premidlife record year comes to an end

Well, as it says in the description, 2006 was the year that it all went down.
Work
House
Baby
Stepped across the adulthood line of no return (turned 31)

How did we say goodbye to the old year? Quietly. The happenings outside were making enough noise that we didn't feel the need to add to it. That and we're all out of fireworks and/or ammunition. I love how since some fireworks are now legal in Minnesota, ALL fireworks are apparently socially acceptable in Minnesota, even in an urban area. And how people feel more free to shoot their guns in the air in the hopes that it will be masked by/mistaken for fireworks. Anyway, I'm pretty sure we heard both gunshots and fireworks last night. I wonder if the ShotSpotter system is in place in my neighborhood yet.

Anyway, we started the year with snow on the ground, a baby in the crib, and Andrea winning at Scrabble. I think this may finally be her year.

Felix is cuter than ever and more gifted and talented and advanced than any other baby on the planet. We're already interviewing recruiters from various ivy league schools. It is a little tricky because so far Felix is undecided about whether he wants to focus his extra-curricular time on intramural lacrosse, judo, chess club, or advanced robotics and industrial design. He's pretty much undecided all around. We won't know for sure until he learns English.


In 2006 Andrea started working on her own magazine, ran an entire design studio essentially by herself (due to high turn-over in all other positions and an ever increasingly insane, bitchy, and wholly unreliable boss), ditched that job for a promising new position at a small furniture design company only to find out she got the old bait-and-switcheroo there(worse position, possibly worse boss), promptly dumped that steaming pile of pucky, went freelance and cranked out a monstrous product catalog for the worst client ever, all before delivering Felix in record time (something like 6 hours, start to finish). And that just brings us to July. After July she went full speed ahead on the mommy path and scaled back her designtrix-extraordinaire efforts just a tad. She joined the local printmaking co-op so that she could screenprint her work rather than shelling out money we don't have for sub-par digital printing. She sent in a poster to a movie festival/art gallery in Cincinnati which sold, and again submitted the same poster at the MCAD artsale where it sold as well. She completed the first in a series of ironic deco-modernist posters and hopes to finish the series in 2007. And of course she has survived being cooped up in our house day-in and day-out due to a very precocious Felix and a separation anxiety ridden german shepherd (more the latter than the former). All in all, a banner year.


Felix spent Jan-July in-utero then joined us on the outsid mid-July. From that point on he's been steadily leading the pack by a several lengths. He regained his birth weight in 2 days, doubled his birth weight in 2 months, and is constantly outgrowing clothing that it one to two age-sizes away. He's a very healthy and robust lad. He is interested in the world around him and he is very keenly aware that we have a dog, though he's not sure what it is for, yet. He reads and writes at the 3rd grade level and is just finishing a series of monographs about "My Pretty Puppy".

It has been a banner year for me as well. I started 2006 with a promotion at work, which included a nifty raise and a move to new new team. Then February I received a great annual review and another happy raise. Both of these played a big part in our ability to finance a house. So we started seriously looking at houses in January, put it on hold for about 2 months, then started again. On May 31, we closed on our house. Yay. We were moved in by June 15th. A month later Felix came flying out like cannonshot. I was present as partner, coach, and clenching-post. The summer seems to have been mostly uneventful aside from googling at Felix every chance we got. Little did we know those were the easy days! As he became more aware of the world, he became more demanding of us. It was no-longer feed me, change my diaper, put me to sleep. It became feed me, change my diaper, entertain me, take me out, show me things, let me watch TV, and I don't want to go to bed yet, I'm just going to wake up in 2 hours anyway so why not cut out the middleman and just let me stay up til then. Andrea and I worked pretty well as a team and the "lack of sleep" really didn't seem to be an issue for the first four months. In September I turned 31 AND made it rain in my kitchen while attempting to DIY some plumbing on the baby room's radiator. In October I got my 3rd raise of the year during the mid-year review. This one appears to be a "industry norm" level-set by HR (i.e. based on your reviews and your current position, we feel we should start paying you what the going rate is for people being recruited into this 'same' position across the industry), but who cares, its mo'money (sorta). Then in November/December I installed a new radiator in our car, saving us hundreds of dollars and gaining 5000 experience points, split between my auto-mechanic skills and manliness attribute. I think I went up a few levels in the process.

So that's 06 in a nutshell.
07 looks to be more of the same :).