Amelia just took three little baby steps. It’s a beginning…
The Train Trip to Nowhere
We had no plans for the day so we hopped the LIRR To Penn station. And came home. Yeah that’s all we did this morning. Teagan wanted to ride the train and it was freezing out so we went to Penn got some coffee and got a train home. We grabbed bagels for lunch and the kids were super happy!
T Started Collecting Microsoft OS Install Disks
T has always liked sorting through the CD’s that we have in the play room. MC likes having a CD player. She says it is easier for our baby sitter to use it vs our bluetooth speakers. She also likes it. I try to explain to her that our baby sitter with an Android phone who uses Pandora to listen to kids music is perfectly fine without a CD player. That is another story altogether. Since we have a CD player we have a ton of CD’s to go with it. Most of them are from my sister but we did buy a few kids music CD’s. Yes I know I am admitting that within the past 2 years I am one of the 5 people out there still buying CD’s. In my defense the first thing I do when we get one is to rip it so we can play it on iTunes.
T likes to sort through the CD’s. Until a few weeks ago these sorting sessions were few and far between. More recently she likes to take an entire pile of them and play with them on her table. We are rebels and don’t use jewel cases. Over the past few days she has been generally more physical with the CD’s. MC finally got concerned that T will damage some of the disks so told her she can’t play with them anymore. That didn’t go over well at all. This morning after she was told she can’t have the CD’s Teagan kept asking for them. My solution was to goto my storage and pull out some old CD’s and DVD’s I had. I found a bunch of old mostly Microsoft OS install disks. I have the ISO’s for everything and I don’t really intend on using any of these OS”s again anyway. If i did it would be in a Virtual Machine that i can use the ISO’s for anyway. Teagan was very happy with the new disks she can do whatever she wants with and the case for them. Now instead of messing up Music for Aardvarks she can beat up on Microsoft Windows 2003 Small Biz Server, or Windows Vista. She sat for about 30 minutes this morning at the dinning room table playing with them. She figured out that sitting up there is a safe place to get away from Amelia trying to get at the disks. Teagan’s most popular phrase recently is “No Amelia” when Amelia tries to take whatever it is Teagan is doing.
If anyone is thinking it, no I am not trying to start her early into Technology. If I was it wouldn’t be with Windows disks!
My Choice of an iPhone 6
When the iPhone 6 & 6 Plus came out I originally wanted the Plus. With my eyes I wanted as big of a screen as I could get. However I did have a Galaxy Note whoever version was out right after Teagan was born. I tried it for a few days and quickly returned it because it was unusable with one hand. Someone needing to hold a baby a lot having two hands free isn’t always possible. Those thoughts in my head and the fact that the Plus wasn’t really available right away led me to the 6. Even with the 6 i was concerned about its size. I need that one handed use. I was pleasantly surprised when I got the 6 that it is generally usable with one hand. The screen size was much better than my old 5.
This upgrade cycle I opted for the 128gig version. I had the 64gig for the 5 and the 4S before that. I may have had a 64 4 if they made them but I can’t remember. When I got the 5 I really needed the space. As I used it and day to day used my iPad more I found the storage not to be as limiting as it used to be. That being said I did come close enough to filling up all 64gig’s that I didn’t want to chance another year or more with that much space. I spend the extra money on the larger storage. I also opted for the white version this year. For a few years I kept wanting white but either canceled the order and changed to black or couldn’t get the white. This go round I didn’t want to make any excuses and I got the white.
So far I have been very happy with my choice. I even toyed with a 6 Plus for a few days last month. I confirmed my original thoughts that it was too big and I returned the phone. I made the right choice for me until next September. Then we shall see what else comes out.
The Story of T’s First Bed
T has been able to climb into Amelia’s crib for a while now. For whatever reason she doesn’t do it often and she hasn’t been able to get out on her own. We caught her on video doing it one day with our baby sitter who was supposed to find her playing in the crib after going to look for her. When that happened we knew our days of having a crib for T were numbered. Over the summer we were at my in laws and T climbed out of the pack and play and it was very challenging to get her to sleep now that she knew how to get free. When that happened we knew she would get out of her crib soon. Surprisingly more months went by and T was happy in her crib. She would climb into Amelia’s crib sometimes but typically would just say “uppie” her word for up please when she wanted to go into the crib. Oddly I would see her trying to climb into her crib every now and again but I don’t recall her ever getting in on her own. MC and I didn’t complain because having her in a crib was much easier than the alternative of a free range toddler once she got a toddler bed.
