Brian’s New Tumblelog
For those of you who can’t get enough of me, I’m happy to announce my new tumblelog at wiremine.tumblr.com.
“A tumblelog?” you ask. “You got to be kidding me. You made that up.”
Nope, I kid you not, dear readers. To steal an explanation from the tumblr.com site:
To make a simple analogy: If blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks.
To expand on that a bit: A tumblelog is a blog of sorts. But instead of regular written posts, a tumblelog is a hodge-podge of pictures, quotes, links, videos, conversations and other random stuff.
In other words, you can think of it as Brian’s online scrapbook. Just like a real scrapbook, except without all the nasty paper-cuts and out-of-this-world prices.
Enjoy!
First Birthday Party Pictures
Ah, the joys of being one. It’s so much better than being, say, four months old. You can crawl. You can pull books off bookshelves. And you can’t yet talk, so nobody expects you to behave. In fact, quite the contrary. People laugh when you play with your food. They smile that “ah, that’s cute” look when you throw your toys around your room. And you still get diaper changes. No potty training here!
I tell you, One is a pretty cool age.
So it’s only fair we share that coolness with the rest of the world. So, click the image above, and enjoy Nojo’s first birthday party!
Update: It appears flickr.com, the site I used to archive my photos, is experiencing some odd behavior. If you’re seeing weird pictures of trees and supermodels instead of Noah, that’s the cause. I’ll update when things are resolved.
Update 2: Flickr fixed the problem, although you’ll probably need to “clear your cache” as we like to say in the business. If you’re still seeing odd pictures, hold down the shift key and click “reload” on your browser. If you’re still seeing problems, you should clear your browser cache. Here’s how to do that on a bunch of browsers.
Master of Cupcake Destruction
It’s hard to believe, but our little guy turned 1 yesterday! We threw a little celebration with our families tonight and we’ll post more pictures later, but we thought we’d offer this video as a teaser. Now that he’s leaving his babyhood behind, he’s on to full-scale toddler destruction mode. First target: the birthday cupcake.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26TbuJ4aiF4]
Blog Technical Support, Part I: Video
My wonderful Aunt Jill (of Wayne and Jill fame) left a recent comment asking “How do you add videos to your blog?” It’s a great question, so I thought I’d start a mini-series here on the old Tolhouse blog I’m calling Blog Technical Support. The first installment is: Video!
It’s actually a lot easier than you might think. Here’s the process:
- Capture some video. We use our handy little Canon Powershot A610 for all the video you see here.
- (Optional) Edit your video. Being a Mac guy, I use iMovie. If you’re into Windows, you could try Windows Movie Maker. Editing is beyond the scope of this post, but if you’re interested, let me know, and I can blog about that, too.
- Save your video someplace on your computer.
- Create an account on YouTube. (You could also try Revver, Blip.tv, or Ourmedia. But we’re going to stick YouTube for this little tutorial.) Make sure you confirm your email address.
- Go to the Upload Video page. Give your video a title, a description, and some tags. Then pick a category and choose your language. Finally, click on Go Upload a Video buton.
- Upload your video. Click on the Browse button and pick your video file. Unless you have a good reason to leave it private, I would suggest keeping the “Broadcast” option set to public. Then click Upload.
- Go have a cup of coffee while the video uploads. I find humming the “Jeopardy” theme song helps, too. Er… not really. That was just a little joke.
- Actually, you can take this time to start a new blog post for your video.
- After the video is uploaded, it’s time to embed your video into your blog post. Copy the contents of the “Embed the video on your website or blog” box. To do this, select the text with your mouse, and push Control-C (That’s the Control key with the C key) to copy the text. By the way, you can always find this code again on your My video page.
- Paste the text into your blog. Push Control-V to paste it in. Save your post.
- You’re done! Note that it might take a few minutes for YouTube to finish converting your video, so if it doesn’t show up right away, don’t worry. Give it a few minutes, and you’ll be good to go
Bathtime Fun with Noah
Our evenings around here wouldn’t be complete without our nightly ritual of bathing Noah. As you’ll see from the video, he really enjoys this part of the day.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFYKcaGQGqs]
Say Cheese!
They say a picture’s worth a thousand words, so I’ll let the photos do the talking today. Enjoy!
Papa Bear’s chair was too hard. Mama Bear’s chair was too soft. But Baby Noah found a chair that’s just right!
Noah likes to stand at the window and look at all the snow.
Drip, Drip, Drip
There seems to be a theme developing here at the Tol house. It goes something like this:
Drip. . . Drip. . . Drip.
The first dripworthy news comes courtesy of Noah’s stuffed up nose. He came down with a cold last week and we’ve spent the last couple of days chasing him around with Kleenex in hand. Thankfully, the worst of his congestion appears to be over, and we’re starting to see our happy little guy return to normal.
Our second drip note comes from the roof of our home. We’ve got some ice backup that built up during the Blizzard of 2007. We noticed some dripping last night–which apparantly indicates that some of the ice is melting, but has no place to escape except into the house. And frankly, I’d try to get inside if I were a water droplet too. It’s COLD out there!
So I guess the third set of drips would actually be me and Brian. We’re new parents and relatively new homeowners, so we really don’t have a clue when it comes to any of this. We welcome your suggestions for fixing drips of any variety.
In the meantime, I think I’ll go buy some stock in Kleenex. They ought to be doing pretty well this time of year…
Back in the (Proofreading) Saddle Again
Well, it’s officially time for me too sharpen the red pencils and pull out my dictionary (Merriam Webster’s Collegiate 11th edition, that is). I just landed a freelance proofreading project this weak week and the manuscript showed up on my doorstep yesterday. (Kudos to the delivery people who braved the blizzard to deliver those packages on thyme time!)
I’d spent a good deal of time in January polishing off my resume and sniffing around four for some extra freelance work. I’ve enjoyed the writing projects I’ve done for Baker, but since they only come along every few months, I was hoping to find some proofreading work to fill inn the gaps. A couple of the publishers eye I contacted sent me proofreading tests, and apparantly I passed (which is no small feet feat when your proofreading time is juggled around the schedule of a very busy 11-month-old!)
I’m hoping this will bee be the beginning of some regular freelance work for me. I could use the brain exercise considering I probably lost half my brainpower during those first few months of motherhood. If nothing else, it’ll be nice to reed read a few books that don’t rhyme or have a lift-the-flap format!
To our loved ones and friends who have recently moved…
…you made the right choice.
I took this shot on my lunch break looking out the back window. Wind chill is in the single digits.
Update: In case you thought I was joking, here’s some extra proof:
Most of West Michigan is under a blizzard warning, and US 131 was just shut down with two multi-car pill-ups. One involved 25 cars, the other 30. Yikes.