Currently, the weather in Baltimore is glorious. Sunny, breezy, 75° San-Francisco-like weather. It’s heaven. Last night I was home a little early from work, so we decided to put Finn in the backpack and take a walk down into town for some ice cream after dinner. There are many days I wish my neck was double-jointed so that I could see the expressions on Finn’s face as she reaches out to brush her hand against bushes and trees and flowers as they pass by. Right before bedtime, she wanted to do some standing, so I put her down on the floor between my knees so she had something to hang onto. She decided she wanted to play with the tube of butt paste on the bed behind her left shoulder, and turned herself completely around, unaided, to be able to reach it. Tonight I have to lower the bed in her crib so that when she pulls herself to a sitting position, she can’t pull herself to a standing position and attempt a jailbreak.

Last week, the hard drive we were storing our entire music collection on started having catastrophic problems, to the point where it wouldn’t boot anymore. I pulled it out, dropped a spare drive in, and resurrected the server, but DiskWarrior is unable to rebuild the directory on the music drive at all. I’ve got a backup that dates back to the middle of 2008, but everything I’ve collected since then (minus the new stuff stored on my iPod) may be kaput. Ouch!

After an inauspicious start, Jen’s garden is going strong. She’s got pumpkins, cantaloupe, plenty of beautiful tomatoes, eggplant, cucumbers, and basil all growing happily. The asparagus is out of control—our cup will runneth over with pee-stinkin’ vegetables next year. On the other hand, my container plants are just sort of moping along, probably pissed that I haven’t been watering them religiously. I lost one of my eggplants to critters, some of my Big Boy tomatoes got blight, and the first crop of beautiful peppers I had coming in got nibbled on by something (most likely squirrels). Of course, they had to nibble on all of them just to be sure they didn’t like the taste instead of only one.

There is dog in our future, and it will be a breed that likes to chase squirrels.