Let him eat crumbs....

We brought home a delicious slab of coffee cake from a party last night. Unfortunately, Eliana polished it off for breakfast this morning, so Leif didn't get to enjoy it. He lay in bed dreaming of coffee and coffee cake, and the anticipation of such a glorious breakfast finally roused him and sent him to the table, where he saw the empty plate... When he expressed his dismay, Eliana told him, "It's okay! You can eat the crumbs."

Thanks, kid.

Leif's new hobby...

This is Leif's new hobby: roasting coffee beans. We have gradually become coffee snobs over the past few years, graduating from a coffee pot to a french press, from buying grounds to grinding coffee beans, and now from buying the beans to roasting our own. I have to admit that freshly roasted coffee, at least the stuff Leif makes, is much better than most of the coffee I've tried. And I like most coffee.

Leif roasts coffee every so often, and tries different beans and different cracking stages to try to get the best flavor. It seems to be something he enjoys immensely, and is most often followed by a freshly steeped pot of coffee and some time with a good book. It's been going on for some time now, but I finally got around to taking pictures of the process while my parents were here. Of course, my dad got in on the coffee roasting action, too.

It's hard to tell what the coffee roasting contraption in the above picture is, but from a different angle you can see quite clearly what turns out such glorious coffee:

Why, it's nothing but an old popcorn popper, you say! Yep, that it is. Leif can give you all the details about first crack, second crack, and all that coffee roasting talk, but the truth of the matter is that it takes little more than some know-how and a popcorn popper to roast your own coffee. It turns out pretty good, too! And I'm just glad he procured another popper so we don't have to eat coffee-flavored popcorn...

Who's the big nerd?

For work, I needed to learn how to write a small piece of software for Mac OS X. I really had no clue how to do it, so I knew I'd need some uninterrupted solitude to figure it out quickly. It turns out that I can find that kind of environment at home more easily than at work, often times.

So, I brought a Mac Mini from work home. While I was taking a break, Elizabeth sat down and started playing with the Mac Mini, making a movie with iDVD. She was also using my Linux box and her Windows Laptop at the same time.



When I met Elizabeth, she was an English major who made fun of the nerdy boys like me. Who's the big nerd now?

I thought this was funny until I realized that when I connected to work from home tonight, I was simultaneously logged into 7 computers. The pot relents.

A day in the life of me.

This comic is a lot of what living with Leif is like. Especially when he has his wife-canceling earphones on...

Whoa!!

Wanna see what Leif did while I was gone??? He shaved off his goatee! His face hasn't been this bald since before we were married. Good thing I was gone for two weeks... it had time to grow back before I got home! (Of course, even without it he's a cutie, but he just doesn't look the same!)

First Blood

Last week we were in Ellie's room. She was happily cruising along her toy box, "pat-pat-patting" it and so forth. She must've somehow slipped because, before I knew it, she was screaming like she'd been horribly hurt. I picked her up and looked her over, but couldn't find an injury. I was about to chalk all the screaming up to her being tired when the next scream shot a bunch of blood onto her cheek and chin. Then I realized that she'd banged her chin on the toy box, ramming her two lower teeth into her toothless upper gum. The wound didn't bleed long and she didn't scream long, considering, but I was somehow reassured to see my daughter bleed. Despite her daring and my fairly rough play, to that point I'd not seen her bleed. It was oddly comforting to discover that she truly was a real little girl that bled red, despite her robotic tenacity. It was surreal to see fresh blood on my child's face and to have neither Elizabeth or me become significantly excited or worried about it. Before we'd had a child, that's how we'd planned to react to such situations; then we did. The incident was also comforting because her first blood-flowing-from-the-mouth injury was really so minor. No more than two minutes afterward, she and I were "walking it off" out of her room, into the living room and she was happily babbling.