Camera catch up

I've got a pile of stuff I missed this month and I need to catch up! Official 9 month update coming soon, the teaser is that one tooth has poked up and three are well on their way. FFM is being as brave as he can about it, but the poor guy is finding that even his bottle is hard on his inflamed gums. I don't like to give him ibuprofen on an empty stomach b/c he's been gaggy and throwing up, so it's a game of give and take...I try to get him to eat so I can give him something to help the pain, he has a hard time putting anything in his mouth. The upside is he'll get four teeth all at once and hopefully will get a break for a while.

Here's some of the fun and games we've been up to (now that I've downloaded one of the cameras). Playing with friends...

And our favorite, rolling around. Our shipment arrived! Who knew I'd be so excited about a handful of boxes! Ok, ok, I knew. And Travis did, too. Oh, the wonders these boxes disgorged! Like my favorite pots and pans...and cookbooks...and just plain books! Oh yes, and loads of paper, too. Paper was lots of fun for a while. Especially great because right now we're learning all about new textures. I realized FFM spends a lot of time on carpet or a blanket with occasional spurts in the sand, so now I'm on a mission and I make him sit in the grass, on the sidewalk, bricks, concrete, and paper. It was great, for a while... ...then not so great. What did I do? Snap a photo, of course! This month I also finished my second knitted toy. The yarn wasn't as nice as the stuff I used for Chilly the penguin, but the platypus turned out OK using the yarn I could find here. He was a going away gift for a friend returning to the US. Toys are fun to knit, they won't get outgrown and I like the fiddly bits, but I have this fear that they'll someday show up in some terrible (yet wonderful) book by Stitchy McYarnpants like the one Christiana and friends gave me when leaving Dublin... FFM and I toured the Andy Warhol Exhibit that's at our Gallery of Modern Art through the middle of April. It was pretty fun, although the free kids part was the best bit. Look at us, we've been Warhol -ed!The best part of all was the Silver Clouds room. This picture is from the museum in PA, I haven't been able to get a good shot of the room here. The room here is glass on 2 sides and 2 stories tall. The clouds are filled with helium and the room is filled with fans so the clouds gently float about. Some stay near the ceiling, some sink to the ground. FFM and I walked through the room for a few minutes and then he just laid on the the carpeted floor and watched those clouds moving about for at least half an hour. We're totally going back.
And finally a quick story and preview of Sydney. These are 'Flat Brownies.' My young cousin Skylar's Brownie Troop is studying Australia this spring and they made 'Flat Brownies' (a la Flat Stanley) for us to tour around with us while they learn about Oz. Usually you get a single Flat Stanley mailed to you and you take a photo, write a note, and mail him on. We've got 15 Flat Brownies and we're hanging on to them until May, taking photos and sending email updates back periodially. Taking pictures of 15 flat little kids is harder than you'd think! They're great, they came laminated and everything, and straight away we duct taped them to a long string. Anyway, we've taken so many pictures of them (and they've lived in the stroller for so long) the that I feel the Flat Brownies deserve a mention. I have to say we've gotten a lot of questions about the Brownies and after explaining what we're doing people are always excited.We just got back from our extra long weekend to Sydney. Loved the city and can't wait to get back. More photos coming soon.

Laceration Celebration

It's a tooth! Tooth #1 officially erupted today and nearly sliced my finger off. There's not really anything to take a photo of, but in the coming weeks perhaps you'll start to see toothy smiles replacing those gummy grins. *sigh* already he's growing up too fast.

No, Mom, I swear it's true!

I stayed up late the other night to call my mom early her time to discuss a little project we're working on. While we were chatting I asked her to keep an eye out for the ONLY sippy cups that FFM likes. We can get a million cups here, but does he use any of them? Of course not, he only deigns to use the two Gerber cups I bought on a whim back before he was born and guess what, I can't get them here. Or get anything at all like them. The upside, they're the cheapest and simplest sippy cups I think Gerber makes, so at least it's not expensive to buy them. Just to ship them.

