So, this quarter at Clark College I’m taking Speech 101 (Public Speaking). Like most people, I’m very afraid of getting up in front of crowds and talking, but I decided that it would be best for me if I ever wanted to get into public service or some form of government office; elected or not. My neighbor recommended the teacher that I ended up taking it with who happens to also be the Director of Forensics. She let me know ahead of time that he will often select a few students out of his classes to enlist onto the team. Well — I think you can see where I’m going with this. After I delivered my last informative speech on the history of the Internet, I got a note in my evaluation asking me to consider joining the Speech and Debate team. In the note he said that if I join and compete until next March the school will be going to Athens, Greece for their next International Forensics Tournament!

To be honest, after this last quarter and the mess with my math class I was (am) having serious doubts about my educational future. Jumping through hoops with the financial aid board doesn’t sound like much fun but thats where I will start. I figure that if they will help me get back on course after this quarter, and I can manage something with work to get a day off every month for tournaments, this could be a great start for me. More to come…

Credits to the new header image go to my lovely wife Shae. I’m not much of a graphic designer when all I have to do to get an image right is crop the top and bottom!

Also — check out some of the new photos that we just put online from their backyard excursion today.

After we updated the gallery, lo-and-behold! WordPress (what we use for the journal) comes out with a major update! So, naturally I had to run it and spend a few hours changing the templates again. Good thing the calls have been really slow this week and I haven’t had hardly any work to do with our company websites.

I’ll probably be adjusting the colors on the gallery page a little over the next few days. Make sure that you are using the most current stylesheet by hitting “F5″ or “Refresh” on your browser. Otherwise you may not see the new look!

Wheew yesterday was long. It seems that I caught Ji’s little bug! I thought taking care a sick baby was hard until I did the same while sick myself. Benjamin was a wonderful help though, and even caught me up on my house chores.
Ji seems to be doing much better, though still pretty mellow and sleeping very well! Tonight I put him in his crib and he put his head on the matress right away and clonked out without a fight. I’ve never seen him do this before!
My stomach is feeling much better and I am starting to get my energy back. I didn’t do, or eat anything for 24 hours. It didn’t take long for recovery at all. I just finished a full meal with Ben followed by some monkey bread dessert that he made:) Yummie!

I installed a new and improved photo gallery system last night. After lots and lots of uploading and tweaking, I got it integrated quite nicely into the rest of the site. We are going to go through and add titles and descriptions to each individual photo so that they will be easily searchable. This new method is a little more work to get online, however it is much easier on the server and I think that many of the features are nice like the Favorites and Slideshows that it can do.

Trying out another video editing program before we get this project into full gear here. This is another quick clip.

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Last night Ji got slammed with a stomache virus. Poor little guy. It only lasted through the night though and seemed fine this morning (save his loss of appitite), happy and full of energy. He was even smiling between episodes last night! Most of us adults are bigger babies when sick than he!