The Cooke Family Website

We have these wonderful friends that live in our computers!

Yesterday, we had a get-together with a few friends that we met on a message board.  Most of them, we have met in person before, but a couple we had not.  We feel very blessed to have these people in our lives.  Even though our face to face contact is rare and brief, we consider them very dear friends.

These amazing and generous people threw a little shower for our little lady!  Heather and Kate did the planning!  Kate and Bill got to the chinese restaurant early and decorated everything.  She brought an adorable cake!

She even brought clay so that everyone could play a shower game.  Everyone had to make little ‘clay babies’ and I had to pick the winner!  My friends are not artistic.  Not with play-doh, anyway.  The results were HILARIOUS, though.  Nothing like a roomful of grown adults playing with clay!

They traveled from all over the state.  All the way from Kalamazoo, Detroit,  Muskegon, Lansing, Grand Rapids and even Alpena!  And they brought the baby-beastie gifts!  David even got his man-bag diaper bag!  LOL (this was a big concern for him- Thanks again, Jim!  LOL)

I just want to thank you all, again.  I don’t think I could possibly thank you all enough.  It meant SO much to us.

CMU Week 3, Baby Week 30-31, Beasties Week 1 at School

CMU

Things are going well at college for me – things are getting routine.  Instead of bringing my GPS with me to Mt Pleasant, I’ve started leaving it at home.  I figure the iPhone can handle anything I need to find anyway.

Supply Chain Management: I can now say that I don’t think this is something I’d like to do for a career in the future.  It’s gone past the first chapter introduction information and has moved on to ratios and the like.  Nothing mindblowing, but the way it’s presented is not the way I would think if I were in the situation in the business world.

Python Programming: I’m 40% complete with the classwork, and have been doing it from home mostly.  I plan on hopping in for some assistance on the next chapter though, some of the syntax in this language is a little off.  This is somewhat challenging since I’m basically teaching myself.

Financial Analysis:  Easy so far – still doing annuities and perpetuities and the like.  So far it’s mostly been review.  I had to buy a calculator since my graphing one isn’t what the book is based on.  I’m not really that pleased with the BA-II calculator as it’s kinda janky in the way that it requires input.  Then again, I didn’t want to use the graphing one because it too has a bad input method for uneven cash flows and other finance items.  Stuff like this, but longer since this is a small example: NPV(12,0,{100,200,300,400,500})*1.12^5.  Yeah, I don’t want to do that on a test.

Marketing Management: I’m enjoying this class more than I thought I would.  I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing.  I recently received the outline of the final project and started compiling data for my company, Urban Outfitters.  Everything is group-work based in this class so far, it seems.  As a veritable hermit, that’s challenging.

Integrated Business Experience: SAP.  So we’ve started to use the industry leading Enterprise Services product.  I’m actually very excited about this class.  Good experience with this product is very marketable.

Week 30-31

She now weighs about 3 pounds, and is starting to become quite the boxer.  I can now sit back and watch Jolene’s stomach’ jump’ at me.  She’s regularly kicking, both her brother in the head as well as my hand.  The baby is gaining weight still, and this is making Jolene more uncomfortable.  She’s dealing with it well, however.  We also got a new Pack n’ Play (thanks mom and dad!).  It’s got some rather unique features.  Putting it all together felt like I was a soldier putting together an M-16 for the first time – it was harder than some of the content of the classes listed above.  It comes with a vibrating device and a light as well, plus changing table, plus a napping pad.  This is really what we need, given our little area we have.

Beasties 1st Week at School

The other two beasties had a successful first week at school.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever David, I’m off to school…”

I didn’t get to hear much from the kids since I’ve been going to school during the times that they’ve been getting out.  All of the exciting news gets simmered down by the time I hit the house.  I missed both of the orientations because of school too.  Things seem to have gone well though, and adjustments have been successful: Ben for not having his sister at school with him for the very first time, and Maddie for going to a new, more grown up school.

More pictures here…

Overall, everything is going exceedingly good, but also exceedingly busy.

A big day for my big girl!

Probably nearing 2 years ago, I made a deal with Madalyn.  If she stopped sucking her thumb, I would let her get a couple streaks of color put into her hair.  At the time, she wanted purple.  Off and on, she would try different methods to ‘earn’ her hair-do.

This summer, Maddie went away to camp for the first time.  About a week before she left for camp, I went to say goodnight and saw her put an X on her calendar.  I asked what the X’s were for and she told me that she put an X on every day she didn’t suck her thumb.  There were 2 straight weeks of X’s.  I started paying attention during the day and peeking in on her after she was asleep, and sure enough… no more thumb sucking!  She decided that making new friends at camp was SO important that she didn’t want to risk anyone making fun of her because she sucks her thumb.

