New childs

I've got a daughter now.

Friday morning we went to the hospital and my amazing wife had our daughter, Allie. Everything worked out perfect, and it couldn't have gone smoother.

It seemed better than when my son was born. I slept better the first night, and endeavored to eat food outside of the hospital this time. Nat ordered room service and the little girl was content with her new parents.

Lots of family visited and I was wondering how my son would take to having a new sister. He seemed to not even notice. He was more inclined to push buttons, crawl under the bed, open drawers and doors, and scream every time we tried to take a picture. So it worked out.
We drove home a couple days later and have had terrible sleep ever since.

Morning Rush

Working nights has a weird effect on me. I've been doing it for 2 months.. and since I've started I've found that the little time I have in the mornings to watch my son and do things around the house are all I really get... by the time I come home at night, I'm so tired that I can't stay up to get all the things done that I'd like to. My art has fallen off, my podcast died, video games are hard to play, and thinking of things to blog about is a distant memory type of thing.

I need a better schedule to figure things out... and just get out of my house. Or I get sucked into a time warp where I don't know where my time goes. So I propose the following schedule:

Breaksfast(s)
Sesame Street.
Time at the park with my son and dog.
Naps (if necessary)
Lunch.
Clean up.
Get ready for work
Go.

I'm going to have to find time on the weekend to catch up on art projects and everything else. House projects, cleaning, and finally organizing myself. I'll probably have to figure out a weekend schedule as well.

yeah...

I don't know if this working evenings thing will last forever. It probably won't and I'll have to readjust again. Maybe I'll start to enjoy it. Who knows. I like where I'm at but I wish I could do more.

Name Game

I can't decide on a name for my kid. We are having a girl in April and she doesn't have a name. I'm not worried though, because I don't decide until I actually know it is a child and not some space monster. Until then, I'll just have to veto all the bad names. My wife believes that this is heresy and that a name must be chosen to ensure our unborn child's ultimate success in this world. I don't really see the problem. We've still got time.

How do you name someone? I just don't like deciding things that are permanent. It's like getting a tattoo or LASIK or something. You could mess it up and that kid has to live with the name forever. A tattoo I can hide, but calling your kid some yuppie name is unacceptable. Do I live with weird name guilt because I've been harassed my whole life because I share the same name as a former frontiersman who died in the Alamo? I don't know. It's a strange situation.

I just don't want to be the guy with weird named kids. That's all.

blog neglect

Blog neglect. It's a terrible thing.

At work today I was looking through old yearbooks again and this time I found a couple from Rice University from the early 50's. I was surprised to see some promotional artwork from Walt Kelly's comic strip Pogo. I looked around the internets and wasn't able to figure out this connection to Rice. It may have been during the Pogo for President campaign. Even though Pogo was before my time as Sunday morning Comics reader, I've enjoyed Kelly's cartoon art style. He worked at Disney before going into comics, and his art definitely shows that style. I still think his influence is seen all over daily comics today.

Volume 1 of the Complete Pogo Daily and Sunday Comic Strips was released in December. I would love to get my grubby drawing hands on that.

another yearbook quote

I found this today while looking through some images. From a middle school yearbook from 1977 someone wrote:

I hope you get hit by a car and get spread over a 50ft area of pavement and they have to scrape up your guts with a putty knife. Let's have a good year!
Your friend
Rex

P.S. Should I?

Should he what? That's what I want to know. Who knows what he was talking about...

Another yearbook from around the same time, and it belonged to a girl. All of the messages written inside started with the phrase "I don't know you very well." Which kinda made me feel sad for her. Why did she get all these semi strangers to sign her book?

This makes me wonder, since most of these books are on loan, how did these people lose their yearbooks? Did they donate them to a library or archive? Why would you give up a yearbook? Interesting. 

year books

At work we are finishing up a big year book project. We scan and photograph yearbooks for genealogical purposes. Big project. Lots of yearbooks dating back over a hundred years. After we import all those images we have to QA each book.

While I was looking through some of the images, it becomes obvious that many of these books once belonged to someone. I can read the short messages people write to their friends. Most of it is the same stuff that you see written down all the time: "Thanks for being a friend. Have a good summer. etc. etc." I've found some long and heartfelt letters between people in serious relationships. One yearbook around 1942 said something like "Strange how this war is tearing our world apart. Victory is in sight, and after everything is over we'll have to get back together again." Serious stuff. If I have time, I try and track down the photo of the owner of the book... Kinda makes all those little notes fit into some sort of context.

I've even found old photos tucked into some of the books. For example: I was taking photos of a very old yearbook from around 1917-1918 and I found a tiny photo of a man dressed in a military uniform. I couldn't tell if that person was one of students from the yearbook, but I assumed it was. On the back was scribbled in fountain pen "Give this to Eleanor". Maybe the book belonged to Eleanor. Who knows.

These brief messages in time are all that are left of some of these people. I'm sure many of them are long dead and forgotten. Who knows what else I'll find?

code talker

My son almost talks. Not really though. It's more of an energetic babble. He's only about 16 months old, so I don't know when he'll start forming sentences like "I need more money dad." or "can I borrow the keys to the car?".

I keep wondering when will be a good time to introduce him to movies, music, and video games. I don't know how "involved" a parent I should be when forcing awesome stuff down his throat. I liked some of the stuff my dad likes, but I ended up figuring it all out on my own. Who knows. I guess we'll see in time.

Crazy stuff.

I didn't think that I'd usually fall into the crowd that buys into special editions of things... even if they're the same thing they already have. For example: all those different color, or special edition game consoles that come out every so often. Did anyone get the Pokemon Edition N64? What about the new Battlefield 3 Xbox 360? Do I really need a red Wii? Things like that make me laugh at the morons that fall into that trap. They're just making money off of you! Your hard earned money!

Then I saw this:

Its the special edition wii classic controller that was bundled with copies of Monster Hunter G. Only available in Japan, this little blue controller is kinda hard to come by by itself, unless you buy the bundle. Ugh. I want it. I don't know why, but I want it.

Lame!

Here's the box for the upcoming Monster Hunter Tri G with included Circle Stick, for the 3DS. I've heard that the new Circle Stick thing is really light, almost in a cheap way, but it make holding the 3DS kinda nice. It adds right and left triggers buttons, and contours the hand in more of a console controller fashion. It takes a AA battery to operate.

Monster Hunter Tri G is an updated and expanded version of Tri, and it looks pretty awesome.

Still haven't heard any news on Monster Hunter 4 which is also for the 3DS. Crossing my fingers that they get localized for North American release.