Well, not quite, but it feels like it.

As of 7:30 pm tonight (Thursday, May 31st) our passports finished the renewal process and were sent overnight and hopefully will be in in our hands by Friday (June 1st). (Note to readers: Departure date for international travel is June 2nd). Camille spent many an hour with the National Passport agency trying to track down the status of our passports. Lessons learned from dealing with the US government and passport renewals?

1. EXPEDITE. 3 weeks until receipt of passports versus 9 weeks of increasing tension and blood pressure.
2. Be prepared to spend inordinate amounts of time calling an 800 number at all times of day and night in hopes you might be put on hold. For every 20 calls, one would put me through to wait on hold. Muzak never sounded so sweet.
3. Magic call time: 3:30 pm. Worked every time.
4. Bach’s Brandenburg concertos should not be used as muzak. It’s just plain wrong.
5. Did I mention to expedite your paperwork? It’s well worth the saved stress on any type A personalities like myself. Especially if you are planning travel in the next 4-6 months.

So hopefully by 6 pm Saturday our family will be en route to Barcelona to rendezvous with Camille’s family for a week in Spain.

Here is the run down for the past couple months:

• Anne graduated from Preschool today. She had two excellent teachers this year and is sad to be done. Makes me wonder if she will be like Jason in Foxtrot. She was very beautiful in the dress her Grandma got her.
• We have been house hunting and found what we hope will be our next accommodations. We put in an offer which was accepted, but contingent on the sellers closing on another house. It has been a while since we bought a house, but amazingly enough, I think the process is even longer in Maryland compared to NewYork.
• Anne got pneumonia today. Very sad. So she will be taking antibiotics for a little while. No clue where she got it from and we hope that no other kids get/got it.
• I started another blog revolving around my coding for the MMORPG I play. Knowing me, I will probably update that one more than this..
• We are getting plugged into our church. I have been periodically helping lead the home group we go to. We love our home group, and we have felt warmly accepted into the community. I managed to get out skiing once with some of them. I think I will miss winter down here.
• Work continues to go well. Just hired someone to work under me and in the process of hiring another (in case anyone wants to send me a resume). I am really enjoying the Zend Framework but unfortunately I had to drop the smarty templates as they were killing the speed. Our hardware has killer I/O but awful CPU speed.
• On my daily commute I have been reading a very good book: As For Me and My House. I wish I had read it while in grad school. I know it would have helped me better understand myself and the stresses I place upon Camille. Better late than never. It is written in a very poetic style (not my style) which took a bit to get used to. While at home, I have been reading Fit Bodies Fat Minds. Another highly recommended read. It is not poetic and more my reading style.
• We have not gone to the movies in a while now. I think the last movie we saw was Children of Men. We did rent some interesting films though. An Inconvenient Truth, Who Killed the Electric Car, and Thank You For Smoking. They raise interesting questions, especially for a stats minded person like myself. The first 2 are more of the documentary type. The last one can get you thinking about how media and sophistry pervade and sway our culture.

So, hopefully Camille will post here soon to give everyone an update on some of the other important things going on in our lives.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

We are now all settled in Maryland. I drove up to Ithaca and brought Camille and the kids back down at the end of October. I am so glad we are all together again. I’ll try to have Camille give a larger update about how things are soon.

We drove back up to Ithaca for Christmas and New Years. It was good to see my parents again, and all our NewLife friends. We managed to get some good fossil hunting in as well, as the temperatures were not ‘normal’. Anne and Drew are becoming good hunters, with Anne scoring a few trilobites herself at the Portland Point quarry.

Today, being MLKJ Day, I had the day off. Woohoo! Being in the DC area is great! It was a normal temperature for January 15th, 72F with a 50 percent chance for rain. So we made the best of it and went to the Chesapeake to hunt for Miocene fossils. We managed to score a small amount of fossilized shark and skate teeth. It was warm enough for me to put on my Tevas and walk around in the water to better hunt. Pretty fun! Plus, having Drew periodically say, “Shark eat me” was great.

