I didn’t know what marriage would be like when this photo was taken*, but I can’t imagine not being married to Kate now.  Its been good times, and I feel like one lucky guy.

*Also, this photo totally makes me want to shave my beard.

What a thing to do…. pack up and head off into the country with nothing more than a Craigslist handshake and a couple of disgruntled cats.

It’s been great, though. And sad sometimes. And awesome other times. However hard or silly or non-Yankee its been (and sometimes it was all three at once), it’s all been worth it.

You Have Betrayed Me for the Last Time
Oh man, what a strange and painful situation it’s been on the tubes. The full story reaches a level of nerdery that continues to hurt my head, but the short story is that you get what you pay for.

Here’s the medium-story: Once upon a time (way back in 2002) we registered Rockland-ave.com from the equivalent of the Building 19 (or Ocean State Job Lot if you’re from RI) of web hosting companies. Twenty five bucks a year seemed like a good deal for both the dot com name and the hosting space.

Five and a half years of poor service, frequent outages and slow response times lead me to almost switch hosting companies numerous times. My hand was forced last week when they deleted the database that held all our blog postings. No warning, no error message, just Error establishing a database connection.

I emailed the hosting company, hoping it could all be restored. The only reply from them I received was an error message stating that their email service had been turned off. Fantastic. I viewed this as a bad sign.

We very much wanted to hold onto the Rockland-ave.com domain name, as it was almost a like a brand for our micro-corner of the web, but it was not meant to be.  All my requests to transfer the domain name went unanswered.  Trying to set up the site again on their servers seemed like a bad idea, fearful it would disappear again.

But here at Rockland-ave AfterVictory.com, we adapt.  So here we are, new domain name, fresh new name-brand hosting service, plus I managed to recover/restore almost all our old posts and comments. I still have to plug in a few comments, but that’s more of a next weekend kind of thing.

Timely
Pushing aside my anger for the DMV-like service we had, and looking at this from afar, it’s not a terrible thing that we’ve changed domain names, and the timing seems sort of appropriate. AfterVictory.com (although a reference to jobs we held almost a decade ago) comes at a time when our lives are about to change significantly. It’s cool that we’ll always have the posts from the Rockland-ave days, like a digital scrapbook of sorts, but it’s also cool that we’re starting something new when we’re about to start a new phase of our lives.

That said, we’ll be keeping this site for a while. Update your bookmarks.

Saturday I went and took the Celica to get inspected, and besides a license-plate-light that was out, it passed and received a new sticker. Pretty crazy that it’s the second North Carolinian inspection for my car… but more crazy that its the seventh inspection for the car since I drove it off the lot. Seems like just yesterday I was throwing all my savings into a shiny silver car. I really didn’t think it would last this long, but am glad it did as we really can’t afford another car as shiny as the Celica. Kate’s car is getting a turn on the ol’ inspectotron this weekend. Her car’s had even more inspection stickers then mine… but she doesn’t drive like a maniac so it’s not really surprising that her ride still rides.

Festivus

Kate and I did our holiday shopping in (almost) one fell swoop over the weekend. We also picked up a tree from the Raleigh Farmers Market, as its all about locally-grown-tree’s and nice people who put trees on stands for you. Our friends Kat and Matt invited us over for Christmas day this year, so we’re looking forward to that.

iMac

I like my job and what I do, but up until last week my job only provided me with a computer built in the same year as my car. It was a great computer in its day, but not really up to snuff for today’s modern website worker. I don’t have proof, but I suspect it was burning oil. Or silicon.That all changed when they brought in a brand new iMac for me to use. This computer is sweeeeet in every way a computer should be. Big screen, dual monitor, and chock full of ram so Photoshop runs quickly. It even has software that runs Windows on it, which makes testing websites much easier, since I don’t have to get up from my desk and find a Windows computer every time I make a new page. It’s come a long way from the original iMac.

