Nite Beach, originally uploaded by cote. It's been family vacation time at the beach. Galveston to be exact. While people have been freaking out about the BP spill, it's still nice. In theory, it won't be soon. My childhood memories are of the beach being hot, sandy, and dirty. Back in the 80s, it seemed like there was an oil spill each year. This year, I enjoyed breezy weather, and when it rained it was particularly nice with the overcast pre-rain and then the rain.

My wife, Kim, and I have been in the adoption process for a long, long time, and we just finalized the last major part this afternoon. We can finally announce our new son, Cormac Murphy Coté-Skotak. For those I've told who've kept the "embargo," thanks so much! And for the rest of you, check out that handsome kid of ours! ;> (And, you know, of course he has a Twitter account: @CormacCS.

I have two personal maxims that generally apply to all situations in my life: Life's too short to live by them rules. What the fuck else am I doing with my time? The first is especially useful when you're fucking around with some stupid technology or instructions that want you to do something tedious - or futzing around too much trying to perfect something, like organizing my photos or music collection.

This is a little "home archeology." Our relatively young home was built in 1949 and under the large kitchen add-on we have, there's (at least) two structures: an old porch that was left there stupidly as a support beam and the remnants of an early kitchen floor - two or three levels of it! This tile is from one of those kitchen floor layers. When we redid the support under our kitchen we found pieces of this tile.