Not too much has changed since my last post, except for the view to the North from our home here in SoCal:

.

No, that’s not a cloud. We don’t live in the best part of town for optimal smoke viewing, but that immense body of suspended particulate is the smoke plume from the “Day” Wild Fire, a 120,000 acre blaze doing its best to burn up all the condors left in the world, and threatening a few towns and causing some rather severe highway closures. Here in safe Camarillo, though, all we really have to worry about is the smoke and ash stopping up our lungs and making our pretty cars all dirty.

In Baby news, Mollie has recently passed the 14 weeks milestone, which means our baby actually looks like a little tiny baby, weighing somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.5 oz. More on that as it develops.

Look! We’re not dead. We’re very much alive and have been busy, which has led to our lack of posting recently… First off, you should all know that I found a beer that was clearly made for me.

Black Toad is a dark, “chestnut” colored beer with a nut-y flavor, which is further more named for me, a man who appreciates a good dark beer.

One of the things we’ve been busy with is a fun trip to San Diego last weekend, to visit our friends Jubal and Suzanne Marlatt, and The Dinwiddie Family. On our way down, we found an interesting Vietnamese restaurant in Oceanside…

First off, when did “OK” become a noun? And, what really is an OK? Whatever it may be, it has another sign that claims that “We Carry: Dine In & Take Out; Special Order; Party & Birthday Group; Gift Certificate Available; Catering.” Last time I checked a “Gift Certificate Available” was a complete sentence. How do you carry a sentence? Go go Engrish!

Sunday in San Diego we spent the afternoon in Balboa Park. We went to the Natural History museum and the Air and Space museum, which were both very fun. We also saw a big pipe organ, and a tree with some mighty impressive roots, which are pictured for you below. I wish I had a person in the tree picture for scale, but those roots are probably a good 50 feet long.

This week, we’re off to a business trip in glorious Stockton, CA, which I’m hoping will go smoothly. More on that later.

So, I noticed that I’ve been, well, lax in my updating, while my wife has been much better about it than me. 😉 Thus, I figured that I ought to drop by and give an update from my perspective.

Work has been about the same as when last I posted; I’m enjoying the work and am being given some of my own projects, which is a good combination of challenging and fun. The apartment is very much our home now, and we’re trying to figure out where to put some baby furnishings. 😉

As Mollie mentioned in her last post, we’re expecting a baby! This is very exciting for both of us, and has introduced a lot of new challenges in our lives. To keep poor Mollie’s tummy happy, our eating habits have gotten a little weird, and there’s lots of last-minute shopping trips or being roused from bed to get new water bottles on my part. I’m really not complaining, though, because even though it doesn’t sound all that fun (and indeed isn’t always), I am overcome with joy at the prospect of having a child, and I am so happy that I can take care of Mollie when she’s not feeling well.

Excepting the baby news, there haven’t been that many new developments in our lives these past few weeks, but that news is probably development enough for a little while. 😉

It’s really in there! We could hear and see the heartbeat on the ultrasound this morning. Don’t feel bad if it doesn’t look like a baby to you, it looks like a grainy blob to me too. 🙂
As for me, I am very tired all the time and my life now revolves around eating whatever temporarily relieves the nausea on that particular day. (The magic foods right now are protein bars and Taco Bell. Yum!) Andy has been extremely helpful and patient, putting up with my random cravings and aversions, running to the store at all hours of the night because I’m too sick to go buy the one food that will make me feel better. What a trooper!

That’s all for now, time for my nap.

I meant to post more often, but it’s already been almost two weeks! I promise it’s because we haven’t done anything interesting. I still go to the gym a lot and make brownies way too often (learned to make them from scratch… WAY to convenient now!). That’s about it.
The weather has been crazy though, so hot and humid. I walk outside and it feels exactly like I am back in Texas! Very eerie! Thankfully our air conditioning finally works, so I don’t have to retreat to the grocery store or other cool places in the afternoon when the house heats up.

Tomorrow night we are going to the Hollywood Bowl, so perhaps I will have some pictures and something interesting to say about that. Jamie got us free tickets. Yay for musician sisters with connections!

I still don’t know how to post pictures. Sorry! Keep coming back for more updates.