Anyway, during this conversation I'm trying to explain to my mom why FFM won't use the millions of sippy cups here. About 95% of the cups here come with non-removable handles, and the remaining 5% either don't have a valve or have a soft sippy spout (all about the hard plastic thank you very much). I give FFM a cup with handles and he looks at me like, "What? What's this strange cup and how do you expect me to pick it up? There are THINGS in the way!" He's quite capable of picking up and holding a cup/bottle without handles and most definitely prefers it.

So there I am, in the middle of the night, trying to explain to my mom how my 8.5 month old 'palms' his bottles. She's laughing, and really it is quite funny. So yesterday I took some pictures so she could see exactly what he looks like drinking his bottle. He can't quite palm the sippy cup yet, it's too bumpy on the bottom, but he does wrangle it one handed.

And here's the one handedview. Not at all into a two handed hold, except to pick it up. He'll flip back and forth between hands. See, handles would just get in the way.

And that, folks, is more than you ever wanted to know about how to hold a bottle.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

March 17th will mean something different to me forevermore. Before living in Dublin it was just a day I had to scrounge something green out of my closet. Now it's a day reserved for all my favorite Ireland memories. And dressing my little Irish-born kid up in green.

You may remember this rugby shirt from many many moons ago. It was big on FFM then, it just fits him now. Ok Mom. I'm done with pictures now. Can we please go for a walk.

Home Sweet Bundamba

Post by TTM.
Back in May 2006 when I arrived to work on the Dublin project it was to a site that had officially demobilized. Our offices were a well-worn double-decker construction trailer and a year later we moved out of the trailer and into a 225-year old stone hotel. Both accommodations were workable but fairly spartan, but they did the job with our small staff.

Arriving in Brisbane to get started at the Bundamba project, I found a much different scene. This site has had 500+ people at once working on it at many points, so the facilities were scaled to match.

Here is a view of some of the trailers from the carpark. This was taken in the evening after most of the trades had left. Tradesmen generally start work at 6AM on this site, so the commissioning staff (including me) usually ends up with the way-out-there parking spots when we arrive shortly before 7AM. These trailers extend in several rows away from the camera and to the left. This is a view down the corridor between the "cribs", or break rooms. There are a lot of them, because when 300+ hungry construction guys emerge from the site for their morning "smoko", it takes a lot of space to hold them all. Most of the corridors between the trailers are covered to keep the sun out. Notice the potted palms. The joint venture went to a good amount of effort to make the site offices and break room a comfortable place, and that includes palm trees, legitimate sidewalks, running-water toilets, air conditioning, a site canteen, etc. This is a photo of the inside of the trailer where I have my "office". My desk is on the left hand wall to the right of the person in the orange shirt. B&V staff have two computers: the B&V laptop and a joint-venture computer. Everyone has two screens on their desk, and two mice, and two keyboards.... And two email accounts - ugh.Here I am at my desk! (This really is work, I haven't been incarcerated for something) The spiffy orange shirt is part of the site uniform. In Dublin we wore fluorescent green jackets and vests; here we wear blaze orange shirts with stripes.
Here I am in more of my safety gear. The yellow hat indicates that I am part of the Commissioning team. Construction wears white hats, safety/first aid gets green, and visitors get blue. Pretty handy to know what people do at a glance. The dark glasses are because it can get really bright outside; everyone issued with a dark pair and a regular clear pair. If you look closely at my shirt you will see an interesting feature: my name. Yup, after most of a decade of professional employment, I am now at the point where I get to wear a shirt with my name embroidered on it to work. Jokes aside, this is also a nice idea; it helps you keep track of who is who and recall their name. Imagine facing several hundred men in orange stripey shirts, hardhats and dark glasses, and trying to be sure not to call yell "Don" when the guy's name is really "Mike".

The project is really going well. Our project (the Bundamba Advanced Water Treatment Plant) is part of the Western Corridor Recycled Water Project; a massive project in southeast Queensland to provide additional treatment to already-treated wastewater so that it can be used as part of Brisbane's water supply. Bundamba is the first part of the project that will be completed, and one of the largest parts. I am the SCADA (computer control system) commissioning leader for the second half of the project, and as such I am responsible to make sure that all of the computer controls are developed and work correctly to provide mostly-automatic control of the water plant.

If you want to take a look at the overall WCRWP, try this link: http://www.westerncorridor.com.au/ Click around and anything you see related to Bundamba or Bundamba Alliance is part of our project.