Wiggles, Giggles and Sunshine at 5, 7, and 9

 I'm totally stealing the title from Laura. And with less than a month left for the kids to be all odd birthdays like this, I have to get this done now.

Alice is a huge reader and spends so much of her time reading all day every day. She's a talented monkey bar swinger and so, so clever. She's more and more independent, but still enjoys cuddles and holding my hand to skip down the street.

Isaac loves to look through books. He's close to reading, but I don't think that he'll have any issues with it clicking. I think that he'll be a huge reader too. He's strong, kind, and loves being chased. He gets along great with Lucy and they get into all kinds of trouble together. The more laughter coming from them tells me the more mess they are making.

Lucy is becoming more independent all the time too. She's still small enough that I can easily carry her. She loves playing games and still loves her bunny Berry. She, like the others, still loves the cuddles and attention.

I love them all dearly.

Strange Dream of Family

 First off I don't know what it means.

The other night shortly before I fully woke up, I was in one of those dreams where I knew it was a dream, but was still in it anyways.

I was at the cottage on the lawn beside the cottage and coming down the hill were family that would have gone to the cottage, both living and dead. Everyone looked the best possible way, not too old, healthy. They greeted me with hugs and it felt so damn good. My grandma Phillips was there, and uncle Gord, and just... everyone it was so warm. As I was hugging them I could hear myself saying that I missed them and that I really needed the hug. I was just overcome with emotions and I think that I actually woke myself up sobbing.

 I'm not sure what my brain is doing or what it means. It was just so short but happy emotions. Just so much of it.

Went to a movie

 It was raining so for a Date Day we went and saw No Time To Die. I always love spending time with Laura.

This was the first movie that I have seen in a theatre since Frozen 2 right before things shut down early 2020. Thinking about it, I think that this might be is the longest that I've spent inside somewhere that's not our home or rented place in quiet some time. It was nice to be out.

I'm very much looking forward to all the kids getting their shots and maybe, maybe doing things like this again.

Finding What was Lost

Many years ago on my old computer I had all our pictures on had the hard drive crash. I didn't have timemachine backups running (stupidly) and lost everything on that drive.

Many of the photos I had backed up to an external drive, but not all. Thankfully they were on flickr though.

For more than 10 years I've been meaning to figure out what pictures were lost and download them and... I've not yet done it. Maybe in the short term I'll just look for photos from the old camera as a starting point. I'm not sure if that's enough but it will probably be better than nothing.

Update 1: It looks like pictures that were taken between May 20th 2006 to July 16th 2006 were the ones that were lost. I also discovered that my uncle took pictures of our wedding and had the wrong date set on his camera - by a whole year. Somewhere less than 250 pictures were lost, but some of those were wedding shots from my buddies wedding.

Update 2: And after like 15 years of meaning to do something, but in a nice generic way, I threw in the towel and looked on either side of the picture above until I found the images that I was missing. Turns out it was like 73mb of 203 images. I tossed them in a set in flickr and downloaded it. Broke it up into the proper albums and tossed it onto the network drive. Yet another example of perfect being the enemy of good.

Getting ready for domestic travel

 It continues to be a year for the books. Both Laura and I have our shots. The rumour is that kids will have approval for their shots in the fall / December range. Cases are currently low, but there's news about the delta or even lambda coming up.

I'm worried about long covid for the kids. I'm still stressed out but... selfishly, not as much because I don't think that I'll get killed by covid. Not right away anyways. I did just get a cold and it's like a week and a half to get over it. I'm the weakest one here.

I'm on income averaging leave right now so I don't feel in the verge of a mental health crisis. Soon we're headed up to the cottage. It'll be really nice to be up there with the kids by the water. I hope that the weather holds out. After that we're home for a couple of days and then into Quebec for adventures there. It'll be a lot of driving but hopefully it will be many nice memories for everyone. As I said, it's been... well, much more than a year.

Lucy started to bike without training wheels 4 days ago. She's so fast. I think that the combo of riding on the yuba for balance and loving the balance bike really gave a jump start for biking. If anything, training wheels reverted some of her skills. She hated them. I don't blame her, they are terrible.

Alice is reading up a storm. Always has her nose in a book / kindle. I can't keep up with getting her enough books. By the end of virtual school last year she had quite good computer skills and was mastering many different skills. We still have issues with her using her words for good and evil. She can heal or harm depending on what she wants at the time. Evil usually happens when she's hungry.

Isaac is doing well. I feel that he's on the edge of reading but we need to put some more time with him. I think that if he had a normal grade 1 he would be reading fine by now. It amazes me how much time he'll spend looking at comics. He and Lucy, when left alone and well fed, will happily play together doing something like foosball. As the kids are getting older and more independent it's been nice. If I'm sitting, someone will still come and curl up in my lap. That's also nice, if somewhat uncomfortable.

I am not looking forward to the fall, the return of school and work, and everything else that will be happening in the world. But maybe at that point our road won't be a torn up mess. We'll see.

COVID - almost been a year

Around this time last year we had been hearing of COVID. I didn't realize at the time how much it would change everything.

It's been hard.

With the kids back in school after an extended Christmas holiday and doing "virtual" school at that time, my work at home came to a slamming stop. Being constantly interrupted lead to context switching hell. Even after they went back to school (1 week so far) I kept on checking over my shoulder expecting to be interrupted... but no one else was home. It feels like some kind of PTSD.

The kids are doing reasonably well. I am a bit worried about new variants coming up with no studies being even started for kids our age. At this point I'm not expecting to have a chance to get a vaccine for myself before September and it wouldn't surprise me if I didn't have a chance until Christmas. I'm feeling a bit bummed out right now because this could easily go on for another year, despite having a vaccine.

I feel lucky with what we do have. But I'm still worried and stressed.

At least the days are getting longer now and there's some sunlight.

Finally got around to uploading to flickr

Our upload speed is slow - 1mb max. So, it's very easy for things that require any effort get paused. I finally uploaded the pictures from my iphone.

I was originally planning on doing it in a data centre because it had already been uploaded to apple, but I wasn't getting it done. Since perfection is the enemy of good, I decided to just get it done and upload it over many, many days in small ~ 200 pictures batches. 3809 photos. The now native file format is HEIC which flickr doesn't like. I have not even thought about the videos.

My steps were roughly

1. Download the files to my computer
2. Install image magic and run
   

         magick mogrify -monitor -format jpg *.HEIC
       

3. Move the files into groups in the subfolders
4. Upload them
5. Now to delete the generated jpg files since we don't need them with the below command

  find . -type f -name "*.HEIC" | cut -f-2 -d'.' | awk '{print $1".jpg"}' | xargs rm --

I would like to solve this by just having faster internet. Hopefully our non-profit ISP will soon have something faster than just slower DSL in our area.