The Leib Family

This past Friday, I was supposed to be hosting my first poker night at our new house (which has a 2nd garage/shop on the back of the property, all set up for woodworking and poker), but had to cancel when 1/2 of my buddies couldn't make it.  Instead, I took the whole family to the velodrome in Redmond at Marymoor Park for some friday night racing under the lights.  A friend from church competes in the races (this was the first time he qualified for Friday night racing by earing points racing on the Wednesday night circuit), so there was a small group of friends there as well to cheer him on.  Midway through the events, they bring the kids out onto the velodrome to race 1 lap around the oval by age group.  Kellen brought his bike and helmet to compete, but I was sure that when it got time to go out there, he would get too scared to do it.  To our big surprise, he rushed right out there, got a number for his back, and completed his lap!  He has only been riding his "big boy" bike for a few months, so I was a little nervous for him when he was all the way on the other side of the track, if he fell and had to start up again, I wasn't sure how he would handle it.  But, he did awesome, and was totally serious the whole way around, then had a big 'ol smile and thumbs up for me after he crossed the finish line and stopped his bike.  He was stoked to pass people, and when he got off his bike, he yelled out to Karly "I passed a *lot* of girls!", which was pretty hilarious.  We didn't take our cameras with us (doh), but my friend Jesse had his, and snapped a couple of pics of Kellen racing.

 

This was the 2nd to last Friday race night of the season, and the last one where they let the kids go out and race, but we will for sure go back next summer and get him out there a few times, hopefully with video and still cameras next time...

 

--
Robbie

Mia Kristen Leib, born 6/18/2007 at 8:48pm at UW Medical Center in Seattle, was 7lbs 1.5oz, and 19.5", and born happy, gentle, and quiet after a very speedy delivery.  Karly was induced, and Mia Kristen came out about 1 hour after they broke her water!

 

 

She has already met her brother and sister, some of her aunts and uncles, grandmas and grandpas, old friends, and some dear friends from our church family have also stopped by to greet the newest Leib.  Mia and mommy are both doing quite well, and we expect to be kicked out of here sometime on Wednesday morning or afternoon.

 

 

Mia Kristen (named after my sister, Kristen) looks like her brother, with a hint of Ella thrown in.  She has some blonde hair, and what look like blue eyes (it takes babies a few days to get their eye color).  I think she is just gorgeous!  I can't wait to get her home and get our family back together, although, it seems crazy to think of us as a family of 5, how weird!  I still look at Karly and remember those days 6-7 years ago, when we were newlyweds with no kids, and just can't believe God has blessed us with so much since then.

 

I read an article today in the NY times that quoted ousted Havard president, and former Clinton Treasury Dept. head, Lawrence Summers, from his column in the Financial Times, where he stated his favorite quote that "since 1979, the share of pretax income going to the top 1 percent of American households has risen by 7 percentage points, to 16 percent. Over the same span, the share of income going to the bottom 80 percent has fallen by 7 percentage points. It’s as if every household in that bottom 80 percent is writing a check for $7,000 every year and sending it to the top 1 percent."

 

Ohh, the big bad top 1% are stealing $7,000 a year from us middle and lower class.  Sounds awful, doesn't it?  The mind-blowingly obvious stat missing from the doom and gloom scare tactic above is that since 1979, the U.S. GDP has gone up over 500%!!!  So, "our" portion of the pie has dipped 7%, but the pie is 5 times larger!  Would you rather have 17% of 100, or 10% or 500?  Why is this kind of nonesense constantly puked out by socialist acedemics, and then lapped up by the media and guilt-ridden post-hippies without questioning the basic facts missing from a statement like that?  Summers is talking about our respective shares of pretax income without any context of what we are sharing.  This kind of thing drives me nuts...

