Now with more fiber

We returned home from our Michigan trip to find our entire neighborhood covered with construction signs, trucks, and equipment. Meh inquired while walking Korby, and the nice construction subcontractor folks reported that this is apparently Verizon laying their fancy new to-the-door fiberoptic network (what they call "FiOS"; I can't tell quite what it's supposed to stand for, or if it's just a made-up marketing term). It's meant to compete with cable as far as bandwidth and features and such. Ironically, during their extensive digging, hole drilling, and piping/fiber-running, they must've cut through their competitor's cable line, so we were internet-less and TV-less yesterday and part of today. Whoops.

Yesterday was the first day of Rosh Hashana, but unfortunately, I actually had to work through it. My group at work (and really the entire building) was involved in a giant epic office move, and I had to go box up all of my gear since I'd been out the previous week in Austin and then Michigan. On the plus side, we had a welcome back lunch for a coworker who had been working in Europe for the past year, so it was nice to have a little celebration. As to the moving, I think I'm a bit of a packrat at the office, and always rediscover really useless things when moves occur. (At MS, this is an endless process usually occuring once or twice a year, though I'd actually been in a stable office for nearly two years. It's also typically a bit of a shell game; my last four moves had been: literally across a hall; to a different floor; to the building next door; and now downstairs in the same building. All certainly at a per-office-move cost to the company that I don't even want to ponder.) Anyway, this move's gems were video recordings of lectures I gave back in 2001 and a pair of Xbox-branded castanets (gotta love weird marketing gimmicks).

In the evening, the three of us went to a lovely Rosh Hashana dinner hosted by our friends J & S (not to be confused with friends S & J, who are incidentally preparing to resume their world adventure!). Zachary actually slept for a bit at the start of dinner so we could enjoy apples and honey, some of my challah, and even soup, while he slept in a bedroom (on his SnuggleNest, of course). Dinner proper was a more impromptu affair served to Meh while Zachary had his own one-course dinner. We had a really nice time catching up with old friends (most of which were named Brian, I think we counted 5 of them?) and making some new ones, and were actually able to stay until like 9 or 9:30 pm before needing to head home to conk out.

This morning, the three of us did a mini-little service together before some (newly engaged!) friends from out of town came to visit in the afternoon. The service went like this: I went through the mahzor (high holiday prayer book) of my youth, found the parts that had melodies, and we sang them together. Zachary was at times fussy, but eventually made it through the service in one piece. Happy first service and New Year to him, and L'Shana Tovah to our family and friends as well!

On to Zachary's latest stats, as he had his one-month checkup yesterday! (Yup, also on the first day of Rosh Hashanah - synagogue definitely wasn't in the cards this time around.) Anyway, as of Thursday morning, he was:

• 22 inches long (50th percentile) [At a rate of 2" per month, I calculate he'll be more than 37 feet tall on his eighteenth birthday - take that, short Selfon genes!]
• 11 lbs exactly (75th percentile) [yup, I saw the scale level out exactly on 11.000]
• 38.4 inch head circumference (50th percentile)

The doctor was also impressed with his early social smile, good disposition (knock on wood that this doesn't change), and strong arms/legs - she thinks he'll likely be an early crawler, and that he has a few developmental indicators more typical of two-month olds. Such an overachiever already! (No bias here.) She also believes that there's a very good chance that his eyes will remain their current blue. The only part of the appointment that was a bit sad for Zachary was his second in the Hep-B series of shots. That put an abrupt stop to the cooing, and I could definitely tell the difference between this cry and the hungry/burp-me/change-me/fussy ones. The next appointment, where he's due for 4 shots, should be, um, interesting.