With age comes...

Gray hair! Today is my birthday and its been a great day. Right now I am relaxing, catching up on some blogs and news online, and enjoying some quiet time by myself. As part of that, I looked at the last 2 years of my blog. I know its not a very active blog so if in fact you are reading this I should be thanking you for your interest. Thank you! But, as much as anything my blog is to chronicle life and what has happened. So I read the last couple years of my blog in addition to the last year of Heather's blog. So, what has happened over the past year?

On the home front, Anna turned 3, Madelyn turned 2, and Heather turned (gasp!) 30. Anna got a real bicycle today. Madelyn moved into a big girl bed. Anna and I were in Derick and Emily's wedding. Anna had semi-oraganized soccer. Madelyn got her first haircut. Both Maddie and Anna learned their letters and letter sounds. We had a couple snows in Raleigh. We travelled and explored - to Sea World Orlando, the NC Zoo, the NC Museum of Life Science (twice), Boone/Blowing Rock NC, Connecticut, Virginia Beach, and Ponte Vedra Florida.

On the work side, my team released the IBM WebSphere Communications Enabled Applications feature pack, an idea I had been working on for a couple of years before we released it. This was a piece of innovative work I really enjoyed working on. Also this past year I have been able to work on some cool new projects with partners. One of the partners I worked closely with was Akamai. This allowed me to take many enjoyable trips to Cambridge to work with very talented people and culminated in an initiative we call "Akamai Ready" software. I also have worked on several projects I can't yet talk about, everything from new organic projects to acquisitions.

On the spiritual side, I had a men's bible study I participated in end last summer and then recently Heather and I have started a small group at our church. We have 4 other great down-to-earth couples in our small group and have enjoyed meeting now for about 3 months. I do miss the weekly Friday morning bible study I was in and may have to look to replace that this fall.

As is usual, I took a day off around my birthday. My mom (aka Oma) flew in to town on Thursday and we spent yesterday morning enjoying the North Carolina Museum of Life and Science. As an IBM employee, we got two free passes to the museum which saved us $25. After that, I got my free birthday lunch at Moe's and then we stopped at Page Farms for some strawberry picking. Today has been a much more low key day but in a couple of hours we are headed to the always great Nantucket Grill with my closest friends for dinner. Its been a good birthday and I look forward to many more good times to review with you in the future. Here are some pictures of the past 2 days...I included the only 2 pictures with me in them even though they weren't good...I was the primary picture taker :-)