Wherein verbosity wins out over quality content. Again.

I’m on day two of a migraine, and I’m stubbornly refusing to lower the blinds in my office so the bright morning light is making me squint rather unattractively at the monitor. I keep thinking, “I swear, the NEXT blog post will have actual real content. Just as soon as I get past XXX” — where XXX = a severe shortage of time, a screaming headache, a complete lack of ideas or inspiration, an itchy left toe… yeah.

Anyway, in lieu of actual content, here’s some stuff:

  • The other day, there was a comment about problems while scrolling with the new blog theme. I’ve had the same problem. If you’ve had this problem too (or, for that matter, any other problem with the layout or design) could you please let me know? From what I’ve read, this particular scrolling problem is a quirk of IE6 (I know, I know, but I can’t do anything about the equipment here. I use Firefox at home!) and the only solution is to wait until the page is fully loaded before scrolling. That should help. Or, update your browser! The comment was anonymous, but if you find that works — or doesn’t — could you please let me know?
  • Did you catch Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson on Q yesterday? They did an hour-long interview but I only caught the second half. Man, I love Rush, I really really do. If you missed it, there’s an extended 63-minute interview available for download on CBC. Their third retrospective album will be my next acquisition on iTunes.
  • I brought Lucas to the after-hours pediatric clinic on Tuesday night. He had a really juicy cough with a wheeze in his chest that I found quite alarming. I’m talking to the doc, and say, “He’s otherwise fine. No fever, no lethargy, no obvious signs of distress.” The doc looks up from his laptop and for the first time since I’ve arrived takes a really good look at me. “Oh, are you in health care?” he asks. “No. But this is my third child.” He nods, looks vaguely perplexed, and goes back to typing. Ah, the things I’ve learned! (FWIW, no medication required. Just a virus. Again.)
  • I spent more than an hour yesterday and an hour on the weekend de-dandelioning my lawn. It’s not even the end of May yet and my back yard is already overgrown. I love summer, but it means that in addition to disaster inside the house now I have to contend with the disaster outside the house! Really, I need more hours in the day. I’m not overly concerned about the dandelions, but we seem to have a lot of those prickly stinging nettles, too, and I hate those things.
  • I think our cat is on his last legs. He’s 18 years old, and has been the worse for wear for at least the last year or so. He’s losing teeth now, and is skinny and matted and looks like he’s having trouble moving around. He’s blind in one eye. Poor old guy. He came upstairs the other day with blood on his mouth, and he’s been gacking and pooping all over the basement. His days are numbered. I hate this part of pet ownership.
  • There’s a giant consignment sale in Nepean this weekend, and I’ll be unloading most of our baby clothes and gear there. So far I’ve tagged about $250 worth of clothes, most of it at $3 – $5 per piece for Gap, Old Navy and Children’s Place clothes. Even if only half of it sells, we should get about $100 bucks out of the deal. I’ve been trying to remain coldhearted in the rise of swelling sentiment (“awwww, all three boys wore these dungarees from Granny!”) but there were a couple of outfits I just couldn’t bear to part with. It feels good to finally divest myself of about three cartons of clothes, though!
  • Yesterday, I met our city councillor, Jan Harder, while standing in line at Subway. I told her about Simon’s enthusiasm for the new Barrhaven children’s library and thanked her for her efforts. It must be a thankless job to be a city councillor, but she seemed genuinely pleased by my praise and thanks. (The careful and almost barely noticable pause before she answered my “Excuse me, but aren’t you Jan Harder?” was very telling!) She said the only feedback she’s received so far is two complaints that taxpayer dollars are being spent on a new (and temporary) security guard who both helps orient people to the new layout and makes sure children don’t wander out the door, in case parents who come in from the upper level aren’t aware of the new exit.

I’m sure I had more stuff. My head is very congested with stuff right now. This will have to do for today. Hey, consider yourself lucky I can’t remember the rest of it!

How’s that for a satisfying narrative with a strong finish?

Good days, bad days

One of the most valuable things that this blog has given me has been a record of the minutiae of our daily lives. Not only of the milestones and special occassions and momentous changes, but of the rhythm of every-day life as our family has grown.

