It’s Erin’s birthday, and she’s home from the hospital today. Both Erin and Julia are doing quite well. Julia is breathing 100% unassisted right now. Not much else to report. She’s adorable.

It was hard to not be able to visit at the hospital (I was sick) but I seem to be over the worst of it now. I went up to see her when I picked up Erin, and she looks amazing. I’m not going to post pictures here, but if people want me to send them some, I can try to dig some up.

Ok, so brace yourselves (as if the midnight posting wasn’t enough of a heads up…)

Saturday night, I took Erin to the hospital to get checked out, because she had some symptoms of a possible premature labor. Turns out that it was a good thing that we went when we did, because less than two hours later, she had the baby. That’s 9 or 10 weeks early, and it was a pretty scary “crash” c-section. Both Erin and the new baby are fine, though Erin will be in hospital for another few days, and the new baby will be in the neonatal intensive care unit for at least 8 weeks. It’s hard to express how scary it was to be sitting in the recovery room waiting for word about what was going on in the OR, but at least the news was good news in the end.

So, first off, “It’s a Girl!” which will shock and amaze a lot of people. Second off, both Erin and the new baby are doing fine - Erin’s actually doing better than she did after William was born I think. It’s a little tough to compare though, cause they have her on a morphine machine. 1020 grams (2 pounds 4 oz) and 39 cm (about 15 1/4 inches) pretty tiny. Her name is Julia Nicole Mitchell, and despite her size she’s quite a little fighter. They’ve got her in the incubator for a while, she’s breathing on her own, but they have a tube into her lungs just in case she needs a boost. Her heart rate is great, and she’s a healthy pink. Anyway, I snuck off after putting William down, so I should get back up there before he notices that I’m gone.

**EDIT** Oh, and to top it all off, William has the chicken pox, so he can’t even go to the hospital, and I’ve got a cold which means I can’t visit my new baby. It’s a frustrating time, but Julia and Erin are both doing great.

Last night, I introduced William to the wonderful world of TurboGrafx 16. Ever since he was a very very little baby, he liked headbutts, I think “bonk” was one of the first things he said reliably, and certainly one of the few things to guarantee a giggle from him.

So last night I fired up a little bit of “Bonk’s Adventure” William had a lot of fun making him bonk his head, and jump, and walk, and eat the walls. He laughed pretty hard. Of course he was in a good mood because he had been playing with Grandpa John in his playroom. From what I heard from the other room, they had a pretty good time together.

Not much else to tell though - I’m getting pretty close to having my XBox ready to step in as a MythTV frontend - all that’s left is installing/configuring MythTV I think. I tried using Xebian, but I couldn’t get the boot disc to boot up properly. End result is that I’ve just now completed an FTP install of Gentoox. The only reason I didn’t go Gentoo(X) in the first place was that I didn’t want to wait for the XBox to compile MythTV, and I didn’t know if I’d be able to set up distcc to share the load. I still don’t know if I could get distcc to do it, but I think that by the time I figure it out, the compile will be done anyway.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “I’m taking this thing to Mexico!” - Snake

Yesterday I had an abbreviated post because I wanted to walk to a computer store downtown and pick up a network cable and some blank DVD-R’s. I got there without incident (no mean feat, wearing dress shoes with the condition of the streets/sidewalks) and found the items I was looking for. As I was waiting in line to pay, I realized that I didn’t have my wallet in my pocket. I’d taken it out when I was shovelling/pushing out the car Monday night. I do however have my credit card number memorized, so I stayed in line and asked the guy if it would be ok if I just rattled it off to him. I didn’t expect it to work, and it didn’t work. Oh well.

So today I walked back there (again without incident) and picked up the two items that they’d amazingly kept behind the counter for me. I had my wallet this time! I paid, looked at my receipt, and noticed that I’d been overcharged by $3. Not a big deal, they credited me back (they’d just dropped the price on the network cable apparently) without hassle. Anyway, on the way back, I took a corner too fast and wiped out. I tend to have pretty good balance, so even when I wipe out, I land lightly - this time was no exception, I got my hands down fast enough to prevent my knee from striking the ground too hard. Nothing serious, but I was cursing out my dress shoes afterwards.

I guess my clever ploy to get some of the lurkers that I don’t know to comment failed. I’m talking about those of you checking the site from such faraway locales as Mexico, or the UAE… I know you’re out there ;)

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Excellent all the pieces of my plan are falling into place.” - Mr. Burns

I was looking through my stats, and see that I have a lot of new visitors here in the last couple of months - ridiculous numbers of people seem to have found me via various means and are now coming back daily. Don’t ask me why…Actually, I know why - every now and then I do have a good post that makes the rest of this drivel worth reading. So, I’ve decided to try and collect those rare gems into a section of the site that new visitors can go to, and avoid having to read about what I had for lunch.

Anyway, to do that, I need help - What are your favourite post(s)? I don’t care if you’ve never commented before, or if you’re shy - you can either comment here, or email me (greg@nodecam.com) to tell me about it. I’m hoping to be able to collect up a bunch of posts to showcase the “stellar” work that I do here :)

Or don’t - it’ll just take me longer to get things together. It’s really up to you.

Or is the “Simpson’s quote of the day” the only reason you come back?

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Don’t mess with the dead, boy, they have eerie powers.” - Homer

I was up until 3:45AM Friday night trying to get the XBox ready for a linux install. Needless to say, it didn’t go particularly well. Let’s just say that my ability to follow instructions degrades around 2AM. Oh well. The end result is that I got a guy in town to install a modchip so I can install linux - if I can find a disc that the xbox can read it shouldn’t be a problem…

Then we got stuck at the end of the driveway on Saturday afternoon and had to get a push out. I was overtired, and it didn’t make for a good day (at this point I hadn’t made arrangements with the modchip guy, so the xbox was a paperweight) It all worked out in the end though.

Bryan is coming back into town on Tuesday, then Erin’s dad is coming into town later in the week for a visit. The following weekend, Erin’s mom is coming for a visit too, so it’s going to be a busy couple of weeks around our house.

Oh yeah, and Saturday night we fired up the projector and watched “The Incredibles” on the plastered wall. It actually wasn’t too bad, the picture was pretty good despite the fact you could see the plaster spots on the wall. I think it’s going to look great once it’s all painted up.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Now the man that puts the ‘you’ in impr-you-vment!” - Troy McClure

As previously mentioned, we went to Jason and Amy’s place last night for some green related activities. A good time was had by all. At the end of the night, I put William’s jacket on him, then put mine on, and in the meantime he went downstairs after the cat. I found him in the corner of a dark bedroom petting the cat. He really wanted to take Flint home with us, and was quite upset when I wouldn’t let him. It was pretty cute anyway.

Dave and Katriona are in town this weekend, and next apparently (I assume Brandy too, but I can neither confirm nor deny that) so there will be visiting of some sort at some point. Between that, and the likely arrival of the new xbox, I don’t think there’s much else going on this weekend.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Ya know, I could call my mom from up here. Hey Ma! Get off the dang roof!” - Cletus the slack-jawed yokel