Some of you may have heard about Google's minor meltdown this morning – see here.  One of the side effects of the melt down was the possibility that email was accidentally listed as spam that was in fact legitimate email.  From Google's Blog post:

This morning there was a problem with the implementation of Google's malware filters. Gmail's spam engine uses those filters (among hundreds of other signals) to help protect our users from malware, and so between 6:00 a.m. PST and 8:00 a.m. PST, we mistakenly sent some legitimate mail to people's spam folders.

We're working to roll out an automated fix to put these legitimate messages back into your inboxes, and we expect this to happen within a day. In the meantime, if you were expecting a critical message this morning, please check your spam folder. (We tune our spam filters well enough that ordinarily you should never have to check your spam folder.

If you happen to use GMail, take a look at your Spam folder to make sure you did not miss any legitimate email.

Evan continues to be as energetic as ever.  He's starting to get past the 'I can just walk around' phase and jumped straight into the 'I can walk around and carry big stuff' phase by completely skipping the 'I can try to walk and try to carry little things' phase.  Evan is now trying to lift things and take them where he thinks they need to go.  This can be cute at first, but when you're starting to wonder where stuff has gone missing to, it gets a little old fast. 

Well tonight Evan did the grand daddy of stunts, something Sam hasn't even done to date.  Evan decided he could carry something, try to run, and not pay attention to what direction he was going all at the same time.  The fact that he tried to do this wasn't the stunning part, it was the result of trying all three of those things at once.  Evan got his first bloody nose. 

The look on Holly's face when she realized what had happened, you would have thought Evan had just cut off his own finger.  Holly wiped off a little bit of blood from Evan's nose and lip.  We then took Evan out to the kitchen and gave him a small sippy cup of milk to try and calm him down.  In two minutes you wouldn't have even known something happened. 

Sorry for not having posted in a few days, but things have been hectic in the household.  Sam and Evan spent the weekend with Holly's parents last weekend and they brought the boys back Sunday afternoon.  Holly and her mom needed to do a little shopping, so we all headed out to the mall for lunch and go to the play area.  Sam and Evan ran around in the mall's play area while Holly and her mom shopped.  Holly's dad did a great job helping me try to keep an eye on Sam in the sea of kids and toddlers that were at the play area that day.

We all had a great time and it was starting to get close to nap time, so we started to bundle up and to go out to the truck.  Oops… we can't go out to the truck because we can't find the car keys.  Holly looked at me and asked where the keys are.  I got to politely remind her that she was the last one with the car keys because she ran back to the truck after we all got back in the mall.  She looked like she had just seen a ghost when she realized she was the one who had lost the car keys.  We searched everywhere and asked everyone if a pair of keys had been returned.  No luck.

So… to top off this frantic retrace of all our activities that afternoon, I needed to go back to the house and get the spare set of keys.  The only way we could get back was via a taxi cab.  I was the lucky one that got to go on a $14 taxi ride back to our house to get our spare car key.  Now if any of you know where our house is in relation to the mall, you will know that there is NO WAY that should have been a $14 ride.  In the end everything has worked out.  We got a call yesterday from the mall that our keys had been turned in and Holly was able to go out last night and get them back. 

Now I don't feel nearly as guilty about the time I just locked my keys in my truck and had to have Holly come to my office with the spare set. 

Things have been relatively quiet in the house the last couple of weeks, as shown by the lack of posts lately.  One thing that has not been quiet is the 5:30am wake up calls Holly and I have been getting from Sam.  No matter what we've said and done, Sam cannot get back to sleep after waking up in the morning.  Some mornings he'll stay in his room and play, while others he'll come into our room to lay by us. 

So now we've moved to the point that Sam now has an alarm clock.  The funny thing is in the 3-4 days he's had it, not once has it been used to actually wake him up.  Instead it's being used as a preset timer on when Sam can come out of his room.  The worst part of the morning isn't Sam getting up, but that he usually wakes up Evan too.  So now the morning is spent with two grumpy kids and a messed afternoon for Holly.  This has got so out of hand I'm starting to Google ideas on what we can do to keep Sam asleep.

Any ideas?

Sam is beginning to enjoy playing computer games on the websites of his favorite characters – Clifford, Cars, Nemo, etc.  However, most of these sites think that making layout updates every 23 minutes is a good thing.  The only thing it really does is frustrate Holly.  For example, tonight Sam wanted to play a puzzle game on PBS's website.  When Holly got there she couldn't find or open any of the games her and Sam played earlier that day.  Sam said, 'Let me try Mommy, I can do it.'  Holly looked at Sam and said go ahead and try. 

20 seconds later the website was asking if you want to play a game and Holly is looking at her computer with her jaw nearly in her lap.  Sam didn't notice, he was just happy he could play his puzzle game again. 

Will Sam and Evan ever associate the William Tell Overture with the Lone Ranger? Will they even know who the Lone Ranger is?

A boy who really enjoys his pop!

My flight to Boise didn't take off as expected. We were at the gate waiting and I could hear the flight attendants fussing about where they were at. I just couldn't figure who 'they' were and why the attendants were so worried 'they' weren't here yet. Just as the flight attendants are about to close the doors, the gate attendant comes down with a bunch envelopes. The lead attendant starts handing them out, explaining the snack cart was late and it would either be an hour to wait for a new one or we can get a $25 discount coupon for our next flight – they opted to hand out coupons.

As she's handing the coupons out to everyone, she's explaining the situation over and over. Part way through one explanation we could hear a few rows back one small question from a concerned passenger, 'Y'all got the beer cart still, don't ya?'.