Educating the Wheelers

It’s been a pretty crazy couple of months here at EtW. Not that you’d know, of course, because the blog has been largely silent. But the kids keep getting bigger. And cuter:

Audrey is really starting to read more and more, and is starting to sound out words that she doesn’t have memorized by just hearing the same book 100 times. Owen is flipping himself over and starting to army crawl. And babbling up a storm! When it was just Audrey and I at home alone, I hadn’t really figured out the whole how to talk to something that doesn’t talk back thing, so she grew up in a very quiet world. Our doc had us bring her in some time after her first birthday to check her hearing since she wasn’t making any moves towards talking. Owen’s world is much louder, crazier, more boisterous … and he definitely wants in on the conversation.

Finance-wise, everything is in … well, let’s not call it turmoil due to negative connotations, though it is the first term that came to mind. Let’s call it “in flux.” Andrew loves his new job, and we’re still in the process of figuring out our new insurances, new savings plans, the whole shebang. We’re sitting on a junkload of cash, but that’s only because we’re still squatting at my parents’ house.

Actually, living at my parents’ house is not the nightmare that it could very well be. The weirdest thing for me is not being in my own space. I’ve been a stay-at-home mom now for almost three years, and it’s weird being in another mom’s [my own mom’s!] domain all day. Not my kitchen, not my pantry. Not my fridge! I’m doing a fair amount of the cooking, but my parents’ have, let’s say, a different palette than we do. But we’re finding common ground.

I admit, one of my very favorite things about having a blog is finding out what search terms people used to get here. Many of them I couldn’t in good conscience repeat here, because this is a Family Blog. But I just now checked for the first time in awhile, and there was an undiscovered gem waiting for me. Even better not one, but TWO clicks came through on this one:

Nick Rhodes potato salad recipe

I can only guess what they were really looking for, but they came here. Welcome!

This time, I’m not even talking about money!

I just spent a fair amount of time on a post about cost of moving pets while nursing my wee one … and now he just kicked the keyboard and the text is all gone. I don’t know exactly what keys he got, but apparently it was the right ones. How did he manage to do that??

We’ve moved over to DreamHost, and got our flickr photos and the rest of our sidebar running again. That was much easier than I thought it would be - knock on wood!

Let us know if you run into any problems.

If you visited over the past couple of days, you may have noticed our site was down. Apparently our hosting service, Razorlogix, lost a hard drive. This caused them to go down multiple days, and also lose some data, or something, as this blog still is back 100%, and my very neglected tech blog is still dead. (I’m beginning to suspect overall system or permissions errors, but who knows). Yeah, pretty unforgivable that a bad hard drive has caused so many problems

Razorlogix apparently agreed. For better or for worse, they’ve decided to throw in the towel: they’re ceasing commercial hosting in a week or so.

So I hooked up w/ Dreamhost, and have already moved my technical blog over. The big job, however, is this blog, which actually has a substantial number of readers…

It will hopefully be a smooth transition, and totally transparent to everyone out there. Regardless, I’ll post when I’m done w/ the move.

I can’t tell you how many posts I’ve discarded or saved or just plain abandoned in the last week.  As I’m down the homestretch in this pregnancy  [today is actually my due date, but there’s nothing going on yet, that’s for sure], it’s been lots of hormones and crazy emotions.  For instance, I wrote a post about the different feelings that men and women have about bringing debt into a marriage and quickly realized that would bring nothing but stinkbombs into my Inbox, just in time for post-partum depression.  Yeah, let’s postpone that one.  I read an article about "push presents" [a horrible term for this stupid idea that your husband should buy you jewelry because you went through labor, I’m not even going to find the link], and you can imagine how quickly I decided to ditch that post, too.  I feel like I’m in a holding pattern until little guy makes his big entrance.

The Nineteenth Festival of Frugality is up at Punny Money and Nick did a really great job this week.  Even if you’ve never followed this Carnival before, this is the time to try it!  [And, yup, I’ve got one in there this week, my Lazy Person’s Guide to Eating More At Home.]  Don’t miss it.

Andrew and I recently moved our photos off of a gallery installation on my friend’s server.  We had been mooching bandwidth for years, and it was time to pay our own way.  So we have been in the process of transferring everything to Flickr.  We’ve been doing them in monthly batches because we have a lot of photos [hey, we’re parents] and there are monthly upload quotas.

See, the funny thing about having your photos on Flickr instead of on a gallery site on your own domain … ?  Well, people look at the photos.  And not just family members that you email a url to when you post a new update.  People you don’t know look at the photos.  And comment on them!  It’s kind of weird to get used to, but who am I to talk?  I mean, I post about our finances on this website.  And people comment on them!  People I don’t know!

So what does the, uh, "general public" like to look at?  For soon-to-be obvious reasons, I’m not going to provide direct links here but according to my stats, it turns out that people like to look at dogs, post-partum cleavage, babies nursing, and children in diapers, where you can see the diaper in the photo.  I’m getting the same spooky feeling as I did when my big-belly photos from Audrey’s pregnancy somehow ended up being the #2 google result for a search term I’m not even going to mention and the next thing I know those photos have more than 9000 views.

I’m not even sure what I’m getting at here.

It’s going to be hovering near 100 degrees for the next couple of days.  And, alas, the air conditioning is now on.  I’ve got it on 76 and all the fans on in the house, which is still enough for a line of sweat on my brow when my big swollen-belly body tries to run around and do chores, but not so bad that I’m lying on the floor saying, "Aaaaaaaarrrgghhhhh."  Most importantly, it saps the that terrible, terribly humidity out of the air.

It’s expensive, sure, but my golly, it sure is bliss right now.

Oh, and I finally updated my blogroll some along the righthand side.   I have been really lazy about that.  

To go with the new blog, we also have a new feed URL .  If you subscribe to our blog, or would like to, then click the link to subscribe to our new feed.

We’re using FeedBurner - a (free) web service that can tell you how many subscriptions you’re getting & such.  Don’t worry, they don’t put ads in the feed or anything!  (I think they can if you  ask them to, but that’s not an option we’re interested in.)  If you haven’t subscribed to a FeedBurner feed before, then the link will bring you to a page where you can tell FeedBurner what kind of feed reader you’re using, and assist you with subscribing.  My wife and I were both surprised by this the first time we saw it, so hopefully no one else finds it difficult…