.: blog :.

Sounds like it should be the name of a song, but we’ve been getting down to business on our kitchen remodeling project. I was happy to discover that the wall we wanted to tear down in our kitchen wasn’t carrying any of the weight of the 1 1/2 stories of bricks and house above it. So once we got the plaster and lath down, my father-in-law and I took to the studs with a sawzall (an essential tool, I’m discovering!). In no time, the wall was history.

As a side note, I’ve been testing the limits of the trash men lately. Sometimes they take all the bags of construction debris I leave out for them, sometimes they leave a couple for me to lug back behind the house, only to haul out for them again the next week. Good thing we’re spreading out the work over several months!

As promised, here is video of the sonogram. Any guesses on whether it’s a boy or a girl? We asked them not to tell us, but I’m naturally curious!  (Note: You might have to right-click and “save link as…” to get the videos to play.)

Clip 1 (9.6MB)
Clip 2 (16.0MB)

Today has been a very special day. No, not that it’s my birthday as the title might imply. But that it’s BABY DAY! Erica and I took the afternoon off work and had our one and only sonogram appointment to see the baby! After that, we had our third baby checkup. We’re about half-way through the pregnancy and we’re thankful to say that everything is going very well. Baby is healthy, mom is doing great, and dad is excited to watch things come along.

This was my first visit to Magee Womens Hospital where we’ll be having the baby. Pittsburgh really has some top-notch hospitals and Magee is one of them, specializing in women’s health care. It’s a beautiful hospital and has a lot of thoughtful touches for expecting parents. We got a strip of six pictures from the sonogram, and they put them in this nice card for us to take home. Having a baby is a big event, and I think they’ll make it very special too.

Check back next week and we’ll have actual video from the sonogram posted. You can see things much better than in the B&W photo.

Wow, can’t believe it’s February already. Erica and I have been looking into buying a new digital camera that we can use to take lots and lots of pictures of the new baby (and other things, of course!). She took a photography class in high school and enjoys taking pictures. Her old camera was a Nikon SLR I think, but it’s broken. As for me, I’ve gotten more “into” graphic design and photography as time goes by.

We got a Canon Powershot A70, our first digital camera, in 2003 and it has worked really well for us. Digital cameras are truly revolutionary, and it’s nice to be able to take all the pictures you want. It enables you to be more creative, capture more things “on film”, and have better photos all around. Not to mention being able to play with them on the computer. So that’s helped us to enjoy photography more and we were looking forward to upgrading since digital cameras have come so far in 4 years.

Enter the Panasonic FZ8. We’re not up for spending big bucks for a digital SLR, but would like more zoom and features in a camera than we have now. So we’ve been looking at some with 12x optical zoom (Olympus just announced one with 18x zoom!) and models by Canon and Panasonic stood out. The Panasonic is less expensive and has the same features more or less, except that it has a better movie mode. You really don’t need a camcorder if your camera can record movies well, and with memory cards up to 16GB this year, you’re not really limited on space. So unless Canon announces a big step up from their S3-IS camera later this month, we’ll probably be getting this bad boy when it goes on sale!