kahunaburger

How can you resist if you are constantly surrounded by all those gorgeous models? I can’t and that’s why I have to post more pictures.

First, for those regulars who were here before Pia, enjoy the tarantula which we found on Friday morning crawling up the wall of our house outside the laundry room. I’d say she was a bit bigger than my hand and when I used the dust pan and the broom to move her back into the desert, I could not believe how fast she was …

Spider on the wall

Next, we move over to my favourite subject these days: Pia. While cleaning a seriously soiled diaper (I’m talking about the curry-carrot-soup-looking kind) this is what you will see - how can you be mad with her? You almost want her to soil her diaper again …

How can you resist?

She has good minutes/hours and then she has bad ones. After returning from some shopping today, Pia was still happily asleep in her car seat. Soon after this picture was taken, her face turned sour and she demanded to be fed right away.

Before the storm

I was finishing “Roger Dodger” (slow, slow) and taking care of Pia. She became a bit restless on my laps, so I put her down on the couch where she seemed to enjoy the extra space. A moment that turned out to be one of my favourite pictures of her (so far).

Do we have enough space?

PS: And just because I’ve seen some hot-linking lately, I want to remind you, the anonymous reader, about the copyright on all images at kahunaburger.com. These pictures mean a lot to me and I would hate to see them being used elsewhere without my permission - thanks for your understanding!

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Psssst - be quiet!

There is some truth to the advice “Have a nap whenever your baby is asleep!”. Pia has been home since Sunday afternoon and I can confim that our lives have changed completely. Most of our actions revolve around the newcomer at the moment and we try to do everything possible to give our baby a good home. The baby decides when we sleep and when we’re awake. We were really happy to find out that she slept from about 11pm until 4am the last two nights and hope that it stays like this.
During the day, this is what we see most of the time of our daughter:

The Mummy

A mummy, tucked in, no noises … sometimes you could almost forget that she’s there.

And then there are the rare moments where she’s awake and alert (and does not hang on one of mummies breasts). She looks around and listens and we enjoy every moment of it.

Looking out the window

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November 3rd was the official due-date, but the baby would not want to wait any longer. Pia was born on Saturday 10:58am at St. Vincent Hospital in Santa Fe, NM.

Welcome to the world, Pia!

Candice started having “different” cramps on Friday evening when we walked the dogs at about 6pm (yes, she walked the dogs twice a day during her whole pregnancy). By 10pm those cramps had turned into really strongs contractions. However, because they were spaced unevenly and did not last long enough, we were not sure whether she was experiencing the “real thing”. At 4am she was in too much pain and we decided to call our Doula, Amy, and head over to the hospital.
Quite surprised we heard that Candice was already 7cm dilated when a nurse checked her at the hospital, which means we did not come a minute to early to the hospital. We left the Triage area and went to our room.
It took another 4.5 hours for Candice to dilate enough before she was allowed to “push”.
After another 1.5 hours Pia was born at exactly 10:58am. She weighed 6 pounds and 12 ounces (3060 grams) and was 19.25 inches (49 cm) long.

This was taken 20 mins after the baby was born. It was very nice to see that the hospital firmly believes that initial mother-child contact is very important. Right after the baby was born, she was transferred to Candice’ chest and did not leave this comfortable place until about 1.5 hrs later:

Welcome to the world, Pia!

Candice did an awesome job and survived the whole birth without any medical intervention (except for a small 1hr dose of pain-killers during the most painful part of labour). Does she look like she just had a baby 25 mins ago?

She does not look like she just had a baby.

It’s incredible to see how quickly she calms down when she can rest on her mother’s chest:

Momma?

An extra big Thank You goes to Amy, our Doula, who was with us from 4:30am on and helped Candice through labour. We really could not have done it without you, Amy!!!

After two hours on Mom’s chest the baby was checked up and washed, that’s where this shot was taken:

Pia

Candice and Pia stayed the night in the hospital, while I decided to sleep at home. I needed to turn on the heating in the house (temperature dropped dramatically in the last few days) and I did not want to spend the night in a sleeper chair at the hospital. But this does not mean I’m not a proud papa:

Tobias and Pia

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There are some classes of spam which make me furious. Here is one example of them. Hotpennies.net (not linked for a reason) sent me this message where they advertise a company called “Integrated Performance Systems Inc.” and urge me to “Watch This Stock Trade!!!”.

