Daddy Day

For John's first Father's Day, we had tickets to the Astros and the three of us plus my cousin Grant headed to the ballpark. It was a good game, especially for Grant since the Rangers won. But it was also Zara's first baseball game. I think daughter and daddy had a good day. Zara has also started making her "d" sounds but I don't think we are quite ready to call it a word yet when she says "da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da". But I'm pretty sure I'm going to 'lose' in the first word battle.



I also spent Monday through Wednesday in Boulder doing some software testing for work. It was a short trip again but we had dinner one night at a pretty cool teahouse from Boulder's sister city in one of the "stans", Dushanbe.

California Dreaming

Monday I headed out to the other, larger Bay Area for a meeting at NASA-Ames. I'd previously never been in the area, so I was looking forward to it. We got in early enough Monday to head up to Napa Valley for a little sight seeing/tasting before the sun went away. My favorite stop was at V. Sattui where they have a deli and we also picked up some great cheese, salami, and bread and enjoyed a mini-feast on the picnic table. We also had dinner at Michael Chiarello's restaurant Bortega. I had oh so yummy braised beef short ribs with Meyer lemon spinach.

Tuesday all day was the meeting and we also got to tour the unitary wind tunnel where they were getting our model setup for testing. After formerly working in a wind tunnel in college it was neat to see the Ames tunnel, too bad I couldn't sneak into the 120x80 foot tunnel I've always wanted to see. In the evening, some of us headed into San Francisco for dinner, we made it to Fisherman's Wharf just in time for sunset. The rock below is actually The Rock, Alcatraz from the end of the pier. And that was it with a return to H-town the next morning. Didn't get to see much, but it was pretty what I did see.

Reverse Psycology

We must be close to crawling... because we started out just an inch out of reach.

EVOlution

John and I have finally joined the 21st century and are now proud owners of smartphones tapping away with our thumbs. Our contract was up so we could get whatever phone we wanted. With all our research we settled on the HTC Evo 4G. Ummm.... it's awesome. It's is blazing fast, especially on 4G, has a huge screen, and other bells and whistles like 8MP camera/camcorder, HD 720P HDMI output, and a whole lot of goodies. Having owned an iPod touch for awhile now, I also think the HTC sense Android interface is way better than the iPhone. The iPhone 4th generation (not actually 4g) is coming out soon and I'm sure a lot of people will like it. But really, the phones are if nothing else comparable but ours comes without the apple overlord at least.

Oh and minor correction, Zara wasn't teething so much as she was sick two weekends ago. how do we know? Because she gave it to us this last weekend. It's special, 8months old and already giving us presents.