It was ten years ago yesterday that my wife and I first met. We owe that chance meeting to the fact that my ex-roommate’s birthday happens to fall on Valentine’s Day, which in college is more than enough reason to have a party…The rest is family history.

Word from back home is that cousin Kelly took fourth place in the women’s biathlon at this year’s Paralympic Games.

Underkofler Takes Fourth, Bascio Fifth in Women’s Biathlon at 2006 Paralympic Games

Way to go, Kelly! That’s a tremendous accomplishment.

My wife, who often finds herself frustrated with the amount of time I spend on the computer, recently found that she’s not alone. According to this survey from Citizen (link to Kyodo news article in Japanese), nearly 30% of wives and 20% of husbands feel frustrated about the amount of time their spouse spends using a computer.

(This is actually one of the reasons I haven’t posted anything to this blog for nearly two months. I’ve been trying to be more available for my family by limiting the amount of time I spend doing computer-related things.)

Consider this post a public service announcement: If you are reading this, there is a good chance your spouse is not very happy with you right now. Go fix that.

Recent discussions with my adorable wife have led to the conclusion that we would prefer to limit access to news about (and pictures of) our family life to our friends and family from now on, so I will be setting up a separate, password-protected weblog for that purpose. This will most likely be the last entry in the Family category of this blog. Subsequent posts about family-related matters will be posted in the new blog (the details of which are forthcoming), but you will need to be a registered—and recognized!—friend or family member to be able to read them. If you are one of these, but have not yet registered, please feel free to do so now. 

It’s too early to say for sure at this stage, but there has been some discussion about having said adorable wife contribute to the friends-and-family blog….

Incidentally, this also means that our Family galleries at smugmug are now password-protected as well. If you would like to know the password, please contact me.

Update 1: Okay, the new blog is more or less ready. There are still some bugs to work out, but it’s in good enough shape to share with family and friends (who will be forgiving, I hope!). The new blog can be found at http://ff.i-sako.com/. Offhand, I cannot think of a more auspicious topic to kick off a new blog than our daughter’s fifth birthday today.

It requires a separate login from this blog, even though the login information for both blogs is the same (I’ll work on fixing that soon).

I’ve received comment from a number of people about this change, but haven’t been able to respond to most of them yet. I will soon. I promise!

I see that the new Jamie 2.0 has finally been released. She’s been totally rewritten from the ground up, using all new materials!

Jamie 2.0 was clearly designed for the fashion-conscious trendsetter. Not surprisingly, she looks a lot like a cross between Jamie 1.0 and Jerry 1.0 (one wonders how far behind Jerry 2.0 can be).

Every family should have at least one Jamie. In our family’s case, we get to have two.