While I’m in no position to judge the perfromance of this company or it’s stock, I’m in a position to judge what I want to see in my EMail-Inbox. And this is not among those items I want to deal with on a daily basis. Even if this company is poised to sky-rocket in the future and one could make millions from buying stock in this company, it had exactly the opposite effect on my: the fact that they chose to advertise via spam makes me avoid them like the plague in the future. I hope you do the same. Too bad.

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I guess I’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg here on kahunaburger. Two more of those blog spammers are present in the comment section for TiVo + Home Media Option + Email. One points us a the incredible and amazing discount-viagra-cheap.com and the other one leads to the wonder discount-life-insurance.us.

For the moment the “http” in those links has been replaced by “hddp”, which will make sure that other robots will not count those stupid links as valid and will also not make people go there.

As long as Registrars like Go Daddy and enom.com allow people to register domains with information like the one you find for discount-life-insurance.us and for discount-viagra-cheap.com every low-life out there has a chance to make money on the web. This has got to change.

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There is a new kind of Spam going on. This time it is not the spam that clogs your inbox and announces the benefits of Viagra from Canada suppliers, no - this time they abuse the commenting facilities of your blog-software.

In my case it started with a comment entry for my “Endless Source of live streams for TiVo” article. This is the email notification I received on Sun 10/12/2003:


A new comment has been posted on your blog KahunaBurger, on entry #54 (Endless Source of live streams for TiVo). http://www.kahunaburger.com/blog/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=54

--
Powered by Movable Type
Version 2.62
http://www.movabletype.org/


Wow - lucy1982@hotmail.com, thanks for the message. Hmm, but wait, there is no reference to the article contents. Where did she come from? How did she end up reading the article? Let’s dig a bit deeper.

The post came from “219.95.14.69″. Where’s that? Again using www.visualroute.com we get this:

So, Lucy with the hotmail account commented on my entry from Malaysia - cool! Well where did Lucy come from? Let’s check the server’s log-files:


$ grep 219.95.14.69 access_log
219.95.14.69 - - [12/Oct/2003:06:35:34 -0600] "GET /blog/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=54 HTTP/1.1" 200 6428 "-" "libwww-perl/5.69"
219.95.14.69 - - [12/Oct/2003:06:35:50 -0600] "POST /blog/mt-comments.cgi HTTP/1.1" 302 5 "-" "libwww-perl/5.69"
$


And those are the only entries in the log file. This means that Lucy went directly to the comments page for this entry and left a comment without even looking at the content (and yes, I did check the few hundred log-entries before for similar IP addresses in case Lucy went through a farm or proxy servers).

What’s even more interesting is the browser that Lucy used: libwww-perl/5.69. This tells me that Lucy left her comment programmatically in the blog and did not use IE, Mozilla, Opera, Konquerer or some other browser.

And here’s the theory:
1) Lucy offered her services to a company claiming she would increase traffic for a site (ip2location.com)
2) Lucy did a query on Google for some popular topics and narrowed the number of responses down to those responses that come from Blog systems like MovableType (as used here on kahunaburger.com)
3) Lucy ran her commenting script on those URLs which generated the comment in my blog.
4) People hit my article on www.kahunaburger.com and some of those will follow her link back to www.ip2location.com, which in turn increases the hits on this target site.

Of course this is only a theory, but a pretty solid one as far as I’m concerned. But there are some links out there which seem to prove this theory:

* http://meta.popdex.com/link/117
* http://www.amishrobot.com/archive/000189.html

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Candice (and Pia) in the mirror

Yes - it is! According to the ultra-sound scans, there is a little girl hidden in there. Hard to believe, but we’ll know for sure in a few weeks.

We went over to Laurie’s today and she took some pictures of the two of us, just to make sure we have some nice photographs from our pregnant time. I took my camera and used the time in between shots to capture the mom.

This one turned out really well in my opinion. Thanks Laurie

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I wonder what it is like to be a baby in our home. Is it really ok for two “grown ups” with their eye levels way above 5ft to design the world of a baby whose viewing point is most certainly way below 5ft? Whose viewing direction will be “up” for most of the first year? So what does it look like from down there?

