BLOGISFACTORY

There I was minding my own business, waiting for my parents to come for a visit. Little did I know that this guy joined them for a ride and a visit. Not seeing him for three years now, I have a lot of catching up to do. I'll do a photo report later on.

The 5-Year-Old will not read this post anytime soon, maybe never. Or maybe in the future she'll want to know how it was in the past, and the internet and this blog will still exist. I think time flies the fastest when you have kids. You have an outside point of reference to judge the flow of your life. Oh my God! Has it really been five years?! I've never had a good memory. My brain prefers to keep in the present and in the future, with the past usually pushed away into the deep recessess. You are not a monkey anymore. You are a fully developed little person, with your likes of princesses and dislikes of anything vegetable. You a strong willed, just like your mom (I am going to get whacked for that), and her smile (one of the reasons I fell in love with your mom) . You love being silly, just like me, and unfortunately you also inherited my lack of attention span. It doesn't matter, I haven't met a person who you can not win over in a span of minutes. When I hugged you i

I have this pestering problem. I've said it many times before but my music colelction contains now approximately 6500 mp3s. About half of them are the Russian music that I always listen to. The problem comes when the Russian information is displayed in any number of MP3 players around my house, including my own PC. See some of the players refuse to play files that have unicode characters in them (read cyrillic alphabet), except my iPod and SanDisk players refuse to show mp3 information in correct manner. To make it even more frustrating once in a while my preferred Library method (MediaMonkey) on occasion translates unicode in ASCII characters, meaning anything Russian gets translated into googly letters. What I have done is wrote a little winform application using .NET. It has two portions. The first portion took all of my music that had russian characters in file names and transliterated them into latin. That part was fairly easy. I did have to manually build a libabry of russian

The Awesome Wife's Chronicles... Couple of days ago she was reading The-5-Year-Old Curious George stories. Wife: ... The End... 5-Year-Old (without missing a bit): Rainforest Cafe proudly sponsors PBS! For those unfamiliar with PBS, this is the place where Curious George cartoons are shown. The-5-Year-Old loves them. ---------------------------------------------------- In the store with The Baby. A woman with two young children gets behind her in the cashier line. Kids flutter about the baby, saying how cute she is, asking their mom for another baby. At that particular moment The Baby decides that it's time to scream. Another 15 seconds later: "Mom, I don't want another baby!"

Here is the a tour of Chicago famous spots done Lego style, from Legoland.

I am picking up a memo from Jason . 1.What time did you get up this morning? 6:48 AM 2.How do you like your steak? Medium, I like a little blood and juices on my plate. 3.What was the last film you saw at the cinema? Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. 4.What is your favorite TV show? StarTrek TNG. Right now I enjoy Mon and Leverage more than anything else. 5.If you could live anywhere in the world where would it be? San Francisco. Probably. 6.What did you have for breakfast? Russian style cottage cheese, called Tvorog. Mixed with sour cream, splenda and diced tomatoes. Yes, I am like that! 7.What is your favorite cuisine? I love Italian and sushi. 8.What foods do you dislike? Tofu. It's pretend food. 9.Favorite place to eat? Tough to say. I try to mix different cuisines. 10.Favorite dressing? Blue cheese. 11.What kind of vehicle do you drive? 07 Nissan Altima. it does the job. 12.What are your favorite clothes? I prefer to wear jeans and a polo. 13.Where would you visit if you

This is going to be a socially busy week for the Soon-To-Be-5-Year-Old. All of her classmates are turning five within a span of August. We have a birthday party on Wednesday, one on Saturday and another one on Sunday. What's a father to do? :) We went to Legoland on Saturday, which was intersting enough in its own right. The have a nice Lego-build Chicago skyline. I will show the pics later on, have to compile them in a nice slideshow first.

Do I have a lot of things to write about? No. Am I going to write something anyway? Absolutely. I can't really focus these last weeks, so everything is going to be thrown together without plan, or grammar checks. The Baby gave me a couple of sleepless nights last week, but today, as I walked into her room, I saw a glimpse of regongnition on her face, accented by a focused four second gaze, and a smile. Most of the time, I tell myself that it's gaz, but this time I am pretty certain that it was a genuine smile. I have seen her smile or smirk in her sleep (what do babies dream of when they sleep?). These moments are priceless and absolutely heart melting. Yes, I am a big softy when it comes to my girls, despite the cynical appearences I try to put on. The Four Yearl Old, who will become the Five Year Old later this month, absolutely adores The Baby. This makes us ridiculously happy right now, because we've been scared by jelousy stories from our friends and families. We actua