This past Thanksgiving we spent the long-weekend in Oklahoma City with Paul's brother Peter and his family.

It would be our first time meeting Baby Iylee, not yet 4 weeks old at the time of our visit. She was a doll!

Abby holding her newest cousin.  Iylee is a champion sleeper.

Abby and Annette huddled in Annette's room.  These two spent hour upon hours playing on their own (Kayleigh joined them occasionally).

Kayleigh struggling to throw a ball quick enough for the overly anxious Ayla.

The girls gathering ingredients (pond scum) for a potion.

Grandma mixed a batch of her special hot cocoa.  Abby and Annette both were tremendously helpful.



And during down-times, the girls watched movies on the iPads...


...and we cuddled with the kitty cats.  Jezebel was the most needy of a lap.

On the last day, we finally let Kayleigh hold Iylee for a brief time.  She was thrilled!

Note: Hickory smoked turkeys are delicious!

Ever wonder what exciting tasks are being worked by a software engineer building the next generation GPS system? Well, let me tell you...I have now spent 4 hours trying to resolve a 15 second anomaly in my s-band data time calculation. 15 seconds is so seemingly insignificant, but if I can't figure out the source of these seconds, I can't close on my task.

4 hours spent and I am almost positive the issue is related to leap seconds. Positive! The frustration is that there have been 25 seconds added since the concept of leap seconds was introduced in 1972 in an attempt to synch up the universal time formats. 16 seconds have been introduced since latest epoch (1/6/1980), which is the value I'm expecting for GPS week and time of week in seconds calculations. The most recent leap second was added at the end of June 2012. I am hoping that the time service I am invoking to retrieve leap second information just hasn't been updated for the latest addition.

Such a shame that I find the topic of leap seconds absolutely mind-numbingly dull. Every tidbit of information related to leap seconds and time formats takes 50 times longer to sink in than anything else, so sadly it has taken this long for me to be convinced I'm on the right track to solving my issue with these piddly 15 seconds.

My friends, if you suffer the same boredom as I do regarding this topic, yet you've made it this far in the post, congratulations to you. Bravo! If you want to learn for yourself more about leap seconds and universal time keeping, here are the links that finally helped me understand what might be happening to my seconds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time
http://adn.agi.com/GNSSWeb/
http://www.csgnetwork.com/gpstimeconv.html

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Abby's first year on a soccer team was a wonderful experience for her.  Her team won just a couple of games, but seeing how far they came from the very first game of the season, we're exceptionally proud of the girls.


Best of all, Abby got to spend a few extra months with buds, Olivia and Emory.  All three are at separate schools now as they begin their elementary school education.  They have been such good friends since 18 months of age.  We would certainly like to see these girls together again for soccer next season. 

This is a big, big milestone for a little girl - learning to put your hair up in a pony tail...all by yourself.

We all love the extra hour for sleeping in, but I'll sure miss driving home and seeing the Colorado skies glowing like this!

View driving up Morningview, turning onto Foothills Dr.