My First Race!

   

On Thanksgiving morning I ran the Oregon Mid-Valley Road Race, my first race ever.  I have never been a runner; it takes too much effort, but I’m actually starting to like it.  Just after the one mile mark a photographer was taking pictures and here I am! 

I signed up for the 5.2 mile scenic challenge.  Interpret “scenic” to mean “hills.”  There was one stretch of “significant elevation gain” about 2 miles in.  Most of the runners around me turned left and ran back for the second half of the flat 3.75 mile run, and I turned right up the switchback road.  I managed to keep my jogging cadence up rather than relaxing into a walk, but near the end of the killer hill a guy who was walking caught up to me and we were going the same speed.  Oh, brother!  I’m a sloooow hill runner.  He motivated me to keep going.

Near the 4 mile marker I was tired and wet. (It rained the whole time.)  A few ladies passed me and I tried to keep up with them since one of my goals was to not be last.  Another goal was to finish in less than an hour.  As I rounded the final corner and crossed the finish line I saw my time: 59 minutes.  Alright!  I also heard the announcer call out another runner after me who finished in just over an hour.  Whoohoo! 

I checked my stats online later in the day and saw that I met two of my goals by one: I was 178 out of 179 runners and my time was an even 59 minutes.  It’s hard for me to do something I know I can’t win or even be anywhere near the best.  I keep reminding myself that about a year ago I couldn’t even run a flat half mile so I’ve improved a lot.  I should be even better next year.  Now I just need to heal my shin splints.  They’ve been bothering me for awhile so I was resting a lot before the race rather than training like I wanted to, but now they’re hurting again.

How Many Words?

I was recently reading an article about the common gender differences in early childhood development.  By 18 months the article says boys typically have around 50 words and girls have 90.  I knew Desmond had more than 50 since a couple months ago Davin and I counted about 30.  So out of curiosity I made a list of all the words Desmond can say on his own.  Here’s what I came up with and I’m realizing all the time that there are more words I haven’t remembered or didn’t know he could say.

1. 1-2-3 2. a-b-c 3. Addi 4. Airplane 5. Apple 6. Apple sauce 7. Baa 8. Baby 9. Bagel 10. Ball 11. Balloon 12. Banana 13. Bath 14. Beans 15. Bear 16. Beep 17. Belly button 18. Bike 19. Bird 20. Bite 21. Blanket 22. Blue 23. Boat 24. Boo 25. Book 26. Boots 27. Bowl 28. Bread 29. Broccoli 30. Brush 31. Bunny 32. Burr 33. Bus 34. Button 35. Buzz 36. Bye-bye 37. Camel 38. Camera 39. Car 40. Cat 41. CD 42. Cheese 43. Chicken 44. Choo-choo 45. Circle 46. Clock 47. Cock-a-doodle-doo 48. Comb 49. Cow 50. Cracker 51. Crayon 52. Cup 53. Daddy 54. Dark 55. Desmond 56. Diaper

57. Ding-Dong 58. Dirt 59. Dirty 60. Dog/Doggie 61. Done 62. Donkey 63. Down 64. Drink 65. Duck 66. Ear 67. Eat 68. Elbow 69. Elmo 70. Eye 71. Feet 72. Fire truck 73. Fish 74. Fork 75. Gina 76. Gorilla 77. Grapes 78. Green 79. Green beans 80. Hair 81. Heart 82. Hexagon 83. Hi 84. Hippo 85. Home 86. Hot 87. Hush 88. Jesus 89. Juice 90. Key 91. Knee 92. Knock-knock 93. Koala 94. Leaf 95. Light 96. Lollipop 97. Macaroni 98. Meow 99. Mickey Mouse 100. Milk 101. Mommy 102. Moo 103. Moon 104. More 105. Mouse 106. Music 107. Nana 108. Nemo 109. Night-night 110. No 111. Nose 112. Oatmeal 113. Off

114. Oh-no 115. On 116. Oops 117. Orange 118. Out 119. Outside 120. Oval 121. Owl 122. Papa 123. Paper 124. Peanut butter 125. Peas 126. Pillow 127. Pizza 128. Please 129. Poop 130. Pop 131. Potty 132. Puppy 133. Quack 134. Radio 135. Rain 136. Rainbow 137. Raisin 138. Remote 139. Robot 140. Rock 141. Seal 142. Shoes 143. Sit down 144. Snack 145. Sneeze 146. Socks 147. Spoon 148. Star 149. Sun 150. Teeth 151. Tick-tock 152. Toes 153. Train 154. Truck 155. TV 156. Twinkle 157. Uh-oh 158. Up 159. Vacuum 160. Vroom 161. Walk 162. Water 163. Whoa 164. Word World 165. Wow 166. Yellow 167. Yummy 168. Zebra

Permission to Get Wet

  

Today Desmond and I went to the Children’s Museum for the first time.  Wow!  I thought he might be too young to really enjoy it, but he had a blast!  They do a great job making many of the exhibits cater to a variety of ages.  We played for two hours straight, and Desmond could have gone longer.  His favorite area was definitely the water.  We started and finished there.  We may need a membership to this place…

Desmond playing in the water

As we left the museum

Giggles, Jabbers, and Song Requests

Desmond’s language is really taking off.  He has quite the little vocabulary with new words popping up daily, I think.  He’s also quite skilled at keeping himself awake for naps these days.  I finally got him down for his afternoon nap and had to share our giggles with you.

