¡Feliz cumpleaños Leah!

My little girl is 3 today. Where has the time gone? Unfortunately, she's exactly 2,893 miles away (Google Maps verified) and this daddy is having some serious withdrawals. I sent off a card, it plays the "Hockey Pocky," which is one of her favorite songs. I have a gift here waiting for her when she gets home next week. And that will have to suffice for now. But I know she is with family and her mom who will make the day special for her. I just wish I could be there.

But I thought just to celebrate the day in my own way I'd share some pics of our little Leah and see how she's grown.

My favorite video of my little Leah ever (because at the end of the video she asks, "Where's daddy?" and goes looking for me):

Happy Birthday Sweetheart!

My Name WAS Mud

Last summer, just before our move to Virginia, the motherboard on our old laptop crapped out. Since I had my last laptop for almost 3 years without any issues, I decided to build one through Dell again. After building the laptop I wanted I discovered that it would have taken a month to be built and delivered. And since Carissa can't stand to be without the internet (wink, wink) we shopped around and found one that suited our needs.

Doing the sensible thing I bought a hard drive enclosure for my old laptop hard drive. Well somehow while transferring over my old files to the new laptop an error occurred and the My Documents and My Pictures files were corrupted. Yeah, over 5,000 pictures gone. Wedding. Gone. Leah's baby pictures. Gone. My happy wife. Gone.

I already know what you're thinking.

Don't you back up your computer files?

If I had a nickel....

Anyway, I took the enclosure into the Geek Squad at Best Buy to see if they could look at it. One of their missionary wannabe techies looked at it and tried to pull the files off but couldn't. After some digging around he was able to pull just a few that were in a sub folder. He then quoted me $1200 to perform a level 4 recovery on the hard drive. Happy Jason. Gone.

$1200 was just out of the question at the time. Let's be real it still is. I mean c'mon they're just pictures. They're only worth a 1,000 words. And 5,000 of them? That's only 5,000,000 words. So with my girls out of town I thought I'd try and see if I could recover the files. I searched around for some data recovery services online and was getting ready to send it off to a place that quoted me $275. Then I remembered I have a father who has all kinds of people at his disposal who do this daily. So he took it in and I spoke with one of his guys who hooked it up, ran his software through the night and voila! 9 GB worth of pictures and all of the important doc files I had stored have been recovered and transferred to this very laptop I am typing on.

God bless the FBI.

So, in honor of this joyous day (and also because my girls are in Oregon and I have nothing better to do) I share with you some of my favorite pictures from the past:

I miss my truck.

And the boat that almost got me divorced before I was even engaged:

I guess I should go back up my computer now.