Hard to believe isn’t it?  What with all the Darwin Award emails and Dateline’s To Catch a Predator series.  But, they do exist.  And they took our stroller.  HUH?  Yup, our stroller.

I drove to the train station Friday on my way to work and parked in the outdoor lot.  Aileen came into the city that day and offered me a ride home.  We went the way home that is not the way home to pass by the station, so in a fit of laziness we left the car in the lot for the weekend.  Turns out we risked it getting towed - Kent Station is owned and operated by Sound Transit who have a semi-strict policy on 24 hour parking limits.  KC Metro allows 72 parking, but now I’m on some Sound Transit hit list of cars to be towed if they hit 24:00:01 time parked.

I digress.  So, Aileen drives me back to the parking lot Monday morning so I can move the car and get to work.  She goes up to drive it to the indoor lot and asks me why I left our daughter Kelsey’s bike helmet on the ground next to the car.  I curiously told her I had not (considering it had been in the trunk…) and went over.  The car was locked, but a bit ransacked inside with the driver seat reclined.  There were NO signs of forced locks.  No broken window.  NOTHING.  The guys that got into the car were good, nay, VERY good at their job.

Here’s the kicker though.  They stole ONE thing - a stroller from the trunk.  Now, we know they didn’t want it for their own or a friend’s kid.  How you ask?  Because they left a slew of toys and bikes in the car that could have gone to the same kid.  They even went to the trouble of taking the busy bar OFF of the stroller.  Come on, what self righteous thief says this busy bar isn’t worth the stroller it’s tied to?  None that I can think of.

My guess?  They used it to wheel something else off from someone else’s car.  But that begs the question of how good the thieves actually are.  If they are THAT good at getting INTO a car, what stopped them from hotwiring the car and driving the whole darn thing away?  Maybe they were interrupted??  Missing tools? gaps in knowledge?  Too big a crime?
Who knows.  But to leave a  car capable of carrying a LOT of stuff and being smart enough to see kids toys in a car and hit it for the possibility of a storller in the trunk is brilliant.  I’m not sure I’d have thought of it had I been stealing things.

Aileen went to take the girls to playtime last week, only to find out it was closed. Apprarently, it follows the time schedule of the School District. I didn’t want her to blow time or be surpised like that again, so I put together an iCal Calendar of time off for the WA state Tahoma School District. Not all Holidays that fall within a break are designated. Instead, the entire break is listed.

Subscribe in iCal
View in Web Browser

It is correct through the 2007-2008 school year per the files listed on the School District website. As more calendars are posted, I will update it into the future so it will always be up to date.
Leave a comment if you have any additional ideas or to let me know if you find it useful!

(This is free for all to use, but if you find it helpful, feel free to send a small paypal amount to myko@blueneedle.com to offset the time it took to create and the cost of bandwidth for hosting it.)

Good grief. No wonder I can’t get anyone in the house to listen to a word I say. They just don’t care.

Like teenagers, babies don’t much care what their parents say.

Though they are learning words at 10 months old, infants tend to grasp the names of objects that interest them rather than whatever the speaker thinks is important, a new study has found.

What Kelsey picks up is so mysterious - my wife and I make deals with her. We’ll say something like “We’re not going to read a book now since we’re going to the store, but if you’re good, we’ll read two when we get back. Deal?” My wife was trying to make a deal with her yesterday and she said “isn’t that the show with the suitcases?” Thanks Howie!

read more | digg story

I have found a replacement for most disturbing sound - nails on chalkboard - you’re history! You’ve been replaced by infant teeth grinding. Yes, Kaela is grinding her only two top teeth with her only two bottom teeth. And by god if it’s not the most bone shivering sound ever.

Anyone know where to get an infant mouthguard? In the meantime, we’re going to make the biter biscuit people rich.

*sigh, cry* Those are our old condo keys. Yes, old, as in no longer ours.

This past Friday we closed a book in our life. The buyers of our condo took possession at 9PM. Whereas we’re glad to have sold it and be on our way to places with much more space to grow, we still close this book with a bit of sadness. We lived in this neighborhood for almost seven years. We did so much in our life while we lived in this building.

