And you thought I forgot

Reviving the old blog.
Its been over a year and a half since I posted anything.  I have some great excuses for that.  Did you know I have two kids now? I am also completely finished with school.  Finally got that second piece of paper.  Following up on my last post I did technically start my last class in Jan 2014.  I failed to mention that I still needed to complete a comprehensive exam in lieu of a thesis.  I am now finally able to admit publicly that it took me two tries, so I did not graduate until Spring of 2015 (exam is offered once a semester).  The way my department runs the exam is to to create a pool of problems from every class offered in your specialty, including all those undergrad classes you had half a decade ago and are jam packed with trick questions.  They randomly pull 10 problems from this pool (and like all good engineering problems, they are usually multi part) and then you are given two hours to complete 7 of them.  My school is quite generous. This is how they manage the fact that you haven't actually taken all the classes in your specialty. The department does show a little magnanimity by allowing you to bring both a pencil AND an eraser to complete the exam.  They also allow a calculator.
So, after off of who would want to take a break?  I mean really, all that wasted time to sit quietly with your thoughts?  I've heard my thoughts and unless I am drunk they do not seem especially interesting. That means I jumped right into new major projects.  The new house is chock full of fun projects.
After we bought it in 2013 (holy cow I have been slack in posting) the first thing we did was gut the kitchen.  Full removal, including a wall.  After replacing it with new kitchen, minus the wall, we had a baby then moved in.  I am not exaggerating the brevity of that time table.  The new baby was born, the plumbers finished a few days later, the baby came home, then we moved to the new house that weekend.  A lot happened in that week.
Now that school is done I have started the next big project.  The new house came with a mostly broken swimming pool. The repair process has evolved into a full back yard remodel.  Currently the yard is completely cleared, the pool is partially repaired (with a whole bunch of extra rework to make it more functional), and the concrete forms are laid out for the new patio.
Please don't mistake my involvement in this work.  I have hired almost all of it out.
I have managed to complete some small projects. For example I did finally hang that very expensive piece of paper on the wall.

Still trucking

No, I haven't fallen off the face of the planet.
New baby, new house, same job, same school.
Start my last class on Friday.  I think I might take a break after I am finished.  Some place quiet, and maybe tropical.

Oh how times change

Oh, how times changed.  My wife is not a morning person.  Her normal idea of early morning is about an hour after the sun comes up.  On weekends, when there were no real obligations driving our schedule I would wake up by my definition of late, usually around 7, then have a few hours to myself which I would use to get very important things done, like play video games.  My wife would wake up around 9ish, wander into a cup of coffee, then breakfast, then a shower.  When it was all said and done, on the really lazy days, the house would finally be up and ready for the day around 11 am.

Then baby.

Having a child changed all that.  My schedule stays the same.  Even after the infant feeding schedule turned into the toddler approximation of a reasonable routine waking up around 9 was no longer in the cards.  I still wake up at my normal time of somewhere around 6, but I no longer get to sleep in until 7 and more often than not I am up in the 5:30 range.  This is because this is when Max wakes up. 

Today is a perfect example of the change in our routine.  I find the family, at 8 am, playing outside in the last bit of reasonable temperatures before the sun finishes obliterating the prospect of having a good time with out the judicious application of water (either in sprinkler or pool form).  At 8 am, the entire family has been up, had the chance to dress, had a big breakfast of pumpkin spice wafffles (it is technically Autumn now), and I have even mowed the lawn.
Its hard to explain, without getting long winded, how surreal this seems.  In a reasonably short amount of time, we have gone from "don't even try to do anything before 10" to "Its a slow morning because it is after 8 and I have only done one useful thing".

My lovely wife has come such a long way.

I have a feeling this will all change with the arrival of baby #2.  I think we will be back to "don't even try to get anything done before 10".  Not because we are all sleeping in, but because it will take us 3-4 hours to wrangle 2 kids through the morning routine.

3 months later, I remember to post.

So its been a while.  I am sure over the last 3 months I have had a lot to say, I've just said it to people instead of the black hole of the internet.  I've also lost a lot of my disdain for social network, so those venues  have received most of my pictures and posts.
Things are changing around here.  We have been house hunting because we decided we needed a bigger place.  Mostly because by the end of the year we will be upgraded to a family of four. My desire for a station wagon is increasing.  A luxury sport wagon packing a supercharged V8 would be nice, but I would be just as happy with a German biturbo V6.  In reality, if I actually got one it would probably a 10 year old Saturn.  I thought a college degree was going to get me a great job and make me rich.  Maybe my university lost the paperwork for my ridiculously large salary.  I should call them.

Today was fathers day.  I spent most of the day playing with my son.  It was a lot of fun, and I"m sure the grass in my yard enjoyed the extra sprinkler time.