My favorite photo

Recently, I've taken loads of photos but this one is by far my favorite. This will (hopefully) go as a 20x16 poster in M's room! This was taken at the beach last weekend. I just LOVE the sand on his nose.

Mr. M

Sorry I'm not finding too much time for blogging. Work is busy as usual, and we're out/doing something almost daily at home. This weekend we're going to hit some museums in DC - Natural History, Air & Space, and probably the National Art Museum. Hopefully, we'll go to the National Zoo as well. Mehul wants to ride on a bus so we'll be taking the Fairfax Connector to the Metro and go by Metro. As far as I can remember, he has never been on a bus!! Except the shuttle at the airport which goes from terminal to terminal. We always drive to the Metro station, or we drive straight into DC. And ofcourse, this will give my parents a chance to see the buses here. This should be fun :)

Enjoy the 3-day weekend!

Busy Busy

Since mummy papa have arrived here, we've been very busy. I don't get as much putter-time as before. We went to the beach on friday and returned yesterday. Visited the Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Museum today. And we've been to Luray Caverns. It has only been 8 days LOL! So much to see, so little time. I'll post some pics later.

Excited

Mummy papa land here in 40 minutes! We're off to the airport as soon as everyone is cleaned up and ready to go! There was some snafu with their seats and I'm hoping they got somewhat decent ones assigned at the airport. They're not carrying a cell phone so we couldn't ask.

I have been cleaning the house pretty much since morning. The last weekend was spent for work so the house wasn't nearly as clean as I'd like.

I'm ready to talk about last week now. I got a lot of appreciation for the work last week. And an out of turn bonus!! I wasn't expecting anything beyond making my co-working whom I substituted for (T), happy. T is extremely thankful as he was able to take his first vacation of the year, and is taking me out to lunch once he gets back from vacation. He said he wouldn't check his email on his vacation, but he did, just to know what happened last week! The work I did was originally assigned to him. He couldn't finish in time because of some scheduling error on someone else's part. I stepped up and took over his entire work (much of which was new to me, which explains 88 hours in my timesheet for the week). What can I say, I like challenges (LOL!) It turned out to be a bigger challenge when the machine he had configured was discovered to be throwing erros on something that was important for the work. It wasn't a matter of mere backup/recovery. That stuff hadn't worked in forever! We (I had help!) configured a brand new machine, got everything configured all over again, and finished in time for the customer demo. Everyone was pleased as demo went very well.

Best of all, I got to learn a bunch of new things, I got a compensatory off whenever I wanted (TODAY). Plus, a nice bonus just for this :) Sweet! On top of this, my coworker thinks the world of me if his email is any indication :) I'm such a people pleaser LOL!

I'm off to get M out of the bath and do something with my hair. 30 minutes to go!

I'm alive

Just have had the week from hell. Everything's fine but I'm just tired and cranky. Not sure I want to bore everyone with details but it is work related again.

Few LOs of the Toronto pics I had done earlier..

Top of the World

Credits:
Papers from Meredith Fenwick
Various Elements from Michelle Coleman, Lori Wile, Lie Fhung, Lori Barnhurst

Rainforest Cafe

Everything from Lie Fhung

Soar

Evening at Niagara

Everything from Lie Fhung

July? Gone?

When did that happen? Slow down, summer!

So I finished the scarf I was knitting. I had to make a restart when I made a mistake and couldn't fix. I mulled over it for *2 entire days*. Could have finished it 2 days sooner. It was so quick. I initially started it at the stitching GTG last Saturday. I was happy with the restart because in the beginning my tension wasn't even, so the scarf had taken a weird shape. I restarted it with the new Bamboo needles I got from AC Moore. So much lighter than the long steel needles I was using! I'll have a picture up here soon. Mehul loves the new scarf and can name all the colors in it :) Now I need to get new yarn for another scarf. This one might be for me or my younger sister.

In other news, my parents are (finally) coming to visit! They are arriving in 12 days from today. I'm so excited. This will be their first visit to the US. I have planned all these trips for the 2 months they'll be spending with us here. I asked Papa if there was any place in particular they wanted to visit while they were here, ofcourse I have planned stuff but if there was something in particular? He said he wanted to visit *us* :) Isn't he sweet!

Work is still busy. I did get a lot of recognition for the work I did over the weekend, specially because of the short notice of the deadline. The customer was happy, and all was well in the end. It still could have been managed a lot better but that's not my call to make. The good news is that this isn't going to be my regular project, the bad news is that I'll be standing by for emergencies, and that this is bound to repeat. Sigh.

Among some happy news, one of my lunch-buddies told us this week that she's pregnant. I told her I had known for 2 whole months LOL! Initially I just had a hunch..she had asked me one day if I was wearing a new shirt (I was), and said that the shirt smells like it's new. Come on, people. Only pregnant ladies can tell a shirt is new by *smelling* from *far away* LOL! And a little while after this she started cutting us off at lunch time, saying she had too much work. And she was munching a little bit *all the time*. The hunch was confirmed when she asked me for a GYN recommendation near work that was a group practice. Doesn't get much clearer than this. I didn't ask her because I knew she'd tell when she wanted. She isn't even showing yet. The look on her face was very amusing upon hearing that I knew. LOL!

Have a happy friday and a great weekend. We don't have any specific plans. DH will be picking up the new tags for my car. His birthday is on Sunday so we might do something.

Pink explosion :)

Since I was home on a working day i.e. sans_DH_And_DS, I had to keep myself busy. So I managed to do 2 loads of laundry, fold 2 (older) loads, clean the master bath, load dishwasher, and attempted to straighten up playroom. I did take a nap as well. Did 2 layouts and went for a walk in the evening.

I wanted the blog to appear clean and fresh after the dark theme I had going since March. I believe this is the longest I've gone without making changes. I do like the pink (though I already think there is too much of it). It is reminding me of Umbridge LOL. As long as there's no lace, we're good!

Weekend ups and downs

Stitching GTG at Debby's was good. I learned knitting. I liked it. Until I screwed up. Now I'm unable to fix it. I'm pretty sure it's fixable, but I just don't know how :(

Boating on Sunday was great. Our community has a nice sized lake where we can do boating. Only available to members, so it was pretty much like this. "Hey, the weather's nice." while passing the lake "Let's go boating." "Ok. Let's go." Lunch after boating was good too (Love Baja Fresh).

Upon reaching home around 4, friends called and said they're dropping by. Sure, I'll just check my work email meanwhile. Hadn't heard anything about how testing was going. They were supposed to start this morning. I had finished all my work on friday and was only supposed to support the testing effort, and stand by to fix issues. Well, that's where the trouble started. After placing a few calls, I made them start testing (not part of my job but we *all* would be in trouble if something isn't working). This issue has been escalated *already* to the highest level in both my company and the client. They're expecting everything to work on Monday. Don't you think it should be tested? Turns out that out of the two *very time consuming* tasks I had done friday evening, one file has gone corrupt. No recovery from that. It's an xml that is generated by the software and it can't be hand-fixed. The other developer had to delete a whole bunch of data (and took hours to do that) and I had to redo part of my work after that. Fun. I finally finished at 2 AM. I do have to say that DH stayed up with me until 1 AM and made me a mug of Tim Horton's before going to bed. He's a sweetie pie :)

The upside is that everything is working now, and that I took the day off. They better compensate this. Grrrr.

So I'm grumpy today. I don't like taking naps but today is a day for it.