Hmmmm, these guys are changing their terms of service, and may not let me upload any more blogs to my own domain.

This, of course, means I will stop using blogger. Oh well, thanks for all the fish!

will try to knock out something before that day

I have so much to say but no time to express it. Must grind. Kept all employees at the shop when all the math said to be heartless - I did not have it in me.

Blogger says they are going to shut down FTP service. Feh. Won't bend, will find another system.

I feel more alive now than I ever have, every time I see Greta Jo looking out from behind her eyes. Four months old, today. Thank you for joining us here, we hope you like this little backwards planet.

i figured there are plenty of early fatherhood blogs out there already and didn't post anything for a while. suffice to say that like descriptions of China, it's so big that everything you've heard is probably true at some point.

will start to do this thing again a little now that we're out of the aughts.

contents under pressure -> but content under pressure

i have never been more motivated to grind than i am right now. i know soon that my rem cycle will be forever altered.

and now i need to get back to work

Baby Haws should be showing up around 3 months from now.

Heavy stuff, that. But I have to share with the few people who actually read this thing, why I want to embark on raising a family.

I believe in the future. Although I constantly am alert to the possibility of collapse and disaster in our modern technological society, I also see that the golden age keeps getting shinier. I constantly point out flaws and issues, but it's the millions of voices pointing out flaws that create the eventual solutions. Society is an open-source collaboration, with an archaic and varying set of lame moderation regimes - but it lurches about and compared to our history, it's getting better. Not fast enough, not urgently enough - but some.

The most important thing that our species needs is people raised to give more than they take. I was born a greedy little ape, but somehow, through the examples of those around me, something soaked in that being so lucky as I already was implied a form of duty. Anyway, optimist that I am, I hope to be able to help raise a human who will produce more in terms of generosity and goodness than they consume in resources. I know that the woman I love and have married is cut from some old-school cloth as far as being a mom goes. I am grateful that we have been given the chance to try.

I have a harder set of tasks in terms of running a business in a recession competing in a more brutal set of costs and margins than ever before - but I have never felt so driven to get it right. Because it is all for this wonderful, blank slate that will have to discover itself.

So that idealistic motivation set out into words, now I have a set of things to accomplish, like fixing a pool so my lady can lay on her belly on a float, and configuring a clusterfrak of a network involving one ancient router and two cheap switches.

Last night was the first summer alley party at the shop, and it was pretty sweet. It was also the one year anniversary for Skull Alley. We fired up the grill and some beats and let it rip. This one - and another in two weeks - are in honor of David Garrett - the "Daveer". No matter what I say about this guy it won't be enough. This dude showed up years ago and said he'd earn his way onto the crew. He started off cleaning one day a week. He watched and learned. And went to two days, then three, part time, full time. I've gotten to watch as he honed his art skills, constantly improving, never satisfied, always harshly self-critical but in such a way that I was always surprised how quickly he changed it up. If you get a chance to check out his art, do it.

Tomorrow is the first father's day I'll celebrate as a father to be. I have seen my future child's face on a scanner, heard the heart beat, felt the kick. I have never felt such purpose in my entire life. I think back to what a hellion I was, and how innately rebellious. We're in for it.

It's hot. It's summer in Kentucky, but at least there's been rain. We have tomatoes and herbs growing, and the summer sunday night open dinners have been an excellent social experiment. We'll have tomato-centric dishes in a month or so.

Still working on the website. Still upgrading the shop. I need 8 arms like Shiva, but with independent brains like an octopus.

Normal life. It's amazing. I still insist that we live in a golden age.

heading to detroit again this weekend

making some random shirts to give away as usual

looking forward to pressing pause on the economic game and reconnecting to the disembodied future network echo that happens to manifest in the presence of very funky electronic music.