So for those of you that know me, I’m expecting a baby girl next month, which should make for some interesting posts come late June, early July.

It also made for an interesting Mother’s Day, as my beautiful wife got a cute card from our as-yet-unborn baby to let Mommy know that her daughter was looking forward to having Mommy be a mommy.  It was cute, thank you very much.  Not that I had anything to do with it, of course.  Then Mommy-To-Be got a couple of hand towels as a present.  I figure since most of the other towels in the house will be used to wipe our baby’s butt, we can use these two to wipe our faces.

Of course, the towels are brown, so maybe that wasn’t the best idea ever…  Oh wait, they’re not brown — they’re the Espresso Bean color.  It’s a shame Bed Bath and Beyond is sold out of that color now, though.  We won’t be able to replace them if need be.  I wonder if that makes them more valuable?

Admittedly, I didn’t do a fabulous job of caring for my wife, outside of our lunch-time celebration of Mom-To-Be (my wife) and my grandmothers.  My mother was out of town, so my wife and I, my single grandmother, and my married grandmother and her husband – the five of us – went out for lunch.  My parents were out of town for the weekend, so my wife and I actually stayed at their house to help take care of my grandmother (the single one), since she’s been having difficultly getting around lately.

My wife did so much for my grandmother (yes – my grandmother – she’s my wife’s grandmother-in-law) on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.  I was working on Friday, and my wife did so much then and throughout the weekend.  Oh, and I think I mentioned she’s pregnant?  Yeah – she’s like a superhero Mom-To-Be, and not just for me. Dum-did-ee-dee.

So with us taking care of my grandmother, it was tough to do things just the two of us, and I ended up spending much of Sunday evening mowing the grass, taking out the garbage, etc.  The whole day, though, not only led me to admire my wife even more than I did before, but it also made me think about how important it is for us to care for our family, particularly those who precede us and are in no small part responsible for us being here.

At lunch on Sunday I got to wheel Grandma around in her new wheelchair — from the car to the elevator to the table, around the buffet while she held the plate and I read her the placards describing the scrumptious treats (mostly) on the tables, etc.  She was a trooper and certainly loved being out of the house for a few hours with family.  Really, I just loved being able to show our love for our grandmothers, with gifts, sure, but mostly with our time and attention.  It meant so much to both of them that we (my wife and I) took them out for lunch and spent part of our weekend with them.  It humbles me that my time should seem so valuable to others.  I’m learning, though, that spending time with others (e.g., my beautiful wife) is one of the best ways to show them love and to care for them.  More of that Quality Time thing that I’m not too good at giving .  As I said above, though, I’m learning!

So you may have noticed the two random photos on the sidebar of the site. I’ve taken some pictures lately, such as several hundred in Italy in February.

Of course, if you click on the Photos link, in the site navigation, you can look at all of them. If you’re looking to burn a few hours, I highly recommend it.

The pictures, while displayed here, are actually hosted on a site called Flickr. I use the site because I can put a lot of pictures up, I can easily use a plug-in to show them here, Flickr allows me to organize them, tag them, label them, etc.

Now, my main purpose here is not to say, “oooh, it’s such a great thing.” My designs are more selfish — the site allows you to sign up for free, and I was thinking, gosh, it would be great for other people to put their pictures on Flickr, then we could all be friends and share our pictures!

It’s quite simple. If you’d like to view my photos, just go to flickr.com/photos/schellack. If you want to view others’, particularly others’ interesting pics, try going to flickr.com/explore. Lastly, if you want to see how Flickr works, what it does, how to sign up, etc., just go to flickr.com/tour.

Should you want to sign up and find some more photos of mine that aren’t displayed elsewhere, I just might add you to my friends list, which would allow you to see those photos that I don’t particularly like to show to the whole world, namely those of my friends and family.

Happy Mother’s Day as well, in advance. I’m planning to post some more this weekend on what Mother’s Day has in store for this year, but in the mean time, check out the “Celebrating Motherhood” post on Flickr’s Blog. It’s got a link to a pool of pictures on moms.

So I got an interesting email from Microsoft about the big, free Spring update to the XBOX 360 that my wife and I keep in our living room and thought others might want to read it (it’s below). Tonight I downloaded the referenced update and it’s quite nice — there’s a new, fifth tab in the interface for the Marketplace which splits things up nicely.

We also rented a movie for the first time for a couple of bucks and enjoyed being able to watch it on our TV within a couple of minutes after the purchase — just enough time to get a couple bowl’s of ice cream and plop down on the couch.

Now the movie really wasn’t any good — For Your Consideration — I really should have heeded Rotten Tomatoes — but it was still fun to be able to watch the movie on a whim without having to leave the house to run to Blockbuster. If they only had a subscription service like an online Netflix sort of thing… and if only Jim, from the Office had made more than just a cameo appearance!

[edit]
I removed the xbox email because it broke the page in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Just try checking out http://www.xbox.com/en-US/support/systemupdates/default.htm instead.