About a week after she got home from camp, she reminded me about our deal.  I tried to talk her into coloring her hair pink, but she wanted to go blond!  We decided to wait until just before school started so it would still look good for her first day of junior high.

Today was the day.  We had 4 “peek-a-boo” blond highlights put in under the top layer of hair.  When she puts the sides up, you can see 4 definite streaks.  When the top layer is down, you can see a few lighter strands, but it just looks like she spent a lot of time in the sun this summer.  We thought about putting the highlights on the top layer, but then they would show roots when they start growing out.  This is a one time deal.  Mom isn’t paying to do this on a regular basis!

So… today, we headed to the local beauty school.

She was so excited.  It turned out exactly as I hoped.  Enough blond that the grown up girl is happy, but hidden enough that I don’t have to admit that she is old enough to have highlighted hair!

Baking with Ben

For the past couple of months, Ben has wanted to make Chocolate Chip Muffins.  He had never had chocolate chip muffins… but he just KNEW they were going to be good.

I looked around for a recipe for him, and found one- I won’t post it because it wasn’t good enough that we will ever re-use it… but he was a happy, happy boy.  His sister was away at camp so he had the kitchen and mom all to himself.  This is rare- with Maddie wanting to be a pastry chef… she thinks she’s an expert already and constantly bosses him around.

I was able to sit back in my chair with my camera and let him go to town.  I offered advice if I saw he was about to do something that would kill the muffins (tablespoon instead of teaspoon kind of stuff) and take pictures.

They turned out exactly as they should have- they had cinnamon in them and I think that none of us were fond of that- but they were edible.

And not one picture of the finished product… We were too busy eating them while they were warm!

Week 28-29, Camping, First Week at CMU

Lest you think I have been remiss about posting on this blog, I have an excuse: I have been quite busy!  Last week we went camping.  Of course, there was no internet, so there was no way to make the normal posting

.

More pictures here

It was wet, and not just because we were on Lake Michigan – it rained nearly the whole time we were there.  Still, it was nice to end the summer.  On the last night there, the clouds finally cleared off just as bedtime hit.  We were able to see tons and tons of stars.  I used an application for my iPhone to locate items of interest, and we were able to find Jupiter and other constellations.

Week 28-29

During camping the baby was spending her time developing wrinkled brains.  Apparently, they start off smooth like a rock on the shores of Lake Michigan, and later develop the wrinkly look that we think of when we think of brains.  She’s also getting fatter, and should be head-down now.  Some people say that during this time the infants start to get REM-sleep patterns, which means that she might be dreaming.  Not sure what she’d have to dream about.  I don’t think there’s any movies being screened in there or anything.

My First Week at CMU

Everything went pretty much as planned.  Parking wasn’t an issue.  I found my classes ok.  I am pleased with most of the rest of it.

BIS 228 – COBOL Python Programming

This class was intended to be COBOL programming, a language that’s from the stone age.  Nobody but big banks really use it anymore, whereas Python is actually actively used.  The professor in this class seems nice, and on the first day he told us that we could do the entirety of our classwork online and didn’t need to show up.  Also, he refuses to teach COBOL, hence the switch to Python. Sounds good to me.

FIN 302 – Integrated Financial Analysis

An interesting professor and class, we started off with a chapter on ‘what is finance’ and have finished the rest of the week off with some Net Present Value of money equations.  All review, basically.  I don’t have the calculator he demonstrates things with, but my trusty TI-84 has all of the functions.  I just need to figure out how to best use them.

MKT 304 – Integrated Marketing Management

A very friendly professor from Romania.  The book is, as you would expect from a marketing book, slick and to the point.  This class will be very involved with active participation, I think.  I’m not really ‘into marketing’ so it’ll be interesting, for sure.

MGT 303 – Integrated Supply Chain Management

This class hurts my brain.  What I’m being told in here goes against what I’ve learned in the past.

BUS 301 – Integrated Business Experience

This is where I’ll learn SAP, work on simulations of running a company, and more.  This takes place in the DiamlerChrysler computer lab, which is one of the nicer ones.  I’m not going to enjoy how late at night it is, though – I will be getting home around 10 PM on Thursdays.

I’m told at the end of my integrated business experience I am going to have to present my company to 90+ people in an auditorium, including the dean of the business school.

Week 27 – Cauliflower, or a Boot?

Cauliflower.

Yup, the baby is apparently the size and weight of a 2 pound cauliflower head. The baby sites always, always seem to concentrate on the fruits and vegetable stands at the supermarket.

I’m not the only one to notice this.

Thankfully, someone has taken the time to setup a new, guy-friendly measurement metric.

I present to you, this weeks guy-friendly fetus-equivalent:

A boot.  A 13 inch work boot.

