Baby Boy Roche is a winner

We went to a doctor's appointment yesterday, and everything is honky donkey with David Lee. No problemos, he's actually running on the big side and Elissa is cold rockin' it. Heartbeat, check. Dancing machine, check.

Meet my new friend Andre

This is Andre.

click any of these pictures to enlarge
We saw him at a bar after my brother Charlie's wedding last week in Somers Point, NJ. He was there by himself, looking good as hell. After doing a pass for the ladies, he put his hair in a pony tail and got down to some serious dancing. I tried to take a couple James Bond photos, but he's like an eel out there. What I did manage to catch is documentation that I wasn't the only Andre fan in the place. If you look around him, everyone was like "Who is that magic little man?".



After twice capturing only passing glances of his splendor, I just tapped him on the shoulder, showed him my camera, and said "Can you take your hair out of the pony tail? I'm going to take a million pictures of you.". He did. I did.



After making love to my camera lens, we set him loose after a quick teaser to get into the video portion of tonight's presentation. If these videos are too dark for your monitor, you can check them out as AVI files from here:



Now, it's Andre. First, he hams it up with a couple hotties. Then they walk away disgusted, and he again makes it happen for my pregnant wife and her tiny camera.



And finally, his swan song. After this, his pink limousine showed up and took him to the excellent future where everyone in the world has this hair cut. He's on in this one. If you listen closely, you can hear me yell "You're a dirty dog, man."

It's a David Lee!

We found out the gender today! It's a boy, it turns out. More important, but not yet official, the ultrasound guy noted that all fingers/toes/brains/organs/arteries/etc. are right where they belong. There's a movie I'll post tomorrow from my Mac, but here's a slideshow with the stills from the 3D ultrasound (scroll to the bottom left of the little embedded window to see the good stuff):

View photos here if slideshow doesn't load or takes too long.

Architect Contract

The new architect sent the boilerplate AIA (American Institute of Architects) contract for our house. I'm torn. It's very vague, and the only literature, despite Google searches using terms like "warning" and "problem", seems to focus on only the hellish scenarios. I'm going to give it an amateur read and see if there's something someone in internet-land had issues with.

In the meantime, we're plugging away on the old house and the new. My job just changed, and we have a vacation to my brother Charlie's wedding next week, so we're still in "never a dull moment" territory.

Old House Almost Done!

Last weekend signaled the end of most of the work on the old house. The interior and exterior painters jumped into high gear to finish ASAP once we cleared out of the house. Both paint jobs look great, despite setbacks. The funny end to the exterior paint job came via the Mexican crew chief.

He asked me if I wanted to pay taxes. It took a couple times to make sure he was asking what he was asking, and then once more to make sure he was serious. When I finally settled up, he told me I owed one price without taxes, or $350 less if I didn't want to pay taxes. His justification was "We won't tell the government either way". I won't say what we paid, but it was a funny exchange.