bentangle

It seems that it will be a mom-free weekend.  Starting tomorrow morning through Sunday it will be just me, Cricket, and Grasshopper fending for ourselves.  I’m not actually particularly concerned.  I’m not one of those passive working dad’s who defers the majority of parenting to the matron of the house.  I even cook sometimes (mostly on the grill, but not exclusively).  So I’m sure we will survive …. hopefully.

My wife will be departing early tomorrow morning on a trek to NYC for a blogging conference (in case you weren’t aware, she has not one, but two blogs that she likely updates more often than I do: Down to Earth Mama and She Acts).  She will be whooping it up in the Big Apple for the weekend with blog-related discussions and parties.  Not that I would worry for the sanctity of our marriage regardless of the nature of the conference, but being that she will be surrounded mostly by female bloggers, the most that will likely happen is some all-girl drunken music videography (it’s happened).  I guess there is a sliver of the possibility she might get swept into an overzealous celebration of the repeal of Prop. 8, but I’m not overly concerned.  What hyjinx will ensue are likely to be of a much more tame and innocent variety of which she greatly deserves.

Anyway, besides regularly scheduled events of the weekend (of which there are surprisingly many) I have very little in mind for our sans matronus weekend.  As it stands, I have to take them to swimming lessons, the farmer’s market, a family reunion, and potentially a free movie screening (and probably some other events that my wife will point out that I forgot to mention and therefore will not remember to do).  So outside of meals there is limited bandwidth for other events.  But I may try to fit in some shopping and some other entertainment where I can – perhaps even some fruit picking if time and weather permit.

My biggest concern is that I’m going to be plagued with work issues that try to follow me home.  I’m slowly working to have more redundancy and less direct dependency for certain things, but the curse of being good at certain things is that you are the only one who can handle them – I’m not playing arrogant here, it is simple fact.  But I’m training a new guy to be the next me, and trying to leave no issues up in the air so that I can make the most of a wife-free and hopefully work-free weekend.

I want to apologize to the small band of followers that I have about making posting and signing up for my blog a tad more complex.  I’ve added a plugin for a captcha box.  While this adds a level of inconvenience to these processes, I hope it is a small and acceptable one.  I’ve added it to mitigate the flood of spam comments and user registrations that I seem to get on a daily basis.  We shall see how effective it is in deterring such things.  As it stood, I was receiving dozens of spam comments as well as dozens of fake site registrations daily.  And it is fully possible that I’ve accidentally deleted valid comments that were marked as spam by just hitting the Empty Spam button (I try to scan through them first).  So I’m sorry for the inconvenience … though only a little bit.

For the past 5 days, I’ve been Mr. Mom.  My wife went away to a blogging conference in Asheville, NC and left me in charge of managing our 2 kids.  Being actively involved with my kids on a regular basis, this was not a daunting task, per se.  The hard part was not paying attention to work for that period of time – especially since my shine, new iPhone would chirp every few minutes telling me I have some new email to read.  But eventually I turned off that notification and got to the serious business of responsibly entertaining my posse.

First priority – getting them to school on time.  Grasshopper only just started going to daycare (2 days a week) and already being without his Mommy, he was very reluctant to go (though apparently his tears ended within minutes of Cricket and I leaving him there).  Cricket just started Kindergarten this year and has been loving every minute of it, but with the possibility of being able to stay home and play Lego Star Wars with Daddy she suddenly was on the fence about going as well.  But I got them there, they did there time, and got them safely home (all perfectly according to schedule).  But outside of that, it was play time – we went to the park almost every day, we went to a play place for the better part of one cloudy afternoon, and we spent a fair share of time watching a couple of movies and playing Lego Star Wars.

By the end of the long weekend, I was ready for reinforcements.  I love my kids, but I can only be jumped on so many times before needing to tag out.  I only took advantage of the in-laws once for a break (which I spent cleaning).  And I actually made semi-nutritious meals for them for all but 2 meals (pancakes are good for you, right?).  So all in all I think I did okay.  And today it was back to work … to deal with my other batch of kids.  Maybe I should go to a conference.

P.S. – Mywife (who now has 2 blogs) went to a blogging conference, but didn’t post anything the entire time.  Ironic.

Obviously I’ve been a bit lax in posting lately – partially due to being on vacation last week, but also due to being busy and falling behind on such things. I am going to try to be more disciplined going forward. In truth, I owe it mostly to myself to do so (not to discredit my readership, but frankly I know that it is small and not very regular – if I’m mistaken, please let me know).

As I believe I’ve stated before, the main purpose of this blog is to act as a sort of digital journal. I post my thoughts and experiences as much for my own catharsis as for anyone else’s enjoyment. With less posts comes less release. And all work and no play … well you get the picture.

So I will try to be more vigilant and consistent in my postings. I will try to stick to my regular memes as best as I can. And I hope that you continue to enjoy my musings as much as I enjoy sharing them.

By the way, for those interested, my vacation entailed a trip to visit family in North Carolina. We spent as much time as we could relaxing in the pool. I finally caught Star Trek on the big screen with my dad (awesome reboot – looking forward to more from this cast). And the wife and I got to have a dinner without kids via a double-date with my sister – Brazilian steakhouse and nice strong drinks (good times). Thanks again to everyone for the hospitality.

It is often said that this word is misused (which is often correct). We will use ‘ironic’ in speech all the time in reference to incidences of coincidence or oddity or as an incorrect substitute for sarcastic. I say we because I’m certainly guilty of it myself. I try to be conscious of it and avoid it when i can, but in speech it can pass as such with most simply due to the ubiquity of its misuse.

Merriam Webster lists the following as one of the definitions of irony: “incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result”. In other words, if you take action specifically to foster a certain result and the opposite result occurs, you have just been a victim of irony. This was a fairly common theme in much of Shakespearian tragedy and is often referred to as tragic irony.

Today I have come to realize that I have made myself a victim of tragic irony. You see, I had long been reluctant to conform to the masses by being drawn into social networking. I initially set up this blog because, well, I had the domain and figured it could serve as a digital journal. I hope that some enjoy reading it, but traffic has never really been a strong goal. But recently I’ve decided to try to make more efforts to grow an audience.

As some of you may know, I am now a Facebook member and in an effort to drive traffic to my blog, I’ve connected my blog feed into it. And oddly, as I’ve been getting more feedback on my writing there, I’ve watched my analytics plummet. As it turns out, the feed stream does not get tracked as a hit on my site, and having full access to the posts in Facebook, no one is coming to my site to read them.

So the very efforts I’ve enacted in order to increase traffic to my site, has resulting in a huge drop in said traffic. While I’m glad that my writing is being well received, I am already making steps alter things. From now on, I will post links to these posts manually on Facebook – thus only including a blurb and forcing people to read the full content here. I hope you forgive any inconvenience this may cause – such a move feels like I’m trying to assert control over my work as if it were some sort of intellectual property (well, I guess it kind of is, but it isn’t like I’m making money off of it regardless – I just like positive graphs). If this move seems to drive even more of you away from my writing, that would indeed be yet another twist of irony (I think).