Beware of moving companies. Check out Moving Scam before you hire anyone.

I sent in my contact info to a moving company aggregator in the hopes of getting some decent companies like Allied or Mayflower to give quotes. I think the site was actually just for one company.

Case in point: americanworldvanlines.com and relocationandstorage.com, two of the “companies” that responded. Curiously they have the same email form showing their quote. Their webpages look different, but they have identical privacy statements (other than replacing their company names). And the same fax number. And (using WHOIS) the same IP address and DNS servers.

In fact, most of the quotes I got used the same email form and online weight calculators. They used the same lingo, …

And, they are all blacklisted on the MovingScam webpage. They should be ashamed of themselves, but obviously they are not.

A final important note, Camille is the one who found the MovingScam website. She is the Holmes and I am the Watson on this case. I have a great wife.

Yesterday, Camille and I celebrated our sixth anniversary. At times it seems like it has only been 2 years, others more like 15 years.

It was Camille’s turn to plan the events this year, and she continued our tradition of having a creative date. We went down to the Corning Museum of Glass to get some culture and then made some of our own art at the Walk-in Workshop there. Lots of fun.

And afterward, we continued our dining tradition which was started on the night of our wedding. We have dined at the same place every year that we have been in Ithaca. Since it is my turn to plan things next year, I will have to be creative, seeing as we will probably not be in Ithaca for it.

Today was the big day! The Fourth Annual Cayuga Lake Triathlon
hosted in our very own Ithaca, NY! I compteted in the short tri which was a 750 m swim, 14 mi bike ride and a 5K run.

I had a great big smile on my face almost the whole time. Lots of fun! I finished at 1:53:25 which was a better time that I’d hoped for. Nothing to win a prize, but definitely something to feel good about. The weather was perfect and it was a lot of fun. My family came to meet me out at the park for the post race party. Not a bad way to spend a Sunday!

So I’ve been lost in the black hole of life where e-mails are received by me, but rarely replied. what have I been up to this summer?

I’ve been training for the Cayuga Lake Triathlon and in the process have been taking swimming lessons at night at the pool where we are members. One stroke per week. Freestyle, backstroke, breast stroke and butterfly. I was usually the only one in the class, but it worked out really well. I had a great time and my instructor was really good. It was a blast. Great to be able to swim better too. Thanks Greg for taking care of the kids and letting me escape every night for an hour the past month to swim.

I never realized how my child’s life could so powerfully bring up emotions and memories from my own childhood.

A few nights ago, I was talking with a friend about our daughters and how they relate with other people. They’re both at the same preschool. So we hear similar stories about stuff. These kids are 3-5 years old and already exhibit junior high mentality. Yikes.

Anne is friends with two other girls that go to our church. They’re all the same age. Anne has always connected well with one girl more than the other. So when the three of them are together, it’s almost always odd man out. I almost started to cry one time at church when I saw the little girl left behind or left out of everything Anne and her other friend were doing. Anne was completely oblivious and I was aching for the third little girl who was following them, asking to join in and eventually just standing there watching. All memories of elementary and junior high school came flooding back with all the feelings of isolation and longing.

A friend of mine once commented that we don’t need to shield our children from experiencing pain in relationships. It’s those experiences that help create empathy, compassion, other-awareness that not much else can do. I can see that in my life. I think my unhappiness growing up has helped to shape the way I see people so that I notice the loner in the corner of the room and try to draw them into conversation.

I can see that now, but it’s easier said than done. It’s a lot easier to set up an environment where children are carefully exposed and nurtured. It’s a lot harder to watch your child struggle with hurt and disappointment and hope in faith that God will use that to build character. I do hope Anne and Drew will grow up to be compassionate, caring and sensitive people. And I also hope I will have the strength to walk with them through those painful moments and not try to shield them from it all or try to solve it for them.