Katherine Meets Pacific: Huntington Beach, CA

This is one of a few pictures I was able to take of Katherine with Rebecca during our first visit to Huntington Beach with her.

We spent a bit of time on the beach so that she could experience the sand and the surf for the first time.

I didn’t make it to the Pacific ocean until I was 26. This was also her first trip on a jet airplane. I was 21 before I first flew on a jet. Then again, my grandparents didn’t live in California like Katherine’s does.

She didn’t seem to mind the sand on her feet. She just seemed curious about it. This was pretty much her same reaction to the waves. Curious, but not fearful.

Friday, June 13, 1997

I don’t have any fear of Friday the 13th.  On Friday, June 13, 1997 I graduated from The Ohio State University.

That day, a freak rain storm came through Columbus.  I recall walking to the Horseshoe as it poured along with many other graduates and it was interesting to see how different folks handled the bad weather.  I saw a few girls crying because they felt their day was ruined for some reason and I sort of marveled at that reaction.  It wasn’t like the weather could be changed, nor did it reflect anyone’s academic achievements.

My reaction was to literally soak up the moment.  Notice I am still wearing my mortarboard!

After all of the students entered into the stadium, E. Gordon Gee attempted to begin speaking, but there was so much rain that the PA system was not working well and it was crackling.  While folks scrambled to get that working, one lone wolf ran down from the stands hooting and hollering and jumped into a puddle of water that had formed at the north end of the stadium where the flagpole is and shouted ‘Wipeout!’ I distinctly remember being given the speech about how that if anyone acted up, Guard members would be there to escort any individuals out of the ceremony.  After this happened, I noticed the Guard members looking around at each other determining what they should do.  When they didn’t do anything to this guy, all of the students broke loose from their seats in the stands and rushed the field.

Our ceremony was effectively over — we didn’t even get to hear our speaker, Bob Greene.  However, I got to do something incredible.  I was able to run across the field and dive on it like it was the world’s largest slip and slide.  It was absolutely incredible how far you could slide while wearing those nylon gowns!

It is really hard to fathom how much rain came down during that ceremony and how quickly it stopped.  My mom had some pills in a prescription bottle inside her purse that was filled with water.

Was it odd that our graduation was rained out on Friday the 13th? Perhaps, but I like to think that good things and bad things can happen every day. It is your choice on how that affects you.

David, Michael and I

A few months back, I found this funny old photo while scanning family pics. In the photo left to right are David, Michael and myself. I don’t know what was in the box, though I am fairly confident it wasn’t diapers. Also, I have no idea why we appear to be strutting like we are rolling up to some casino like you see so often in the movies.

The other mystery to me is ‘What happened to 12-26 lb. size diapers?’

Polar Bear At Columbus Zoo

Rebecca, Katherine and I met up with some friends at the Columbus Zoo yesterday.  It was my first time there this year and I hadn’t seen the new Polar Bear exhibit yet.  It is a decent exhibit that has an underwater viewing area that gets really crowded when the bears jump in and try to get fish.

I guess we happened to catch one of them during an afternoon nap.

Amish Buggy

I recently attended my grandfather’s estate sale around Rushsylvania in Logan County Ohio.  While walking to Grandma’s house from where we parked, we noticed this Amish horse and buggy tied to a tree in Grandpa’s walnut tree woods.

So much about this picture evokes the notion of a simple life.   It is peaceful, quiet and serene.  For me, this is a big part of what I like about going home. It relaxes me.

Still, it is a bit of a paradox. Simple does not mean easy.  It doesn’t really take much to care for and maintain an automobile.  Feeding and caring for a horse on the other hand — not so much. How about enjoying that nice grove of trees? That only took ~30 years to develop

Here are a few highlights:

Fourth of July in Rushsylvania

Throughout my life, this has been virtually a yearly event.  Rushsylvania is not the most exciting town, but that’s where our family gets together and that is nice.  Also, this year, my nephew Greg was visiting from North Carolina and it was great to see him interact with Katherine. I think they like each other.

Katherine and Greg

Air Conditioner Failure

During one of the hottest stretches of the year, our air conditioner went out.  This is never fun and really not fun with an infant in the house.  Thankfully, it was just a blown capacitor that was fixed quickly and didn’t require a new unit.

Mega Sports Camp

I spent a week of evenings volunteering as a football coach for children at our church.  I had a lot of fun doing this and thought it was great that there were two girls who played football as well.  I have worked with kids before, but never as a parent myself.  I caught a glimpse of what our future will be like as Katherine gets a bit older.

Goodbye, Jacob

After a very tough time and decision process, we had to say goodbye to our tabby cat Jacob. He was  a part of our family since 2003.  He was a very sweet and affectionate cat and required a lot of attention. I think he never adjusted to Katherine being in our house. We thought that since he never acted up when she first arrived, he would be fine. However, as she got older and more animated, I think it must have just stressed him out more until it was too much to the point that he was not using the litter box appropriately far too frequently.  Thankfully, the shelter we adopted him from could take him back.  This was a terribly tough decision, but I like to think he’ll do great in the right home.