And because I tend to blog whatever is in my head, however I happen to be perceiving it, the blog is in a lot of ways like my own personal mood barometer. Without it, I might not have realized, for instance, that the month of May seems to be a particularly difficult time for me on an emotional level. It’s a funny time to be depressed, with the flowers blooming and the days growing longer and full of sunshine and warmth, but for whatever reason, I seem to be more likely to be anxious and even mildly depressed in May. Also in November, which makes a little more sense from a seasonal perspective.

(May also happens to be when I am most fertile. Of five pregnancies, four of them were conceived in May or June. Even with the vasectomy last year, I can’t bring myself to have unprotected sex this month!!)

A friend and I were discussing the anxieties of parenting, and what you do on the dark days when it seems like you’ve truly lost control. I don’t blog about those feeling much anymore, partly because it got a little embarrassing having my colleagues who read the blog come rushing into my cubicle to check on my obviously precarious mental health after reading that morning’s rant, and partially because I was just sick of listening to myself whine about the tedium of the anxiety of the moment when by the time I hit “publish” or at latest, the next morning, I was over whatever knot had twisted my knickers.

The anxieties still come and go, though, in a sort of a regular cycle that I am now learning to recognize. That recognition has been a huge relief in and of itself, because now I can simply say, “This too shall pass” and believe myself. I can see in the blog that I’ve felt overwhelmed by my own life on a fairly regular basis, that the feelings of being incompetent and lost and simply exhausted by it all come and go like the tulips and the fall leaves — sometimes in a couple of hours, sometimes over the course of a couple of days.

I’ve even wondered, occassionally. whether I should find a way — through therapy, maybe, or medication — to try to fight off the bad days, the dark moods, the wrenching anxiety that occasionally gets the better of me and turns me into a tantrumming two-year-old or feeling hollow and frustrated and incapable. But then the tides turn and I feel strong and smart in control again, and I forget — until the next time.

All this to say, in talking to my friend about this, she said that if nothing else, it was good to know somebody else sometimes feels that way, too. It makes me wonder whether we’re all in a similar place on that continuum of contentment to anxiety, slipping back and forth depending on season and circumstance.

It’s a very personal subject, and something we just don’t talk about very much, even in this most personal and intimate of forums, but if you’d like to talk about it I’m curious: do you know that feeling, of slipping beyond comfortable footing into the panic of despair? Do you just hold your breath and wait it out, knowing that this too shall pass, or do you have other ways of coping? How do you judge the difference between “I’m having a bad day” and “I need professional help” and “I really need to get the hell out of my head”? (That last one would be my personal Achilles heel.) When the stress threatens to break out of whatever containment system you’ve rigged up in your brain, what do you do to get it back under control?

(And even as I type, I’m thinking about just deleting the whole post, because it’s too close to the sort of self-indulgent navel-gazing and whining that I dislike in myself. But I’ll publish it, because if nothing else I don’t have any other ideas for today.)

Free museum admissions in Ottawa on May 18

Looking for something to do in Ottawa tomorrow? May 18, 2009 is International Museum day, and you can get free admission to all or part of the exhibits at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, the Canadian War Museum, the Nature Museum and the National Gallery, among others.

I think we’ll be checking out the Mythic Beasts exhibit at the Museum of Civilization. If you haven’t already done so, consider combining a visit to the Tulip Festival (Monday is the last day!) at Major’s Hill Park with a visit to the National Gallery. Should be a beautiful and bright (if not terribly warm) day for it!

105b:365 National Gallery from the ferris wheel

Project 365: Reflections and raindrops

Ooo, I’m very excited! Lots of new stuff to share with you today, not least of which is the new blog design. (Click through if you’re reading in a feed reader and tell me what you think!)

Remember how excited I was when one of my pictures got the nod from Flickr’s capricious “Explore” function? Well, apparently Flickr (and a few friends) also liked my Primary Entrance picture from last week, because it made it into Explore as well! I’m pleased, because it’s one of my favourite shots so far.

106:365 Primary Entrance

And then later in the week, I got a Flickr-mail from Scmaps telling me that two of my photos had been “shortlisted” to be included in their downloadable map/travel guide of Ottawa. No remuneration, but I get the photo credit, and since it’s a couple of photos I like but don’t feel particularly proprietary over, I was happy to oblidge. I’ll let you know if they make the final cut. The photos were of the Peace Tower and of the Heart and Crown.

Yay for meaningless and random praise!

