Brenton Cameron Tabor...

... But you can call him Brent. The newest addition to our family was born on Wednesday, May 14th at 2:20PM. He was 7 lbs 13 oz.

Jen was great and she didn't take any pain medication at all! Unbelievable!

He was born on my birthday, what a gift!

It's nice to have a little boy and a girl, now we can experience both aspects of parenting. People are saying this one looks a lot like me. I can't wait to see how his personality is similar and how it is different from Annelise's.

Here he is:


Brent and proud big sister Annelise:


In the car seat getting ready to go home!

Who's reading?

For those of you who still venture to my little coner of the internets, Jen and I are expecting a new TaborTot in mid May of this year!

So, congratulations to us.

I hope it's as cute as Annelise but less opinionated.

VMI vs. Citadel game

Jen and I took a nice trip out to Lexington/Staunton/Bridgewater this weekend. The main attraction was the VMI vs. Citadel game at VMI. No need to go into details, but suffice it to say we did not win. It was still a lot of fun. And we had great seats, practically on the 50 yard line.

..And by that I mean the 30 yard line in a row numbered "BBB". By my calculations, that's a mere 54 rows up. It was funny, we were all so winded by the time we had walked up there. We were a little tardy to the game and paid the price I guess. We walked to the stadium about 5 minutes into the game and we were already down by 7, it was a little disheartening.

We still had a great time though, I had planned on meeting 5 of my classmates out there, but we ended up running into at least 10 people we had graduated with. We tailgated out on the parade deck in front of VMI before and after the game.

We thought all the leaves would have fallen already, but it was still beautiful up there. You'll have to take my word for it because I didn't snap any good foliage shots.

We stayed in Staunton Friday and Saturday night. Jen went to college in Staunton at Mary Baldwin College so we thought it would be a good spot between our two destinations of Lexington and Bridgewater (Up near Harrisonburg).


So that night we went and watched Jen's brother Robby fight in his MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) fight up in Bridgewater. It was the first of those I had been to. Pretty crazy stuff. He lost his fight because he fought a dude that outweighed him by 30 pounds because his scheduled fight cancelled.

Fun weekend all in all, but I was wore out today for sure.

After being there, I thought I would check YouTube and see if anybody has ever posted video from within VMI during ratline activities. I did find a recent video of when the rats met cadre, aka one of the worst days of their lives. This is basically when things go down hill for a few months after you arrive there in late summer. This pretty much the same as when I was there, minus the women. Truly one of the most anxious feelings I have ever experienced.

Conversely, I was one of the "Cadre" for the next 3 years. If it looks like the Cadre hate the rats, it's because they do.

It's November

I sometimes wish I never started blogging to begin with. I really didn't need something else to feel guilty about not doing, I have plenty of those. Clean the garage (every few months this one comes back), fix the gate out back, pull weeds out of the back yard, clean my office closet, the list goes on.

But I do find it a good way to:

a) Brag about Annelise and other things without having to work them into daily conversation.
b) Keep a kind of journal for historical purposes.

So the bragging begins... Annelise is cuter than ever, she was a ladybug for Halloween.

It's really getting fun around holidays with her now because she understands what's going on.

She was a lot of fun at her birthday this year also (she's 2).

So other than that I'm just working, playing some racquetball, and working a little more. I'm looking forward to the holiday season, Thanksgiving is fast approaching. I'm also enjoying the cooler weather, this summer was getting brutal there for a while.

This concludes my generic catch up blog post. Hopefully (for my multitudes of readers) I will have more frequent and pointed updates. But all I can promise you at this point is that I have every intention to do so.

Yearly Post (part 2)

I wanted to add one more thing, but I didn't want it to get buried in my previous post.

Of course Annelise is cute as ever. She is doing more and more talking now. Her favorite words are "bye, bye" and "uh-oh". She says uh-oh every time she drops something or knocks something over. The other night she cracked Jen and I up. We were watching "Lost" and Annelise was playing on the floor getting ready for bed. There was this scene where some chick runs out of the woods and collapses. Right after she collapsed and the camera pans around for dramatic effect, Annelise belts out "uh-oh!." We laughed so hard.

Anyway Jen took Annelise and cooper to the lake the other day. While they were there they ran into an aspiring photographer. She took some pretty good pics of Annelise. Her hair is blowing in the wind, and what a cute face. I know I'm biased, but she is a cute kid for sure.

Yearly Post

Here it is... my yearly addition to the internets. A bunch of stuff has happened since I last blogged (obviously), among them were Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year, St. Patricks Day. Happy New year everybody!

There have been a few other things going on. One of which is our makeover of the loft. Basically, Jen and I were talking about what a waste it was to have a pretty good sized room upstairs that wasn't really being used. The loft used to have a pool table in it, but since most of my friends are married with kids, it really only got used like twice a year.

