a lot, but we also enjoyed just being by ourselves. It was so nice being able to set our own schedule. We ate when we wanted. We went to bed when we wanted. If we wanted to walk on the beach after dinner, we did it. Oh, and air travel is SO much easier without a kid.

By all accounts, Sofia had a great time too. She's been a little clingy lately (much crying at day care when she gets dropped off), so I was a little worried about how she would fare. She did great, though. They took walks, played, read 87,000 books, ate in retaurants, and even went to the mall. It sounds like Grandpa and Oma had a great time, too. We're all looking forward to doing it again.


Nov. 17-19: Stockstock Web Site As I mentioned the other day, the Stockstock web site is up. We're doing the festival differently this year - the whole thing is online, even the screening - so we decided to redo the entire web site. Man, redoing an entire web site is a lot of work, and I only did half of it. The almost inhumanly talented Feng (by which I mean that his talent exceeds all expectations, and that he has a robot hand) delivered the graphics and the pages. I spent the weekend finishing the content and doing the programming, in between birthday parties and baby showers. As it turned out, finishing the content ended up taking almost the entire time, and the programming still isn't done. I also undertook the myriad of other tasks associated with resurrecting an online venture that has been dormant for a while, chief among which was clearing the spam out of our email accounts. Holy CRAP did we have a lot of spam. The online mail system our host uses is terrible (unsurprisingly), so that made it take even longer. We're back in shape now, but we have got to figure out a better long-term solution. If anyone has an ideas, I am all ears.


November 22 - 24: Thanksgiving We went to Port Townsend for Thanksgiving to visit Nicole's family; we just got back last night. We had a nice time, but it was a long drive. 5.5 hours is far too long to get to Port Townsend. On the plus side, my right foot is now extra strong from all of that braking in traffic. Luckily, the trip back wasn't as bad.

Nicole spent most of yesterday cooking, while I corralled the young one. Sofia had a fun time playing with her cousins and getting in to all of her Grandma's stuff. Unlike our house, which has gradually been babyproofed into a No Fun Zone, her grandma has lots of low tables and cabinets, and many of them were covered with either a) little bowls of snacks or b) breakable stuff. I think Sofia thought she'd gone to heaven. I'd estimate that she ate roughly 37 Chickens in a Biskit, simply because she could steal them and eat them before we could react. (Aside: Did you know that in Australia they have Vegemite in a Biskit?) How Grandma's china made it through the day unbroken is a mystery.


So that's the story. I'm going to try to get back to my one-post-per-day schedule, although it may be tough with my Stockstock duties. I may go to once every other day. We'll see how it goes. I hope you had a great Thanksgiving!

  The Stockstock web site is finally done:

http://www.stockstock.org

I'm going to go get some sleep now. I'll post again tomorrow.