This week, I seem to be on a theme of raindrops and reflections. This is by far my favourite picture this week, taken yesterday from the stairwell of the building where I work, in between the 6th and 7th floor and looking down on Sussex Street.

115:365 Umbrellas, way down there

It was taken through a dirty window, though, and even with my fancy new polarizing filter it was still a little murky so I added some texture in photoshop and that’s where the raindrop effect came in. Here, for comparison, is the original photograph straight out of the camera:

Umbrella photo - original shot

Rain was definitely a theme this week!

Bokeh grass in the morning sun

110:365 Puddles

(I’m fond of the title of this one: “Another day, another dam(p) flower…”)

109:365 Another day, another dam(p) flower

This was my Mother’s Day photo. Isn’t she lovely? This picture hardly does her justice, but you can see the beauty of her smile and her warmth quite clearly!

111:365 Happy Mother's Day

I had a bit of a reflections theme going on this week, too. I love reflections! In this one, I was originally just trying to capture the flowers in the bistro window and the reflections were a bit of a nuissance — there was a garbage truck idling behind me! Then I moved around the corner and realized I could capture this beautiful old heritage building in the reflection and actually incorporate it into the photo. Anybody from work recognize that building? 🙂

113:365 Bistro

And this one! I was driving to work down alongside the Rideau Canal when this stunning image caught my eye. If you know Colonel By, you know there’s nowhere to stop, so I doubled back through Carleton and hiked up a bit of a hill so I could come back and take this photo of the Fair Jeanne in the morning stillness. Turns out she’s a tall ship and has sailed more than 150,000 nautical miles! They use her as a training ship now. It’s not every day you see a tall ship moored at the lock stations on the Canal!

112:365 Fair Jeanne reflecting

And, last but not least, this one I took for the monthly scavenger hunt theme of “message in a bottle.” We had these pretty yellow carnations, and I thought the boys would like the effect that the blue water would have on this one. Part centerpiece, part botany lesson — in a Frank’s Red Hot bottle!

114:365 Message in a bottle

All in all, a good week in pictures!

Surprise!!!

So???? What do you think? (If you’re reading through a feed reader, you MUST click through — I’ve done a massive blog reno.)

Mad props to Nikki at Design Coyote (and also at Snailbird.com) who managed to give me what I wanted instead of what I asked for.

I was originally going to upload the Evening Stars theme from her free themes page when, on a lark, I sent her a query on the cost of a custom design. She was very reasonable, both in the rate she charged and in tolerating endless requests for minute adjustments (“Oh, but what if we tried the font in this colour? And what if we moved this over here just 15 pixels or so…”) and after a bit of back-and-forth and a bit more tinkering on my part, I’m thrilled to present it to you!

It’s a big change, I know, but I really wanted something with two sidebars, something that was playful and yet not childish, something that was fluid width instead of fixed-width, and something that gave props to my 365 project. I think she did a great job!

Please do let me know if you have any trouble with the design or the pages loading. For some reason, my previous design started loading really slowly recently, so another one of my criteria was a faster load. And, on our desktop there’s a scrollbar across the bottom because the display is a little bit too wide, but I don’t have that on the laptop and it doesn’t seem to interfere with the display of any of the content. I’ve checked it in IE, Firefox and Safari.

So, really — what do you think????

Talk to me about sleep training

First, I loved your comments on my last post, where I asked you your thoughts about letting my five- and seven-year-old boys walk around the block together alone. For now, we’ve decided to hold off, and I swear it’s not because my mother called me up the night I posted it and more or less told me I was free to support the idea of free range kids but I was not free to subject her grandsons to the philosophy. Well, not entirely because of that, anyway… (*waves to mom*)

So today, let’s talk about what psychological damage I can wreak on her youngest grandson instead. Yep, I want to talk about sleep training. Ah, the controversy never gets old around here.

Lucas is fifteen months old, and for pretty much each night of those fifteen months, he’s been cuddled to sleep. I think it’s time he learned to start falling asleep on his own in his crib. Can someone please flip a magic switch so I can get him to do it immediately, without any stress to him or extraneous effort on my part? No? I didn’t think so.

I’m not opposed to letting him cry it out, if I must. It worked with both Tristan and Simon, although they were each a little less than a year old when we tried it. It took about five nights of fussing with Tristan (you can read my CIO diaries in the archives) and about twice that long with Simon, but in the end, it was soooooo worth it to just be able to put the baby in his crib, kiss him goodnight and walk away.

