New Years Score

I was already pining about the expensiveness of Christmas season when my old mouse died. I very reluctantly went ahead and bought a new mouse made by a company that makes operating systems based in Washington state thinking it would easily integrate into the system. One of the charming features was that the mouse came with a free rechargeable battery.  To my dismay the mouse absolutely did not work at all. I troubleshot for a couple of days and even the help file said it must be hardware. So we returned it to a local electronics store called K's Denki and they tested and confirmed the issue, then I was able to exchange and they even let me pick a little more expensive wireless keyboard/mouse combo. They included a little hand towel as an apology. Oops, I forgot to return the rechargeable battery (which go for about $7). Score!

Incidentally the new keyboard and mouse set integrated and worked in seconds flat. Happy endings abound.

3rd birthday video

I should have mentioned about the music in the 2nd birthday video. There may be some copyright claim down the road forcing me to remove the songs or videos, but I like to coincide the pictures to musical memory from the year. So last year I was listening to Moby's album 'Wait For Me' - very mellow and probably his best since the aclaimed Play- the instrumental is unfortunately called 'Shot in the Back of the Head'. Ouch. The other song is Radiohead's 'These are My Twisted Words' which was made available as a free download. Not sure if it is still free though. If you like these songs, hop over to iTunes and buy them. ;-)

So on to this year's birthday picture video:

This time I featured a little bit of Feist and Ben Gibbard's 'Train Song', from Dark was the Night; Band of Horse's song 'First Song', the Disney anthemic 'It's a Small World' and The Gorillaz song '19-2000'. Please go and buy the songs if you like them and sorry if I have to take the video down one day...

Ken's room

Sleep tight

Ken has been co-sleeping since birth, something that is quite common in Japanese families. Since Mona came along, I have had duties sharing my bed with him. He is actually a pretty good guy to sleep with, no feet in my southern orifices or whatnot. But now he is 3 years old and Ritsy is back to working graveyard shifts at the hospital from this coming weekend. So yesterday we went live with the 'Ken's bedroom project'. Actually we started working on it a few months ago. Ritsy bought some bed sheets that would agree with his sensibilities and we will convert an old sofa of ours into a Thomas sofa later on. I have also been doing 'practice falling asleep by himself runs'. We started with 5 minutes solo and around the 17 minutes solo trials he was often falling asleep.

So last night was the first run with the room changed out and it was a success. I read a book, kissed goodnight and turned the light off. We never heard a peep from him. I was able to help put Mona to sleep (now located in my room) and in the future this will be really helpful for when it is just I or Ritsy putting him to bed. Even though the first day was a success I am sceptical, I am sure there will be some bumps on the road, but it's a start!

Good Job!

2nd birthday's cheesey picture video for Ken

Title says it all. I like to make a photo retrospective video each year for his birthday. So before I throw up this years, here is the one from the year previous.

Happy 2011

We are still here. A lot has happened since my last post- and yet not much really.

I am trying a reboot of the blog to start the year. Maybe shorter posts- 3 picture max instead of the 5-6 I used before and shorter stories. May be easier for me to stay on top of posting.

This year I have a lot of ideas for resolutions-- of course I need to be more focused and I will try to embrace change deeper. And of course try to be a better father every day.

Happy New Year everyone!