I guess it’s not too bad after all (the colored animals on the mobile would freak me out a bit, but perhaps I’m too old to judge that):

View from the crib

  

View in the playpen

  

Max from below

  

Frisco from below

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Americans do have a lot of traditions and some of them seem to be quite useful. Take the “shower” thing: There are a number of different showering occasions. The wedding shower, the baby shower, the divorce shower (not sure about the last one). The idea is to invite friends and family to a little party celebrating the upcoming event, but the catch is that those friends and family members need to have a “ticket” to the party. And a ticket is simply a present for the bride to be or mother to be or single-again to be (again, not sure about the last one).
We have the distinct advantage of having deep roots in California and (not so deep) roots in New Mexico, which means that we can do what others can’t do: double-shower!!!

Beginning of September Candice flew out to California and spent some time with her parents. On September 7th they had a shower there in the house in Cupertino. Betty snapped away and gave me the pictures below (among others):

Baby shower in Cupertino	Baby shower in Cupertino	Baby shower in Cupertino	Baby shower in Cupertino	Baby shower in Cupertino
Baby shower in Cupertino	Baby shower in Cupertino	Baby shower in Cupertino	Baby shower in Cupertino	Baby shower in Cupertino

Then just two weeks later we are showered again. This time it is on the balcony of Manitou Galleries in Santa Fe. Amber, Amy and Kathrine organized everything just perfect (thanks again!). Laurie took Candice’ photo for the invitation and the cookies (yes, they printed Candice’ picture on the cookies). Here are a few pictures from Sept 21st:

Baby Shower at Manitou	Baby Shower at Manitou	Baby Shower at Manitou	Baby Shower at Manitou
Baby Shower at Manitou	Baby Shower at Manitou	Baby Shower at Manitou	Baby Shower at Manitou

Thanks again to everybody for their generous presents …

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A mixed bag it is. Complaints left and right about non-existant updates to kahunaburger.com made it necessary to put in extra hours (after work!) to create this (and the following) entries.

We’ve been busy doing the baby thing. Doing the baby thing means getting rid of things in the baby’s room, making sure that we have at least a hundred outfits before the baby is born, finding out what the differences between the diaper-genie, the diaper-master and the diaper-sucker are, and of course sorting the one hundred outfits into 10 different baskets:

Sorting baby clothes

The last exercise is extremely exhausting and when I say extremely I mean extremely. You won’t believe how much energy it costs to put sockies to sockies, onesies to onesies, hatsies to hatsies and make sure that things are color coordinated, that the “up to 3 months” stuff is not mixed with the “3 to 6 months” stuff - this is damned hard work and requires a damend hard break afterwards:

Busy on the couch

Momma is doing fine and the dogs also seem to notice that there is something going on with Candice. Not that they sniff her belly, but I get the impression that they also realized that she’s not the same as before (for one she does not run around as much as she did ..).

While Candice is changing the seasons here are also changing and they are changing almost as rapidly as she does. Eternal sunshine has been replaced by morning fogs and very welcome thunderstorms/rains. And the earth is soaking up the rain like a dry sponge. Where there used to be sand and dust only, we suddenly see flowers and grass. The landscape is magically transformed into a desert landscape with lots and lots of colorful patches. Wildflowers are everywhere and our eyes feast on them …

Watching a heavy rain

 

Flowers in the afternoon

With the flowers come the bees and with the bees comes the praying mantisse. This one happens to be sitting in the Russian Sage bush in the back of the house and I visit her daily. She really waits right next to a bloom for a victim to show up. Almost every time I visit her (or him? how can you tell?) she has a snack in her hands:

Breakfast

While walking the dogs I also notice that the usually dry patches have changed. Where there was sand only, there is now baked earth forming the weirdest shapes and patterns:

Baked earth I

 

Baked earth III

 

Baked earth II

The last few weeks have been busy at work and in our private lifes. We are going through one of the most significant changes right now and it seems to consume a lot of energy and time already (wonder how this is going to be once we have the baby?!?). Everything is fine with mother and father to be … accept these flowers as an apology that I did not update the site earlier (I’m talking to you Deeee …):

Flowers on the fire place

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