Our Persisting Memories

Heather turned one year more beautiful today. I just wanted to say on here how much I love and appreciate her. 35263|640

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[poll id="2"] This is just an awesome test.

The post title dates me yet still shows how young I am... heh. 35000|640 34916|640

Blah! We have been busy, busy, busy. We had some close friends of ours visit us from Iowa for a week and only days after they left did my sister and her 3 kids come into town. So, here is what has been happening. 35217|640 Phoebe: Can now successfully drink from a beginners sippy cup and seems to rather enjoy it. Stand on her own for several seconds and transfer to furniture with one step. She has taken to pointing her finger at a lot of random things. She will also get on her knees, reach her arms up and tilt her head up. It seems to me she is wanting to stand but can't figure out how to get to her feet without something to pull herself up on. The little sneak has figured out to look UNDER things. I tried hiding something in between my legs as I was kneeling on the floor and she laid down to look under them and started to reach. Things are becoming less and less safe around here! She learned to clap her hands which I am loving right now! She has developed a...

Bob Barr secured the Libertarian Party nomination at the LP convention in Denver over this past weekend. For those who don't follow third party politics, the Libertarian presidential nominee in 1988 was Ron Paul. He basically had the same platform then that he did during his current primary run. Bob Barr was probably picked by the delegates specifically because he has similarities with Dr. Paul. Don't expect me to start evangelizing his name though. Mr. Barr was a short sighted Republican until recently, and even before that was a short sighted Democrat. He has shifted his rhetoric on most of the LP talking points, but in the end find himself on the hilarious side of opposing things he used to chair. He was the anti-drug coordinator for the Department of Justice (libertarians are usually pro drug legalization to some extent). He promoted the idea that the practice of Wicca should be banned in the military (restricting religious rights would be a big libertarian no-no), ...

Huh? Where is it? I keep asking Heather and the only thing she says is, "I know, I know, but I've been so busy." Good I say, that means there's a lot to catch everyone up on. Here's a picture to help pass the time. 34584|640

30754|640 This picture was shot all wrong. In post I neglected to do any sharpening to bring the hawk into a format worth cropping, and fundamentally it needs a little denoising in the dark areas since I had to fix exposure in post. If you want to print this one... wait and I'll put up a fixed version. If not, it looks just fine at 640 x 4xx just don't zoom in too close or crop too tight or you'll be sorely dissappointed.

I've written similar things before, but like any discussion on global warming I'd like to frame my personal stance. I believe humans have a drastic affect on the environment. From straight pollution to the destruction of habitat to global warming, the existence of man has a significant effect on the world around us. I think we're causing global warming, but I disagree that it's in humanity's best interest to fight it using the currently proposed methodology. I feel there are other concerns to human life that are more important. Disease, war, hunger, and poverty should all take priority over global warming. These are tangible things with easily verifiable statistical results in the longevity of humans. In my arguments I appear to be a global warming denier. I've mentioned before that global warming is a red herring, and I stand by that assertion, but I also firmly believe that humans are causing it, or at the very least exacerbating it. Yesterday the new ...

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I need to mow the lawn. Just FYI though this pic was taken with our new camera with a Nikon 55-200mm AF-S VR lens through our back door window. The VR part is vibration reduction. The shot was handheld, barely before full sunset at full zoom. It would have been impossible without VR as the shutter was at 1/6 of a second. It was run through lightroom then denoised in Photoshop using noise ninja and a custom denoising preset. I'm not saying the shot is good... in fact it's pretty bad, it just would have been impossible any other way heh, and the technical data is the only reason it interests me. I love the new lens. The only problem is that it vignettes quite a bit at and near full zoom when shot fully open. 34401|640

EDIT: Please note that any ads that appear on this blog don't necessarily represent the feelings of Heather or I on any particular issue. In a hilarious moment... mentioning Ron Paul apparently triggers google to start showing McCain ads. Last week there was an article on digg leading to a youtube video of excerpts from a speech made by congressman Ron Paul in the House of Representatives. The video also contained quite a bit of anti-semetic imagery put there by the creator of the video, as such it's not as effective as the original speech made July 10, 2003. I'm sure people are sick of hearing about Dr. Paul on our blog but he is truly unique. He might be a little loony compared to your average politician, but it's only because he doesn't know when to spin, he just says what people need to hear. This speech explains the neo-conservative movement and names names of those involved. You can find the original transcript here . I've posted the entirety of the...

