It's a Boy!

Tina and I just returned from our 18 week ultrasound. Crimson Raptor is a boy! All the ultrasound measurements of development were normal. There were twenty digits all in the right places. There was a four-chambered heart, a brain, a good looking spine, and a pair of kidneys. I'll post some pictures and maybe some video a little later on when I've got the computer better set up. I recorded the whole ultrasound exam on video, so we have that for posterity. Now, we just have to find a name for a boy. We'd actually already settled on a name for a girl. Not because we had a preference, just because we happened to agree on that particular name. Anyway, there it is!

Moving In Complete

With one last load of boxes from Carolyn's basement, we've completed our move into the new house. I expect to finish unpacking sometime in early 2007. Okay, maybe late 2007. Carolyn was kind enough to lend us some of her basement space during our move process. We moved a bunch of our clutter into her basement so that the house wouldn't look so cluttered when we had the house on the market. Thanks Carolyn! There's no way we could have made the townhouse look as good as it did without your help.

Our first priority was to get the kitchen up and operational. We've achieved that. My next priority is to get the home theatre back into operation. I've been pulling cables through walls and ceilings. That went pretty well until I discovered that a wall I was hoping to route cable through is actually built onto the face of a cinderblock wall. And the walls downstairs have a textured surface, so I can't just tear into them and patch them up later because I can't reproduce the texture. Well, what's life without a challenge?

I've started reading up on putting together my woodshop out in the new garage. I'm looking into heating/cooling solutions. A guy from Trane is suppossed to come out and give me some ideas about what I can do for such a small building.

Also soon to come is redecorating the nursery. I keep telling Tina that babies like beige, but she doesn't seem to be buying it.

Tina just mentioned another priority that I'd forgotten. We really need to replace the packing paper and masking tape that we're using for curtains. I know...it's a very guy thing for me to forget about that.

Moving Day

We moved today. Well, to be honest, three very strong men we hired did most of the work. The most harrowing moment was, as expected, the extraction of the china hutch from the old townhouse. It makes it down the stairs with less that an inch to spare. The new house is great. It has a garage. This allows me to do something I've always wanted to do. Put things in the garage. We also have a crawl space. I'm looking forward to putting things in it too. The house also fulfils another of my life long dreams. Shortly after closing on the house, I filled a glass of water from the dispenser on the refrigerator. There are pictures of the event.

After moving all of the stuff, we moved the cats. They're prowling about the new master bedroom. Havoc has already tried to convince us to let him out into the rest of the house, but I told him he has to convince me that he knows where the litter box is before I let him roam.

I'm planning to put a woodshop into our detached garage. This will involve insulating the walls and ceiling, installing some sort of heating/cooling unit, and buying a bunch of really cool machines.

But first, the great task of unpacking begins. That will be followed by the task of working on the yard and the outside of the house. The inside of the house has just been entirely redone. So, the inside is like a new house. The outside is less so. The yard mostly needs work. Oh, and decorating the nursery. There's that too. :-)

New House

We've successfully gotten a contract on a new house. That's good. The days of not knowing where we would live are, pending a house inspection and an appraisal, over. I really like the walls of glass. I'm a sucker for a big window.

Sold the House

Tina and I have successfully sold the house. We had some help from Judy and Bob Caton. We put the house up for sale on a Friday. Over the weekend we had 40 agents show the house. Thirteen people made offers. We accepted one significantly above the list price. Selling a house isn't done until the settlement, of course, but we think we've got a good buyer and we think the house is in really good shape so we have every confidence that the sale will go through.

If you have flash installed you can see the web advertisement.

Our New Fetus Codename: Crimson Raptor

Tina and I would like to announce the existence of our new fetus. The fetus is currently code named Crimson Raptor. It's hard to find a good gender neutral code name, but luckily the Internet is full of helpful people willing to lend a hand. This is a close up of the fetus taken using ultrasound technology. The picture is from March 1st. The baby is due September 25. Here's the wide angle version of the picture. Update: I corrected the due date from 9/21 to 9/25

Baby Name Voyager

Here's a really neat program for exploring baby names. I got it from Sarah Lane's blog. Check it out. It explores frequency of baby names from 1900 to 2003.