once the new fence is up. Poor doggie.
There are advantages
A few days ago, we finished the Recipe View and launched it on Viewzi.
I think it is a fantastic way to search recipes, and was really excited to show it to Tricia. After about a minute of looking at it, Tricia asks, “Does it have Southern Living recipes?” Well no, as it so happens, it didn’t.
Hmmm… turns out Southern Living hosts their recipes, along with several other magazines, on myrecipes.com. It also turns out myrecipes.com has the sort of data that we need for this particular View (a rich picture contained in a well-labeled div). So now we have Southern Living recipes.
There are advantages to being married to the product manager (that is, the guy who helps decide what gets built next).
Hubbub at House of Horne
Early this morning alley workers arrived to rework some sections of the concrete behind our house which apparently were not soundly constructed during the Alley Rebuild of 2007-2008. They originally showed up this past Saturday, during the Bridal Shower of 2008 (more on that another time) and began the loud and smelly work of cutting through cement whilst 27 fashionably dressed women drinking champagne punch watched them with interest through the windows along the back of our house. The Bride-to-be of course appreciated the extra drama and excitement which this added to her special day. Thankfully she is my sister, and quite used to the antics and craziness which is life around here!
The timing wasn’t supposed to work out like this, but then you don’t get to plan these things. Three weeks ago we drew up a contract for a fence rebuild around our backyard. Our charming picket, while lovely to look at:
is pushing the 25 year old mark, and Jay has resorted to holding it together with rubberbands and scotchtape. So, it was time to say goodbye.
Today while the rather moody city workers laid rebar in preparation for pouring cement, who should arrive but our wonderful fence folks for their first day of work, and of course they needed to be in the same exact spot as the alley laborers. And the alley men were none too happy about it. I got grumped at by the foreman (who by the way had assured me on Saturday afternoon during the bridal shower, that all the pouring of cement would be completely finished on Monday and our fence guys could be back there working with no problems by the end of this week) who told me I’d best hold off on constructing my fence (but sir, we already had, they were supposed to begin construction on Monday, remember, but you told me not to?) or else. Huh. I told the fence workers I was sorry for the trouble, especially after I’d already asked them to postpone their work earlier in the week.
Regardless, the fence teardown commenced in the midst of the alley work and no one threw any punches (or bits of picket fence) that I could see. Heheh. About an hour later, our sprinkler service showed up to repair a line we unfortunately nicked while sodding part of the back yard a few weeks ago. They turned on the various sprinkler zones to verify the source of the leak, and promptly gave the fence workers a bit of a bath, which maybe they appreciated – it is almost 90 degrees out! Even so, I found myself apologizing yet again to the guys from Zarate Fence, as I feel they will be more than tired of this job before it’s even begun at this rate.
But as I write this, things are calming down. The alley workers are almost done with the cement behind our yard, and have moved just next door, and are making noise and such behind our neighbor’s house now, so the area is clear for fence work. The sprinkler dudes have repaired the nicked line and also informed me that our pipes are not really dug deep enough for sodding/planting purposes, so we’d best be careful when doing any future landscaping. Brilliant, but I regress.
Work continues on the fence, and in another week’s time, if all goes as planned (hah!) maybe we’ll have pictures of a brand spankin’ new fence to share with you. For now, I leave you with an early picture of the teardown:
Mommy’s Little Helper + Deck Spruce-Up
Just so’s you all know: Josiah has a pretty sweet side to him too. When he’s not making messes and being ornery!! This morning I walked outside and found him doing this:
He was watering all the new little plants I put in last week! No one told him to; but he’s seen me go turn on the garden hose and sprinkle all these tender plants each day, so I guess he figured he’d take care of that chore for me today. What a helpful boy!!
For a bit of history, when we bought the house, this was the place the previous owners let their dogs sleep. It was a real mess, full of dirty hay (for dog bedding??) and looked like this:
Early this year after the deck redo was complete, I finally got down to the business of cleaning out the hay and other debris.
We pulled brick after brick after brick out from underneath the hay.
I had lots of good help.
And some folks who just wanted to play in the dirt, but hey that’s cool too.
After our hard work, it was at least free of junk, and tidy-looking. But since January, it has sat feeling rather lonely and empty.
Until last week: I visited a local nursery and got some advice on what to plant here in hopes that we could keep it alive despite mostly shade and no sprinkler system feeding this area. I wanted as many evergreen perennials as would work so as to minimize effort/expense in the future. Among other things I planted a jasmine vine which I am hoping will happily climb and bloom all over this cute little birdy trellis I painted black (I love my trellis!):
And a Japanese Holly Fern, a Gardenia, Curly Red Coral Bells, and some Purple Shamrock.
I have yet to choose a plant for the corner, where I’d like something that will grow somewhat tall, yet narrow enough that it does not cover the kitchen window and block light from coming in. I definitely want to put something evergreen here. If any of my wonderful, green-thumbed readers have suggestions, please speak up! I need all the gardening help I can get.
