Tracy’s 3 months of maternity leave is almost up, so that means Lauren will be headed to day care soon. The time has passed pretty quickly and our baby girl is growing up so fast. She’s already outgrowing some of her 6 month outfits because she’s over 90th% for height and weight for her age. We’re happy that one of Lucas’ favorite teachers at day care will also get to be Lauren’s teacher too.

We’ve now gone to outsourcing, which is ironic given the current exchange rates. Although we’re not exactly offshoring. I hired someone to do our taxes and someone to clean our house. Our tax guy seems good. Very experienced and reliable. We’ll see how our new house cleaner does this weekend, but the rates are very reasonable. It’s funny that we haven’t done these before.

I’ve always done my own taxes because I didn’t want to explain them to someone else, but it really wasn’t that bad. The data collection is the hard part and I’d have to do that either way, and the explaining took only an hour or two. The thing that I’m buying with his services is peace of mind in knowing that things are done right and I’m not losing any big money due to missed deductions, credits or putting some item in the wrong line. Stupid complicated tax code.

I started to twitter. I’m not sure if I’ll keep it up, and I haven’t yet decided how I’ll put it on this page. But you can look at Facebook or follow my feed here: http://www.twitter.com/hubt/
The service does have a lot more downtime than it ought to, but the UI is nice and simple, and it mostly works.

Picked up an 8Gig 3G iPhone this morning. I tried yesterday but the lines were too long and I didn’t want to wait. Today I got to an AT&T store about 20 minutes before they opened and there were about a dozen people in line. By the time I had gotten mine and left, they had already sold out of their daily shipment. She said they had about 20 today.

Impressions so far: I like it quite a bit. I had played with other iPhones a bit, but not that much. My opinions are that of a new user and not a comparison to a version 1 iPhone. Good, almost everything works well.

Overall: the interface is good and mostly intuitive, there are a few things that puzzle me, but overall it’s good.

Keyboard: I’m still getting used to the keyboard, there’s a learning curve for sure. I’m not sure how long it will take to get to my max speed, but i hope it’s not more than a couple of weeks.

Camera: Good/Bad. I’ve never had a cameraphone before. The resolution is better than I expected. The shutter speed is much worse than I expected, all shots pretty much have to be carefully composed.

GPS: Just tried it with GMaps once. Seems good.

Voice: haven’t tried calls, but the voicemail seems interesting. I make very very few calls anyways. I see an iPhone as a mobile web browser that happens to do voice

Apps: Haven’t tried many of them, but the catalog of apps is pretty good.

I finally got a chance to read Freakanomics last week and I was not really surprised that both our kids names were in the top 20 of middle or upper income white Americans. Lauren was #2 in fact. The names will pretty quickly fall out of fashion, but it was amusing still.

We spent 5 days in Michigan last week. It was a nice break because Tracy’s parents live on a lake and have a nice little boat that you can sit in and lounge around on. It was also great weather, so it was perfect for the 4th. Lucas really loved going on the boat and watching the fireworks and seeing his grandpa and grandma. Grandpa, Grandma, Uncle Ed, Aunt Mary all got to see Lauren for the first time, so it was all fun. The trip there was a bit of a nightmare because our flight from Chicago to Kalamazoo got delayed 3 times for 3 hours and then finally cancelled, so we had to rent a car and drive it.