That sense of awe at the energy contained in the wind is similar to what I feel as the power of time. Just two days ago I experienced what has been my best day as a father. Maya and I spent a full 5 minutes (though it seemed like an eternity) staring into each other’s eyes where she seemed like a fully aware human being.

She was staring as intently at me as any other fully grown person would do when I was talking to them. She has these moments from time to time, but what made this special was that she started to smile at me. The smile started in her left, my right, corner of her mouth. She kind of half smiled, then with a tremendous effort the smile spread to the right side of her mouth. It was amazing. I was in awe. I’m sure my friend Chris and Sarita and my parents who were at the dinner table with me as I held her didn’t notice, but it was so powerful. She smiled and the world stopped. But to bring it back to my wind analogy, the power of time is quickly diminishing what that smile felt like. Today I came home between a long day in the office and a business dinner to kiss Maya and Sarita and I couldn’t remember the feeling of that smile. I could remember that it happened, but the feeling of peace and confidence was just a memory – no longer real but just some words I could recall to describe that experience.

I went to lunch with my friend Mike on Tuesday and he mentioned to me the power that time had and the ability of time to wipe away the real feelings. I’m hoping he’s wrong, but planning that he’s right. I’m therefore going to try to record, from the moment, what it feels like as Maya’s dad. She’s amazing. She’s life changing. I want to remember it all without having the process of recording it all to interfere with experiencing the moment. Is that too much to ask? Maybe I should tell it to the wind.

The one from my personal experience, though, that I find most ironic is Home Depot.

I’ve been to HD about 5 times in the past week, some times completing just one transaction (buying a draw handle) and some times completing multiple (returning a draw handle and buying a drawer knob). Each time, along w/ my list of products, HD’s address and phone number, the return policy and some marketing material about the 10% guarantee, my receipt contains a survey invitation printed in both English and Spanish that doubles the length of the receipt.

Take my visit earlier today where I needed to exchange five bags of 1 5/8″ screws for five bags of 1 1/2″ screws. This amounted to two transactions (apparently HD registers can’t both purchase and return at the same time…) each of which included a survey invitation.

When he heard my comment about this, the clerk replied, “I know! And they never turn the lights off in the electric department, imagine how much energy we’d save just by flipping off a few of those incandescent light bulbs!”

If it didn’t take 20 minutes, I’d fill out each and every one of those surveys from here out… Hopefully though Home Depot will see enough blog posts like this one to get the picture.

It’s nitty-gritty, but essentially it knocked out like 2 hours from my day following all the instructions and getting my email all set up.  Well then in the new email program I couldn’t tell what I had read and what I hadn’t so I spent a ton of time going back and forth between the old and the new program. What a pain.

I didn’t even respond to anyone today because I was so busy trying to figure out what had and hadn’t been done while I was gone.

Tomorrow is going to be rough.

I did have a very strange situation to deal with today. In one of the many emails I read I found that a colleague had forwarded some racist jokes. I really didn’t know how to respond, if at all. I know that this person didn’t mean any harm in the jokes (in fact I honestly believe the person was under the impression they were a real David Letterman top-10 list and figured that made it OK to pass along), the jokes weren’t really even overtly racist, more just playing on stereotypes–but still they were the kind of thing that wasn’t appropriate for the work place.

I did get to thinking though; about how when you sometimes get a “forward” and there is that incredibly long string of To: and From: headers you have to scroll through to get to the actual meat of the message. I thought about what it would look like if somehow that message did get passed further along and there in the middle of the stream of endless headers was @blah.com where blah is my employer. How would that reflect upon my employer? Is that the kind of employer I’d want to work for?

So what did I do? I said something to the person about not forwarding messages from a work email account and how the content of the message even if not questionable (which this message certainly was) reflects upon our workplace in a way that isn’t in line with the kind of workplace I want. Honestly most days I wouldn’t have said something, but there was something my little brother said during his toast that inspired me today. While mentioning that I have strong strength of character he said (and I’ll probably get the quote wrong) “some people talk the talk, but -pause- my brother -pause- he walks the walk”.

