My life right now

So it's Ben this time. Usually Emily is the one to blog, but I thought I'd take a turn. Life lately has been busy. I've been working extra at work lately and really doing well (if I do say so myself). I'm one of the more productive members of my team, so I think I'll have a favorable review next year. At least that's what I tell myself when I have to work extra. The downside of being so productive at work is that they expect so much sometimes. Emily has been very supportive. Did you know that I don't have to get up in the middle of the night when Lily cries? How lucky am I? Lily's sleeping a lot better at night lately. If we get her to bed on time, she'll usually sleep all through the night, and if she doesn't, it's usually just at 5 or so, so she sleeps most of the way through the night all the time now, and that's nice. (By the way that was just a big run-on sentence, but I'm not going to change it because I don't want to!)

I'm still taking the bus to work every day. It takes about 45 minutes when I could drive it in 25ish, but I get to be on my laptop the whole time, plus we don't need two cars which saves a lot of money too. Oh, and did I mention that not only does Microsoft pay for my bus pass, they sometimes give out gift cards to people who ride the bus. I've already gotten 3 so far. I like having the bus time to work on my laptop and work on whatever project I'd like, but with the rainy Seattle weather, I have to put it away during transfers to keep it from getting rained on.

For those of you who don't know, I started programming when I was about 13 years old. My brother Daniel and his friend were making small programs in QBasic, and I, being the tag-along little brother that I was, learned to so I could fit in. Well it turns out that I'm good at it and I love programming (I actually enjoy going to work every day). So anyway, you can't find a QBasic compiler anymore these days, at least not one that will run on Windows Vista. But they did come out with something similar called Small Basic recently and I've been teaching Emily how to program using that, and she's doing really well. She's working on a Breakout (single player-pong) type game, which is really good for a beginner. Small basic does make things a little easier than they were back in the days of QBasic where all you had was PSET, and that wasn't fast enough, so you had to figure out how to write directly to the screen using PEEK & POKE (I bet Daniel is the only one who understood what I just said there).

Emily's Game. She even made the blocks pink so it would be a girly game.

Me and Emily are on the ball! We're both almost done with Christmas shopping, and birthday shopping which is pretty impressive because I usually wait until the last minute. Now the hard part is keeping everything hidden until Christmas. There's not a lot of places in the condo that we don't use on a regular basis, so we'll have to be creative about hiding spots.

We're going to my parents for Thanksgiving, and I'm really looking forward to it because we don't get to see them very often, and I'm close with my dad. We're spending a whole week there, which means we'll be there for Em's birthday too. I've gotta take Em & Lily to the zoo there because I keep telling her how the Denver zoo is so much cooler than the Woodland park zoo. So look forward to pictures of that in a month or so.

So there it is, my life right now, but the only reason my mom reads this blog is for pictures of Lily. So this next section is dedicated to you mom.

My Lily...so adorable

Lily has been making roaring noises lately, it's so cute!!

Lily all bundled up for a walk outside

Rubber ducky, you're the one!

Lily taking over the computer chair.

Our Halloween costume. Lily's wasn't that creative, but me and Em
liked dressing like babies.