Chasin’

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Muscle Beach

We travelled south last month for my sister’s wedding and took a few days to see some sites around Los Angeles. Our first stop was the farmers market to get some good kid food. We knew that eating out a lot would be expensive, especially if Chase was being picky so we stocked up on fruits and vegetables that we knew he liked. As far as farmers market’s go this one was pretty terrible, but it accomplished what we needed ( they did have California strawberries for $.88/lb).

The first “touristy” thing we visited was the Getty Center. In our guidebook it was listed as kid friendly and free (admission was free, but parking was $15). Chase had a great time climbing up and down the stairs. The entrance had 50 or so stairs to climb so we didn’t actually go into the center for twenty minutes while he played on them. Once inside, Megan and I enjoyed the exhibits, gardens and pools. The tricky part was trying to get Chase to nap when there was so much action going on. One nice thing about the Center was that the had strollers for families, unfortunately even these couldn’t get Chase to fall to sleep.

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From the Getty Center we headed back towards Beverly Hills via Mulholland Drive. It is one of those iconic roads that you see in many movies. It has beautiful views of the valley and the ocean. Chase slept through the whole thing :)

On our second day in LA we headed west, to the beach. Parking is sparse near the beach but after looking for awhile we ended up parking right in front of Muscle Beach which happened to be one of the highlights to our visit. Very kid friendly. Very parent friendly. They had rings…

Tight ropes…

Segways…

Ok, that part wasn’t a highlight, but funny none the less. There were a few stereotypical ‘muscle dudes’ which was also fun to watch. Chase really enjoyed all the sun. We would stayed longer but were afraid of too much sun exposure for our little guy (we did lather him up every two hours).

Overall, our experience was really fun. Chase was happy most of the time and because we drove so much he also napped very well.

Favorite Olympic Moments

Sadly, the Vancouver Olympics have come to and end. My favorite moments where:

1.) Watching Shaun White win Gold in the Men's Snowboard competition. As far as judged sports go, this was a slam dunk.

2.) The Women's Downhill. Lot's of crashes made this one good.

3.) Short Track Day One. When Apolo won Silver. Set the tone for the Olympics.

4.) USA v Canada. That was an amazing game. I don't know much about hockey and I watched more that day on TV then the rest of my life combined.

5.) The mime in the closing ceremonies. It's nice when people can laugh at themselves.

Eat Salem

To say that Salem lacks in culinary choices would be an understatement. Espcially compared to Portland, which is renowed for its quality and variety. But there are quite a few bright spots. Due to a large Mexican population the Mexican food is authentic. And because it's proximity to the ocean, seafood restaurants can serve fresh dishes.

In late 2008, Megan and I started going out to a 'nice' restaurant once a month. Nice places to eat vary widely from person to person and from place to place. One way, for me, to rule out a restaurant as being nice is a chain. Olive Garden, Applebee's, Red Robin, all have their place but it's not the kind of place I look forward to going. The menu is very standard, the food is good but not unique, and the wait staff is very customer oriented but nothing special. To me, a nice restaurant is place where the food is the focus and it's a little different for some reason or another.

One such place is Venti's Cafe. We ate there this evening and it was splendid. It has a fairly small dining room and bar in the basement. They pride themselves on serving a "True Pint", 16oz of beer in a 20 oz glass. I guess that's a pretty big deal to some people. The unique thing about Venti's is their menu. It's hardly what I would consider a cafe (no burgers or potato fries) and though the signature dish is Chicken Teriyaki I would call it Chinese Food. They simply serve what they now how to make very good. The ingredients are top notch and the entrés are very well balanced. The flavor alone qualifies it as a nice restaurant. If you get to go there, I highly recommend the sweet potato fries.

If anybody knows of some hidden gems in Salem please let us know in the comments.

Happy Birthday Chaser

Chase celebrated his first birthday last week. We shared the time with family and friends. He was very accommodating in eating his first birthday cake. While eating his cake you can see in a video below the paparazzi getting in their shots.









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DDR

If you liked Dancing Baby from December, you'll love the Dance Dance Revolution baby from 2010!




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And another...


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Raise the roof little man!

Or maybe a baby pushing a car, complete with sound effects...


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Hobbies

Hello, I'm Captain Random. I don't have a lot of free time. What I do have is a lot of time in a car, commuting to work. During this time I think about the normal stuff (dinner, weekend plans, etc) but I also dream about what I should do with my free time or what my dream career would be. I call myself Capt. Random because these ideas come every day and they seem to be vastly different. I'll get home and tell Megan about them, convinced that that is how I will spend the next 3 or 12 months. The next day the process will start over again. I've been accused of having Adult ADD, an accusation I wear like a badge of honor. A few weeks ago I started writing them down as soon as I got to a computer.

Below are my ideas from the past few weeks:

Writing
Write story about kids who do white collar crimes on the playground. One example would be to view the cafeteria as the open market. Kids would trade their lunch items, Hostess for Little Debbie, Dinasour fruit snacks for Pudding etc. But one kid gets left out of the trade because his parents don't buy him packaged goodness. To remedy this he fabricates an idea that his Mom is going to bring in a large cake for his upcoming Birthday. Using this story he trades his cake futures for Snack Packs and Bite Size Snickers, screwing up the balance of the market, creating a bubble that explodes in his face.

Comedy about a guy who decides to run the local race that in the past four years has been won by Africans. The locals get really excited, he was a high school athelete. He finds out that he's not nearly fast enough so he takes tons of steriods. The steriods have serious/funny side effects (huge head, man boobs) and right before the race he finds out there will be random drug screening because of a few other races where runners were doping.

