Winding Down

Viv seems to have thoroughly enjoyed her first vacation. The car ride she could do without though. At any rate, we're in Birmingham tonight and will make the rest of the way back to N.O. tomorrow.

She had a lot of room to crawl around and work on standing over the last 5 days and it's amazing how much progress she's made. She even managed to stand on her own for a few seconds a number of times. She'll more than likely be walking within a month at this rate.

Memorial Day

Yesterday we went to Damascus and had some fine Mexican food at a little place called the Baja Grill. After that we did a little tour in the mountains. Viv also had some fun splashing around in her pool.

Middle of Nowhere

Tonight we went to a restaraunt called Cuz's in the middle of nowhere, hillbilly Virginia. It's in an old converted barn and has some of the best steaks I've ever seen. It's run by this old hippie artist and his wife and the food was just frickin great. Here's a link to it- Cuz's.

Here's a few pictures from yesterday:

Hikin'

Viv went on her first real hike today- we did a few miles in Hungry Mother state park. I gave her a stick at the start of the hike and she waved it around like a wand the entire time. She was probably trying to cast an enchanted cheerios spell or something. Notice the stick in every pic.

Made it

We made in to Marion about 9:00 tonight. Viv spent almost ten hours in the car today to get here. We had a handful of rest area stops to let her crawl around and yank grass to put her in mouth. I'll put up a bunch of pics over the next few days.

First Vacation

Viv started her first vacation today. We're heading to Marion, VA to stay with Pod, Laura & the boys. We left this afternoon and we're spending the night in Tuscaloosa, AL. She did pretty well today but tomorrow is going to be a lot longer, so we'll see how she does.

Swim Lessons

It's been a pretty busy week for Viv. We've introduced her to cheerios, which she absolutely loves. In fact, she loves them so much that she thinks they should be liberally tossed about wherever she goes- the kitchen, to the dogs, you name it and she's flinging cheerios at it. She's also had a bit of a cold which hasn't really dampened her mood but she didn't want to eat a lot for a few days. She seems to have recovered and is pretty much back to her old self though.

On another note, Viv got to meet Junior Rodriguez (or just Junior, as everyone in St. Bernard calls him). Junior's the parish president out here- he's the cranky fat guy who poked then FEMA director Mike 'Brownie' Brown in the crotch with his cane and asked 'Where the f*ck have you been?' the first time Brownie showed up here a few weeks after the storm. The best part was, a local news crew was there for it and got it on camera. Needless to say, everyone here loves the guy.

Viv also had her first time in the wading the pool this weekend and really likes it.

Sheep

Viv has had enough of them damn sheep- bah bah bah all the time. It's all a little girl can take.



In other exciting news, she's started eating cheerios. Mostly she just squishes them around in her mouth until they either go down her throat or dribble out on to her chin, either way, it's cool with her. Her grandpa Cliff was down for a brief visit this weekend as well and Viv went to a big family gathering of her relatives on his side.




One more little non-Viv related note. I just want remind everyone that uses wireless networking at home to please use encryption. WPA is best, but WEP is better than nothing at all. One of my neighbors has just put up a wireless network with no encryption and they've set their C: drive as shared- I have complete access to everything on their system. I'm thinking of installing the drivers for their shared printer and leaving them a little message, or maybe a picture of Angus's butt with a message photoshopped on it. Most people aren't as nice as me though and would have stolen their tax info, Quicken files, compromising pictures, etc. then wiped the registry and master boot record clean and left the computer as a $1000 paperweight. So, beware- and secure your wireless network (yes dad, I'm talking to you if you haven't done this yet) and change the admin password on the router.

Last Day of Jazz Fest

Here's Viv in the blues tent:



It was crazily hot and humid out yesterday but we set up a little tent over our chairs to give Viv some shade. It seemed to be ok with her since she slept through pretty much all of Steely Dan.





Her Grandpa Cliff is going to be in town this coming weekend and I've heard some rumors that my dad and Marjie (and Emily?) will be here sometime in the month of June. Of course, I heard this rumor from Alice via Marjie so I'm hoping a certain other grandpa of Viv's will clarify all this for me sometime......

Here they are

Here's the pics of Viv standing, as promised.

Misc. pics

Here's a couple of miscellaneous pics. I'll work on catching her standing over the next few days.

It has begun

Alice reported that while I was sailing last night, Viv managed to pull herself up to a standing position on the couch in order to smack the cat. I wholeheartedly approve of both the standing and the smacking, that cat had it coming to him. Then tonight we tried this new method of letting her cry herself out to go to sleep- we caved when she grabbed the rail of the crib and stood up and stared at us.

I don't have any pics of any of this yet, but here's a screenshot of the brand-spanking new ubuntu linux (7.04, feisty fawn release) running on my laptop. It's faster to load and run than XP, graphically blows Vista out of the water, and is completely open source- translation: it's completely free and is pretty dang smooth. I've been using linux off and on for about 10 years now and this is the first time I can honestly say a linux release is better than windows in both speed and ease of setup. It took less than 40 minutes to install and the default setup worked flawlessy. Firefox, Thunderbird, Open Office, and a host of other programs are installed by default, everything else you could ever possibly need can be easily installed through the package manager (again, all free). As a matter of fact, Dell and Toshiba currently have plans to offer ubuntu linux as an alternative to Windows Vista on a number of their laptop and desktop systems within the coming months. Anyway, here's a screenshot: