P.A.S.

Today Cora turns 3.

With last weekend being Halloween, I decided to share photos of Cora’s Dwight costume with Mr. Dwight Schrute himself, Rainn Wilson, via Twitter. He liked the photos enough to re-tweet my message out to his 1.5 million Twitter followers. Well, you can image what came next…

Cora’s picture was passed around the internet thousands and thousands of times. As more and more people saw it, I watched my stats on Flickr grow to nearly 40,000 in the first few hours of my original message to Rainn. Since then the photos have been viewed over 80,000 times and I’ve had numerous friends email me or text me saying that they saw Cora’s costume mentioned on someone else’s blog or over Twitter, Facebook, etc. It was pretty fun to watch her photo being shared in so many places.

There is a blog dedicated to The Office (www.officetally.com) who was holding a costume contest for people dressed up as characters from The Office. Naturally, I had to enter. Well, long story short, she won! Check out their blog post here.

Sometimes things take a turn in this direction.

It took us a full two days to finally decide on a fitting name for our little girl. Most of you already know, but for those who may not, we named her Penny Ann Stott.

We actually filled out the birth certificate papers with a different middle name… but we shortly realized that P.M.S. were probably not the best initials.

Penny is a name that Marie and I have both loved for a long time. Ann is Marie’s middle name, and P.A.S. are my initials also. So the name couldn’t fit any better. We love it and we’re glad that we took the time to think it through before giving Penny her name.

Well, the wait is finally over. For some it was a long wait, but for us wasn’t too bad. Since we didn’t find out what we were having, we have been asking Cora all the time if she was going to have a baby brother or baby sister. Her response was “baby sister” about 98% of the time… and she was right!

After about 9 1/2 hours of being at the hospital anxiously awaiting her arrival, she was born at 2:40am. She weighs 7 lbs 12 oz and is 20″ long with a full head of dark hair. I don’t mean to brag or anything but she got a 10 on her APGAR Score.

Marie is doing very well and at one point after the birth was heard saying, “oh man, I could do that every day.”

If you haven’t heard already, we’ve narrowed it down to 2 names: Pear and Heart. I forgot to bring our lucky coin to the hospital so hopefully I can find something in the uncomfortable couch I slept on so we can flip it and make a decision on which name to use. If I don’t find a coin, we may just have to combine the two names since that’s so popular these days. Peart maybe?

I’m kidding.

We haven’t decided on a name for her quite yet, but when we do I’ll make sure to post it here. Be patient though. It may be a day or two.

We appreciate so much all the kind words, thoughts and prayers expressed the past few days. Thanks

And here she is…

Check out the poll to the left.

<<-------------------

Will Cora have a new baby brother or sister?

People never cease to amaze me with the things they come up with.

Provo city must have plans to build some big new building or pimp out their fleet of police cruisers this year because they recently increased a few of their parking violation fees by 150%.

Yep, I got a parking ticket today. I’m not proud of it, but the ticket was justified. However, the fee for the ticket is not. Seriously, $25 for being in a parking spot for more than 2 hours? Has Provo parking real estate become as valuable as somewhere like New York or Boston?

Thanks Provo. I hope that the money collected will at least go towards fixing your crappy streets.

I drink a lot of water. My taste buds work well. The water here is Utah isn’t the best. Therefore I buy bottled water. I usually drink between 1.5 and 2 liters a day while at work. That’s roughly 3 to 4 regular plastic water bottles.

3 x 5 x 52 = ~780 bottles per year

Not only does this get expensive (about $10 a month), but since “The City of Trees” where I live doesn’t have a recycling program, I’m contributing lots of plastic to the landfill. So I’ve decided to change my habits.

I bought these:

Sure, the pitcher and bottle were a little expensive, but they will pay for themselves in about 3 months. Plus, the Sigg bottle doesn’t alter the nice taste of the water after going through the Brita filter. Win Win.

I’ve been looking for a few years for an online storage solution that was cost effective and would let me relax and know that I didn’t have anything to worry about. The closest thing lately is Amazon’s S3 service. It was something I could trust for sure, but the price was much higher than I could justify. The search continued…until now.

Backblaze is exactly what I was looking for. I can back up an UNLIMITED amount of data for only $5 a month. That’s pretty amazing considering I have about 55,000 photos and 24,000 songs on my computer.

Anyway, if you are looking for a cheap way to back up everything on your computer, this is it.