Geek Habitat

Apologies in advance to anyone for whom this qualifies as “sickeningly sweet”. That said, this is my blog and I’ll make an even bigger geek out of myself if I want to.

Here is a videotaped conversation with Sara (YouTube) that I had on the morning of Tuesday, June 26, 2007. She was in her characteristic happy and talkative morning mood, and I fired up my camera to record our conversation. Apologies for the poor framing/camera angle. I have no illusions of being a film-maker, and if I hold the camera Sara looks intently at it instead of getting engrossed in talking to me directly so I just placed it on my bedside table and hoped for the best. The end result is some great audio and some questionable quality video of Sara’s feet. LOL! I left it as a video file, however, because you can see her little feet and legs go nuts as she gets excited at various points in our chat.

Miles Levin is an 18-year-old with Stage IV cancer (alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma, a rare soft tissue cancer) that will quite likely steal his life before the end of the year. In truth, he was not expected to survive to reach his high school prom, much less graduate, two milestones which he has thankfully achieved recently.

I’m quoting his latest entry because it touched me, but if you’d like to read more from him and his parents, create a free account at the hospital’s website (CarePages) to read his other entries. He makes you realize how precious each day is, and how petty some of our day-to-day “problems” (even horrific traffic or a bad day at the office) are when others don’t know how many more hours they have on this Earth.

Today was a study in contrasts. I resumed a bit of the routine, welcoming my parents back late this evening from their week-long Alaskan cruise and visiting with my brother who had the day off from work.

I’ve got nothing to post, but am posting anyway. We had a productive, busy weekend but didn’t get around to taking 3 month or Father’s Day photos of Sara. Soon, I hope. We’re also overdue on giving her a bath, but she is on Day #3 of her growth spurt and the accompanying piranha-like feeding frenzy that I had almost forgotten about from 3 weeks, 6 weeks, 9 weeks, etc. By the time she is even remotely ready for anything other than feeding, it’s 11:30 PM or like tonight, 12:30 AM. Tomorrow will definitely be a bath day because sponge baths only go so far when you’ve got a drool and spit-up machine (albeit a very cute, endearing one!)

So, I was a little late getting the photos posted to Flickr. I blame Time Warner… our Internet access keeps going out, only to come back up just as unpredictably as it dies.

Anyway, after posting some of our more recent shots (we need to take more, bear with us!), I started looking at some of our older shots and… man, that’s hard! Day-to-day, we already notice how quickly Sara is growing and developing, but looking at photos taken during her first month of life? OUCH… right to my heartstrings, every time!