It’s not that I begrudge Lucas his nightly cuddle, either. I’d still cuddle him before hand, but I still believe that it’s important that they learn to sooth themselves to sleep. He’s not a bad night-time sleeper overall, but he’s been waking in the night a lot lately, and I think he’d be less fussy when he wakes up if he’d put himself to sleep in the first place. A couple of times in the past week, instead of dropping right back to sleep when I re-insert his soother, he’s been wide awake in the crib. He’ll stay in the crib and eventually drift off again, but only if I’m standing there. While I’m pleased with this development, I’m not overly fond of standing stock-still in his room for fifteen minutes at a time in the middle of the night, pining for my bed the whole time. I’m thinking I can somehow parlay this into sleep training, but not quite sure how to do it or if I want to start down that road.

This is, after all, my last baby and I’m coddling him for all he’s worth. As much as I’m a fan of Ferber’s ideas and I totally agree with the theory — I just don’t want to put either of us through it all and in my experience thus far, there’s been no middle ground. It’s either CIO or cuddle to sleep, and I’m not sure either extreme is where I want to go next.

This is where you come in. I don’t particularly want to debate the merits of CIO, and you should know up front that I am deeply offended by Elizabeth Pantley so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t drag her into the conversation, but other than that — what have you found works or doesn’t work in sleep training? How did you get your kids to start falling asleep on their own? How old were they? As with all things mothering, I know I won’t still be rocking him to sleep when he’s on his honeymoon, but even on the third go-round, I’m still not sure how I want to navigate this one. And you know I get all my best mothering material from the bloggy peeps, right?

Growing boys, growing freedom

We’ve talked about this subject before, but it’s always an interesting conversation to me. Mom, don’t read this post. You won’t like it!

Now that the weather is fine, the boys have started playing outside every evening after dinner, and they’ve made friends with the family that lives across the back fence. Their kids are a little older — ages eight, 10 and 12, I’d guess — but they seem to enjoy playing with Tristan and Simon. They’ve been playing catch over the back fence (it’s one of those 6-foot wooden plank fences) and Tristan has clambered up and over once or twice — until I firmly and unequivocally forbade him from doing that. Even so, the kids on the other side (and it’s one of those yards that seem to contain almost all of the neighbourhood kids) climb up from their side and sit on the top to chat with the boys.

I like this family a lot, but I don’t know them very well. Just a kind of “Hi” over the back fence thing. I think Tristan is old enough to play with them as a peer, but they’re tolerant of Simon as well. I’ve debated pulling out a plank or two to give the kids access through the fence, but worry about (a) damaging the fence and (b) the dog escaping. Last time we talked about this, someone suggested adding velcro to a couple of the planks, making them removable. This seems like a neat idea, but I really don’t want to muck too much with the fence — a replacement fence is simply not in the budget right now, nor is building a gate. Plus, I’m just not sure how long this fledgling friendship will last — I figure the older kids will lose interest pretty quickly.

After a couple of evenings of watching them play and holler across the fence, I started thinking about walking Tristan and Simon around the block to let them play in the other kids’ yard. This poses a couple of inconveniences, including what do I do once I’m there (with Lucas) — do I sit on the deck and supervise in someone else’s yard, waiting to walk them back home again? Knock on the door and ask the mom to call me when they’re done? This seems to me to be a big imposition, because her kids are old enough to play unsupervised.

So I started thinking about letting them walk over by themselves. There’s lots of reasons why it would be okay. It’s a single block — no streets to cross, and they live on a cul-de-sac, so it’s pretty safe all the way along. Tristan is fairly responsible, and there is safety in numbers. I could see them when they get there, and they could come home whenever they wanted without having to call for me and I wouldn’t have to wait for them. Plus, I do believe in giving freedom where freedom is earned. The drawbacks are that if they left the yard, I couldn’t see what they were up to, and I don’t know that any progress is made if I spend the whole time hovering at the window spying on them.

Late last week, I took an informal poll on Twitter, asking this question: would you allow your five and seven year old to walk around the block, unescorted but with no streets to cross, to play with the kids who live behind you?

The results were split pretty much down the middle, with most of the “yes” answers having the caveat along the lines of “as long as they’re together” and quite a few “as long as I could see them” or “I’d creep along behind them” type of answers.

