Howie - Our Photographic Challenge!

Photo by Fotomom.

While Maryann AKA Fotomom was here visiting last week she took a really sweet picture of Howie in our kitchen.  After she got home this week, she took some time to dress up the picture and wrote a lovely blog post about him and how she made the great picture!

Photographers have been challenged many times with Howie.  Here are a couple of the not-so-great professional family pictures with Howie.

November 2002.

October 2005.

Howie does a good job with sitting still and letting the camera do his thing (hint: just say the magic word, "WALK?" and he'll look right at you attentively!), if only he showed up better-looking...Maryann got it right by taking advantage of the white-colored setting.

Pandering to the Pond

This week I put away the "kitchen laptop" once and for all.  We got our weather webcam working again with Dave's old PC laptop that had been sitting in our front office unused since we moved here.

With no kitchen laptop to occupy my time reformatting and partitioning, I've taken on a new hopeless project.  Wasn't sure whether to call it my Waterloo or my Achilles' heel or what, but it's effectively taken the place of the kitchen laptop.

I've talked about the small pond in front my rental house before.  It's pretty, and the cascading fountain is really really cool.  Most of the time my involvement with the pond isn't the greatest.

The hose in the background is connected to our well pump, thus making it easy (and free-of-charge) to refill the pond with non-chlorinated water.

It's too small.  I'm going to guess the homeowner doesn't read this blog so I'll just be honest here and declare that it's almost inhumane to have tried to keep 4 large koi in that small space.  I'd guess it's about 55-60 gallons.  Not enough for large goldfish.

I've been keeping notes of my "pond issues".

• At first there was a lot of splashing out of those cascading trays and when the sprinklers weren't running in the winter, I had to manually refill the pond almost daily.  I recently rearranged the trays and virtually eliminated this problem.
• The hose that runs up the center of the fountain often slips and without warning the water isn't cascading down the trays.  I have to remove one of the trays to access the hose and thread it back up the center of the fountain.  Darned gravity!
• As I had written about this past spring, I had killed all 4 of the original koi that were with the house when we moved here in December.  So I had replaced those koi with 3 smaller ones.  The day we left on vacation we had thunderstorms and the outdoor electrical circuit that includes the pond pump shorted out.  Within 24 hours, those new koi were dead.
• The algae!!!  Once the weather started warming up the amounts of algae have been very difficult to control.  The pond is too small for a UV filter, which probably would solve all of our problems, so I'm trying humane methods to control the algae: barley straw packets and manual water changes.
• There is a frog that lives in or near the pond.  He's really loud.  My neighbors send me Facebook wall posts, he's so loud.
• Or shall I say..."She?"

Meet Mr. Tadpole, one of about a dozen living in the pond now!  Perhaps this picture is difficult to see?  I brought 3 of the tadpoles into the house to show to the boys.

So I now have 3 tadpoles in the kitchen swimming in a Pyrex glass and I'm not sure what to do with them.  I'm considering setting up a small habitat and seeing if we can see the development over the next few weeks...a cool summer science project, right?  After all, I'm the ant-farming, vermicomposting Mom, right?

Also, to replace the koi that died during our vacation, I bought 8 feeder goldfish from our local Wal-mart.  At 38 cents a piece, I've officially thrown in the towel on making large investments in this pond.

I tried to get pictures of the new little goldfish trucking around the pond, but the water is so incredibly murky from the algae, it's been near impossible:

Do you trust me when I say there's a goldfish in there?

Wish me luck!

Change of Command Time!

Hey -- is this lady really juggling for you?  In my blog post draft this is animated!

Today I'm doing a "reset" of sorts.  As great a time as we had at Disneyworld, on our road trip, and hosting our North Carolina friends showing off the sights of the Florida Panhandle, I realized we were "on the go" for a solid MONTH!

From June 8th through July 10th!  Wow!  And then there's GeekMom Jenny who's currently halfway through a 40-day vacation!

So here's our "reset": The kids are taking it easy, we're taking care of a few errands, cleaning up the house some, and we're getting ready for this weekend's next set of festivities.

My Dear Husband's assumption of command is this Friday.  Dave will be taking command of an Air Force weather squadron, and I couldn't be more proud!  The "change of command" ceremony itself is a pretty elegant affair, and much of our extended family is coming into town this weekend to see the ceremony and celebrate with Dave.

I did a cursory search for some easy-to-digest information to help define Air Force Squadron command to a non-military member.  I didn't think I'd find it, but I found this recent blog post with exactly what I need!  An Air Force Colonel at Sheppard AFB, TX wrote about how squadron commanders are selected and what kind of job is ahead of the Air Force's newest squadron commanders.  Wow!  How easy is that?  I'll just link it for you here:

Sheppard Live: Squadron Command

I'm proud and excited for Dave, but also nervous about what impact squadron command will have on the family.  While part of me is dreading that I'll never see Dave for the next 2 years, that his new wife will be his squadron, I also remember how it was when Dave first started his 3-year PhD program in North Carolina.  Several fellow Air Force PhD-student families warned me, "Kiss Dave goodbye for the next 3 years.  He's going to be living at his office!".

So. Not. True.  Dave did a great job managing his time and even though it was tough work, things didn't seem as bad as I thought they would be.

We are looking forward to have all the parents in town for the weekend, along with Dave's brother and our 16-year-old niece.