For some reason, my blogging has barely been happening. You would think I would be able to keep it up-to-date since I am up most of the day and night, but no such luck. Since it's late tonight, this will be quick.

It was necessary to blog today given the monumental scope of the days events. Today Chase received his first package - surely only the first of potentially dozens over the course of his life. Today's package came from the glaciers of Idaho and contained a magical gift from the Barnet family. Actually, the package was only addressed from Misti, so assume what you will.

Here are some pictures of Chase receiving this most excellent gift. You can see that he was perplexed at first - never having received a package before - but he squealed with glee when he gazed upon the contents...

Much thanks! We and he are very grateful!!

Finally, here's another random picture of the boy:

Since no one really cares about my opinions, I'll include the baby update first so that you can be on your way. Today is Chase's four-week birthday. Today has been the first day where a little bit of personality started to shine through. He's still keeping us up at night - he tends to get up at 11p and finally falls back asleep by about 12:30a-1a. He gets up around 2a or 3a and goes right back to sleep; however, when he gets up at about 4a or 5a he tends to stay away until 9a or 10a. He's getting a little better, but he's still torturing us with sleep deprivation. Emilie is the one that bears the brunt of it. I try to help, but I'm not really good for much. He's generally pretty good, but has occasional fits. Anyway, here are a couple of pictures take during the last week. The first is Chase getting a bath. The second is Chase with Grandpa Carpenter.

And now, less interesting stuff:

It was good/odd to hear that Glenn Beck is going to have a TV show on CNN Headline News. His live shows consistently sell out and are supposed to be very good. A TV show format could be very promising.

Speaking of TV, I'm in a real bad way right now. Between the start of the new season of 24, a new season of American Idol, House, My Name is Earl and The Office, I've got a very unhealthy TV addiction to deal with. It's not cool.

I find it funny that the product page for the Kodak EASYSHARE P880 Zoom Digital Camera lists "Proprietary RAW* file format" as a feature. Perhaps it's just weird wording, but it sounds like they're bragging about a proprietary format. I thought those days were long gone...

This isn't necessarily new news, but it's new to me. The Idaho State Legislature passed a Napoleon Dynamite resolution and the text of it is hilarious! You have to read it to get the full effect, but some sample lines read as follows:

I finally found the USA version of the Ovaltine website. Compared to the UK version and the official site, the US site seems pretty lame. It is far less professional and has almost no content. Strange.

In my quest for information about a product I do not enjoy, I found the following on Wikipedia:

Ovaltine had a minor but memorable role in a 1996 episode of Seinfeld, The Fatigues, in which Jerry is nominally attempting to 'mentor' his comedic nemesis Kenny Bania. Noting that much of Bania's stand-up act concerns milk drinks such as Nesquik and Bosco, Seinfeld writes the following (deliberately obtuse) routine for Bania: "Why do they call it Ovaltine? The mug is round. The jar is round. They should call it Roundtine!" Bania reacts eagerly, declaring, "That's gold, Jerry! Gold!"

Per Mike's shout, I should mention one more thing about Pringles. The salsa-flavored Pringles come in a blue can. I'm not sure why they think that blue is a good color for salsa. What's more, I'm not sure why they think salsa is a good flavor for potato chips. Salsa is pretty much a corn chip exclusive. Potato chips have french onion dip. I've been eating the chips, but salsa-flavor is pretty much the Ovaltine of all the Pringles flavors.

And now, miscellaneous useless rantings:

Amidst the endless advertising for rich, chocolate Ovaltine, I decided to get some to try. Although I've been plodding through my supply, I can't say that I'm very fond of it. It has a very grainy aftertaste. To cover my bases, I also tried "Ovaltine hot". This was far more disappointing than drinking it cold. It is safe to say that I'm sticking with good ol' Nesquik, health factors be darned. As a side note, it seems a bit goofy that their tagline for mothers (correction: mums) is "A source of goodness for you and your bump." Very strange - even for people in England.

Over the Christmas and New Years holidays we ate a lot of Pringles. One of my purchases was the fat-free version of the barbecue chips. The can boldly advertises that fat-free Pringles have half the calories of competing chips. I happened to have a can of regular Pringles and found that they have more than double the number of calories of fat-free Pringles. This means that regular Pringles have more calories than the competing regular chips. Why don't they adveritise this?

I continue to be curious about Airborne. There seems to be an advertising push lately, which only heightens my curiosity. According to their advertisements, you should use Airborne because it was "created by a second grade school teacher." I'm not sure how being a second grade school teacher qualifies a person to develop medicine. I'm also not sure what a second grade school teacher knows that the multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical companies have not been able to figure out. I have not tried this product, nor do I intend to try it.

Finally, I could whine all day about Microsoft products. The most recent frustrations come from two specific issues. First, if you double-click the address bar in Explorer to highlight the text and then begin typing in the address bar, Windows will continue to randomly highlight and delete what you type unless you move the mouse out of the address bar area. Bizarre and lame. Second, when an uninstall program is invoked using Add/Remove Programs the Add/Remove Programs window remains frozen (by design) until the uninstall completes. If part of the uninstall pops behind the Add/Remove Programs window and is inaccessible using alt-tab, you have a conundrum. This is a true story.

First and foremost, baby and mom are doing good. Chase is growing very quickly - he already has his dad's double-chin. Emilie is doing much better. The most recent bit of excitement happened when she went to the doctor last week. She apparently had a seroma, which required the doctor to take action. The process was a little nasty, so if you don't want to know about it just skip to the next paragraph. Anyway, there was one part of Emilie's incision that didn't seem to be healing-up. The doctor poked at it and it suddenly started gushing fluid. Ultimately, he had to open the incision about 1cm to allow all the fluid to come out. He put a Q-Tip inside the incision to swab it out and then packed it with sterile gauze. The really fun part is that he sent us home with a bag of goodies for me to do that same thing three times a day for Emilie. It seems to be all better now and Emilie is happy about that.

Super congrats go to the Barnet's on moving into their new home! I'm anxious for an opportunity to go to Boise to scope the pad.

I was deeply saddened to hear yesterday that two Mormon missionaries were shot, one was killed.

Additionally, the actual outcome of the search for the miners was very sad, especially following the news last night that all but one had been found alive.

Emilie continues to recover and is currently doing very well. She's still enjoying the effects of surgery, but at this point it's primarily the typical effects - no surprises. I think it's driving her crazy that she's basically stuck at home - she's ready to spend some time away from the house. The first real chance we had to get out was yesterday, but the flooding kept her at home. Our neighborhood was unaffected, but it wasn't very good weather to be joyriding.

I go back to work this week on Tuesday, so that will be the next test for Em. She will have help from family, so hopefully it won't be too traumatizing.