Archive for April 2008
Updated: 29 Apr 2008 05:44 am by Ron
Filed: Adoption • Life in General
Tagged: li zhong • walking
As of yesterday evening, we now have a walker! Right after dinner, Li took a tentative first step and we happened to see her doing it… so we encouraged her a bit and she just took off! Within the next few minutes, she had gone on half a dozen little journeys around our living room, each time with a little encouragement and each time into the waiting arms of one of us. The look on her face each time she did it was incredible: a huge excited smile and big laugh. It was so cool that all three of us happened to be around and were all there to experience this with her.
This is something that we’ve known was coming. She was close a couple of times right after we got home from China, but then kind of backed off. The past couple days we could feel that grip on our hands continually loosen as we walked with her, so we knew it was close.
Deb made the comment this evening that it is still a bit surreal to glance up and see her walking around or walking across the room…
(And, yes, I know I’ve been horribly deficient in posting anything lately. That’s just one area where I have been horribly deficient, I promise. These past couple weeks have been filled to overflowing — with no end in sight — but I will try to squeeze out some time in the next couple days for an update. I did manage to get some short video segments on my camera of her walking last night, so I’ll try to post those, too…)
Updated: 27 Apr 2008 08:28 am by Ron
Filed: Geek Stuff • Linux
Tagged: blubuntu • fedora • Linux • opensuse • ubuntu
Not to be confused with a red herring…
Although I didn’t start out with this particular destination in mind, I have a new and different distribution of Linux running on my laptop as of late Friday. With previews available of upcoming releases of both Fedora and openSUSE, I had intended to try one of those two distros for a bit while I await the next release of Linux Mint (which is currently my distro of choice). Having pulled down images for those two previews, I got started early Friday morning trying to get both of them running — and failed. Bad installation image for Fedora 9’s preview (despite the checksum on the download being correct) and openSUSE’s 11 beta 1 just doesn’t work on my laptop well enough to keep there. So what to do, having dropped my installed Linux Mint?
Ubuntu 8.04, codenamed “Hardy Heron”, was released on Thursday, so I figured I had nothing to lose at this point in pulling down a copy and trying it. I’ve used Ubuntu in the past, so I knew what to expect. Installation and support for the hardware on this particular box has always been quite good in Ubuntu and this version didn’t break that string.
I’ve never been crazy about Ubuntu’s orange/brown color scheme, however, so the first thing after installation was to start tweaking and prodding to get it to look like something I can use. Installation of the “blubuntu-*” packages via synaptic, some image assistance from Ian to get a blue version of the default heron desktop image, and some tweaking of my .conkyrc to fit from a color perspective… and I think this will work for now. I still need to get most of my local stuff installed and working again (apache, MySQL, Komodo, etc.) but I don’t anticipate any problems there based on past experience. I’m sure I will take a hard look at the next version of Linux Mint when it comes out — particularly for our main box here at home — but I’m OK with this on my laptop for now.
Updated: 17 Apr 2008 06:22 am by Ron
Filed: Life in General
Tagged: daffodils • soccer • springtime
Tough day for daffodils…
I saw this in one of our flower beds this morning when I went out to get the newspaper. After spending a fair amount of time outside with my soccer team these past three weeks since getting back from China, I have a pretty good idea how this daffodil feels. (And it could be worse: for a change, when I took this picture, the winds were relatively calm — a welcome change from the 30+ mph we’ve had the past couple days.)
Updated: 14 Apr 2008 10:23 pm by Ron
Filed: Adoption • Life in General
Tagged: Adoption • grandparents • li zhong • sleep
Kind of a tough second week for Li, with more lows than highs…
- She came down with a stomach bug early in the week that necessitated a scaling back of her diet, lots of diaper changes, and lots of laundry. She shared it with Deb, it would seem, on Tuesday which made for a long day for all of us. By Wednesday afternoon, though, she seemed to have shaken it and was feeling better.
- Late Wednesday and early Thursday, Li just didn’t seem to feel good. As best we can tell from the symptoms, she was dealing with a slight reaction to her MMR shot a week earlier — not all that uncommon but obviously not all that pleasant either.
She met one set of her grandparents on Friday (that visit having been postponed from Tuesday for obvious reasons) as my parents came over for the day from Twin Falls. We weren’t really sure what to expect from her. She was pretty quiet and slow in the morning, still dealing with the aftermath of the shot the previous week. After her mid-day nap — not yet a regular occurrence — she seemed to be feeling better, and had a great afternoon with all of us. We went out for Chinese food at our favorite local place and she loved it.- Li woke up unhappy at 3am Saturday and aside from sleeping fitfully for a couple of 30 minute-ish stretches didn’t sleep again until collapsing somewhere around 10pm. Every little thing resulted in what looked and sounded like a temper tantrum (kicking, screaming, arched back) that would go on for (in a couple cases) an hour or more. We’d love to know what was wrong, but we have no way of getting into her little head to find out. As best we could tell, there wasn’t anything physically amiss. This was the toughest day yet for all of us since we got her, and was all the more unexpected based on how she was Friday afternoon and evening. At one point or another during this day, all of us except Ian, was in tears from frustration, anger, and/or exhaustion.
- Sunday started with a 6am wakeup, but she was generally happy. Li showed no inclination to go back to bed and was happy to play with toys in our bedroom for an hour or so as we dozed and finished waking up. She ate well at breakfast and then promptly fell asleep in my arms after breakfast for an hour and a half nap; given Saturday, we were reluctant to try to put her down and just let her nap in our arms. She woke just in time for a quick snack before church — her first time there — and she did great at church: she seemed to like the music, wanted to walk a bit during the message, and lasted until the very end of the service by which time she was getting a little antsy. She was a bit overwhelmed with all of the attention and new faces, but dealt with all of it pretty well. She had a great afternoon, with a bit of a nap in the stroller during Mom’s walk (the weather has finally turned a bit warmer!) and enjoyed being outside while we got a bit of yardwork done. Ate well at dinner, a good bath, books, and then she went down to sleep with only a minor squawk or two. (It’s nearly 6am as I am drafting this, and she has only fussed a couple of times during the night, making this the closest we have come to a full night’s sleep so far.)
This will be an interesting week to watch, as I head back to work on a half-day basis and it is going to be a busy week with Ian’s parent/teacher conferences, soccer every day (including a tournament in Pocatello next weekend), Deb’s folks visiting on Tuesday and Wednesday, and all of us continuing to move toward some sort of regular pattern of life.
Updated: 05 Apr 2008 10:42 pm by Ron
Filed: Geek Stuff
Tagged: blogging • stats
I use Google’s Analytics to track traffic on my blog; in response to a question posed by a friend in a conversation this week, here is a summary of the traffic during March 2008:
- 631 visits by 281 unique visitors from 39 different countries and from 34 states in the US
- 1,478 page views
- Firefox accounted for 55% of the visits, with Internet Explorer accounting for 38%, and Safari about 4%
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