Ok, I can jive with that.  However, he doesn’t go into much more detail (nor should he) about the development during the weeks.  So I’ll still have to look at pictures like these…

… which (I assume) is what our baby would look like if they were a who from whoville.

Anyway…

This week the baby is beginning it’s slow turn around.  Soon, she’ll be loaded into the chamber and ready to be fired!

Sorry, got carried away with this ‘guy’ stuff.  She can fully breath now, so she’s more viable now than ever.

We started registering at babies-r-us, and are getting all the final stuff in place for the arrival.  It’s getting exciting!

The Decemberists and The Heartless Bastards – 8/11/2009

The concert finally arrived!  The day I had been waiting for.  Early on that day 11th I was sitting at the computer and saw a couple of updates at twitter.com.  I basically use twitter as a means to follow updates people of interest to me.  Two of those are members of The Decemberists.

They had gotten to Royal Oak early, and decided to pass the time busking for dollars

It’s not every day that you see a major-label signed band play on the street.  They earned two dollars.

Then, they got busted for busking!  Apparently the cops took a dim view on them playing on the street.  This was kind of odd, because when we arrived there was an italian street festival going on.

We drove down to the Royal Oak Music Theater later and got there just as the doors were opening.  Because of our pre-printed tickets, we got to enter in the VIP entrance rather than wait in the line.  This secured us a spot right up next to the stage.

The first band was called “The Heartless Bastards”.  Interesting name, but they definitely put heart into their playing

I was looking forward to seeing their opening act, since I have quite enjoyed their newest disc, ‘The Mountain’.  They played a reasonably long setlist, with lots of songs that I knew and had heard from that album.  There was only one issue – the vocals were fairly low and we had a hard time hearing what she was singing.  We were so close to the stage that we were underneath the big PA system that the venue had installed, so we were worried that we weren’t going to be able to hear the concert from where we were.

Finally, the Decemberists came on stage after a short break.

They played The Hazards of Love in it’s entirety, from start to finish.  It’s better in person than it is on the CD, for sure.  An interesting thing to note: we were close enough to the performers to see their eyes and what they were looking at.  It was interesting to see that they were basically people watching throughout the performance.  I guess I didn’t expect that.

The entire concert was high energy, even though the theater was extraordinarily hot.  The crowd up front was closely packed.  After drinking 3 bottles of water and standing in the heat for several hours, we decided to retreat to the relative coolness of the middle of the theater after the intermission.  The full setlist for the concert was:

01. Prelude
02. The Hazards of Love 1 (The Prettiest Whistles Won’t Wrestle the Thistles Undone)
03. A Bower Scene
04. Won’t Want for Love (Margaret in the Taiga)
05. The Hazards of Love 2 (Wager All)
06. The Queen’s Approach
07. Isn’t It a Lovely Night?
08. The Wanting Comes in Waves / Repaid
09. An Interlude
10. The Rake’s Song
11. The Abduction of Margaret
12. The Queen’s Rebuke / The Crossing
13. Annan Water
14. Margaret in Captivity
15. The Hazards of Love 3 (Revenge!)
16. The Wanting Comes in Waves (Reprise)
17. The Hazards of Love 4 (The Drowned)

Second Set:

01. Intro
02. California One/Youth and Beauty Brigade
03. The Sporting Life
04. Yankee Bayonet (I Will Be Home Then)
05. The Bachelor and the Bride
06. The Calamity Song
07. Dracula’s Daughter
08. O Valencia!
09. Crazy on You*

Encore:

10. Eli, the Barrow Boy
11. Sons and Daughters

The second hour of music was amazing.  The band commented on the Royal Oak police force being kind of a drag.  The entirety of the concert was recorded and can be found online here

All in all, it was an amazing concert, and definitely ranks up there with my favorite performances I’ve attended.  This was a most amazing way to finish our summer vacation.

Does the baby not like Tori Amos? Concerts Continue, Week 26

Finally!

I’ve been waiting for a kick from my daughter seemingly forever now.  She’d kick, I’d put my hand where it was, and she’d stop.  She seems to be a very contrary baby!

Last night Jolene went to a Tori Amos concert in Detroit, about two hours away.  After she got back late last night, we started dozing off to sleep at the late hour of 2:30AM.

Suddenly, we felt a ‘thud’.  She was up, kicking, and had miraculously kicked the exact location my hand was in.  Finally!  I was half asleep, but it was sudden and obvious what happened.  We waited for a second one, and she delivered yet another to me.

She must’ve missed me, or didn’t like Tori Amos or something.

