Happy Birthday, Tunde! It was a fun party on Saturday; we loved seeing everyone. Anyone who has not seen Rezso’s pictures can go here. Some very cute Camilla-and-Lumpy photos there – need to take those for myself.
We’re looking forward to your birthday next year!
Ferenc, one of our guests this summer from Hungary, was fascinated by California trash trucks. The trash trucks here automatically pick up the trash from special containers, which everyone has. I took a video.
This also allows me to showcase a new discovery: I can host my own videos rather than running them through YouTube. I know that I can get much better quality from my own videos, but it’s going to take some fiddling. See below:
From YouTube:
From Steussy.com
Up at 5:30 this morning, running with Pappy through the horse trails of Temecula. Back now, with coffee in hand and the whole house still asleep. I haven’t written anything for a couple of days, so time for a general family update.
Gabi continues her pregnancy, keeping house, and running after kids. Its a lot of work on her part, but she does it all well. This has been a tougher pregnancy than previous ones, but nothing that she can’t handle.
Dan-dan is coming off a series of fevers, probably associated with the immunizations he got last week for his four-year-old check up. His train creations in the living room are growing steadily more complicated, with inter-connecting series of bridges and turnoffs and switches.
Camilla continues growing, holding Lumpy (her favorite stuffed animal, a purple elephant) by the nose and carrying him around the yard; swinging him in the infant swing, taking him on car rides in one of our Flintstone-style push cars.
As-Yet_Unnamed continues to grow. We do have a name for him, but its still temporary and subject to change, so don’t ask.
Dad is working hard. A series of late week deadlines kept him from adding anything to his blog over the last couple of days.
Speaking of which, the Freitag Farm blog has not received any direct email response. The log files show that quite a few members of the family looked in on it, from as far as South Korea and Canada, but no one asked for access to make their own entries, nor left any comments for the others to see. I’ll play with it some more, probably plugging in some genealogical data that a distant cousin sent me months ago.
After a brief delay, I finally have the Freitag Family Farm site up and running. My paternal grandmother was a Freitag, and the extended family has maintained their roots in New Glarus, Wisconsin. As a group, the family owns the farm our great-grandparents built in the early 1900′s, shown in the photo below.
You can find the website by clicking here.
When I was growing up in Indiana, this was our second home. 1967-1992.
–You may need to refresh your browser to see this.–
OK, OK, I had a few minutes this afternoon and looked for how to add images to the background of the blog. What I found was a “Make Your Own Banner in Five Minutes” website. It took longer than that, but I am very happy with my Pappy image above.
History here. We got Pappy in Los Angeles. For his first three years, we dutifully took him out to the dog park and the beach. The beach was sandy; the dog park, muddy. He never saw more than a few leaves of grass at any one time.
In August 2004, we moved to Orange County, an extensive suburb of Los Angeles. For the very first time, he saw full fields of grass. This photo was taken during one of our first runs in a local park there. Even though it isn’t from our backyard here, you get the idea.
Probably not much posting going on this week. Lots of deadlines facing my company over the next few days.
One piece of very good news. The Internets are running a rumor that the New York Times will be removing their Select Service, which forced readers to pay $50 a year to read Thomas Friedman and other columnists. Since Friedman was the only must-read for me in the New York Times, and since I couldn’t justify paying the equivalent of two or three hardcover books for his column, that meant that I no longer read the New York Times.
Hurray! I have greatly missed Mr. Friedman. I will welcome his return.
While I was very happy to set up rusz.org, I always considered it secondary to steussy.com. How wrong I was. While steussy.com has been up for three months, rusz.org has far surpassed it in traffic over its first weekend. And I don’t mean by a little.
So, today was spent getting rusz.org organized. Photo database set up, blog started, usernames and passwords handed out. It was a big production.
All of the photos that I scanned are now on Gabi’s blog site, located here or the Hungarian version is here. All of the Main Page controls of her blog are in Hungarian now. Quite an effort.
Today is Gabi’s birthday! For her birthday, I took 104 photos that she had brought from Hungary to the US, dating all the way back to the 1940′s, scanned them, Photoshopped them and put them on her computer. I also gave her www.rusz.org – with a blog engine pre-loaded. She is giving access to her family, so they can do posts like we have on Steussy.com
Below is one photo, showing Gabi in her twenties. Below the fold are some more photos.
March Field, CA
