Jane fell asleep during lunch today

She was so tired. I don't blame her. I was in the kitchen and Hannah starts saying her name, "jane... Jane... JANE... JAAAAANE!"

I walked in and found Jane asleep.

Gourmet Homemade Ravioli

Since Minna is gone this weekend I decided to have a gourmet dinner. Joe came over with his pasta machine.

First you roll out the dough.


Then you add the ravioli filling (goat cheese with ricotta, basil, spinach, parmesean, garlic)


It was so easy, even Jane helped.


This is how the final product turned out.


The sauce was delicious made with chicken stock and pesto but there is no photo. Joe made the excellent dough and a great fennel salad, and Boston lettuce salad.

The girls were already done eating by the time the ravioli was ready, but Jane downed four more raviolis.

The swing was the best playground toy ever invented

I'll tell you why there is no better way to play with your kids than using a swing.


Jane is actually pretty good at using a non-kiddie swing.


They don't run away from you.

It's really easy to make them laugh.

You can make a game out of it.



I would swing them and they would try to eat the Teddy Graham from my fingers on the up swing. After the Teddy Grahams were gone Hannah lost her flip-flop so I was trying to put her flip-flop back on while she was swinging. This caused an outpouring of laughter on all accounts. I was about to take a picture of this until Jane fell out of the swing.


Then we reversed roles and I was swinging and trying to get the grahams from Hannah. Jane was recovering in the stroller.

This morning was the perfect day at the beach

The temperature was perfect, not hot, not cold.
The wind wasn't blasting sand in our eyes. It was just enough wind to keep the kite up.






This afternoon we took the bike and trailer for an errand and ended up at the park.

Hovering a thousand feet above the park were about 20 billion news helicopters with cameras pointed at the Queens County Courthouse where the Sean Bell verdict was announced. They were like mosquitoes.

Minna gets a break from the kids this weekend

I have the girls this weekend. Starting tonight.



Bedtime was really easy. Hannah feel asleep on the couch just after 8pm.


Jane was not tired, I heard her playing with toys in the dark and then put her in bed with Hannah, and that seemed to work. I didn't hear her again.

When Hannah woke up crying I couldn't find Jane. She had fallen asleep by behind door.

The fun part of Boston

Boston was awesome, except for the battle against my sinuses.


---

We were hanging out with the ultra fun Truscotts.


---

We did the Freedom Trail







---

We played Wii.

---

At 1am when Jane started to scream, I sat up with the Wii still on my mind, I was totally confused and referring to Jane and said, "I think we just need to change the settings".

---

I climbed Bunker Hill Monument.




---

We saw David and Debbie's fabulous new home two blocks from Bunker Monument, and ate all their delicious cookies.

---

We went to the park on Sunday night even though I was feeling horrible, but it was probably the most fun part of the trip.




We entertained our wives and children by jumping over the fence. It was ridiculous.

Notice the excellent form by Tadd.






Gus wanted to be in the photo too so he stood in the background.






We changed Jane's settings and put her in "swing mode".

I'm sick of being sick

I've been sick for probably three weeks now. It'll be my sinuses then my throat, then my sinuses again. Then I'll feel good and think it's all done. But not today. I feel horrible.

I'm having fun in Boston, but it's been a battle. Me being sick vs me having fun.

But I'm not just sick. Sleep was minimal last night since we're sleeping in the same room with the girls. Jane had a whopper of night last night and cried for a solid hour from about 1am-2am. I'm very tired.

At church today I felt like lying down on the floor of the wheelchair accessible bathroom to sleep. But, I was distracted by the Lost & Found closet which is in that bathroom. That, and the floor was tile and didn't look comfortable.

I was sneezing and blowing my nose all day.

This is how we store all those photos

Minna received a question on how we store all her photos. Every awesome photographer needs a sidekick right. Well as her official photo sidekick I take care of all the technical details of storing the photos. She uses Lightroom and she has about 34,000 photos and this is how we store them all. We do this all on a Mac.


Right now we keep everything on an external drive. This image represents all the data on our external drive. Although you probably can't see them, every little square left of the yellow line is a photo. Everything to the right is something else, mostly video. (I used Disk Inventory to create these images.)
Here is a closer look so you can see all the different squares.


The photos require about 140 of the 150 gigs of space. We have been keeping them on a RAID 1 external drive from CalDigit.

RAID 1 just means there are two disks inside the external drive that mirror each other so if one disk goes bad the other one serves as a backup.

If I were completely paranoid, I would get a third disk and store one at work switching them out every other day or so. That way if our apartment building burned to the ground we'd still have the photos, but probably nothing else.

The problem is that we're about to run out of space on this external drive. So I'm going to change how it works.

First, I've purchased a D-Link DNS-323. It's a storage device that connects to our computer via our wireless router. I like this because this little device hides on the shelf with the router and doesn't take up more space on the desk.

Soon, I'm going to change the RAID 1 external drive to be a RAID 0, which means the two disks inside the CalDigit device will work together to store and retrieve photos, but not mirror each other. This will improve performance and because the disks won't be mirrored it will double storage capacity, but if one of the disks inside fails, all photos on both disks will be lost. But that is why we bought the DNS-323. As soon as I get all the bugs worked out of backing up the external RAID drive to the network drive, and everything is backed up flawlessly for a couple nights in a row I'll make the RAID switch.

There aren't really any bugs in my backup system. I'm using and highly recommend backuplist+. It's free and works fantastic. The main problem is my wireless connection isn't stable enough to backup 150 gigs without a hitch.

The downside to this photo storage system is that we can't take it on the road, because the external drive is not mobile.

So there you have it. We have a ton of photos that are completely backed up, and that's how we do it.

It's getting warmer!

I took the girls out for a spin today. We went to the park and it was packed.

Jane was loving the slides. She was very confident and going down them all by herself. I would stand at the bottom and clap my hands until she went. She seemed pretty unfazed by it each time and just wanted to go again. On the twisty slide she always started feet first and finished head first.

Hannah laughed and laughed at a boy a couple years older than her who kept fake falling off the ladder just to make her laugh.

My sister is evil

This is my evil sister.



On April 1, she posted her decision about which school to go to for her Master's in Social Work. I knew she had applied to more than one school but I wasn't too concerned about the schools she applied to.

All us siblings have done our share of traveling, especially her. She's been Guatemala, London and been a Trail Walker with the Anasazi Foundation in Arizona. So she is all about adventure.

When she announced her decision to go to China for her MSW. I had not heard about the application but was not surprised that she would seek the opportunity. But for two years? That's a long time, and she would be away from boys that she could date and marry (yes, I'm opinionated about that). So, I wanted to see what her motivation was. I called her right then.

Bits of our conversation:

Keri:..."You're totally not excited for me?!"
Me:..."I'm excited for you, its just a long time."

I'm still thinking in my head. Wow she'll come back and be totally awesome at speaking Chinese. And... I wonder how expensive it would be to visit her while she's there.

Finally near the end she said, "I'm so glad you called, cause it's just an April Fools joke."

I can't believe it and I fell for it so hard that I called her. Well done. Just wait until next year.