Flash forward to last Saturday (24-January) I walked into the girls room to let T out after a time out. Her room is typically her time out location since we can close the door and let her get some alone time. I opened the door and to my surprise I see T horozontal holding on to the top of her crib. Her leg was caught between the bars of the crib and she was about to fall. I grabbed her and got her down. At that moment I thought ok, she has outgrown her crib. I went to the video to see what she was doing prior to me walking in. I saw that she had actually climbed into the crib and was playing around and then got stuck as she was climbing out. That sealed the decision that T needed a bed and not a crib. My sister told me once the story of how my oldest niece got out of her crib and the recounted how she did it. At that moment my sister knew it was time for a bed and got one that day. I had a feeling for a while I would have the same revolution one day and that day was yesterday. Luckily the cribs that my mom bought for us are convertible into toddler beds. Before nap time we got some allen wrenches and took off the front crib bars. It was surprisingly easy to do. We then rolled up a towel and put it under the bed sheets by the open end of the bed. We read that this should help prevent T from rolling out of the bed. We then got her a pillow. T was excited for her new bed.
Excitement didn’t get her to nap in the bed though. As expected she ran around a bit but didn’t nap. We took her out after an hour. At bedtime she didn’t wander around that much and eventually went to bed. It wasn’t too bad but i think she was tired from not napping.
This week she did nap most days. There were a few nights where she would be calling us at the door before she went down to sleep but so far not any outrageous drama. We are thankful for that but T is generally good. A on the other hand I don’t know what to expect but we have hopefully a year to go with her before we find out.
I am not ashamed that I get excited by LED lightbulbs
Today MC and I took some of our holiday to goto Home Depot. We are looking at renovating our kitchen and we needed to investigate some details. After we finished doing that I wanted to check out the lighting section. Our fixtures in the ceiling are not big enough to allow me to put in 75 Watt equivalent CFL bulbs. I have enough trouble seeing on a bright sunny day outside so I can use every extra lumen I can get. I recently read about a flat LED bulb from Phillips. The shape of the bulb had me curious if a 75 Watt equivalent would fit in the ceiling fixtures. The only problem has been that the last Home Depot and every online store I have gone to have not had them in stock. I am not ashamed to say I was very happy to see that this Home Depot had them in stock. I picked up 4 of them to see if they would work out. I was happy to see that the bulbs do fit perfectly in the fixtures were only 60 watt equivalent CFL’s fit before. In our bedroom it was amazing how an extra 300-400 lumens make the room so much brighter.
Besides the fact that I now have brighter lighting in the apartment, these bulbs shouldn’t need to be changed until after Amelia is out of College. That is assuming we still live in this apartment. The LED bulbs will also allow me to dim them. Master plan is to put in smart dimmer switches that plug into my home automation system. The possibilities get interesting once i do that. I hope to write about that once my plans start to materialize, but I am excited by the possibilities. Yes I said it i am excited about new light bulbs and light switches. I had to think about why that was. The reason I came to is I always loved Science Fiction. I don’t yet have swooshing doors that open when i walk up to them but I can have lights that dim depending on the time of day or go off when people leave the room. That on top of the fact that my iPad seems to do more than those PADD’s in Star Trek The Next Generation my 12 year old self would think I am living in a great Sci-Fi future. Take that Star Trek!
Raffi vs Rafi
I can no longer listen to the children’s musician Raffi. Every time I or hear a song of his I think of Rafi from the League and get the shivers thinking of him singing to my kids.
Homemade Bread
Gouged myself on homemade bread with dinner tonight. It was totally worth the hour of Amelia screaming while MC was making it and not able to hold her. Because that is how Amelia rolls, no mommy no quiet.
My Evolving Use of Cloud Storage
Last year I canceled my pay Drobo subscription. I still have the service but with a lot less storage. At the time I wanted to build my own “cloud” storage system. In reality I wanted to take my data at home and make it syncable via the internet like a cloud storage provider to my devices were ever i was. Originally I bought a Transporter that I had hopes would take a 1TB drive and let me sync data to my computers. That dream lasted about a week. Their sync software was problimatic for me. Instead I opted for a Synology NAS DS412+. The added app’s functionality and redundant storage allowed me to move all my data to the Synology and no longer rely on my aging Drobo(s) as my primary storage system. The Synology also allowed me to move some multimedia functions i did on my mac mini off to the NAS. So far I have been very happy. The Synology Cloud Sync app gives me Dropbox like functionality with my personal stuff. The other file access options the Synology offers gives me access to all my data. To do that with any other provider would be prohibitivly expensive because of the amount of data stored on the NAS.