More Music

The night previous to this, Jolene and I and some of her friends from work all went to go see Lacuna Coil again:

We had all seen them previously as an opener to Disturbed, but everyone in the group felt that they didn’t play nearly long enough.  We got our full dose of Lacuna Coil Friday, as they played a regular length set.  The opening bands were local groups that were pretty good as well.  As you can see in the pictures, it was a small club event and not a large stadium event like the Disturbed concert.  This is a good thing – you get much closer to the artists and see how they really are.

It was a great concert.

We’re going to our last scheduled concert this Tuesday – another Decemberists concert.  I missed the last one, and so I just had to get tickets.  I’m looking forward to it very much!

Week 26

No more fruits or vegetables – I am having a harder and harder time finding posts about fetal development that deal in the metrics of fruits and veggies.

However, this week she’s developing eyebrows and fingernails and the like.  Also, some hair might be starting to grow on her head.  More importantly, her blue eyes are opening.  They’re blue because all infants eyes are blue at this time, not having a chance for the pigments to take hold yet.  She can see around her now, and knows when it’s dark and when it’s light.  Now she truly knows her mother likes to stay up too late at night!

Everything else is going well, we excised the desks from our house and I have built a new desk to make room for the chair that we’re going to be using a lot in the next few months

It was quite a project.  When I originally put it together, it was far too tall for use as a computer desk.  I would’ve had to sit on phone books or something to get high enough to use the computer.  In the end, I had to jigsaw off the bottom ‘kick plate’ area of the cabinets.  It all came together nicely in the end.

The Summer Doldrums, Week 24, The Divine Proportion, Week 25

Well, the summer is officially ‘on’.  All of the kids activities and vacationing that we did in the beginning of our summer vacation are now decidedly over.  The beasties are very much always around, which makes writing in this blog difficult.  As I write this, one is arguing with the other about chore duties; a mere foot away from me.

There’s only so much room in a 1000 sq foot house.

Week 24

Week 24 was last week, in which fingernails were completed, nails were done, and the lungs started secreting a fat that allows for easier inflation.  Movement-wise, she’s been quite the little jumper – kicking and bouncing quite a bit.  I have yet to feel any kicks or anything of the sort.  Usually she stops doing it as soon as I put my hand there.

At some point during this week we passed the divine proportion.  The divine proportion is of historical, mathematical, and artistic significance.  Numerically, it’s approximately .6180339887 – but what does it mean?

The Divine Proportion, Week 25

Essentially, the divine proportion it’s a ratio that’s derived from the Fibonacci Sequence.  It’s also called the golden ratio and the golden mean.  It has been used by artists, and observed in nature since about 300 BC.  It really came into it’s own during the Renaissance in Europe, most famously used during this time in the Mona Lisa

The face in this painting makes up almost a perfect divine proportion rectangle, with her eyes making up the line that delineates the portions. It’s also used in architecture, and seen in nature in things like beehives and leaf patterns in trees.

What it has come to mean is a pleasing, natural beauty that is apparent to everyone. Humans, and nature itself seem designed around this number.  From what I can surmise, it’s true.  Is it any coincidence that the majority of the development is completed in this week, with the remaining weeks concentrating on building up mass and developing the nervous system?  Is it a coincidence that survival rates of premature infants past the point of this ratio are reasonable?

In the upcoming week, the baby will start to gain lots of weight.  It’s the ending section of the pregnancy, and the baby is getting more and more strong as the days go by.  14 more weeks until her journey is complete.

Week 22, Home Renovations, Week 23

Week 22

Week 22 brings a bunch of things – it was this previous week that these things happened.  I can verify these things:

• The baby reacts to loud sounds
• The baby starts having regular sleeping and waking rhythms
• The mother’s movements can wake the baby

In talking to the baby (yes, face to stomach) Jolene has felt the baby move after I speak loudly to her.  She seems to wake up every night around 10 o’clock. This might be because of what we’re doing at 10 o’clock (sitting at the computer) or perhaps because she’s decided that she likes to be up at night.

Mom is doing well.  The baby seems to like to jump up and down a lot, literally bouncing off of the walls.

Renovations

We’ve begun the final ‘chore list’ that needs to be done before we end our summer vacation.  I’ve installed a rack of baskets for additional storage in our room:

We also got a new loft bed – given to Ben by Aunt Carissa.  He loves it, he can have his computer in his room now:

I think the  lesson is, when you can’t build out, build up.

Week 23

This week the baby will reach 1 pound in weight.  The baby will have her nostrils open for the first time.  I didn’t know they were closed.  The baby is now ‘working out’, as they say, by bouncing back and forth.  We know this is already happening though.  Finally, a full nervous system is now being created.  Most amusingly, the baby has wrinkly skin right now.  She’ll ‘grow into it’.  I guess this is like putting on a clean shirt from the dryer that you left for too long before hanging.