Aileen and I moved here just after getting engaged. We started our new life together here. We walked the streets, went to the parks. Hempfest, Bumbershoot, Folk Life, Vegfest, the St Patty’s Day Dash, Pagdiriwang, and more were all 5-10 minutes walk away.

I worked in the office building next door and started to realize how stressful I found driving to work. To this day I still take the bus, even though we live further away. I’ve found an inner peace that can’t be bought.

We had many superbowl parties and BBQs in both units. We made freinds, we formed bonds.

We got married and bought our first condo after our apartment building got converted to condos. This was a big step for us as we started to grow in our life together.

We had our first daughter, Kelsey. A miracle then, now, and forever.

I got laid off for the first time. I think the management was surprised at how in stride I took it. I was actually welcoming it, as I got to stay home and take care of Kelsey for two years. They were stressful, but I wouldn’t give anything at all in exchange for them. I formed a bond with her that most fathers could only dream of having with their daughters.

I started my business and worked from home out of a makeshift office we created in our bedroom with a door desk and two free-standing partitions we scored off of Craigslist. This was by far the hardest thing ever. Kelsey would refuse to go to bed until I was done working at night, and I could only get things done after Aileen got home from work to take over night shift day care duties.

We moved my mom to Seattle and out of the sheer drudgery that was Middletown, PA. I have not seen her this happy, full of life and enrgetic since I was in high school. She’s come to a palce she can call home (with or w/o us). After years of inactivity and boredom, she walks and buses all ove rthe city every day. She even walked a 5K with us on St Patricks Day.

We got pregnant again and are less than a month away from delivering K2, Kelsey’s younger sister.

In January it was with great sorrow that we decided to sell our condo FSBO. Things were going veyr well at first, but we just couldn’t get enough people in, and it proved much to stressful with everything else going on to get enough people in to see it. A month or so ago (it seems like forever right now) we hired a realtor to list it on the MLS and represent us.

Now, as of Friday we no longer own the condo, we are preparing for the end of May when Aileen is due, and are looking forward to the future which holds places that have at least 3 bedrooms. Our current lease ends in July or when the house we’re renting sells. Likely we’ll rent again for another year or two while we save for another down payment.

This will give Aileen the chance to stay home with K2 like I got to do with Kelsey. She’ll soon be starting the SAHM/start your own business cycle I did a few years ago. I know without a douby that she’ll be as successful at it as I was.

Goodbye Queen Anne…

The company I work for, Pure Networks, released Network Magic to the public this morning.

Network Magic makes management of a home network much simpler and provides a much easier way to setup Windows networking for sharing files and printers.

It shows the status of your network and all connected devices through a Network Map that is very easy to read:

Besides sharing files and printers, you can also detect wifi signal strength of any wireless device from any PC running Network Magic. You can track and defend against wireless intruders. It will also throw your computer into a “shields up” mode when you roam off your home network and protect your shares from other devices on the roamed onto network until or unless you tell it not to.

I might be a little biased, but I wouldn’t write up an entry suggesting you go download it unless I absolutely believed in it myself. It solves so many of my home networking problems; I think it can do the same for you.

Now that I’m back online after a day w/o my domain I just noticed I haven’t posted in about a month. Much has been going on, and I want to catch you up.

In no particular order:

1. We are expecting another daughter (temporarily named K2) May 29th. Kelsey is already looking forward to little sister and is starting to divide the play things up. She says goodnight to K2 in Aileen’s tummy every night!
2. We are in the process of selling our condo. Closing is coming up in the middle of April.
3. I started a full time job at Pure Networks. The company is extremely exhilirating. I’ve never worked with such a talented, dedicated group (and given some of the companies I’ve worked at, this says a lot about my current co-workers.) We’ve got a beta going for our new product Network Magic (I’ll post more on this soon…)
4. After about 3 years on the wait list, we finally got a plot at one of Seattle’s community P-Patch gardens. We have a cure little 10′x10′ plot and will be growing all manner of vegetables this year. We can’t wait!!
5. Aileen is gearing up to start her own business as I’m gearing to slow mine down.

