97 Days to Baby Day! (26 Weeks, One Day Pregnant)
5 Days to Dominica’s 30th Birthday. (Thursday!)
NowMedia’s article “Growing Plants the Disney Way” used one of my Disney greenhouse pictures today.
I have been pondering what to get Dominica for her thirtieth birthday. It is a tough time for gift giving – neither of us has any outstanding items of which we wish (other than the obvious – spare time, travel, etc.) nor do we have any space in which to put anything if we were to receive it. The only thing for which I know Dominica has been pining for some time is a pink laptop, originally an Asus EeePC but as those have been discontinued in pink the more powerful and up-to-date Acer Aspire One perhaps. She is addicted to pink personal electronics, as my regular readers undoubtably know.
The issue with any electronic device as a gift is that it is so temporal. The gift will not last, or at least not last as a regularly used item, and will quickly age and be considered to be old. Not a long-lasting thirtieth birthday gift. Other than the laptop we have no other real ideas. Dominica doesn’t wear jewelry really and she just got a nice watch for Christmas. Large items are out of the question right now as well.
I had to be up quite early this morning. Five minutes before six, to be exact. Way too early to be getting up on a Saturday morning after having gone to bed late after having worked a very long Friday, but what can you do?
I worked all morning for the office and then had a little time to myself around the middle of the day. At eleven Dominica drove up to Nutley, NJ to get her hair cut. It is her first hair cut since she had it cut in preparation for our last trip to the United Kingdom in November.
My day, although it involved getting up early and doing formal “work” all morning, is actually an incredibly relaxing one. I have no huge deadlines looming over me today and my to-do list, while always expansive, doesn’t have any really hot, “must-do” items that have to be addressed today. i am pretty much caught up on several fronts and I get to work on some more “fun” items and relax a bit.
I did a bit of reading today, both in “The Zen of CSS Design” and “The Sex Lives of Cannibals.” Dominica spent the afternoon watching Funny Girl and Funny Lady with Barbara Streisand and Omar Sherif.
I spent a bit of the afternoon working on some PHP programming. I have a project that has been on the back burner for way too long and I need to get it “completed”. Right now the project is straight PHP with an XHTML/CSS interface. Down the road I am thinking about converting it to Ruby on Rails and using an AJAX framework to make it really schnazzy. Something like the YUI or Dojo.
We ordered in pizza for dinner from Brazilian Pizza tonight. For the meal we got milho verde and for dessert we tried banana pizza. Dominica really like the banana pizza but for me it wasn’t sweet enough to be a dessert pizza but I could tell that the idea of banana pizza was really good. I think that the obvious choice would be to make a chocolate and banana pizza. That would be awesome.
We finished watching Harry and the Hendersons and then watched two episodes of the second half of the first season of The Love Boat.
Tomorrow is going to be a very busy day. In the morning I will be doing some work but before too long we have to get ready to leave as we have Nadine and Clarence’s wedding to attend at four down in Mountainside, NJ.
I didn’t get checked out from the office until almost eight in the evening. I was stuck supporting the continuity of business test for over thirteen hours. It was a long day being trapped at the computer. Several hours of that were on active conference calls. I have no scheduled work for tomorrow.