EchoBooming in Birmingham

Ignore

The District 54 race is rearing its ugly hair again (as if anyone doubted that an election won by 51 votes wouldn’t be contested).

http://alablawg.wordpress.com/2006/07/28/district-54-again/" target="_blank" target="_blank">AlabLAWg managed to pipe up with some excelent points including this little gem about the WAR ON DUMB article that I http://3choboomer.net/2006/07/25/thar-be-monsters-here/" target="_blank" target="_blank">blogged about last week:

The mayor’s atlas is not only wrong, but anyone who accepts it cares not for Birmingham, and has plenty of their own prejudices.

First, that Kincaid and Hendricks could be so wrong about the make-up of the area means they have no interest at all in the area. That is a shame, because these are the wealthiest neighborhoods in B’ham. And that these well-to-do people choose to live in B’ham in spite of the high crime, bad schools, and inept leadership, means that they really love the city. Yet the mayor, and Hendricks ignore them. The resource is not just untapped, it is rejected. That is bad for B’ham.

Amen Brother, Amen…

Shore

Fairlyn had quite the grainy time at the beach. I’m sure she injested nearly as much sand as I got in my shoes all week. Hopefully sand is good ruffage.

Her first reactions to things like the surf and salt water are priceless memories that I will never forget.

More pics after the jump…

Subaru Whore

I whored myself out to the COBB/GOTO:Racing Subaru Legacy GT team this weekend at the Barber Motorsports Park. They are a very well organized team and I really didn’t do too much to help them other than watch them work. I could have been a bad luck charm as they had a few electrical gremlins on the pace lap and started the race in the pits. They finally got back out on to the track a few laps down, and quickly moved through the field (even passing in the grass after being pushed off the track by a BMW). They were not able to get back on the lead lap before they retired due to some mechanical issues (I was asked not to go into any details about the mechanical issues by the team owner, and if that changes, I’ll post up the details).

However all was not lost for Subaru’s racing efforts Saturday. The ICY/Pheonix Subaru Legacy GT (which is sponsored by Subaru themselves) finished the race in 2nd place and they would have won the race outright had the Grand Am officials not called off the race due to the threat of severe weather. (All we got was rain, and the AWD Legacy would have cleaned house against the other rear and front wheel drive competitors). I also heard a little rumor that because of politics, the ICY team was not forced to monitor the turbo boost on their car (All of the other turbo and supercharged cars are forced to monitor their boost including the other Subaru Legacy). Since racing is all about cheating within the rules, I’m sure they were running much more boost than they were supposed to, and subsequently making much more power than the rest of the field. But I ain’t one to gossip, so you didn’t hear that from me…
Subaru Wagon Photo Credit: Jeffery Keeton
(more…)

Many folks have complained that I haven’t been posting enough pictures of Fairlyn, and I’ve posted about things to do in Birmingham but I’ve never posted with a recap of the events.

I’m solving that right now and answering a few questions in the process:

The place was pretty packed with a softball game going on across the street, plenty of free BBQ to be eaten and thousands of sunflowers ripe for the picking. $10 for all you could carry and $0.50/stem otherwise.

Fairlyn really enjoyed the mist tent (as shown in the fuzzy pic above, the fuzzyness is really the mist from the mist tent), getting lost in the sunflowers and picking off as many petals as she could from as many flowers as she could find…

I’d say that mom and dad had a good time as well

For any of you that know DrWife, it should come as no surprise that our offspring is every bit as stubborn and independent as her mother.

Last night, while feeding attempting to feed Fairlyn it became abundantly clear that if she couldn’t feed it to herself, she wasn’t going to eat it.

She was putting down her “veggie puffs” like she hadn’t eaten in 11 months (btw, she’ll be 11 months old tomorrow), but every time I’d attempt to shovel some apple cinnamon blended food stuffs down her throat, she’d bat it out of the way…

The next thing I tried was a carrot stick. She was really digging that, pulling off slivers of carrot and munching away… So I gave her another one and she would put the one she was eating down, and pick up the other one… then throw it on the floor, pick up the other one while I washed off the one that ended up on the floor. Once I gave it back to her the entire process would repeat itself.

Well, as entertaining as this was, I knew I had to find some way of getting her to eat something else (or she’d be waking up in the middle of the night hungry). So I decided to use some of these funky spoon like things that my mom gave us and see if they’d work. So I loaded up one with some of the apple cinnamon food product and she immediately grabbed it and shoved it in her mouth!

As happy as I was with this, I was soon amazed at the fact that all I had to do was hold my hand out and she would graciously hand the quasi spoon back to me so I could load it up again.

I was pretty impressed with her first attempt at spoon feeding herself (as was Fairlyn, she would clap and slather the apple cinnamon goo on her hands after nearly every bite). About half of the apple cinnamon stuff ended up in her mouth and the the other half ended up on the floor, her high chair, the walls, etc.

Not bad IMHO…

I’ve neglected the site for the past couple of weeks.

I’m trying to quit smoking, UAB lost what will become one of the best basketball coaches of all time, upper management can’t make up their mind at my company, etc. etc…

The good news is that DrWife is done with her grand rounds presentation and she knocked one out of the park with it (as usual), and Fairlyn is growing like a weed!

Nothing brings out the comments like a few pics of a baby, so without futher rambling:

There’s no doubt she’s mine:

A triumphant return to HNT!

This HNT is at the instance of my mother (WTF is my MOM doing directing my HNT posts? ewwwww) I’m going to be posting one of the pictures we had made of Fairlyn a few weeks ago… She’s half naked, and 100% cute, so I guess it’ll work…