I’m a huge believer in the idea of “free range kids” and I wish there were more (heck, any!) kids on our street for the boys to play with. Not to haul out this old song again, but really — when I was four I was walking to and from school by myself, and when I was six I used to walk down to the corner store and the park by myself all the time. I really don’t believe the world has changed so much in 30+ years that it’s any different now.

In the last year, the boys have been earning more and more freedoms. They’re now allowed to play in the front or back yard unsupervised (unless I leave the front door open or watch from the bedroom, I can’t see the front yard from the house) and they’ve been allowed to walk to the mailbox around the corner unescorted to get the mail by themselves. There’s a park across the street and down a bit, just out of my line of sight, and I think next summer they’ll probably be allowed to go over together and without an escort. (Although by that time, Lucas will be old enough to demand that he go to the park with them, and perhaps two is a little young for unescorted trips to the park…)

So what do you think? Would you let your five and seven year old walk around the block unescorted to play outside? Not a supervised playdate, just neighbourhood kids running around together, just like I remember doing back in the golden days of my childhood. If not five and seven, then what age? And is it really so different now than it was in 1975?

Random bullets of Mother’s Day

In lieu of a coherent blog post, which I promise you is forthcoming one of these days (ahem, weeks) here’s a few random bullets of Mother’s Day.

  • It started early as Simon woke me up at 5:25, clutching the Mother’s Day present he brought home from school on Friday anxiously as he stage whispered in a near shout, “Mom! Are you still sleeping yet?” Um, not anymore I’m not!
  • Barely a couple of minutes later, Lucas was awake as well. We’re early risers, but for the entire family to be awake and downstairs before 6 am on a Sunday is not only mostly unprecedented but bodes for a very long day. (On days when I’m not working, usually Tristan and I are up a good hour or more before everyone else, giving me precious time to have a coffee or three and peruse the morning paper before the rest of them tumble out of bed in all their needy and noisy glory.)
  • The coffee was still percolating as I opened the Mother’s Day gifts the boys brought home from school on Friday. Simon had asked several times over the weekend if I could please open my Mother’s Day gifts NOW, please please please, and each time I gently put him off and said I wanted to save the surprise for Sunday morning. Imagine the guilt I felt when I opened the beautifully-decorated brown-paper-bag he’d been clutching to find a small planter of annuals — inside a sealed ziploc baggie. Poor things were traumatized yellow by the weekend without air, but they perked up a bit with some water. We’ll see if they survive to be transplanted into the garden.
  • Tristan’s gift was instructions for a foot massage and a little bottle of lotion he’d decorated himself, and a cookbook of his classmates’ favourite recipes. Tristan’s pizza recipe:

    1/2 cup of pineapple
    5 pieces of pepperoni
    a bag of cheese
    some sauce
    one piece of wheat bread

    Put sauce on bread, add cheese, place pepperoni and pineapple and bake for 8 minutes at 20 degrees.

    (How cute is that?)

  • The day was already feeling a little long when I stepped out of the shower and in the midst of towel-drying my hair felt an unbearable wrenching pull in my back, just off my shoulder blade. It was so painful I could barely draw a deep breath. I’m not sure if this is what people mean when they say, “I put my back out,” but holy god in heaven does it ever hurt. Even 24 hours later, I’m holding myself stiffly to avoid the wrenching spasm that shoots across the upper right quadrant of my back if I move the wrong way. (The wrong way being just about any extension of my arms, turning of my head to the side, or looking down in the slightest bit.)
  • It’s still painful enough that I’d debated a bit about the merits of coming to work versus staying home, but with a houseful of kids and nanny, I thought work might be the more peaceful option. After just about a half an hour of typing and mouse-clicking, though, I’m beginning to think it was a bad choice.
  • Any insight into whether this merits medical attention or a wait-it-out approach is appreciated, as is your anecdotal experience with back pain. This is a new one for me.
  • The good news is that Beloved was a darling throughout the day, and the pull in my back forced me to pretty much take it easy the whole of Mother’s Day, something I might not have done otherwise. I didn’t change a single diaper all day, and read the last half of a photography book that was due back at the library this week. Of course, I also emptied the dishwasher, picked up some clutter and did a few loads of laundry — because I think I’m now physically and mentally incapable of actually doing nothing for a day.
  • After Lucas’s nap, Beloved took the whole family on a trip to Henry’s camera shop where he let me pick out my Mother’s Day gift. I waffled for a bit between a set of reflectors, a Gorillapod, and a neutral density filter, but finally settled on a circular polarizing filter. A polarizing filter is cool to have because it balances the brightness of the sky against a landscape while bringing out details and colour saturation, and cuts down on reflectivity of water and glass. A fun new toy to play with!
  • To finish off the day, we had Granny and Papa Lou over for takeout fajitas from Lone Star, and they brought cheesecake from Costco for dessert. Five-star seal of approval on that meal!

