Tina's Graduation

Just got back from Tina's graduation. She's completed her nephrology fellowship. That represents the culmination of nine years of post graduate education and training. That puts her at thirteen total years, which beats the paltry eleven years I put in getting my Ph.D. in electrical engineering. Congratulations to Tina! All that's left to do now (you may have thought there was nothing left, but you would have been wrong) is take the board certification test in nephrology. It is a big long test that's only given once a year. No pressure though. If you don't pass, you can always take it again the following year.

Trip to the Petting Zoo

The flickr set is here.

Vacation 2007

Tina and I are in our second week of vacation. Tina had two weeks of vacation left at her job, but her job ends June 30th, so she took off her last two weeks at work. Trent was sick for most of the first week of our vacation. He came down with some sort of viral fever on Friday leading into the vacation. What timing!

The fever lasted until Monday and tailed off into some diarrhea. Tina caught a little of it and had to postpone her Georgetown interview until the end of the week. So, the first week of the vacation was mostly about Trent being sick and worrying about the interview which should have been over early in the week.

We were hoping to take Trent on his first trip to the zoo. The weather that first week was great. Into the second week, the weather turned hot which made the zoo seem like a difficult option. So, since many of Tina's future employment options may require a move, we've been focusing one some long neglected household tasks. We've made some donations to Goodwill and made a trip to the dump. We've worked on some general cleaning up and organizational tasks. All things that would be good if we had to put the house on the market and also good if we stayed.

Tomorrow, we're going to have our good friend Kathy watch Trent for most of the day and Tina and I are going to spend a rare day together doing something. Maybe seeing a movie and getting lunch at a restaurant. It's going to be very exciting!

xkcd

I just read some of a new comic called xkcd. Cory Doctorow posted about it on Boing Boing. Here are a few favorites that I ran across. [1][2][3][4][5]

Trent's Words

Trent can say several words now. He says "Mommy" quite clearly and unambiguously. He also pronounces "Bye" correctly and uses it in the right situations. He says "Da" or "DaDa", but not as well as "Mommy". He has other words that he doesn't pronounce correctly, but that he does use consistently to refer to things. He uses "Ba" for his bottle. He says something I don't know how to spell that means kitty. He uses several other sounds for several other things. Tina things he has about a dozen words total.

The Quest for a Wii

After many weeks of polling various stores, Tina and I finally managed to acquire a Nintendo Wii. It's the latest console game system from Nintendo. It was designed by Nintendo to have appeal beyond the typical gaming market. It has a new controller that has many revolutionary features. The controller allows the user to aim a cursor on the screen by pointing. The controller has accelerometers and level sensors. It's really pretty neat. The systems comes with Wii Sports. It includes simulations of bowling, golf, baseball, boxing, and tennis. The neat thing about the game is that playing the game involves making the actual motions associated with real sport. They're all games that you play standing up. When you bowl, you bring you arm back and swing it through in a real bowling motion. When you golf you swing the controller like a golf club. It's really a very neat system. In addition, we've also been playing WarioWare: Smooth Moves. Smooth Moves is a game made up of over 200 very small micro-games. The idea is that players are presented with very simple puzzles to solve and only a few seconds to solve each one. Last, but not least, is Legend of Zelda. I've never played a Zelda game before. So far it's been a lot of fun. It's an interesting cross between Ultima and a Sierra Online game.

Superhero Dating

In honor of Valentines Day, digg has link to an online quiz that matches you to your idea superhero mate. I had no idea what to expect from my results. Tied for first place were Psylocke and Jean Grey. Lois Lane was second place. I've certainly never thought of myself as a Lois Lane kind of guy, though I'm not familiar with the actual comic character, only the various TV and movie portrayals. [Update 2/17/07] Tina took the test as well. Her results indicates that her ideal superhero mate is Beast with Nightwing a few percentage points behind.