We went bowling yesterday and Stephen was very excited. He kept up his intensity through two games. Then we got some lunch at the bowling alley and he loved having his own sprite (who wouldn't).

Wow so, apparently if I want something in my life to get better, I just have to write a long, whining entry on this very blog. One week ago today, I laid out the reasons that it has been pretty tough to be in this house, and within a few days, things seem to have made a drastic change.

Here it is, only November 8th, and I swear Henry looks so much thinner than he did in his Halloween pictures. Suddenly he's a very tall, skinny boy. He loves to grab on to the couch and pull himself upright. He's starting to try to climb the stairs. He's undergone an incredible amount of development in a short period of time. And most importantly, he doesn't shriek a constant, mind-bending falsetto squeal these days.

Also, in between then and now, our offer on the home was accepted, and the place "passed" the home inspection. I know it's not a pass/fail inspection, but the house is in pretty good shape and the current owners agreed to fix everything that we listed. There are also some noteworthy things I learned about the house. It uses a well for water; it's an enclosed steel well about 100ft deep in the front yard. This means we can't flush the toilets when the power goes out, because we are not attached to a water supply that has constant pressure. The roof was put on in 1999 or 2000 and they wrapped all the wood trim in aluminum, so there's no exterior painting to do.

Every once in a while, I can't help but feel like we made a huge mistake. I'm sure everything's fine, but it all happened so fast. First it was "Yeah, we may look at houses." Then it was "We're looking at a few homes this weekend and next." Then it was "Okay, we bought a house." I haven't even walked to the back of the back yard yet, and the house is (probably) ours already. There could be an alligator swamp back there!

Checking back through this blog's archives, I see that Stephen slept through the night from the age of 3 or 4 months, with very few exceptions. Henry is now seven and a half months old, and he never sleeps through the night, with very few exceptions. He completely sucks at sleeping and napping. It's terrible. We sort of knew how spoiled we were with Stephen, but we couldn't really comprehend it because we had never experienced the other side of it for ourselves. Well, now we know what it's like to be the parent of a mortal, less-than-angelic child in regards to sleep. It's terrible. Who wants to wake up every single night for the better part of a year? What's the point of that? When does it stop?

In addition to that, Henry is generally terrible at napping. At Henry's current age, Stephen was sleeping ten hours a night and taking two naps a day totaling 3-5 hours. Henry maybe takes 2 hours of naps in a day. One positive is that I can synchronize Henry with Stephen's once-a-day nap schedule and get some time to myself in the middle of the day (12-2pm maybe). Recently I use this time to make an attempt at napping myself, which is completely wasteful and stupid of me.

Well, football is back, which means I have self-imposed sleep deprivation a couple nights a week. It also means I drink a lot more beer, like a good American. Stupid. I was doing so well, too.

I think I'm going to attempt to not drink any soda--diet or otherwise--for the entirety of 2012. Soda is about as useless as the NFL, so I don't know why this should be hard. I've done well with my 2011 goal, which was to not use any tobacco product of any kind. This included bumming single cigarettes off people or using Steve's snus. I've stuck to it 100%, so it will most likely become permanent. I remember my parents having a conversation with each other when I was younger that New Years resolutions are pointless because one can make positive changes to their lives any day of the year. I have often repeated this cynical notion for most of my life, but I eventually realized that it doesn't really make sense. You can buy your wife a dozen roses any day of the year too, but you do it on Valentine's Day because it is the day that you show your love for someone. There are certain days to do certain things; we can't all do everything on every day. Anything that prompts you to do something beneficial for yourself is, well, a good thing, obviously. I had a couple other ideas of things to do for 2012 but none come to mind at the moment. How about not impregnating my wife? We'll save that for 2013, hopefully. That's a good goal.

Recently I've come to see the importance of abstaining from things. I don't think we should have everything that we want simply because we can. It's important to have rules to live by--things to make us stop and think about the things that we are doing. I made a conscious effort to take six months off from making music in order to get my motivation back. I still have over two months left on that, and I've done somewhat well. I haven't opened Buzz (software) in any of this time. I've done some other things to ensure that I don't get completely out of practice. I used some stretching software to slow some earsauce songs down by a factor of 5-10 times. I took my favorites from that project and am putting together a sort of "aside" album of free music. I should be done with that this weekend.

Anyway, that's enough stream-of-conscious rambling for now. I just figured I needed some text on here to break up the constant barrage of pictures and videos.

October 05, 2011

I turned up the Noise Reduction abnormally high on this one. Once you start to turn the Noise Reduction up really high, it misinterprets every little detail in your image as "noise" and smooths it out. This gives it a soft look, almost like it has been painted.