The timeing for this change to self hosting my data was perfect. I couldn’t realistically do what I am doing now earlier because when I had Time Warner my upload speeds were horrible (1.5mb). After I moved to Fios my upload speeds jumped to between 25-35mb. I have no problems using the Synology.
The problem with the Synology is that as much as the NAS itself is designed to last and has some drive resiliance in it, I do not have an offsite backup. I used to copy my data manually for a while but now a days that is not a good idea. it is also not feasable with the amount of data i have now.
After leaving Dropbox I read more and more about the potential issues with public cloud providers. Such as Dropbox knows what you upload and wont keep a duplicate copy of a file of music if others have it. That means they can (and i believe they have) removed content if there is a DMCA request. I am also increasingly uneasy about US based hosting providers and the easy the government can get access to data. I am not a criminal and don’t really have anything to hide in what I am storing however those are not reasons why I should be ok with the ease of government access to my data. I will talk about that more in another post. In relation to cloud storage I am glad I do not use Dropbox, however I put myself in the same situation with another provider.
Because I have so much data and I need to really be thinking about a 321 backup sceme I started using Crashplan and Amazon Glacial. Crashplan I recently canceled because I was having problems with my copy of data on my Drobo that i would sync to Crashplan. The crashplan app kept thinking that the drobo was disconnected and would keep creating new copies of my data. When it takes weeks to sync a backup using crashplan having a new copy get created every so often is not good. With that issue and the fact that the Crashplan Synology app caused my Synology to perform super slow to the point that I uninstalled it I gave up on Crashplan and canceled it.
Amazon Glacial has been good so far. The challanges with Glacial is that the cost per month varries by how much i use it. It is also much more expensive than Crashplan for the amount of data i have. Another challange is getting data out is expensive in the event of a major issue. Thankfully i havent had to worry about that yet but it is a concern. The most current concern I have is that Amazon is a US based company and my data is hosted on US servers. For now I am living with that risk. My rational side says I dont do anything to warrent the government to want my data however I would rather that not even be an option.
One alternative to Dropbox I have been looking at is Mega.NZ. They don’t have any access to my data once it is uploaded. They offer 50gig free. It is good to replace dropbox for some files i have and to give my most important stuff an offsite backup but it is not enough to backup my music, videos, and photos. Their 1tb option is doable for me but even that isn’t enough to backup everything. For now I will continue with Glacial as my backup. I am investigating working with a friend or two to replica sync our Synologies between each other. The cost of that may not be worth it but it is an interesting idea.
T and Our Coffee Ritual
When T was about 4 or 5 months old she was big enough to fit into the Exosaucer and bob around. She loved it. On the weekends MC and I would (and still do) rotation who would get up with T and later both girls. Some days it was great bonding time. When T was that little there was little to do with her after her bottle. We would put her in the Exosaucer so she wasn’t lying down right after her bottle. After doing that I would make myself some coffee. I like Cappuccino so I would make a cup with our Nespresso machine and then sit with T. She would follow my coffee no matter were it was in my hand. I thought it was just any beverage but when I moved a glass of water around the same way i would move the coffee she was less interested. It was very funny.
Once T got a little older I would hold T in one hand and make the coffee in the other. She was always facinated. Once she was crawling or walking and saw that I was going to make some coffee she would come over and in he own way demand to be picked up.
Sometime after T was a year old (the exact time eludes me and I wish I kept track better) after she would keep trying to drink my coffee I had the idea to take an espresso spoon and give her a little of the frothed milk from the Cappuccino. It was the stuff right on top that was not touched by coffee so it was just foamed milk. It was an instant hit for T. I didn’t do it all the time but she often wanted spoons of milk. A few times I just made T a cup of frothy milk for her to spoon up. That could get messy so I didn’t do it often.
Over the past several months T has gotten old enough to be good enough to help with our ritual. When I go to make Epsresso or Cappuccino she runs over to the kitchen and demands to be picked up (uppie). T puts the cartredge into the machine. She has trouble closing the door but does most of the work. She then presses the button to make the coffee. Afterward if I do a Cappuccino she will expect some or go get heself a spoon.
A few weeks ago I was working at my computer with a Cappuccino in hand. I heard T demand a spoon to MC but didn’t think anything of it until she shows up at my desk with it. It was clearly implied that I was to provide her some milk.
Amelia on the otherhand has not been as interested in the same ritual. I am wondering what she will get into when she gets a little bit older.