That quote has really been sticking with me the past couple weeks. It’s never something I really considered myself doing, but now I almost feel guilty not doing the right thing (like when I saw some trash on the beach in Hawaii and just had to pick it up, or when my napkin didn’t land in the trash at the airport restaurant how I had to pick it up)… it’s completely ridiculous that someone could hold themselves to such a high standard so I’m sure sooner or later I’ll be able to relax and let myself make a mistake here or there, but for now I’m really fueled.

I should have photos from vacation up sometime today, I’m debating right now about posting all the photos or just the good ones. For Sarita and I, I think all of them would be nice, but for sending folks to our site, I think just the highlights. Leave me a comment on your thoughts!

The reception was a blast, the bridal party did a very exciting entrance from the top of the stairs. The first dance was so much fun and the song was perfect: David Gray – Be Mine, begins with the line which is the title of this posting, “From the very first moment I saw you, that’s when I knew…”

The speaches went so well, that totally put Sarita and I at ease. Sarita’s grandma was very missed as Flora pointed out. Then I had the chance to welcome and thank everyone as well as remember my dad (whom I wrote about two weeks ago). My brother’s speach was very touching; it’s hard to see yourself from someone else’s perspective until they articulate it as well as he did. I never knew he had such a knack for speaking. Sarita’s cousin and sister gave a really funny speach about their old make-believe land SarMichMon… I never knew she played so much… was very glad to hear those cute stories and get a warm welcome to the family.
We got many compliments on the DJ (Great Day Productions) and the kissing game went over very well. It was set up sooo perfect. Our guests clinked their glasses three times and Sarita and I were trying so hard not to laugh. The first couple, Denis and Mimi, totally set it off with an lift in the air, bend over backwards kiss. Every other couple was totally into it from that moment on. Even my Grandma got two handfuls of my Grandpa’s butt!!!! I bet my aunts and uncles had never seen that before.

The food was excellent, I had the salmon and Sarit had the filet. I heard from many of the people who had the Vegetarian option that it was very good as well.

We danced the night away, starting from the electric slide, to Maahe Ve, to trying to sing to Living on a Prayer and wrapping the night up with a group rendition of the Piano Man.

For the out of town travelers we held a brunch in the revolving restaurant atop the Millenium hotel.  My head is still sort of spinning; I don’t know if it’s from the whole event or the rotation for 3 hours

All in all, Sarita and I went from griping about all the little things leading up to the wedding to having a wonderful time and feeling like everything went just the way we wanted it to.  Thanks to all who helped, all who attended, and all who kept us in their mind on our special day!!!

Got a new camera today to take some good photos on the vacation. Will post in our gallery when we’re back.

In other news, making the last minute touches to the wedding programs, I don’t even want to think how long it will take to print 140 of these things.

Got some pics back from the Zeltmann wedding; was my first time as a groomsman, will upload pics to the gallery soon.

Also, read some good news today. My friend Matt’s older brother Mark is making huge progress in recovering from a spinal cord injury that nearly took his life a month ago. It’s amazing to read the story day by day; what a great way for technology to help us keep connected.

Thought I’d explain my fix in case others have the same problem.

focusminded.com describes a security setting which could indeed be the issue, but before contacting your hosting provider to check security problems, it’s probably a good idea to make sure you have deepest sender looking for the right “xmlrpc.php” page set to your posting page. If you copied the URL directly from wordpress for posting, you’ll probably have something like http://domain.com/wordpress/wp-admin/post.php.  You really want http://domain.com/wordpress/xmlrpc.php.  Try that URL out, if it exists, it’s the correct one (by exists, I mean you’ll get something other than a 404 error).  If you’ve already got the correct xmlrpc.php page, you might have the security issue that is described by the focusminded site and you may need to contact your hosting provider.

Hopefully this will save some time with the same issue.