Ah, once again it's been a month since I posted. Sigh. Whatever, I guess. One of the things about having kids is that it teaches you to live one day at a time. It makes it easy for time to get away from you when you do, though. So greetings everybody! Things have been going well with us here at Chez Vanderburg. Steve did end up having an interview with the Portland office (they didn't call until five weeks after the posting closed!!) but we haven't heard back on that one. Despite Steve being such a strong candidate, we're not sure he's going to be chosen. It sounds like they need a techie, someone who can do programing, and that's so not Steve. But never fear, he has another application in at the other Portland office, as well as Cheyenne. The other Portland office is a River Forecast Center, dealing with, oddly enough, rivers. There is a lot of interesting things involved with that one, but I won't bore everybody with the details unless he gets the job. Since then ya'll are going to hear way more than you ever wanted to know anyway. As for the Cheyenne job, I know what you're thinking. Cheyenne? As in, Wyoming? WHY-oming? We're not as desperate to go just anywhere as you might think. Steve got me thinking about Cheyenne with one simple statement. 90/10. 90% of your time, it doesn't matter where you are. If you're just chilling in front of the boob tube or online, playing with the baby or doing chores, or working, San Diego is not really any different from Maine, or Kentucky. The other ten percent of the time, your free time, that's when it matters. Now, you say, yea but that ten percent in Cheyenne sounds really hick and boring. Ah, but wait dear friends. Cheyenne is only 90 minutes from Boulder, Denver, and the Rocky Mountain National Forest. That's the same distance as Julian to downtown San Diego. But we'd have the added bonus of not having to drive half an hour to the grocery store, an hour to the hardware store, or an hour and a half to the airport or hospital or doctor. All of that is in town, and it only takes about twenty minutes to drive from one side of Cheyenne to the other. Then there is the financial aspect of the place. Wyoming doesn't have a state income tax. That means the ten percent we're paying now would go straight into our pocket. Their sales tax is lower. Pretty much every fee or tax they have is lower than California (it's hard not to be). And we could get a nice house, better than what we have, for approximately $160K. Gee. And, just for Steve's sake, it's chase country. They get massive hail, tornadoes, huge supercells, summer thunderstorms. And their year round weather is always of interest to a meteorologist. Maybe not so much the rest of us, but that's okay. I've resigned myself to the fact that if we move there, I'm going to have to listen to conversation about the weather 90% of the time. Such is life. So. There you have it. Oh, and as for the hick factor of Cheyenne....we do all of our grocery etc. shopping in Ramona. Been there. Done that. Enough said.

Beet is growing so fast. He's able to grab things and hold them, successfully navigate them to his mouth. He's recently discovered his feet and his ears. He can stand up for several minutes at a time, as long as someone is stabilizing him. He's not quite to the sitting on his own yet, but he's not too far. He's still not crawling, mostly because of his sincere and utter disgust with belly time, but we're hoping to change that soon. We went to a follow-up physical therapy assessment at the hospital yesterday, and the PT gave us some good ideas about how to help him with belly time. So, we'll see if we can't get him crawling yet. We gave him his first taste of applesauce yesterday, and he actually ate some of it. Didn't like it very much and didn't seem to have a great idea of what to do with the food once it got into his mouth, but he did eat it. He'd probably eat a lot more of it if we smeared it on his toys, since he spends so much time chewing on them. But then he'd have to figure out how to beat off the dogs. Seems like too much trouble.