personal

Well, it's been a very nice Christmas, although it looked a little touch-and-go for a bit.

Two weeks ago Rose started getting sick with a cold, a cold that then attacked Tammy and me with a vengeance. Where Rose was sick for a day or so, both I and my wife were stuck at home for two days, with me only returning to work at the tail end of the week by working from home.

I just had a nice light weekend. Mostly it entailed diaper changes on baby Rose, although a fair amount of time was spent driving around to deliver a baby shower present.

Parenting, so far, has been generally easy. Admittedly this is partially thanks to my mother's help, who flew out early to help us get by this month, but really at this point my duties as a parent are like this:

• Feed Baby
• Change Diapers / Keep Baby Clean
• Burp Baby
• Hold Baby

So, this is Denver: Three days ago I stayed home from work because of a blizzard dropping a foot or two of snow on the city. Today I have the doors open to air out the house, and am happily doing a little work outside. The snow is happily melting away, and will be gone by mid-week, except for those mountains of snow created by the supermarkets pushing all of the snow in their parking lots into one pile of dirty snow, which will last for weeks.

The new bookshelves are great, but it was a bit of a job carving up the boxes they came into into small enough pieces for recycling... but I've managed to do that. This being the weekend after MileHiCon, there's a bunch of minor household chores that didn't get done last weekend and still need to get done now. Tammy's off having fun with a friend, and later on I get to show off the registration system I knocked together for Magnacon. Yay me!

A little over three weeks ago i set into motion my big gamble - stepping away from pingVision, and starting life as a freelance consultant. I'm not really able to go into all of the reasons, but partially it's a test - can I go out on my own and find my own way, without a company supporting what I do?

And, so far it's launched very nicely. My first client has been SpireMedia, here in downtown Denver, where I've been assisting them with an ubercart site with a large number of customizations, starting with working in three currencies and custom shipping costs, moving all the way to some interesting ways of presenting and offering discounts... which have already lead to one patch for uc_discounts_alt, and probably leading to more later.

Today is my wife Tammy's 40th birthday! Feel free to drop her a line at beadinglady @ gmail dot com and wish her a happy birthday.

I am reminded particularly today how lucky I am to be married to such a wonderful woman.

And yet, somehow I ended up with the day off...

It was with considerable surprise that I weighed in at Weight Watchers yesterday morning and was told that I'd lost another pound. I hadn't been really concentrating on my diet for the last two weeks - since the last time I'd weighed in - and although I had generally kept away from the fattening and rich stuff, I hadn't totally. But apparently I'd been good enough, and my official tally at WW went up to 10.8 pounds lost.