What else? Oh yeah, I knocked up my wife. Again. We called this baby “Scooby” until the birth because we didn’t discover the gender until birth. I’ll post about that sometime. It was different than I expected it to be. Scooby was born in the nick of time – December 31.

I submitted a patent application with some co-inventors. I won’t get rich from it because my employer owns it.

I’ve learned a lot about my industry and about the technical stuff related to my job (and consequently picked up a lot of professional confidence along the way).

Scooby’s impending arrival meant that we needed another bedroom in the house. This meant that my study had to go, or at least be moved. Moved to where, you ask? Outside, of course! We decided to put it out in a detached building on my property. For myriad reasons (ok, not myriad, but several), we didn’t want to get one of the prefabricated ones from The Home Depot and concluded that I would build one myself. See all my “detached study” postings for more about that. The main part of that for this post is that I severely injured my back while working on it. I was out of work for about a month. I’ve more or less recovered now, although I’m still taking some medication to keep the nerves in my back from becoming inflamed, which allows them to heal and prevents permanent nerve damage (which I understand is the cause of the chronic back pain that most people have).

Anyway, this has been an eventful year; one that can’t be done justice in a format like this. I’ll just close with this. God has blessed my family tremendously. He has given us good health, an uneventful birth of our third child, and family that seems to have an inexhaustible willingness to help us.