Alex is snoozing away.  This means I got to watch TV and use the computer.  Yay!  He's actually a sweatheart.  Everyday I'm amazed at the rapid progress he's been making.  Today I changed the "the Wheel on the Bus" to work on airplanes and he followed right along.  That's a really good sign since autistic kids don't like changing established patterns, but he jumped right in (whereas he wouldn't do it just six months ago).

Alex also found that he has a Curious George plush toy and he's been glued to it for the past two days.  I've seen him attached to machines like cars and trains (my little Cylon) but not stuffed animals, so that's really sweet to watch as well as very encouraging. 

I made ceviche tonight, and it was great.  I posted the recipe to the cooking community, but here's a link to it:

http://community.livejournal.com/cooking/6362721.html

I love to cook and I've been having a lot of fun participating in that community.  It's given me some great ideas already, but in general it's just fun to talk about food and discuss recipes. 

Unfortunately work is still crazy, so I'm heading straight back to work.

So the weekend plan went without a hitch. We got to drop off Alex at the inlaws on Saturday just after noon. The plan is to stay at a hotel near the BART station in Pleasant Hill so we can take a train into scary Oakland.  The hotels was excellent, and we got a discreet, corner suite that we can use for any nefarious reasons ;)

We had a great dinner afterwards at a Cuban restaurant in downtown Walnut Creek.  They had a great halibut ceviche and tasty mojitos, but unfortunately something did a number on our stomachs. That delayed us hopping on BART to go to the concert, and as a result we missed the first band (called 3) on stage. Slight bummer, but no problem. The main attraction is yet to come. 


So overall we had a great time at the concert.  We got back to the hotels at midnight, and went to sleep by 1:30am. I was in bliss not having the baby boy stick his foot in my ribs or my head (or even worse places). We woke up at 10am and went to brunch in Walnut Creek at a place called the San Franciscan. The food was good (I had crab cakes Benedict), but then it was time to pick up Alex. So we showed up at my inlaw's house. Alex was pretty good with them, but he was ready to go home. So we got home and all was well. I made a teppanyaki dinner again because naiad8  wanted to go to Benihana earlier but the idiots wouldn't open for lunch until 1pm.

The weekend was great, but the week is going to be crazy.  It's already started crazy.  Alex woke up at 2am and didn't go back to sleep until 5am.  So I'm pretty tired this morning.  My company is having a software release today, but I'll miss that because I have to go pick up my relatives at the airport.  A cousin of mine is graduating from UW Pullman so her brother and mom came from Costa Rica, who will then go on the coast-to-coast tour of America with stops in San Francisco and New York.  The original plan was for my mom and I pick up at the airport, but a phone call last night drafted naiad8 and Alex in the second car because apparently my cousin at Pullman decided to send two suitcases worth of crap with her mother and brother back to Costa Rica.  So they'll have like 6 pieces of luggage and carry-on, and there's just no way it'd fit in any of our cars.  Don't you just love cheapskate relatives?  How hard is it to ship her crap to Costa Rica?  It's not like it's a real third-world country.  Jeez!

Anyway, back to work.  It's gonna be crazy.

Software release day is next Monday. Same day I got relatives flying in and I gotta pick them up in the afternoon. This means that the rest of the crew gets to do the upgrade without me. I think I need codeine to get sleep between now and Monday night.

Not that I've been sleeping much lately. I've been up until godless hours working on ten man-days worth of work that needs to be done in two days. Yeah, it's that good.

Stress, what's that?

At least this weekend Alex will be with the grandparents so we got to go to Prog Nation 2008 with Dream Theater and Opeth. Oh yeah! Plus we'll get a nice dinner by ourselves and a night w/o He-Who-Uses-His-Mom-As-Pillow-And-His-Dad-As-Foot-Rest.

And why am I using my Cylon icon? Because of this:

New Basic Element For Electronic Circuits: 'Memristor' Could Give Computers Memories That Don't Forget
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080501155234.htm

Current computer memory is either stored in magnetic wells on your hard drives (slow) or between capacitors as in main memory (volatile).  This new memristor is supposedly both fast and non-volatile.  And really small.  5 nanometers, about the size of a sugar molecule. 

