Chris Holmes Online

Some folks have asked recently what happened to my blog. Well, it’s pretty simple: On July 14th, 2008, my wife gave birth to our son, Cameron.

A newborn, as anyone with children knows, sucks up some free time. In addition, his big sis, Jessica, is becoming a handful as well.

I also spent some time this summer doing some .NET consulting for a friend. It was a great opportunity to share some knowledge and solve some problems. The consulting also took away some blogging time, but it did help pay for a couple new guitars, because…

In January, I co-founded a hard rock cover band: Day of Rain. When we started the band it was just two of us, a drummer and myself (on guitars). We had both been playing our instruments for 15+ years, but we had never done anything with that skill. Now seemed like the right time to both of us.

I’ve found the band to be a great source of fun and a great outlet for my musicality. Having to learn new material and having to be at my best so I don’t let down my band mates has forced me to practice and really become much more proficient with my instrument.

At the same time, putting together the band has tested our collective patience. The first several months were marked with one failure after another in our attempts to recruit a quality vocalist and bass player. Musicians are weird people, and often they lack in the areas of dependability and professionalism (or they lack in talent, which seems to be the case with so many people who think they can actually sing).

Recently, we did add a vocalist, and she is one of the best singers I’ve ever heard. We’re fortunate to have her. We’re still short a bass player, but our list of known songs is growing each week and we all believe we’ll be gigging next year.

I’m still working at Nez Perce County and still trying to do cool stuff with .NET. We just upgraded to version 3.5 and we’re now able to take advantage of some very cool Linq goodness. I hope to have more to say about that and what we’re doing with it in the weeks to come.

There’s so much to write about, and so little time.

Mom & Dad came through at Christmas time and put a brand new Cannon PowerShot S70 in our hands – our first digital camera. Explicit instructions did not come with it, but it was assumed I’d post photos of The Kid on a somewhat more regular basis.

Then the Seahawks went and had their best season ever and I forgot I had offspring.

The nice thing about the digital camera is, of course, not having to take the roll somewhere and have it developed and not having to scan the images myself. God, I hate scanning. Yeah, it was so cool in the ’90s to be able to stuff a document of some kind into a computer, but it’s sooooooo not worth it now. I am thankful for all the wonderful tech geeks who figured out how to bypass scanners. Sorry HP.

Jessica’s latest passion is playing with “Ponies”. Carrie has given her a bag full of the things and now Jess can’t go anywhere without them. She puts them in her play pots and pans, cooking meals with them, stirring them like a pot of spaghetti.

And her eyes are still an amazing blue. Pretty good for a recessive gene, eh?

The other day we finally dug out her last Christmas present, a giant chalkboard with a dry erase board on the other side. The dry erase markers were a nightmare from the beginning as Jess managed to mark herself up pretty good in the span of about thirty seconds. The caps were too sticky for her to get on and off and that lead to a tantrum, so the markers got taken away.

Chalk, on the other hand, works pretty good. I left her alone for about five minutes standing at the board and came back to catch her in the photo above. She had gone off and found her little folding chair and slapped it down in front of the board, as if standing was oh so much work. Cracked me up…

She’s also going through a bit of separation anxiety right now, so Carrie can’t wander too far or Jessica blows a gasket. There’s a lot of “see mommy!” going on, even when mommy is standing three inches in front of her nose. It’s gotten better in the past week, but she still has her moments when she begs for mommy as if one of H.R. Geiger’s Aliens was about to catch her and eat her.

22 Months

Talking hasn’t been much of a problem for Jess, but lately her vocabuarly has exploded. When she first started attempting human-speak (as opposed to her native Jessie-speak, which sounds suspiciously like Pig Latin) she was very timid about it; one word here, one word there, nothing more complicated than a single syllable.

We would practice her vocabulary on the drive home from Day Care. I’d say a word I knew she could repeat, and she’d oblige as best she could. At first, we could only get about six blocks before we’d have to start repeating words. Then we’d get about halfway home before we’d repeat anything.

But now we’ve entered the dangerous time: she blurts out anything she hears, and she only has to hear it once. Carrie and I have been worrying about this time period for months, constantly warning each other about our liberal use of certain curses, trying our best to cut back on their use. We must avoid accidental use of those words because .002 seconds later we’re probably going to hear them coming out of her mouth, and then how will we explain it to the lady at Day Care, let alone when she makes her next trip to see the grandparents…

Outside of that, things are fairly normal. She loves the cats. Max is her favorite, althought that sentiment is not reciprocated. He hides from her under the dining room table, or behind the bed, when he hears her shriek of “MACK!” (the “X”, much like the “R” in Japanese, isn’t part of Jessie’s speech capability quite yet).

She also has a new habit: waking up in the middle of the night, and only going back to sleep once she’s tucked in between her mother and I on our bed. I am not sure I would mind this so much if (a) my slumber wasn’t interrupted in the middle of the night and (b) she didn’t flop and kick like a steelhead just dragged into a boat. The flailing and kicking continues all night long, and then escalates when she thinks it is time to get up (which is always pricisely 20 minutes before my alarm goes off, further robbing me of precious restful minutes).

I’m sure I’d be much more perterbed about the whole experience if she wasn’t so damn cute.