Desmond has been up in his crib happily jabbering and laughing to himself for almost an hour. Everything has been thrown out of the crib by this time except for his special “bay-det” that he’s chewing the corner of.  I open the door and quietly tell him it is time to go to sleep.  I pick him up and go sit in the rocking chair.  He just giggles at me.  “Shhh,” I tell him.  “Ssss,” he giggles back.  I start singing softly to him, “Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are” but he starts singing along, “Upa,” he says with a big smile.  Okay, maybe I should skip his favorite and do a different song, and I’ll just hum it this time so he’ll quiet down.  I start to hum, “Rock-a-bye Baby” since, strangely enough, I’ve only recently introduced it to him, but when I get to the “when the wind blows” part, he laughs and starts blowing.  Great!  He still hears the words in his head!  Here we go, I haven’t sung this one in a little while.  I softly sing the words, “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make…”  “Appy!” he chimes in.  What?!  I can’t help but laugh out loud which only sets off his giggles again, too.  “It’s time to sleep, okay?,” I remind him.  “Eeep!” “Yes, you need to sleep,” I reply, trying in vain to keep a straight face.  “Geekle, geekle,” he says smiling up at me.  Oh, a song request is it?  Back to the favorite.  “Okay,” I said, “but you need to close your eyes.”  He squeezes his eyes shut and stuffs the soaked corner of his blanket back in his mouth.  I quietly sing “Twinkle, Twinkle” again and by the third time through he’s snoring and doing the cute dream smiles.  Whew!  I carefully lay him down and sneak out.  Silly boy!

IE6, IE7, & IE8 On My Box … At the Same Time!

I just installed Windows 7 on my desktop machine. Today I set up XP mode ... cause I can. And the first thing I did was to create two virtual machine ... one running IE6 and one running IE7. So there you have it. I can now run IE6, IE7, and IE8 on one box. The image is a screenshot of my box with the proof. This will make website debugging so much easier. Although for the most part I've kinda let IE6 go, but at least I can know how bad it will look.

Fun Fall Day at the Pumpkin Patch

On Saturday morning we went with some friends to the Twisted Creek Ranch.  Desmond caught a nap on the way out, and the first thing he did when he got out of the car was to fill both hands with gravel.  We saw the fish pond, farm animals, a fire truck, and jumped in the bounce house where Desmond got hilariously wedged in between the floor and the side and I almost got stuck myself trying to help him out.  We finished it off with a wagon ride to pick out a pumpkin (Desmond’s newest word), and once we got loaded up, he was out for his second nap. 

        

Enjoying the Last Few Sunny Days

    

During the late afternoon fussies, I’ve been taking advantage of the nice sunny weather.  It’s amazing how playing outside really helps!  Desmond loves to play in the “duht” with his “gucks” in I guess what you’d call our front yard. This has also been our time to practice obeying mommy by not wandering too far away.  The rain is coming later this week so I think we’ll take to puddle jumping very soon.

 

Friday I took Desmond to Laurelhurst park where we fed the ducks.  Desmond was somewhat interested, but ended up wanting to eat the bread himself.  He’s a boy after my own heart and chased after this squirrel for awhile though he couldn’t quite toddle fast enough to cause any real concern on the part of the squirrel.

A Princess Birthday Party

A few weeks ago Desmond’s friend Addison turned 3 and she had a fun princess birthday party. We were all invited to dress up for the event, so I dusted off my princess dress that Mom made me for my old college fairytale themed banquet. I love any opportunity to wear it! Desmond wore his little prince crown the whole time, and we enjoyed the beautiful day at the Flower Farmer. One of the highlights was riding the train out to see the farm animals. Happy birthday, Addison!

My Boy

This morning I cut Desmond’s hair out on the patio.  He did fairly well while I tried to entertain him with things outside of his normal toy repertoire.  (The floss lasted the longest.)  After we were done he was running around with his shirt off carrying the stick we use to bar the patio door.  Such a good boy picture.  I love it!

 

 

Daddy’s boy carries a more powerful weapon.  The force is strong with our little one!

Pivoting SQL Data

So, the other day I was trying to pivot some SQL data that was basically in this format...

RecNumber	ColNumber	FieldName	FieldValue
1	1	FirstName	Davin
1	2	LastName	Studer
2	1	FirstName	Melissa
2	2	LastName	Studer

I wanted to see it like this ...

RecNumber	FirstName	LastName
1	Davin	Studer
2	Melissa	Studer

It took me a while to figure out the syntax for this, but here it is. It uses the SQL pivot keyword.

This first portion dynamically creates the column names to be used in the pivot.

declare @cols varchar(max)

    select  @cols = stuff (
        (
            select '], [' + FieldName
            from table
            group by FieldName
            order by min(ColNumber)
            for
            xml path('')
        )
        , 1, 2, ''
    ) + ']'

This next part creates a query within a string that we will run with the SQL exec command.

declare @query varchar(max)

    set @query = '
    select RecNumber, ' + @cols + '
    from (
        select RecNumber, FieldName, FieldValue
        from table
    ) dta
    pivot
    (
        min(FieldValue)
        for FieldName in (' + @cols + ')
    ) pvt'

All that is left to do is to execute the query that was created. I ended up putting this into a stored procedure.

exec(@query)