2 Million Words Worth

Owlcon was good this year, as always, but this year it was particularly nice for different reasons. I had originally planed on going Friday night by myself to play an RPG and take Marcel the rest of the weekend since he enjoys it so much. I really hate missing out on the RPGs but the time I get with Marcel always makes up for it. I ended up showing up late friday night so I missed the time slot. I ended up going to see Rambo. Having always been a Rambo fan, I was knocked off balance by the level of realistic gore in this movie and downright appalled by some scenes of violence. Had I known the movie was on such a level of disturbing scenes I wouldn't have gone. Anyway.
This year at Owlcon we only played a few games so we spent most of our time talking about everything under the sun, browsing the bookstore together, and just goofing off. He did learn how to play Magic the Gathering and I'm pretty eager to show him my organizing system for my own cards. I never would have thought that when I bought my first deck back in 1993 that I would one day play the game with my son.
The majority of my time the past few weeks have honestly been spent watching TV with Lana and organizing our box of family photos. The box has been in bad need or organizing and I've been putting off scanning them for years now. It's always been such a task because I always get distracted by the photos. Well, I finally broke down and got it organized - again. I was prompted mostly by a spilled drink. A coke spilled on some of our pictures and it was a real kick in the nuts because I realized a lot of the pictures in that box are irreplaceable. Fortunately, I'm a bit anal retentive and was always a stickler about saving my negatives so most of them we still have to scan. So now I've started scanning them into the computer. It's amazing how many gems we had sitting in that box. I'm slowly cataloging them as I scan them into the computer and tagging them in Abobe Bridge CS3. It's a bit slow but very enjoyable. Most of Marcel's baby pictures have never been scanned much less seen the light of day but every now and then. It's like discovering hidden treasures all over again. Backing up my photos has become a daily process now with my album now reaching into the 14 gigabit range.
Turns out, we were pretty good about taking plenty of pictures of Marcel growing up.
Speaking of Marcel, I gotta get ready to roll out of here to go get him from school. Later!

Back in the Groove

So our first My Baby Can Talk - First Signs dvd came in the mail the other day. We all gathered around the TV and watched the dvd and learned a few basic signs. According the dvd it's still a few more months before she's coordinated enough to start signing back at us but we're pretty excited about it. It's really a lot of fun and I'm really looking forward to learning more. It's pretty neat to think that she'll be able to communicate with us with her hands before she's able to communicate verbally.
It's a little weird finally being a schedule with Lana that doesn't have us up at noon. Olivia's pretty good about keeping us on task. We're up with Marcel, he goes to school, then Lana goes up to the office while I hold down the fort in the house listening to music or watching tv while I get other stuff done. The suck part is that around 8:00pm I'll start to drift off to sleep if I don't find something to do. So I keep busy until Marcel goes to bed, then Lana and I end up staying up watching Scrubs or Malcolm in the Middle until two in the morning. We've even managed to get out to the movies now and then.
I took Marcel to his first Horror movie. I was very proud. I had to wait for the right movie to come along though. After reading up on Cloverfield and even breaking my rule about spoilers, I decided it was the right movie. He had a blast and wants to see it again. It was really pretty good and worthy of another theater trip. I'm hoping I'll be able to make it off to the movies soon to see Teeth before it leaves the theater although I have a feeling Lana won't want to come along for that one like she did with Sweeney Todd.
It's been really rather refreshing being on a good schedule. It's amazing how much we can get done when we're out of bed before noon. I'm gonna log off before I start to ramble. Back to uploading pics and jammin to Sepultura. :)