So, we’ve been a touch busy… Sorry for the absence and look for more posts as things start to stabalize at least a little bit.

We’ve finally hit our maximum breaking point for lack of space. There’s just no sanity involved in three people living in a one bedroom condo. Condos are great, don’t get me wrong, but a one bedroom for three people and two cats is just plain wrong. It means no separate bedrooms, no office (well, we have a makeshift one with partitions crammed into the corner of the bedroom…), no space to call your own, and on and on…

So, without further ado, and with much fanfare, we are selling our condo. The web site we created for it has pages with unit features, a mortgage calculator, and will soon have a neighborhood map and pictures galore.

We’re super convieniently located four block west of the Seattle Center and Key Arena, while being only a slight walk further from the Space Needle, Experience Music Project, and the monorail to downtown.

Major bus lines run right through our area that go to almost every area of town with no transfer. See the coming map for a better idea.

If you’ve been looking to live in the city in a condo that is reasonably priced, you have to check this out! If you know someone who’s looking, please pass the permalink for this post to them, or point them to our Condo For Sale Web Site.

We’re selling this FSBO at the moment, so any help we can from friends and family is very much appreciated (cough cough cough… - excuse me…

How time flies when kids grow up.

I remember when we’d be able to have her lie on the couch and not worry about her falling off because she couldn’t roll yet. Now, we lie in bed trying not to wake up as she rolls back and forth over my wife and I. Two year olds are active!!!

She runs, jumps, loves to slide, can lump words together into smal sentences, and loves to come back to my office at night, where “lap” is soon followed by “cracker pwease.” It’s amazing how polite she is. I guess my efforts in that regard are paying off. She doesn’t always say the P words (how many kids do?,) but please, thank you, welcome, and bless you are much more common than I expected at this age.

Now, the somber yet hopeful news. Last week we had to take her into Children’s Hospital for a yearly checkup of her Neutropenia. They did another hip biopsy, which requires general anesthesia. It’s very sad and disheartening to watch her drift into sleep and then to just sit and wait for her to come back out. We found out that my combing her hair is an effective way to piss her off so that she comes out of her sleep state. I guess I don’t do it that well, huh??

The results are back, and she is no worse off than before. Negative on all the tests they ran, and they even ran one that went to the chromosomal level (it checks for the possibility of onset MDS/AML)

She’s been back on her shots for a while, and with these results, it looks like she’ll be on them for a while longer. So even though she hasn’t gotten worse, she hasn’t gotten better yet either. Kind of a good news/bad news scenario.

As a treat for both her and my mom (nana,) we got a family membership to the Seattle Children’s Museum. This place is so much fun (and only 4 blocks walk away to boot!!) I took them both last week and Kelsey had a great time. So much to explore and learn!

Hope all is well with you and yours.

EDIT: So, it appears I’ve jinxed us once again. Whereas she was not admitted, we did have to take her to Children’s this evening for a fever (Nuetropenics have to go in if they spike over 101.5. No Tylenol, no sleeping it off, just a trip straight to the ER. She had an ANC (absolute neutophil count) of 6200, which means we could go home. The minimum is 1200, or she gets admitted and dosed with antibiotics in case the fever is due to a bacterial infection, that with an ANC too low she could not fight on her own.) At least we got to see Balto while we waited in our isolation room (she can’t even wait in the ER waiting room until her room is ready, we have to stay in the car, go straight to triage, and then striaght into isolation.)

I just saw the Amber Alert Ticker on another blog and was psyched that such a thing exists. Whenever there is an active Amber Alert, it turns yellow and gives the details of the alert.

I’ve already added it to the top of my Kelsey and Who’s Your Daddy category pages. I don’t know yet if I’m going to add it to every page, as I don’t want to start diluting my blog with tickers here and ad space there, but it seems particularly pertinent where it is.