While I do nominally hold an electrical engineering degree, I have to say that EE people needs to come up with better names.  "Memristor"?  Sounds like a bad marketing move from 1999 for some failed dotcom (like the ones I was in *hides in shame*).

OK, back to work.

Ruffian came home with us last night after six hours of IV in the hospital.  I took him back this morning and they ran the same blood tests again.  His test results are either normal or close to normal, so he's definitely getting better.  We also concluded that he accidentally ate some ibuprofen while digging through my wife's old purse.  Crackers and pills were mixed in the bottom, and so he probably swallowed some while wolfing down crackers. 

He started eating again and has been keeping it down, so that's a good sign.  In fact, he looked pretty darn hungry last night already, and I felt so guilty not being to feed him because the vet told us to withhold food until his stomach was more back to normal.  So looks like Ruffian dodged the bullet this time, although only time will tell what long-term effect this episode had on his kidneys.

And then...Alex started vomiting today.  Not really badly, but I think he might have a stomach flu.  He was a good boy about it, because the second time around I told him to go puke into the toilet, and he did.  Yay!  But I am so sick of cleaning up vomitus Canis domesticus and vomitus Homo sapiens from the floor. 

And oh yeah, to top it off, naiad8 found a dead rat in the garden.  WTF?  Of course I got to disposed of it, as I did last time with the field mouse.  Can I say that I'm also sick of disposing of rodents?

On the other hand, the weekend wasn't too bad.  The sun came and chased the cold away.  Sunny California is finally sunny and warm again.  It felt like spring already.   Of course, just in time for me to go back to work where I stay indoor but get to stare at a beautiful park by the Bay.  Eh!

Hope y'all had a better weekend than me!

Hope everybody had a good weekend. Mine was pretty good.

On Saturday my side of the family celebrated the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival, aka Moon Festival. It's an ancient harvest festival but since the Chinese calendar is lunar it's usually timed to the full moon closest to Autumn Equinox.  Like most holidays it's basically dinner with family, which meant that I had a fun day of cooking. Between my mom and I we made a total of eight dishes to serve a grand total of seven people. Oh well, eight is a lucky number anyway.  Besides, my SIL (aka the bottomless pit of the family) took a whole bunch of stuff home anyway, so nothing got wasted. 

The most fun was making Christine's garam masala to make chicken satay. I measured out all the spices and took a picture so that I have future reference when I need to make it again. Here's the annotated picture, 'coz it's just so purrdy.



Sunday was less hectic.  My inlaws came for a visit, and my father-in-law installed a brand new thermostat and I cleaned out our heater which sent me to the ER a month ago for gas poisoning.  Finally we have safe heat again!

Another excitement this weekend was the start of the quarterfinals in the Women's Soccer World Cup.  The USA beat England with a 3-0.  Pretty impressive.  I'm just watching Brazil vs Australia right now even though it was recorded half a day ago.  Brazil is pretty ferocious, but Aussies are resilient.  Should be an interesting game.

Hope you all had a good weekend.  Mine was certainly interesting.  On Saturday we had tickets to see a new musical called Emma (as in the Jane Austen novel) in the afternoon at Mountain View's Center for the Performing Arts.  The musical was cute and funny, and I'd highly recommend it to anybody in the area.

The other major event was a power outage on Saturday that started at 11:30am.  Unfortunately my laptop ran out of charge pretty quickly, and Google WiFi only gets one bar in my house, so I was kind of bored out of my head.  Fortunately we had the musical to go to, and because we had no power, we all went out to a nice Japanese dinner and to a downtown cafe where Alex could watch trains.  The power came back at 3am, which meant that I missed my favorite anime shows.  Ah well, BitTorrent to the rescue.

Sunday was a simple day.  I cleaned out the garage though, especially after the flooding caused by the clogged washer pipe.  Anyway, I can park the car in the garage without fear of hitting some protruding box or worse, some power tool that might scratch the door.

Well, it's Monday in an hour.  Ugh!