Jacob

Celebrated Dad’s 60th Birthday

We had a nice cookout with family at Mom and Dad’s house.  I think it was 95 degrees, but in the back of their house are a few shade trees and there is always a nice breeze there. It felt great.  There are few things in life more refreshing than moments like these.

Katherine Started Swimming Lessons

Rebecca and Katherine started lessons in the pool to get her comfortable in the water. She won’t be doing laps soon, but I think it is great for her to get use to it and she seems to have a great time in the water.

Rebecca and I Kayaked

We haven’t done this since late 2008 in Huntington Beach, CA while visiting Rebecca’s parents for Christmas.  Last year, Rebecca was pregnant for Katherine and didn’t feel comfortable in situations that might involve slipping and I didn’t end up doing it alone for whatever reason.  Yesterday, Mom and Dad babysat Katherine so we could get out on the water again. It was better than I remembered — hope to get out a few more times this year.

I probably missed a few things, but that was kind of a fun way to jot it all down.  I guess this post was more like a Christmas letter.  Christmas in July — ahem–  August?

While I wasn’t completely thrilled, I figured I would at least find out how well my backup strategy worked.  I use Time Machine for my home computers and have apparently been completing their tasks successfully.  However, I had never tried to restore from it before.

While I am now back up and running, I did learn about a few problems with my backup strategy that didn’t work seamlessly which I will pass on along with things that did work.

Perform Regular Backups

This is a no brainer, right? If you don’t backup routinely, you’ll lose data.  The aspect of this I never really thought much about is that psychologically, you will be most concerned about the data you were working with most recently. This also happens to be the stuff you will lose if you don’t regularly backup.  For me, this is the best part about Time Machine.  When it is enabled, you get hourly backups and you can’t configure it with any other frequency. Until you have a failure, this may seem overkill. When the failure happens, you will be very happy about this feature.

Make Offline Storage Part Of Your Backup

While your computer is down for the count and in need of restoration, you may need access to certain documents while this is occurring. Dropbox is a great solution for this and they offer 2 GB free storage. This amount of space is typically enough for document syncing. It also doubles as a convenient way to use these documents any time you are away from your computer.  A bonus is that since you get a chance to utilize your synced content before a failure happens, you can feel more confident that restoration will work.

Do NOT exclude your iTunes Library Files From Your Backup

If you have chosen to exclude your media from backup because you have stored it elsewhere such as a network share, etc. make sure to backup your iTunes library files. I made this mistake while choosing to exclude my Music folder from my backup and found out the hard way that this also means your iPod can’t sync files back to your library.  Apart from the hassle of re-importing the files, you lose playlists, ratings and more.  Further, if you exclude like I did, you may  lose apps you have as well.

Exclude VM’s From Backup

When configuring Time Machine, you have the option of excluding files from the backup. You might do this if you have a different backup strategy for certain files, and in the case of virtual machine disks, you really want a different strategy. Time Machine will determine if a file needs backed up based on modification date. Since virtual machine disks modify this date at every use and they are in the many-gigs size category, they would quickly fill your hard drive, unless of course you never used them.

Include System Files In Your Backup

I had read in some  articles the notion that it made sense to exclude these from your Time Machine backup, and I did. The idea was that you would save space because you had the installation disks. Big mistake. Firstly, relative to everything else they don’t take up that much space. Secondly, if you don’t back these up, you lose out on a very nice feature of the Leopard/Snow Leopard installation process, which is to restore from a Time Machine backup.  As it was, I needed to go through the installation process and then do my restore, which takes longer and is more manually involved.

It’s OK to Backup iPhoto/Aperture Libraries

Due to the same reasoning about backing up VM’s, one might be led to think that a large iPhoto library or Aperture library might not be a good idea to backup since they end up being large over time and change frequently for the typical user. While these look like very large single files to you in Finder, they are actually bundles. This means they may be expanded by you for examination and Time Machine does this too. The result is that it makes incremental updates within the bundle.

Secondary Backup For Important Stuff

When faced with a hard drive failure, you really reflect on what files are important. This is the stuff you should have a second copy of — just in case.  Redundant hard drives and optical are fine for this, but I found that while I was re-installing things, I considered how if a fire or theft occurred, I would need something offsite.

There are many offsite backup options such as Mozy, Carbonite, JungleDisk and DropBox that I suppose fill this purpose.

For me, the big thing is photos. I store my photos on SmugMug that offers unlimited storage with their plan. Unlike the other solutions, this is geared also for photo sharing, so the bonus is that I get some value out of it even before using it to restore photos.

If interested, use this code for $5  off at SmugMug: Z072MKPtbXNgA.

In short

• Time Machine works wonderfully well — don’t try to over think it to save disk space. Using the default settings would have worked much better for me.
• Complement your local backups with remote storage for immediate access and redundancy.

Rebecca surprised me with pictures she had taken of Katherine just a few weeks ago, ~6 months old. They are beautiful. I dare say we have a very photogenic child — and I admit to being biased

Katherine ~ 6 months

I am feeling extremely blessed today!