Write a comedy about a group of friends set in post-apocalyptic North America. There are a lot of movies about the end of the world but I want to see what happens after the dust settles and, I want it to be funny. The genre has been played enough that there should be some common themes. Kind of like Shawn of the Dead did for Zombies.

Write a story about a guy who gets revenge for someone killing his family. Learns how to steal, fake id, shoot gun, drive getaway car etc via Internet articles, some of which were written by the killers. I like a good revenge movie.

Computer

Learn WPF and make an interface kind of like Pivot, from Microsoft.

I think the next frontier for computing will be the car. I don't have the time or expertise to design a full system but I have a lot of ideas about what would make a good one. This idea boils down to buying a carputer design and marketing it. I really like Ford Sync.

Other

Fix up old Subaru Outback with turbo engine. Recently I worked on my car for quite a few hours and really enjoyed it. As we now have a child we need space so we can put a lot of junk in our trunk. I think you could have a pretty cool 1998 Outback with the power train from a car like mine.

Male Nurse. I think I would enjoy being a nurse, a doctor is too much school. I don't think I'd be good at being a female nurse.

Note: At one point I wanted to keep some of them secret so no one would "steal" them but now realize that if someone did I would be happy. This is because I actually want to read a story like the above ones mentioned.

Zippers

If I could pass on only one piece of information for raising a baby - up to 10 months old - it would be zippers. Avoid snaps, buttons, Velcro and elastic at all costs. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to snap 17 buttons on a screaming, crying baby on 4 hours of sleep. I can vouch that the quality of your life will improve in direct proportion to the number of zippered garments your child wears whereas the rest of this post has no basis outside the previous 10 months of experience with my unique child.

The advice you get from others - including me - is useless and invaluable. It's useless because they've told you something that worked for them, for their baby, on that particular occasion and does not apply in a bazillion other cases. It's invaluable because you might be the bazillionth case. For this reason you need to seek out information from others. The more advice you get the more likely you will be able to apply it. Many times advice can easily - sometimes rightly - be perceived as critisim. Don't take it as criticism.

Parenting is not a twelve hour job. You do not have the right to a full nights sleep.

In parenting, consistency is important but rationality is paramount. Try Ferbering, Babywise, Dr. Sears, etc. Don't bet all of your chips on anyone of them. Be flexible enough to abandon your strategy and start over. Pick and choose the parts that work for your child.

Babies haven't learned consistency. Just because they ate every two hours for three months doesn't mean that today they won't want to eat every 45 minutes.

Your child is going through a growth spurt. It ends when they are twenty.

The first 24 hours are magical. The baby sleeps for most of them and hasn't learned true hunger. Savor all 24 of them.

Get out as much as you did before your baby was born. Go shopping, to dinner, on hikes, and visit your friends. It's twice as much effort and half as much fun but still very worthwhile. Make sure not to overdue it.

Your kid is the cutest. No matter what they looked like when they were born. Keep taking pictures. You'll have 1582 pictures from the first three weeks and 50 from the the next three months and it'll be work to get those. After the first four months they don't change as rapidly so get in those daily shots.

Your baby is smarter than you think. They learn from watching you. They are trying to learn the routine. Read to your child. As long as they aren't crying they enjoy it. Even if they don't pay attention to you, pay attention to them. Let them play. Parents and other adults teach children by interacting with them and, most of all, allowing them to play.

2009 Year in Pictures

2009 was a quite the year in for Megan and I. Having a child is by far the biggest challenge I've had. To say my life will never be the same would be an understatement. Most times in life, change is gradual. Not with a baby, one night you get 9 hours of sleep and the next (300+) you don't. But I'm getting ahead of the story...

Starting in December 2008, 2009 was a rather wintery year for the Willamette Valley...

Megan loved being pregnant (except she couldn't eat pizza (heart burn) and couldn't sleep on her back or stomach)...


Seems very long ago...


On February 11th Chase was born. Here is the first picture I have of him. He was blue when he was born...


After the initial scare, mother and baby where very healthy...


And we brought home a beautiful baby boy...

We stayed home a lot those first few months. It was much less stressful than going out...


Chase spent much of his first year in either a sling, a backpack or a frontpack. Not that he was awake for much of it...


Our little baby slowly showed us his personality...


Sometimes he looks like me...


Other times Megan...


We had our first house guests (looks like Oliver wants to fly away)...


It's no wonder that Chase dances whenever he hear music...


Finally some outside time...


After a pretty stressful plane ride we go to visit Pennsylvania. They had a very nice reception for us...
At one point Chase was in the 80th percentile for weight. He was chunky. Here he his next to his best bud Troy, three months older...


In July he even spent a night in the woods...


He did a lot of sleep packing (that's backpacking while sleeping). Opal Creek...


Hart's Cove, Oregon beach...


At some point, he got really good at smiling. One might even say he was addicted to it...


He also got good at blank stares...


One form of non-baby recreation I had was gardening. I would say it was a success (except the squash, the tomatoes took them over)...


For Chase's second plane ride we went to California. It was the first time he was with all his cousins (from my side)...


We stretched out the hiking season well into October. We were well prepared for the colder weather thanks to this puffer we received as a gift...


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Once mobile he kept us on our toes. We purposefully didn't try to baby proof our house too much. He was quick to show us the areas we needed to pay special attention too...


Oliver and Chase have learned to get along pretty well. Especially with now that Mom and Dad watch their every interaction. They definitly had some good moments...


Chase fit the stereotype of liking the packing of the present more that the actual presents he got for Christmas...


We finished out the year with some skiing and sledding in Central Oregon. Chase enjoyed the action. Mom and Dad would have preferred to stay home and just do day trips...


Here's to 2010 and bathing with other people!

Baby's First Christmas