Blake Thomas Peckovitch

On Monday July 21st, we were blessed with the arrival of Blake Thomas Peckovitch. He was 5lb 4oz and 18 1/4" tall. Blake decided he wanted to come out 2 weeks early. His original due date was August 3rd. Tera's water broke at about 11:20am while she was vacuuming. She called me, her parents and sister and than decided to take a shower. During the shower, the contractions started. She said they were pretty close. I arrived home at noon and she called her Dr. The Dr's office told her to come in at 1pm because they were about to go on lunch. Seriously? That wasn't going to happen. After talking to someone again, they said just go to the hospital, so we left at about 12:15pm. We arrived at the hospital at about 12:50pm. Stupid traffic. Tera was hooked up to the fetal monitor at 12:58pm and a few pushes later, Blake arrived at 1:18pm. There was a bit of a complication though. He decided to relieve himself in the womb and swallowed some of the meconium.  After about 20 min or so of suctioning, they were able to remove most of it. We did later find some still in one of his ears. Because of his smallness, the Pediatrician said we couldn't leave the next day and ended being in the hospital for about 49 hours total. Well Tera and Blake were, I had to go home each night (2 nights) with Shelby because she wouldn't sleep there. We arrived home on the afternoon of Weds, the 23rd of July and everything has been good so far.

Here are some pics from the first week after Blake's birth.

 

I love his face in the last picture.





Vacation

Last month I was privileged enough to be able to attend Revit Technology Conference North America. The company I work for, BCER Engineering, sent me. I had a great time. If you haven't seen it, here is my post about the trip. RTC North America. At any rate, this post is not about that. This post is about the vacation I took shortly after returning from Chicago.

You see, I came back to work on a Monday and on Wednesday, I was supposed to start vacation. That actually didn't start until Thursday because I was wrapping up a project I had been working on since January. I am so glad I have finally finished this project as it had been preventing me from doing any of my BIM Manager duties except for the occasional "can you fix this" stuff. Taking note, that has put me 6+ months behind on the tasks I need to get finished. Some of those tasks include: a 2014 template, upgrading families and container file to 2014, various family corrections, and cleaning my desk (LOL).

Back to the vacation. During this vacation my family and I were supposed to head back to New York (where I am from) to see my little sister graduate from high school, however, we couldn't go. Tera was going to be 34 weeks pregnant with our second child and her Dr. wouldn't let her drive all that way (Denver to NY) and we would have to jump through a lot of hoops in order to fly. It was too expensive to fly all 3 of us as well. I could have gone solo but Tera didn't want me too in case something happened, so I didn't go. I did, however, get a LOT of projects done around the house. I cleaned out the garage and we can now park the Explorer or Fusion in there. Shelby's bike, wagon and lawn mower prevent us from getting another vehicle in there though. I cut down a sick tree out back, replaced the bathroom light fixtures and exterior lighting. We also had a new concrete patio poured and a new retaining wall and sod laid. With the new sod, came an extension of the flower bed around the window well. We got a new window well cover, laid new mulch and planted some flowers.

Overall it was a very needed and productive vacation but put me even further behind. A month later and I am still playing catch-up!

RTC North America!!

RTCNA was an excellent experience for me and very intimate. I met a lot of great people and attended lots of great classes. There were a couple of disappointing classes, but I sat through anyways out of respect to the presenter and the Q&A at the end turned out to be the best part. I hope that I am able to attend the next event which is going to be in or around Washington D.C. in July of 2015.

I think my memorable class was the one I attended called "BIM Managers Guide to Automating Revit Using Macros" which was taught by +Troy Gates. The other most memorable class was Harry Mattison's  "Maintaining Order and Preventing Chaos with the Revit API". Both classes offered lots of information with the Revit API and Macros and definitely things I would like to try and/or implement. Troy's macro on creating dependent views with the Revit API was awesome. I know it takes quite a while for me to create dependent views when they are needed for a project when I set them up. This will save me a lot of time. I guess it is part of the LARUG add-in for Revit. I will have to find that for sure. Harry had some great tips on spying on your fellow Revit users for adding and/or modifying families, changing to a non-standard font or creating random text types.

All of the meals were top-notch with a different variety of food each day. the 30 minute "Morning Tea" or "Afternoon Tea" breaks were very much needed. I did a lot of networking, socializing and made a lot of new friends with whom I hope to keep continued contact with.

Fun factoid from the Wrap Up Session: at one of the previous RTCNA events, I believe it was Atlanta, $700 of alcohol was consumed per attendee during the conference of 500 people, so you do that math.

There was a "Twaffle" and "Click" contest that I participated in as well. Don't go looking up the definition as there are many and they are kind of NSFW. Here are some of the pics I took for the Twaffle and Click contest (that didn't actually get awarded that I saw) and a few others from the event.