BilikFamily.com

It's been an... ummm... interesting day.

Phones -- Shortly after we got up this morning, Claire tried to use the phone. She announced that it didn't seem to be working. There was no dial tone. My first thought: great! The number has transitioned to Michelle's cell phone. No, not so great. Verizon released the number, but Nextel hasn't done whatever they do to transition it to her phone. I called our friendly Nextel rep and she made a few calls. Hopefully by tomorrow it'll be moved, but for now you hear those annoying buzzy tones accompanied by "we're sorry, the number you're trying to reach ... is no longer in service. No further information is available."

Internet -- Shortly after I got to work I noticed that we had no network connection outside of the building. In a multi-site company, this can have some serious impacts. It also limits the amount of email communication we can do with customers. It's hard to send data back and forth when you have no connection to the internet. It turns out that one or more PCs in our building is infected, either with a virus, spyware, or adware... most likely the latter two. Normally our virus detection software is excellent. But spyware and adware are different type of annoyances. Somedays I feel like I just hate PCs. It's not because of any deep seated resentment against Microsoft. It's just that having >90% of the computers out there running the exact same software is a recipe for this. Nature abhors a monoculture.

Timothy -- I got home tonight after picking up Abigail from gymnastics. Michelle was pretty tired out. In addition to her struggles with getting Michael toilet trained, Timothy was really over the top today. His nickname, Turbo Timbo, doesn't do him justice lately. Today Michelle struggled with the following issues:

• He twice climbed up the computer desk to see what valuables he could get into. Besides the obvious, I should note I keep our cameras up there.
• He climbed up the deck table to get into the garbage can that Michelle had put there so that it would be out of his reach.
• He was in our parked van and discovered how to use the horn, Chicago-freeway style!
• He ran into the street numerous times, despite the large yard that he could play in.
• He walked under the trampoline while the kids were jumping on it -- pile driver!
• If the cat food bowl is on the floor, the food in it soon will be.
• If the bathroom door is left open, likely while we're training the twins, you'd better check that Timothy didn't throw anything in the toilet.
• He's constantly in the kitchen cabinets and drawers.
• He's figured out how to open the piano keyboard cover. Luckily he can't reach the power knob, but I've found the volume knob cranked up on more than one occasion.

And yet, if you put him in the toy room, he can't seem to keep himself busy there. They say that every family has one. I think Timothy is our 'one'. Michelle says he's definitely more difficult than the twins combined were.

Nonetheless, I'm still pretty upbeat. Since I awoke early today, I worked out on the elliptical trainer before going to work this morning. I got to go to Mass at lunchtime. The weather outside turned out much better than forecasts had predicted. I got a lot of my work "to-do's" done today. I updated the homepage weather scraping script to fix a minor bug. I may even get to write some throw away code tomorrow at work to move some of our legacy email into a new system. I'm also grateful that Daniel is doing extremely well on the toilet training front.