And baby makes three...

Yes...if you hadn't already heard (we told a number of you this weekend while in Missouri and Illinois visiting), Kelsey and I found out on Easter Sunday morning that we're expecting! We initially were not going to tell anyone, but I just couldn't keep it to myself any longer -- I am so darn excited! So with this big news, we've decided that were going to go and get hitched (to make it official and get Kels on my insurance) on May 1st -- aka Mayday!

As of the writing of this entry, Kelsey is about 7 weeks along and starting to feel like she's pregnant with indigestion and waves of nausea. But it's so worth it to have a little one by December!

That's it for now...

Well heck!

How quickly I return to my ways. I guess it's just hard to sit down for 10 or 15 minutes a day and type up something about what's going on. So much so that I've outright neglected my duties here -- to my friends and family that read this blog.

Anyway...things are good here in Dallas. Work is busy. I'm being put on projects where the management knows they're up against a wall to get the project done in "record time", so they put Skip (my code-buddy) and I on it. We've been pulling long hours, but it's kinda rewarding...

I'm trying to keep up with a bunch of side-projects including the Ozark Regional YMCA website that my sister Carolyn (aka KoA) has been pushing me to finish. It's a redesign, with a content management system and it's taken a lot longer to work on that I had originally anticipated. I also finally got to a point on the Passport Experts website -- I've got a mockup of the site at http://pesite.rsge.com -- where I'm done with the coding and just waiting for content.

Kels and I will be driving out of town tomorrow morning to head north (and east) to Missouri and Illinois. My darlin' Kelsey will be 21 on the 23rd, so we're headed up there to see her family (her mom & brother are even coming down) as well as spend time with my family in Missouri. It's the second anniversary of my mom's passing, so we're going to spend some time with my dad, visit mom's grave and just reminice.

Wish us luck!

Delusions of Free-time

Haha! Well, you caught me Dave. I said way back on 4/3/06, in the short post entitled "Dear Blogger..." that I'd post later that day with the gory details of my last few weeks of busy-ness. And, well...I got busy again and didn't post that post that I said I would post. So, here it is -- all of it.

About three weeks ago, life was seemingly normal for me at work. Until, the boss came over to the little space I call "the cube" and addressed Skip (my buddy and fellow outcast-coder) with a proposal. A new business group at EMSI (we'll call them HSD) had acquired some new business -- namely BNSF and CSX Railroads -- with a system that would revolutionize the way that drug and alcohol testing was conducted for their employees. A system that would merge scheduling those tests with the actual lab results. Needless to say, one system existed and the other system needed to be built. So, Skip and I were charged with the effort which I had estimated would take approximately 150 man-hours to complete (that's a little over three weeks). We were given two options: a) Get it to test in two weeks = $500 bonus; OR b) Get it to production in two weeks = $1k bonus.

After working through spring break, planned vacation time and putting in 146 hours in two weeks. We rolled the iSchedule system (actually two separate apps) -- composed of a web front-end and a system that reads email attachments sent from the BNSF/CSX into our database back-end -- into production on March 27th with much to-do! And...we got our bonus money...the full amount.

This past week was actually nice...fixing bugs, adding enhancements to the system and working a normal work week. Oh...and I actually played WoW again for the first time in nearly two months the other night. Crazy, huh? :P

Dear Blogger...

I've missed you. I seems like only yesterday, I used to blog here everyday. Alas, my busy life has caused me to stray. I'll try not to do that again! Alright...back to our regularly scheduled program. I'll post here later today and give the gory details.