November 20th, 2006 by 
Steven Gould
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Welcome to our new home.
The old one, over at Blogger Beta, was kinda like a starter rental, where the walls are just a bit too thin and you can hear the neighbors just a bit too well, the grass is worn very thin, the a/c drips down the inside wall on a wallpaper best described as…hideous, I guess.
Okay, it wasn’t at all that bad but I did just have flashbacks to my college days.
I don’t want you to think the new place is MacMansion–we did buy a good lot and we did buy a shiny Craftsman Blogerator and some blueprints, but we’re building it ourselves so please forgive the odd bulgy seam and non-euclidean corner. We’re learning this WordPress thing as we go along.
We were only in the old digs a month so we hadn’t cluttered it up too much and we brought all that STUFF over with us but it’s in different rooms now. For instance, all the introductory posts I did about our cast of contributor brains is now up in the Pages bar.
Not quite a fixer-upper, not quite a do-it-yourselfer.
Tell your friends. |
Posted in Steve, Technology | 
2 Comments »
November 20th, 2006 by Rory Harper
When Rachael turned 18 in August, a lot of friends asked me how I felt about it.
“You have no idea how relieved I am,” I said. “I can no longer be prosecuted for anything she does.”
The truth was a bit more complex, of course.
I’ve begun to realize that I can’t just think my way through the changes that I have to go through now. I have to feel my way through them, too.
I feel a pervasive sense of loss at no longer being the parent of a child. She’s still the most important person in my life, but I’m not responsible for guiding the life that she’s so quickly and ferociously creating for herself. She’s grown and she’s not anyone’s baby any more.
And that means I can lighten up a lot. I don’t have to be totally responsible for two people now, just one.
There are a lot of implications attached to that. It’s not an accident that I don’t have a car anymore, as of this summer, and that I’m in the market for a motorcycle. That’s not mid-life crisis, incidentally. I had that one about thirteen years ago, and I filed for divorce a bit later.
I found that, if I was going to be her Papa, rather than this guy she used to know, in the face of Texas’s monstrous divorce/custody laws and a relentlessly hostile ex-wife, I had to become more of a grown-up than I’d ever been before. It wasn’t easy. Grown-ups have security and stability in their lives. They don’t take unecessary risks. They can’t skimp or do without important things, like medical insurance, as they could when it was just them alone.
They accumulate stuff.
There are a lot of other issues, too, but I’d like to talk about the stuff right now.
I have way too much stuff.
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Posted in Art, Barb, Brad, Daily Life, Rachael is Awesome, Rory | 8 Comments »
