avablog

We’re off to Madison for the weekend. Weather looks to be fantastic for pumpkin patching and brewery touring. We’re really looking forward to it.
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Please bear with me. I almost never get Ava to pose for me, so when I do, I tend to get carried away.

See how the eyes match the color of the pillow?

What better way to celebrate the new home than a moment of cuteness? I ask you….

Three cheers for Kevin and Greg, who got avablog up and running at its new home last night! As you can see, I need to get my old Cutline theme reinstalled, but that’s minor compared to switching over the MySQL database, etc.

If you’ve been kind enough to link to avablog from your site, please note our new URL:

http://nicheplayer.net/avablog (used to be /wordpress)

Kevin’s set up a redirect on his server, so hitting the old address will get you here, but in the interest of cleanliness, I’m providing you with the new URL. Thanks, and sorry for the hassle!

Hi! avablog is moving to a new host after a long stint on the back of my pal Greg Smith. I’m not certain where we’ll end up yet, but I do have a brother-in-law with some technical know how, a fast pipe, and a lightly-loaded server, so who knows? In any case, I’ll keep you posted on our progress! Oh, and, because I’m pulling a database dump from the current host, there’s a chance any comments you leave in the next couple days might get killed; sorry! I’ll do my best to make sure that doesn’t happen, but you might want to exercise some restraint until we’re all moved (I know, it’ll be tough).

Thanks for your patience!

I think we mentioned that Ava’s been waking up every night (morning) between 2 and 4 and crying in her bed. At which point, one of us gets up and brings her into our room. It’s frustrating.
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From today’s WSJ:

For all the speculation over how Sarah Palin will fare in the vice-presidential debate Thursday night, her Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, faces a challenge of his own: taking on the Alaska governor without coming across as sexist or a bully.

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because I’d so have her in one of these. I gots to find me an adult size of this model.

Hate to let this month end without a nod to the late, great David Foster Wallace. Harper’s has put up PDFs of the pieces he wrote for them. It’s awesome stuff.

I’ve been shooting RAW lately in my XTi and playing with the results in Adobe Camera Raw. I’m still undecided about whether I want to spend a lot of time fussing with my shots after they’re out of the camera, but I have to say, a couple small tweaks can make a noticeable difference in the final product.

Those of you lucky enough to be one of my family or friends on Flickr may have already seen this. For the rest of you, behold Ava’s 2008 Halloween costume:

I love this site. It’s so sweet. It transports me back to a more innocent time, when teenagers were married in matching striped polo shirts. In case you don’t recognize that strapping lad in the photo, that’s Josh Duggar, one of the soon-to-be 18 Duggar children.
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Rest in peace, Paul. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Hustler, Cool Hand Luke…Slap Shot. Sheesh. What a body of work.

Sometimes nothin’ is a real cool hand.

We had Ava’s four-year checkup today at the doctor’s office. It included four different injections, a finger prick for a blood test, and an anti-flu nasal spray. Many tears were shed, but she actually did a pretty good job. Leah hit her with a sucker as soon as the last shot was done, and the nurse brought Ava a small stuffed panda (“remember your painful shots when you cuddle me!).
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Because once your kid is that old, she wakes up at 4 o’clock every morning. Why didn’t anyone ever tell me?

We ran into our friend Sarah Palin Dawn last evening outside The Airliner, and I couldn’t resist getting a picture of her in all her cuteness.

I try to reserve the moment of cuteness posts for my beloved little girl, but when Dawn made a special request to have her very own moment of cuteness, how could I resist? She is awfully adorable, after all. Oh, and Dawn? Your Palin name is Ripper Shook Palin.

Back in high school, my chums and I spent a fair amount of time listening to music favored by the skater set (we had a 16′ wide half pipe in our back yard — 8′ transitions — that drew all sorts of skaters and bikers from all over the place; the neighbors were thrilled). Broadly defined, it was almost anything hard or confrontational or ironic, from D.R.I. to Bad Brains to Suicidal Tendencies to Anthrax to the Beastie Boys to the Violent Femmes. Ah, they were heady days.
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you really should. I just turned 38 two days ago, and this link to a relatively obscure Martin Luther King, Jr. speech is incredibly timely and amazing. Here’s a link to the MP3. And here’s an excerpt:

“I say to you, this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren’t fit to live.

You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be, and one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid.

You refuse to do it because you want to live longer. You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab or shoot or bomb your house. So you refuse to take a stand.

Well, you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you are just as dead at 38 as you would be at ninety.

And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.

You died when you refused to stand up for right.

You died when you refused to stand up for truth.

You died when you refused to stand up for justice.”

Ava with Poom Poom and Joyce, scrubbing apples in Decorah this past weekend.

Chicago’s rising unemployment rate, expensive gas, high population density and relatively poor air quality create a perfect storm of stress, according to measures we used to calculate the country’s anxiety hot spots.