open letter to california drivers

april 7, 2010 Presented without further comment. (Click here)

who am i?

I'm a professional geek (tech support guy/programmer/network administrator) living in Southern California, about 70(ish) miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles, with my family of eight and a half: myself, my lovely wife Sarah, my four wonderful kids, our bird and our dog... the "half" is the cat who really lives next door, but likes to visit us frequently.

I grew up on Cleveland's East Side. We were living in an almost-lakefront house in Lake County, Ohio (about two blocks south of Lake Erie) when we decided to move to the Victor Valley to be closer to Sarah's family. We moved here in 2003, rented a house in Apple Valley for a few years, and we now own a house on the edge of downtown Victorville, in Southern California's Victor Valley.

the baby

Thanks to everyone who has congratulated us on the November 17th, 2008 birth of Eliyanah Zohar. Eliyanah is Hebrew for "God answered me" and Zohar is Hebrew for "Light." She weighed 5 pounds, 11 ounces at birth, was 18 1/2 inches long, and her birth was nothing short of a miracle. It was a breech birth, and the umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck, and unlike our three previous births, there was an extremely short time between the time Sarah's water broke and the time Ellie was ready to come out... she was born in Sarah's car about 15 minutes away from the hospital. The fact that she came out alive at all was a blessing. And not only did she come out alive, there were ZERO complications! Check out this Victorville Daily Press article for details.

You can see a few professional photographs of Ellie at Our365.com; they were taken less than 24 hours after the birth.