Cautionary Tales

I've had a very busy work-wise, and as a result I've been really bad about posting pictures/video. Work appears to be getting back to normal somewhat, so I'm going to try to catch up on everything I've neglected during the long summer (which seems to have ended everywhere else in the northern hemisphere expect here in Arizona). I decided it was time to get going again when I came into the kitchen tonight to find Matthew laughing about as hard as you'll ever hear him laugh. I guess Karin dropped something she was eating, and he thought it was pretty funny, so she kept doing it. He was eating something chocolate at the time, so sorry about the state of his face.

While I'm at it, here's another one from the beginning of August. The audio is horrible, but it's too late tonight for me to bother fixing it (I may re-post this tomorrow). I mainly like this clip because Matthew decides about halfway through that a spatula he dragged into the living room would make a good guitar.



I'm glad I live in a time when we can capture all of these little moments, but I'm also glad that I am fairly consistent at backing all of them up. Our computer crashed over the weekend, and had I not been backing everything up, we would have lost a lot of stuff - pictures, video, Karin's projects. Twice during my MBA within about a two week span, I suffered through late night computer crashes with assignments due the next morning, so I learned my lesson. If you haven't had this happen before, learn from my experience. It's well worth the cost of an additional hard drive, an external hard drive, or a network storage box (I actually have all three, probably the result of working in a storage products division) to have a little peace of mind.

While I'm at it, let me pass along another lesson learned from the weekend. At some point in the past year or so, we started playing this little game with Matthew where we'd pretend to be asleep, and he'd sneak up on us and yell "Wake Up!". It was funny for a while, but today I was deep in the middle of a quality Sunday afternoon nap (which I don't take often enough) and awoke to a 2-year-old yelling about 3 inches from my face. In retrospect, it was kind of funny, but at the time I wasn't too amused.

One last word of caution. The other day a "friend of mine" sent me a link to this video on YouTube, and now it's been stuck in my head for two days. I would argue that this is simultaneously the low point in the history of Christian music and in the top 10 of all time (regardless of genre) in terms of catchiness (sandwiched between "Ice, Ice Baby" and the theme to "The Greatest American Hero."). It's evidently real and seems to have been well-intentioned, but watch at your own risk.