Aside from the wrenched muscles and the fact that it was grey and just about subzero all day, it was a lovely Mother’s Day. You?

Project 365: Pretty colours

It’s been a crazy week, and I feel like I’ve been neglecting the poor blog lately. Blog makes a good argument for being the favourite child over Project 365 because it is not demanding and simply waits for me to be finished gallavanting and come back to lavish love and attention on it, while Project 365 relentlessly demands my attention every single day.

But the 365 has been rewarding me with some beautiful images this week, which makes me a little bit less resentful of the time I didn’t get to spend, um, ironing or emptying the dishwasher or picking up dirty socks.

Come to think of it, sometimes the blog AND the 365 are the golden children, and it’s the actual children who are cramping my style!

I’ve been enjoying having a discussion theme around the 365 posts lately, but as you can see I’m a little scattered today, and frankly still really really short on time, so let’s just move on to looking at the pretty pictures, shall we? Rational thought and reasoned discussion may or may not return next week.

I loved this picture of Tristan for several reasons, not least of which it was the first time I’d seen him spend any length of time curled up reading a book all by himself. Be still my heart! He read the whole book that afternoon, and I could practically feel his world expanding.

103:365 A good book

I’m getting pretty good at photographing stuff, but am still intimidated by portraits. This one was a candid shot (I’d been turned around, photographing the trilliums in this little copse of trees when I turned around to see him with a piece of bark most of the way into his mouth, and that cheeky grin is a result of me playfully scolding him “ah ah ah!” as I pointed the camera at him) that turned out to be a pretty nice little portrait. He should be just a little bit less centred to give more room on the right side of the frame, but the darn kids never sit still long enough for me to get through my entire composition checklist in my head before I snap!

104:365 Lucas on the path

I’d walked past this triplex on St Patrick Street in Lowertown a handful of times and always loved the multi-coloured doors. I called it “primary entrance” and really wish the guy in the first apartment had a better aesthetic sense and had painted his door navy or royal blue instead of that bluegrass slate colour!

106:365 Primary Entrance

This was an idea for the monthly scavenger hunt. The clue was “out of roundness.” Get it? “Out of” in roundness? The crystal ball is from a gift my parents gave me for my birthday last summer, and it hangs in our back window. (My very first 365 picture features it, in fact!) I’d taken it down to play with the light, and noticed the magnification effect. The book idea and the scavenger hunt clue kind of coalesced from there.

107:365 Out of roundness

This was yesterday’s picture. Yesterday was not my finest day. An all-day meeting off site (so no computer access! ack!!) followed by a very long evening with all three boys because Beloved was working late. I snapped this in the backyard, in between dinner and packing the boys’ lunches for school and cleaning the kitchen floor not once, not twice, but three times as the dog and the boys tracked mud in from the back yard. The year we moved in to this house, the baby crab apple tree the previous owners had planted died. Three years later I noticed that it was re-growing — about three feet over from the original tree and less than six inches from the back fence. I haven’t had the heart to cut it down — partly because of it’s stubborn will to survive and partly because it’s simply magnificent in the spring when covered with blossoms, but I’m afraid it’s going to take the fence out as it grows. Anyway, all that to say, I’m not totally satisfied with this picture and would have liked more time to play with it but at least I can look at it and say that my “hurry up and take a damn picture and post something so you’ll have a picture for today” pictures are a lot better than they were a couple of months ago!

108:365 Apple blossoms

(That’s a lot of stress for a couple of pretty pink blossoms, isn’t it? It’s been that kind of week!)

Speaking of pretty, stay tuned for some big changes around here in the next little while. I’m not sure exactly when I’ll get around to the big reveal, but here’s a hint. Very, very exciting!!