Mid-summer Update

It's been quite the summer so far. I feel like the whole month of June was one big soggy, rainy mess. And there was hail. The biggest hail I've ever seen. The storms made every walk a gamble; more often than not, we ended up drenched.

Then there was the day we planned on grilling steaks for dinner...


When we couldn't stand another drop, we packed up the car and took off for the shore.

Once we arrived, Alex and his best bud Jeffers were up to no good.


We were treated to a 4th of July weekend full of uninterrupted sun, sand, and waves! Alex did his best to be the cutest little one on the beach, and we did our best to keep the sand off his pacifier.

Of course we couldn't help but dip his toes in the ocean, and, of course, a killer wave took us by surprise.


Once home, we were engulfed in the same heat wave that swept the nation... and we handled it like adults. That means a daily round of radlers and dips in the pool. I've since switched to Shock Top's Lemon Shandy and am loving it.

Poor Ca$h, he's no longer the absolute center of our attention, but he's a pretty close second, and we've been sure to spoil him to plenty of hikes in the cool, cool woods.

It has been a great summer, but nothing compares to our Sunday mornings. C has been teaching Alex to flip a mean pancake, and I spend the first few moments lingering in the background and adoring these two while coming to life with the biggest mug of coffee I can find.

Finally - we've fixed our photo storage/backup problem {whoop-dee-do, I know, but I'm recording my fix here in case I ever need these links again}! This is a problem that's been plaguing me for years, and I got the big wake-up call I needed this past January when we were on vacation and my {not backed-up} hard drive with last year's photos began to fail. After six months of researching my options and dragging my feet on making the big purchase, we are the proud owners of one of these guys. It's set to RAID 0, which means it stores mirror copies of our files onto both of its hard drives. Before the move, my files were split across three iPhoto libraries, two of which had problem files. I used the iPhoto library manager to rebuild and fix those libraries while moving them to the new drive. In addition, the Lacie drive is partitioned, and I'm using a portion of it for backing up my full system with Super Duper's software.