We were in Portland the week before last and I finally got around to pulling together a few photos from our mini vacation. I got a bit carried away with the size of the thing so you’ll have to click through on the thumbnail below to get a legible version.

It was on the chilly side, but we were particularly lucky that it didn’t rain the week that we were there. Thanks to George and Sasha for entertaining us and recommending things to do while we were there. Speaking of what we did, I recommend bumming around the Nike campus in Beaverton, visiting the Portland Zoo, entertaining the little ones at the Portland Children’s Museum, and taking a drive out along the Columbia River Gorge in the direction of Mt. Hood. And who can forget getting down with the 0% sales tax in Oregon?

Where do I start? This has been an event-filled week, to say the least. Let me silence the crickets who are getting organized in an attempt to overthrow this blog and get to the pile of news to report.

What’s this? A moneypit?
We’re now proud homeowners! No, we didn’t abandon the Bay Area and start buying huge tracts of land in North Dakota. We picked up the first official Shih family money pit over in the Redwood Heights neighborhood of Oakland. We’re in the process of boxing up all our worldly possessions to move next week. All I have to say is that I’m glad that after this move, I won’t have to think about moving for a long time.

What’s this? More Shihs?
Yeah, baby. Literally. For those of you who have missed Tam’s expanding waistline, that’s right, the family is primed to expand by 33.333% (repeating, of course) come April. We had a date with the ultrasound yesterday afternoon and found out the gender. Apparently everyone was guessing that it was a girl. Well, they were right!

Here she is picking her nose…

And here she is waving to all of you out there on the web…

It seems I’ve already been vetoed on my first baby name: Sue. Come on, you know you laughed. Don’t lie.