Emma had her second check-up yesterday, and she's back up to her birthweight, has grown a bit more, and is doing well all around. We don't need to take her in again for two months. Today, the bit of umbilical cord finally finished shrivelling up and fell off, so she has an actual belly-button.

Changing the subject entirely, this is a picture of me holding a bar of silver from the Atocha, one of the Spanish treasure fleet that sank in 1622. This bar is about the size of a loaf of bread, and weighs 77 pounds. How did I get my hands on it, and why am I holding it in a pizza joint in New Jersey?

On Monday, I had to go to a meeting with members of other firms our company is on a team with for an Army Corps project we bid on. The meeting was set up so the team members would have actually met before we went and talked to the Corps, which seems reasonable. The president of the firm who set up the meeting liked the restaurant and was friends with the owners, thus the choice of venue. His firm specializes in underwater survey and drilling, and has a lot of specialized equipment for finding things like underwater cables so they don't get caught during dredging operations. They also have been developing other equipment to find metal objects buried more deeply in sediment, such as unexploded ordinance for military contracts, and other metal things. In this case, the firm was working with Mel Fisher, the guy who found the Atocha, to find more of these silver bars, plus some that fell off a barge in New Jersey a hundred years ago. The bar in the picture was used to calibrate the new equipment, and it was brought to the meeting to show it off because its really cool. Thus, I end up holding a 17th-century silver bar from a Spanish shipwreck in a pizza joint in New Jersey. The bar is now safely back under lock and key (and was pretty safe during the meeting, given there were 4 uniformed police having lunch in the pizza place).