 

Part of the reason the pie is 5 times bigger today is that taxes, even on those in the top 1%, heaven forbid, have been lowered and lowered.  Those top earners are the smart, resourceful, ingenious, entrepreneurial, job-creating, industry-changing folks that create the companies (or fund them) that make your house value rise, your 401ks go up, and probably pay your wage, either directly or indirectly.  Let the top 1% earn even more of the pie, I say, especially if the pie is going to grow by 5x again the next 28 years.  If we punitavely tax the rich to make us feel better about ourselves, the unintended consequence is that the shares of the pie might start moving in the "right" direction, but the pie is going to shrink, and the incentive for the rich to put their money out there will be greatly diminished.

 

Why can some wannabe bonehead like me see through the intellectual dishonesty and foolishness of a Harvard president?  Scary...

 

 

 

A video of Ella dancing to Justin Timberlake.

Wow, I have been a loser when it comes to getting new content up via blog, flickr, or youtube.  I still don't have all my computers or network setup in our new house, so that has been my main excuse, but I need to get a little more proactive...

 

Not much new in our life right now, besides having finally moved and settled into our new place.  I'm sucked into American Idol for the first time ever (I used to only watch the audition episodes for the comedy), and I absolutely love seeing Sanjaya stay on the show week after week.  I might not even be able to watch after he gets voted off.  If you didn't know how or why he gets so many votes, check out votefortheworst.com, and you will see why he isn't even in the bottom three each week.

 

I got pretty pumped today when I heard that Rudy Guilliani is being backed by Steve Forbes, and supports a flat tax.  On that issue alone, he may have won my vote, but it is way too early to hitch yourself to a canidate.  I still need to see what Gingrich does, because any ticket he is on (as President or VP) would be very attractive to me.  A Guilliani/Gingrich ticket would be pretty bomb, but that might be too much no-nonsense, no-frills, common sense for the American public to handle.  They might actually win the war on terror, secure the border, lower (and simplify) taxes, reform health care, welfare, and social security, and still have a year or two left on their first term.  What would the fun be in that?  They should be able to pull in some Bill Clinton fans as well, having both cheated on their wives in the past...

Most of you know all of this already, but just in case there are still some of you unaware...

 

1) Karly is pregnant!  We found out last week we are having a girl, due in late June.  We have a short list of names we have narrowed it down to, but a couple of them will get us in trouble with friends and family, so we have to be careful with what we pick, and how/when we tell people our choice.  More then likely, we won't tell anyone until after she is born (how we did it with Kellen, and somewhat with Ella).

 

2) We bought a new house!  This is pretty old news, but I didn't want to blog about it until it was 100% final.  We actually closed back in December, but the sellers needed a few months to find a new house themselves, so we have been renting it back to them.  They are moving out by the end of this month, so we will hopefully be moving in a week or two after they get out.  I told our land lord we would be out by March 10th at the latest, so I guess we are on the clock now to make this move.  The house is in Sammamish, which puts us a tad closer to church and friends, a bit closer to south-end family, but a little farther from my current office.  It is a long walk from a really cool fishing lake, and the neigboorhood feels like you are camping with all the tall trees and big lots.  I can't wait to move and own again.  This house has some work to do on it to get it into tip-top shape, but I am excited to get busy building decks and doing roof stuff.

 

3)  I am trying to buy a coffee stand business.  This has been something I've wanted to do for a long time.  No, I won't be quitting Microsoft, I just wanted to invest in something that makes a little money on the side, that hopefully requires little to no hands-on interaction.  That last part is probably a pipe-dream, at least for my first attempt at being a small business owner, but my goal is to kep this as "passive" income, and if I am driving to Auburn 4 times a week to check up on my coffee cart, that isn't really passive at all.

 

That's it for now, 3 big changes coming our way in the next few months...

Have you ever tried to take a group photograph, and tried to "fix" the end results by combining the best takes for each person?  Or maybe you wished you could do that, but didn't have the Photoshop skillz needed to piece together Susi's good smile with the version of Dave with his eyes open?  Check out http://research.microsoft.com/projects/GroupShot/, a little app our research department at Microsoft developed that helps you to combine the best parts of a group of images into one composite image.  It work great, and is actually quite easy to use, despite having been developed by scientists, and not user interface gurus...