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In spite of a late night, the gentle dawn woke our daughter up like a soldier at reveille.  My wife and I were a little more lackadaisical in our rising.  The hotel had attentive staff, plenty of scenic beauty surrounding it and rustic charm to its grounds.

Soft beds and luxurious showers, on the other hand, it did not have.

It also had very large breakfast platters on which my wife and child dined while I sipped at my coffee.

My wife was not required to do anything for the wedding until late in the afternoon.  We  decided to start the day by finding some kind of entertainment for our toddler.

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So I mentioned in previous posts that these next few weeks would be pretty hectic for my little family.

We just completed one round of travel and are looking ahead to another one coming up.   And then another one after that.  And then my wife’s OB is going to order physical restraints for my wife to prevent her from traveling during the dwindling few weeks of her pregnancy.

This past weekend we traveled to Boston for a wedding.   The bride had asked my wife to participate as a bridesmaid (actually she hadn’t, but that’s a funny aside for another time), so we ended up staying in the Gloucester, MA for a bit longer than we otherwise would have.

It was a fun.  It was also very trying.  But we managed.

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Ok, finally got around to starting the upload process.

…this could take a while

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I’ve downloaded the 500+ images I took over the weekend into Picasa, and I’ve started to go through them all, separating the wheat from the chaff.

But I’ve also encountered a problem.

Recently Google updated the Picasa desktop software.   Among other things, this update included a feature that had been added to the web albums hosted by Google, but had been left out of the desktop software application.

Facial recognition.  Picasa now allows you to identify the people in pictures.  Furthermore, once you’ve added a few new people from the pictures, the software will attempt to guess where those people are showing up in your collection.  And it gets better the more pictures of a person you add.

On its initial scan, Picasa found over 10,000 faces in my picture collection.

I’m now addicted to refining its search procedures  And I’ve found that I myself have become rather good at identifying people.   I can spot my daughter from clips of pictures that feature only her eyes or the curve of her cheek.

It’s actually hard to concentrate on other things…

Like uploading pictures.

Don’t ask.  Don’t bother.  Don’t nudge, cajoled, or otherwise try to bully me into posting any faster than I chose to do so.

Pictures from the wedding this weekend will appear.  They will appear soon.  Just not now.

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Is it wrong to look down at the angelic face of your sleeping child and mutter “Dammit, dammit, dammit”?

I mean, I can explain.  Really.

I saw her sleeping with her mouth slightly open and a thin trail of drool tracing her lower jawline while driving her back home after a long…LONG weekend of travel and fun and more travel and fun and extremely early risings and extremely late bedtimes and more travel.

In fact, this morning I roused the family out of the hotel beds just before 3:00 AM Eastern (2:00 AM Central).  Forty minutes of quick packing and showering and other last minute preparations saw us out the door and on the highway.  My daughter was up the whole way to the airport,babbling along in the back.  She doggedly clung to consciousness during the bus ride from the car rental place and in the lines in the airport.  She was pliable, but aware.

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Ok…this was a busy weekend.  And it only gets better.  Just about 5 hours to go before I have to get up to drive to the airport.

Don’t expect a cohesive post tomorrow.

4:00, in the driveway of our daycare provider:

“Daddy, where are we going?”

“We’re going to your Aunt Amy and Uncle Dave’s house.”

“Yaaaaaaaaaaaay!”

A little while later:

“Can we go to a wedding party?

“Oh, we’re going to do that on Saturday…”

“Please?  Please can we go to a wedding party?   PLEEEEEEEEEEASE???”

“We’re going to go to a wedding party on Saturday.”

“PLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEASE?!”

“We’ve got to go on an airplane ride first.”

“I want to go on an airplane ride.”

“We’re going to go on an airplane ride tomorrow.”

“Please?  Please can we go on an airplane ride?”

“We’re going to go on an airplane ride tomorrow.”

A little while later:

“I want to go on a train.   Please can we go on a train?”

“No sweetheart, we’re going on an airplane ride tomorrow.  Tonight we’re going to Amy and Dave’s.”

“Yeah!”

A little while later:

“I want to go on a bus.”

A little while later:

“I want to go to Amy and Dave’s house.”

A little while later:

“I want to go on a plane and a train and a bus.”

A little while later:

“I want to go to a wedding party.”

20 minutes out from Amy and Dave’s house:

“CAN WE PLEASE GO TO A WEDDING PARTY?  PLEASE?!“

“No, we’re not going to go to a wedding party tonight.  We’re going to one on Saturday.”

“I don’t want to go to Amy and Dave’s house.  I want to go home.”

Sigh….

It was a long hour and a half drive.

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When I submitted a PTO request to my boss the other week, he paused for a moment and then said, “Do you realize you’re missing the next three Fridays in a row?”

Not that it was a problem really, especially as my company is sending me for training during one of those weeks.  But still, it was just an indication of how crazy things were going to be for me over the next three weeks.

Wednesday night the family is leaving on a trip to Boston that will last through Sunday.  The following Friday we’re all heading down to Georgia for just about 30 hours before turning right back around to come back home on Saturday.  Sunday I’m heading out bright and early to California.

Within three weeks I’ll have logged sixteen hours or so in a plane traveling over 8,000 miles in the process.

Posting might be a bit spotty during that time.

I’m just saying.

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I’m not exactly sure how it happened, but as I was downloading some of the images I took on Saturday while visiting AM’s folks and the message popped up:

“Downloading 1 of 298…”

How did that even happen?   It’s not even like I took a few pictures every few minutes every hour that I was awake on Saturday.

It all happened within a few hours.

I guess an 8 GB memory card makes you a little trigger happy.