Very well done.

It’s the political season, and I am afraid I will write something stupid on this blog about the election or one of the candidates. That stops now.

I’m pretty conservative, but John McCain has disappointed me since his nomination, as he has abandoned his principles and become an ally of the failed policies of Bush, Cheney, etc. I have since favored Obama.

McCain’s supporters have been getting out of hand, calling Obama an Arab, a terrorist, and many other things. He’s a socialist who’s made some bad judgment calls, and I thank John McCain for his (albeit late) response today in Lakeville, Minnesota.

The sad thing here is that supporters actually booed him when he told them that Obama is a good person, and that people do not have to be scared of him.

You may disagree with someone, but you need to learn to respect people who disagree with you. People are so easily blinded by hate and lies. We’ve had enough of that.

Yahoo thinks you should.

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Lisa has surgery on Thursday morning. This is going to be the sixth one and I’m getting really tired of this. It’s expensive and nerve-racking, and I really hate putting her through it each time. Ana’s gone this week again, and I miss her. Things are moving so fast and yet I feel like we’re going nowhere.

I’ve been busy. Many of my side projects have come to an end and I’m not actively looking for more at this moment so I can get the graphics book finished. It’s holding up my life a bit and I want it done. The problem is that you can’t force writing, no matter how much you really want to.

I launched http://www.snippetstash.com/ a few weeks ago. It’s just a simple site that lets programmers store bits of code they tend to use over and over again. When you program for a living or as a hobby, you tend to encounter cool tricks that you’d like to keep track of for later use, and SnippetStash lets you do that. You can also share your code snippeets with the rest of the world if you want to. It was something I threw together over the weekend and I got some decent feedback on it.

Other than that, it’s been book, book, book. Oh, and Call of Duty on XBOX Live every Tuesday night.

So Lisa’s more than four months old already. I can’t believe how much time flies. In the last four months, quite a few things have happened around here.

First, Ana just finished up Second Grade. She’s planning to spend her summer doing lots of reading and learning, and hopefully she’ll get some video game time in with me. I’m pretty proud of her–she really pulled it together this year.

Next, I just gave a presentation at RailsConf 2008 in front of 208 people. I gave hands-on training in web design, teaching color theory, typography basics, and showed some fun Photoshop and Illustrator stuff too. If you’re bored, you can check out the slides and handouts from my presentation.

I’ve made good progress on the book. We launched MyDecisionHelper so I have some more free time, although I’m looking for more work since I could use the money. Unfortunately the book is top priority right now and I’ve been rewriting a good chunk of it as of late.

I also launched a site caled FeelMySkills where you can build your own online profile page where you can list your skills and show examples of your photography, illustrations, designs, video or audio production, or whatever else you can share on the web. The site is designed to be easy to use so it’s easy to create an employer-safe web presence for yourself like this one. Give it a try. You can sign up for free and upgrade to a pro account when they’re available.

Lisa’s doing very well with things. There’s a chance she’ll need surgery again on the 27th of this month, so we’re all hoping she won’t. The 27th, as you may or may not be aware, is the day before Dad’s wedding. We’ll have to go to Marshfield on the 27th and then head to Monroe on that day or the next day depending on the need for surgery. Nobody’s happy about that, least of all Dad.

And I’m still waiting to hear about Tor Seilheimer, son of Titus and Amy. Any day now, right?

Carissa’s getting in on the internets action. Go check it out here.

I can’t believe it’s been over 8 weeks already! We just finished removing Lisa’s final leg casts in preparation for her new set of shoes. We’re excited, but she didn’t like the cast removal this time It seemed to be quite painful for her which was hard on us.

She’s also finally done with eye surgeries. For those that don’t know, she had to have two additional surgeries (making four total - two on each eye) because some scar tissue was in the way of the pupil so her eyes couldn’t dilate. She already has one contact lens in her right eye and she’s happily exploring anything and everything she can. Whe’ll get her other contact lens on Thursday, and then she has an appointment with the county nurse and the early childhood people on Monday. We did a rather unofficial assessment of her development and she’s pretty far behind in a lot of areas so we’re going to learn how we should work with her so she can catch up.

It’s almost time to go get the new shoes, but I’ve got some pictures to share coming very very soon.

It’s been a month now since Lisa was born and we’re still balancing everything. The house needs a good cleaning and I’m getting ready to return to work in the middle of the week. Lisa’s already on her fourth set of casts (two more to go) and we’re ordering the shoes with the bar this week when we go in, so we can be sure it will get here in time. Taking the casts off was much easier next time.

Carissa and Ana are organizing some stuff upstairs and Lisa’s up there checking things out. I’m going to get off the computer and do some much needed housecleaning.

Last week, on the 13th, Lisa had her first eye surgery and it went very well. She’s had a shield on her eye at night for the last week just so she doesn’t accidentally put her hand in her eye. Today she had her second surgery and it went just as well. We’re so glad that’s over. We have to come back to Marshfield soon to get her fitted for contacts sometime in the next few weeks.

Thank you all for your support and kind words. It means a lot to us all.