So we decided to convert it into the main entertainment area. The first task was to offload the pool table. It has been in the family for something like 25 years, so naturally it went to one of my uncles. So sometime back in January I disassembled it and hauled it up to my uncle Paul's in Salisbury MD.

The next step was to get some furniture. So we went to one of those "Deal of a lifetime, one time sales" at Haynes and picked up a new couch and lounge chair.

Along with my co-worker and buddy Langdon, who was also upgrading his home theater, I bought a 50" plasma television to put up there. Dad helped me do some electrical wiring for sconces to get some ambient theather style lighting in there. It came out well, no pics yet.

Also Jen ran the Shamrock half marathon. She ran a new personal best, very awesome. I whimped out and ran the 8k. I finished in 49 minutes and something.

Blogger Updated

Google has completed absorption of blogger. So now I'm blogging through the new interface. So far it isn't very different. I'm sure there are a bunch of improvements, I'll look forward to finding them if I ever log in to blog again.

I've been out of the blogging scene for a while, not sure why. It's kind of against my nature to communicate my inner thoughts anyway, maybe that has something to do with it. I'll try harder this time.

Annelise is walking now!!! That is one huge thing that has changed. She's just over 13 months old. She has been pushing around this walker toy for a few months now, she can really zoom around the house on that thing. And she took her first steps on Jen's birthday (October 17th 2006). But she didn't really walk more than a step or two until the other night.

Jen and I were sitting in the loft, she had left Annelise playing in her room. We looked up and there she was, rounding the corner of her room and walking down the hallway! For the past few days she has been walking more and more, it's very exciting and very cute to watch.

Not much else has really changed, we cleaned out our garage a few weeks ago, we are very excited about that. We can actually get a car in there, the other side has the lawn mower and the larger baby toys and strollers, we need to find some way to hang that stuff from the wall.

We also put in a patio with brick pavers in the back yard. We hope to get some nice furniture to put back there and do more cooking out.

The shows we are currently into are: "Lost," "Heroes," and "Prison Break." All very good and highly recommended, although Heroes is on 2 episode probation with me, I'm starting to lose interest, hopefully they can turn it around.

Holler if you read this. Who will be first? Langdon?, Chris?, a surprise guest? Let's all find out together...

Lost Interest

Clearly I have lost interest in blogging. The thought would cross my mind to update about once a week, but then I'd start feeling guilty about it and block it out of my mind. Too much other stuff going on.

I put in some crazy hours with INTER-OP this month, I think it was 116 hours in March. Ouch. I guess my bout with Bells Palsy occurred since my last post as well. That is pretty much cleared up.

I was sick as a dog this last weekend. Man, I haven't been that sick since I can remember. Maybe since back in high school when I was down for like a week. I've been pretty much out of it since Saturday night, it's now Tuesday night. To be honest, in a strange way, I think the down time did me some good. I haven't had much chance recently to take down time. I guess it could even be my body's way of saying "here, take some mandatory down time." Regardless, I feel kind of refreshed, although I'm not 100% over it yet.

I did get a chance to watch the entire 1st season of Battlestar Galactica, wow what a pleasant surprise that turned out to be. I definitely recommend watching, even if you're not a Sci-fi nerd. It is very interesting and well done.

Ok, I'd best get to bed, it's 3:00 am and I can't duck out of work any more.

It's about time...

It's getting longer and longer between updates. I wonder how long before someone notices that I have posted an entry. Let's do an experiment, first one to post a comment acknowledging that they have read this wins all the prizes.





Annelise is growing so fast! We had a fun night tonight, she was lauging and making all kind of noises. Jen and I couldn't stop laughing. She definitely has her upset moments, but in general she is a happy baby. It's so cool when I hear her stirring from a nap and go over there, then she opens her eyes and give me the biggest smile.

Cooper had his other hip replacement surgery back in January (hence the hair line in the pic), so far so good with recovery. He doesn't understand why we don't take him to the lake anymore, but hopefully he'll be back to normal in a month or so.

Work has returned to a normal state again. That's good news, it was crazy for a while there. I need to start hitting the gym again, it's so easy to get out of the habit when life get's really crazy for a while, but it's so hard to get back in the habit.

A long work days

(The following was typed by Chris Johnson as we toiled away at getting our application deployed at work on January 20, 2006. We actually ended up being there until 12:30 A.M. A 42 hour work day.)

No, the plural is not a mistake. I've been at work from 0800 hours on Thursday to 2120 hours (right now) on Friday and still going strong. Needless to say, I'm a little sleepyish. My good friend Langdon was with me through the whole thing. What a guy. The hard part is that there's no concrete end in sight. Just silly.

The other thing that I find frustrating is that a good portion of the time I spent was in troubleshooting an app that we have to use but did not write. Needless to say, since I didn't write it, it wasn't very good. But, hopefully, soon all will be done and I can find my bed and re-aquaint myself with it's comforts in short order.

(As you may have noticed, this entry is not in my usual lighthearted style. I'm so tired, I had this typed by proxy)