What would normally be a nice picture turns into a horror event by an out of focus Sophia. 34166|640

Due to the crazy weekend, Heather is saving everything for a 2 week catchup weekly update spectacular. I'll just highlight some pictures for your perusal. 31295|640 Sophia at the Scarborough Faire petting zoo 30286|640 Cousin Yoroko on the swings at the community playground 30206|640 Mommy and Phoebe sharing a moment 30096|640 Dazed and Confused 30914|640 Birds of Prey at Scarborough Faire

Meganne Grumbles tagged me weeks ago but I am just now getting around to this. Like Alicia, I think I will cheat a bit and not follow rule #3. Anyone I know with a site or a blog has been tagged or would not be the type of person to do this. So here it goes about me....... 713 Rules: A. Post the Rules B. Answer all the questions about yourself C. After you are done posting, tag 5 people. 1. What were you doing 10 years ago? I was a junior in high school and dating an RLDS guy of all things! He was a soccer player and a pianist for the choir. What a combination, right? I was interested in Nursing and was gearing up to apply for the Certified Nursing Assistant college program offered through my high school for my senior year. I didn't really have a job, per se, but I worked in my high school bookstore during my lunch hour and occasionally after school. 2. 5 things on your To Do List today: Take the girls to JC Penney's for portraits, buy some frames at Hobby Lobby and ...

For those not following the case, here is a summary from wikipedia. District of Columbia v. Heller, No. 07-290, is a case pending before the Supreme Court of the United States. It is an appeal from Parker v. District of Columbia, 478 F.3d 370 (D.C. Cir. 2007), a decision in which the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit became the first federal appeals court in the United States to rule that a firearm ban was an unconstitutional infringement of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, and the second to expressly interpret the Second Amendment as protecting an individual right to possess firearms for private use. The stepping stone to the case was a security guard who filed for permission with DC to keep a firearm at home for the purposes of protection. The denial of and subsequent ruling by the DC district court is the impetus to the current Supreme Court review. On March 18th the Supreme Court heard oral arguments. If you're at all i...

Seriously. If you have the means (you're not being forced to use IE6 due to surfing the site from work), switch to another browser. There's a reason my site looks a little funny in Internet Explorer 6 ; IE6 can't display png transparencies correctly. The missing lines you see at the top and bottom of every content area on the blog exist in every other browser except Internet Explorer 6 . Even using IE7 would be a huge upgrade. Since I'm a web dev, I love Firefox, due to it's plug-ins for adblocking, code parsing, script building, etc etc... Firefox is still hampered a bit by accounting for legacy html but you're most likely to see most sites on the internet as the creators intended by using Firefox. Download it. Here's a big banner to click on and download it from. (full disclosure, I gain revenue if download it from this link. This isn't merely me being a whore however as you really really need to not be using IE6) Otherwise just go to Firefox...

I turned ads back on. It's not that I expect any revenue from them, they exist solely in the event that traffic floods the blog as has happened in a minor sense with the Jury trial post . I haven't come anywhere close to capacity as far as bandwidth is concerned, but I want to be prepared in case of emergency bandwidth or CPU costs. Let me know if they're too obtrusive. I'll gladly turn them back off, but for now I'm just experimenting again with google-analytics and the ads themselves.

Yessiree. Her logic was that I am outnumbered in the household. I tend to agree. She also wanted the sidebar moved. So here we are with a new blog layout. Let me know what you think. Switching back is simple, but honestly I think I like the changes. Now to blog about Heller vs the District of Columbia.

Heather and I have begun to be a little more picky in our food choices as of late. I'm not saying we're eating more healthy, but we're definitely trying to find higher a quality food. Our current breakdown of food purchasing goes like this: dairy from Braums, produce from Sprouts or Central Market, Asian food from the Asian supermarket in Carrollton, and packaged/processed food from Wal-Mart. Central Market also has a great butcher, deli, and cheese selection. The produce from there is locally sourced when possible and the next best thing to going all the way to the downtown Dallas farmers market. Sprouts is much closer but shares the same mentality for produce. This means we still go to Central Market for deli and uncooked meats. Heather and I discussed this and decided it wasn't complex enough (sarcasm), so instead we've decided to begin to order our non-steak beef cuts from a local ranch. We've made one order through burgundy pasture beef, and so far ...

Sophia now says "I love you too" instead of "I love you." She is also beginning to show possession. She says "my" or "mine" before all sorts of stuff: my daddy's shoes, my mommy's cup, my shirt, etc. Our struggle over the last 2 months (it seems) has been Sophia fighting taking naps and coming to our bed in the middle of the night. One of our methods came back to bite me the other day. In an attempt to get some rest myself, and get Sophia down, we laid in my bed for a nap. Anytime I moved, even a little, she pointed her finger at me and said in a firm voice "Lay down! Night time! Sh!" I weaned Phoebe a few weeks ago and she has been packing on the weight very quickly being on formula. She has finally graduated to size 3 diapers this week. I thought it worth mentioning just because she is 9 months old and only now going up in size. Sophia and I had play group again this week. We went to a fabulous duck pond with an ever b...