Quincy's World

I was playing around with a pretty neat freeware program this evening called XnView. One of the many uses is to create slideshows and save them either as an executable file or as a screen saver. I thought it would be cool to see Quincy morph from 1 week old until 30 weeks old.

I have created one slideshow of all of Quincy’s weekly pictures as an executable file. I recommend downloading it and running it locally on your computer. There is a 5 second pause between weeks, but if you want to move quicker – click the right mouse button to move forward in time and use the back button to watch Quincy regress. 😉

Here is the download link: Quincy’s Slides

I wish I had a really good explanation for why Quincy is wearing a bandana in this picture, but I don’t. I was trying to play a game with him with the bandana, and he could’ve cared less about it. So, next thing I know, I’m putting it on his head – never thinking that he would let me. He may be young, but he is patriotic!

Quincy likes to roll in his walk-behind wagon, only we’re the ones who have to walk behind it! As you can see from the picture, Quincy will pick up hitchhikers – especially if they are bears.

I thought of hooking Ashby up to the wagon to pull him, but then I could picture Ashby bolting thru the house with Quincy on two wheels as he holds on for dear life. So, I decided that it really wasn’t worth trying to do that.

Quincy continues to do well. I think he is getting ready to consolidate his separate naps into just one in the AM and one in the afternoon. He doesn’t sleep very long (or well) any more for his first nap. Unfortunately, with the weekend coming up, we won’t be able to try anything new until Monday. We are going to Rochester tomorrow to pick up his 6-month pictures, so that will undoubtedly mess up his schedule. Oh, the trials of being a infant.

We spent a nice Sunday afternoon up in Buffalo for Isaac’s 4th birthday celebration. We left in plenty of time to get home around 7pm to keep Quincy on his usual schedule. We did our part – our house did not. We hadn’t been home very long when I noticed that the temperature wasn’t what it should have been at that hour. I glanced at the thermostat – 60. Whoops. It should have read 68.

I started playing around with it, trying to figure out why the heat wasn’t coming on. Deep down in the pit of my stomach I was concerned that the furnace was just plain broken. Now, I know as much about furnaces as I do about astrophysics, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to tinker around with it. 🙂

I established that the problem was not with the natural gas – the stove and hot water heater worked fine. So I did a little research online about furnaces and based on what I read and saw on our furnace, I figured it was the ignitor (ours doesn’t have a pilot light). Well, knowing what was wrong isn’t the same as fixing it. By this time it is around 8pm, on a Sunday, on a very cold Sunday – 14 degrees.

Our short term solution for the rest of the night was to fire up the gas fireplace in the living room. By this time, Quincy was already in bed in his nice climate controlled room. Lucky sucker. Dara called a place in Wellsville that had 24 hour emergency service – got the answering machine. Another place doesn’t stock Ruud parts (sigh). I was resigned to just calling some place in the morning. Dara called one final place to see if they could fix it on Monday (if they had the right parts). Well, she hit the jackpot – they could come out at 10am to fix the ignitor.

I decided to shut off the gas fireplace for the evening since the idea of leaving that much open flame unattended in the house was a bit worrisome to me. Now we just had to survive the cold night. I knew that wouldn’t be a problem. Ashby could’ve cared less, Quincy had his space heater, and we had our down comforter. For good measure, Dara threw on another regular comforter. I ended up getting very hot during the night and did not sleep well (shocker I know). At 5:30am I went downstairs to turn on the fireplace and see just how cold it got inside – 47. Yup, that is 4-7 degrees.

I kept that fireplace on for about 5 hours and it managed to bring the inside temperature (of the living room) up to 58. It was very comfortable by the fire – which is where Quincy spent his play time. If you haven’t looked yet, check out his weekly picture from today – he is bundled up in many layers and wearing a hat and booties.

The repairman came a little after 10am and had the ignitor fixed in about 10 minutes. The furnace came to life and in a matter of maybe 20 minutes had the whole house nice and toasty. There were no other problems associated with the lack of heat – all the pipes stayed thawed.

So, we learned that A) Heat is nice – especially in winter, B) We need a spare space heater or two and, C) Dara got the better end of the deal by going to work in a heated building.