This past week Benjamin’s made some huge leaps in development. From the painful looking frog-hop/belly flop, he’s figured out how to put one hand in front of the other and do a real, honest-to-goodness crawl. He still only does it about half the time — when the road gets difficult, he’ll switch back to the belly hop, but he can do it if he wants to.

He also shares his daddy’s passion for electronic gadgets, and especially likes to put shiny things like iPods and cameras into this mouth. He loves to bang on the keyboard to help daddy with his programming.  In fact, he frequently says “DADADADADADA” while he does it!

And finally, this evening, he pulled himself up to a standing position using the couch… then fell flat on his face. Right now he’s crawling back and forth between me in the bedroom and mommy in the kitchen, looking for someone to feed him.

Don’t try doing it in the States right now.
When we moved here, it seemed like a good gamble. We could make 20% more on our Canadian dollar, just by working in the States. Now it seems the tables have turned — the sad little CAN$ is now worth slightly more than the US$. Which means we’re now losing money, on top of the service changes, by sending our funds back home.
We’re seriously considering moving our savings to a British Pound account. Anyone have any thoughts/experience/advice on this?

Today is the alpha release of phase 1 of my project. Thursday it gets handed off to QA for intense testing — which will undoubtedly uncover some bugs. Nonetheless, this is the result of a lot of work by me, and two other team mates who’s creative solutions to the problems I pose are doing a great job of making me look smart today. It’s been a long haul — in many ways, much longer than it needed to be — but it feels good to have things where they’re at… finally.

My job frequently gets the short end of my stick when it comes to passion and enthusiasm, but I work for a good company, and our family enjoys a lot of benefits from it. I’m proud of what I’m releasing today, and of the things I’ve learned while I got here. Hopefully our customers are as enthused as I am!