TuttleTree.com

Whew. Let me tell you. You'll never get more hate mail than when you ignore your blog for more than a month. You miss the blog, you still check it every day, you'll murder me in my sleep, blah blah blah. Yeah Mom, I get it.

Did I mention we're having a baby? And making significant modification to our house? These things take time. Lots of it. (Oh crap, what have I gotten myself into?) So let me bring you up to speed on a few things.

Having a baby is exciting. Really exciting. And I would know what qualifies as exciting… I've jumped out of air planes before. Here are a few of the fun baby things we've been doing:

• Baby Names: My strategy for choosing a name is to walk around the house screaming the full name (first, middle, last) at the top of my lungs. It lets you know what you're going to sound like in line at Walmart years in advance, and really lets you get a feel for how the name rolls off your tongue.
  
  
• Getting kicked in the head: Only acceptable in-utero; but hot-damn is it cool to feel your baby kick or punch you in the head for the first 200 times. Megan may be getting tired of me resting my head on her belly while we watch TV, but she really should have thought of that before going and getting knocked up, now shouldn't she?
  
  
• Registering: And I thought registering for our wedding was tedious! It probably didn't help that the Baby's R Us computer system was down and I had to hand-write every SKU number down for some old lady to later transcribe. And let me tell you: she's not perfect. There's no way I wrote down the SKU for that special sun screen. Now we're paranoid about what it was we DID write down, that is now missing. Thanks, Baby's R Us / old lady!
  
  
• Not lying to Megan: Like I would assume many first time fathers do, I had this lingering fear that my wife would turn into a whale, and I would have to lie through my teeth and tell her that she was carrying it gracefully and never looked better in her life. (I even practiced lines like this in my head: "You look so good, we should have another one right away so you can get back this way!") But the fact of the matter is she is carrying it nicely and she does look stunning. (But I don't think we'll be rushing #2) So I was prepared to lie, but so far, so good.

And not to be outdone by a fetus, Megan has had me busting my butt on these shelves/cabinets/whatever they are (we should really decide what to call them) whenever we have a free day. That's not to say she isn't helping and doing her share, but she is certainly more motivated than I am. Oh, looky here: pictures of the progress. Careful, you might start to think we were good at this or something.

The only other thing of note, that comes to mind at least, is that we went camping… oh, I don't know, like 3+ weeks ago? And there are, like, pictures and stuff.

And lastly, here's some technobabble that 90% of you won't understand.

I've moved servers again, which I would like to say is at least partially to blame for the lack of posts, but who am I kidding? And with the move to a new server, I also switched blogging platforms, from WordPress to Mango. In general, that doesn't mean much as far as you, Joe Reader, are concerned, with one tiny exception. I've just noticed that comment dates weren't correctly preserved when I exported and imported all my old posts. I'm not going to stress over it anyway, because I don't think you would have even noticed if I hadn't mentioned it.

So there you have it, TuttleTree is back. At least for today…

What's up? I know we haven't talked in a while. I haven't really written you since like 2 Fridays ago. Seems like forever, what with the flurry of posts in November. If you didn't know better, you might think I was half-heartedly joining in on 31 days of nothing. I mean, I've been using you like normal. We're almost done with our Christmas shopping for the year and we surprisingly got far more of it done online than we expected. That and I read a ton of blogs on you. So good for you. You're useful for more than pornography and piracy after all. You know I've always believed in you. We are quietly at work on our 3rd annual holiday "letter" — or I guess "post" is more appropriate. That, and making cookies. You might actually already have that post if it weren't for all of these holiday snacks showing up. Multi-colored cookies with sprinkles just don't take a break from blogging to eat themselves, now do they?

I signed up for NaBloPoMo again this year, so if nothing else you get to look forward to me writing something nonsensical and irrelevant every night at 11:30… for a whole month. Outside of November I think I'm going to attempt a regular posting schedule of Monday, Wednesday, and Friday – if such a thing is possible. It seems to jive with my schedule and give me a little extra time to do or find something interesting to write about, if I need it; and I often do. I've found a little inspiration here and there for photography, so I'm going to attempt to post one interesting picture every day, too. I'm trying to move from interesting snapshots to real photography: concept, composition, post-processing… the whole package. Not just taking pictures of things that I come across that are picture-worthy; but rather making something picture-worthy and then capturing it. This is going to take incredible discipline on my part, either to make it home and make use of the sunlight while it's still available, or to shoot enough on the weekends to last a whole week. That means thinking ahead… preparing… things that I haven't generally associated with blogging — at least not my own blog. Still, if you don't set goals, there's no way to measure success.