Looks like Josiah knows that, and it’s a good thing he’s jumped in to help with the efforts to keep my little plants alive and thriving. Let’s hear it for Mommy’s Little Gardening Helper!
Viewzi has launched!
Sunday night found most of us viewzers huddled around a table sorting out the final details for our launch until almost midnight. Thankfully, the table was at a nice country club, so it wasn’t all that bad. Monday morning at 7 a.m., TechCrunch posted their exclusive coverage of our launch. For the next 12 hours, Viewzi was live but only accessible via the TechCrunch link. Then at 7 p.m., the wall came down fully and we were live.
It has gone fantastically! All the new platform code, some of which was written just days before launch, worked flawlessly and the site absorbed a massive increase in traffic without so much as flinching. At 8 p.m. last night, a huge group of us (well, huge for a company of 12) met at Kenichi and celebrated the success with wives, husbands, and even a set of parents. What fun! There’s pretty much no better way to enjoy your success than to eat some raw tuna.
Now go use the coolest search on the internet to find something fun.
A Picture is Worth….
…so much in this case that I don’t even know that this one needs a caption. But hey, captions are fun. So come on, everyone, give it your best shot.
Food, folks, and fun
My first post on the Viewzi blog went up a few days ago. More to come over the next few weeks.
Thirteen
Yesterday, Tricia and I celebrated 13 years of marriage. She was amazing then, and is so much more now. What a privilege it has been to grow and love and live and work together these many years. I am not the man I was (which is a good thing!), and much of that change is due to Tricia’s patient love for me.
May God bless us with many more decades together. I love you, sweetie!
Viewzi in the Newzi
Okay, first, let’s just clear up one thing. The whole “newzi” rhyme was Tricia’s idea. So if you loved it, now you know. And if you didn’t, well, there you have it.
Yesterday around 4:30 p.m. a news-team of two showed up at our offices to put together a story on Viewzi’s upcoming live launch. Stephanie Lucero interviewed several of us, got her footage, and had a story run on the 10 p.m. news. We were on the air at about 10:15 p.m. The end of the story included a teaser for a referral code found at the story’s accompanying web article. At approximately 10:22 p.m., our servers became a giant molten blob that sank into the earth’s crust…
Actually, the platform did amazingly. And the story had a fun “local boys try to make good and take on the big-bads of internet search” angle to it. You’ll see me briefly. If it was a movie, I would be listed in the credits as “Man 1, 3 men at a table”. Here’s the video. Enjoy!
Sweet, Beautiful Sleep…How Thou Dost Elude Us
See these four cute, angelic-faced creatures? Aren’t they sweet all snuggled together and ready for bed in their various nighttime attires?
Who would believe, looking at these four cherubic little faces, that these dear children are the cause of night after sleepless night for their poor dear parents? Parents, who despite their youthful good looks, cannot deny the fact that they are continually aging, and feeling the need for more rest for their weary bodies. The dark blotches underneath our eyes are a testimony to the nighttime antics around House of Horne, and except for one blissful night of uninterrupted sleep that happened a few days ago, we parents cannot recall another night in the past many, many weeks around here that we were not wakened by at least one incident in the wee hours of the night. So we are feeling sleep-deprived, despite the fact that we are more than two and half years out from having a newborn in the house. And this at a time which is, perhaps even more so than usual, pretty busy around here.
Popular themes in nighttime wakings include (but are by no means limited to) bad dreams, bed-wetting (through your diaper if you are the two year old and through your Spiderman boxer briefs if you are five – even though you haven’t wet your bed in literally almost a year’s time), coughing spells, stomach aches, night terrors (this is really actually quite sad despite my attempt at humor — Nicolas has suffered continually since January with ongoing, very awful night terrors), and various requests from the two-year-old to “sleep in your bed with you” just because “I want to” at 3am. Ugh. Continuous wakings throughout the night do nothing to improve my looks or my countenance, and it has been more of a struggle of late to hold my frustrations and tendency toward impatience in check.
So…why do I take the time to emote (albeit mildly) about this on our usually rant-free site here at House of Horne? I don’t know…running out of interesting fodder? Not really. But, I told Jay the other day that I really do love this stage of life with relatively young children. Mind you, I think I made this statement after that one night where we were not woken up by children, but even so. I love our life, sleep-deprivation and all, and would not exchange it if you gave me the option.
Despite the physical exhaustion that is often a part of parenting young ones, it is a precious time, and one I do not want to miss, no matter how tired I am. I feel as though we are given a gift in watching these little people grow and mature, and in having a huge part in shaping whom they become. Being their parents is hard, hard work, but is it also wonderful fun, and heaps blessing after blessing upon our lives. I pray, despite sleep deprivation which will most likely continue, that we will parent these children well. That God blesses our efforts, feeble and stupid though they sometimes are. And yes — since you asked —yes, after everything else, I do pray for sweet sleep as well…maybe someday.