Photo Gallery

Our Rockland-ave photo gallery is currently busted. The hosting company upgraded their server software, and our gallery software apparently doesn’t play nice with it. Hopefully this weekend I can check under the hood and get it to work. Makes a guy want to print out all his photos and put them in a shoe box.

Best Dog Ever

March 1991 – December 8, 2007

We have been having very cold weather lately. Two nights in the twenties and yesterday I had to scrape a thick sheet of ice off my windshield for the first time this season. Oddly enough it is supposed to be 75 degrees on Monday and Tuesday. I am still not used to the weather down here.

I have started feeling Ted kick. Very surreal. Even after months of morning sickness, ultrasound photos, and a rapidly expanding waistline, it doesn’t feel real that we will have an actual baby around here in April. The kicking and punching going on inside is definitely making it feel more and more like there really is an actual infant in there.

Zoe has been climbing all over me like a mountain goat lately. She insists upon sitting directly on my belly. Maybe it is less mountain goat, more mother hen trying to hatch an egg. I wonder if it is the warmest spot around or if she somehow knows there is somebody in there.

Unlike last year’s Thanksgiving madness, our second North Carolinian Thanksgiving was refreshingly laid back. We spent it with Kate, Peter, Andy and their family. It was a fun time, and we were well fed. Later on in the day, DJ stopped by Rockland-Ave for some holidayish eats. We also played a favorite game, just like the first Thanksgiving.

BossTones

The Mighty Mighty Bosstones are getting back together. This brings me great joy. They’re only playing in New England around the holidays, which brings me great sadness. I saw this band many times back in the day and it was always a good time. Does that make me old? Being a fan of a band, seeing the band break up, and then getting excited about them getting back together years later? Yeah that kind of sounds old.

Homeowners Association

Tonight I went to the our Homeowner’s association meeting. It consisted of some food, seeing a few familiar neighbors, and about 30 people essentially shouting get off my lawn at each other and at the HOA/developer people. It went from a crowd of calm, recently fed people and became a slightly disgruntled mob. No chairs were thrown thankfully, but it was unpleasant and I left. I feel torn about the whole homeowners association thing. One part of me wants to know that I have some recourse when a neighbor paints their house plaid and puts several unregistered Camaro’s on their lawn, but that part of me is in conflict with the part of me that despises rooms full of shouting people. Luckily I think these meetings are only once a year.

So tonight was our first Halloween as homeowners (last year, you’ll recall, we were in our in-between apartment). Five, five bags of candy we had, all gone in just over an hour of non-stop doorbell ringing! At one point we had overflow off the front porch, and a posse of kids and parents out on the lawn.

We had to do the unthinkable and go dark on Halloween.

All lights out and the shades drawn. Very sad, but it’s hard to estimate just how many kids will come to your door, dressed as super-heroes and princesses, demanding sugar. Previous years at the old Rockland-Ave found us on the third floor of an apartment, so we really didn’t have any experience with trick-r-treater estimation.

Next year we’ll have to stock up, and possibly with generic candy.

Digital camera’s are completely sweet.  Sometimes I forget about the amount of time involved with the whole film process… trying to make sure each shot was perfect (so as not to waste film), the sound of a 35 mm camera rewinding it’s film at a social event, and going with mom to the Fotomat hut.    Of course, now I spend an inordinate amount of time backing up .jpg files.

Be sure to check out Kate’s mom’s website as well, she’s a photo-posting-fool.

Today I got up after Kate did, made some breakfast and read the paper while Kate surfed potential registry websites (besides grandfather-to-be favorite H-D.com).   Right now Kate is checking out the real estate listing for the house next door to us which just went on the market.

I should be doing freelance work now… but the allure of Saturday morning laziness is strong.

Jack. The most adorable nephew in the history of the universe.

Josh. A very welcome new brother-in-law.

It was a whirlwind trip up north. We had lots of fun. The wedding was perfect. Jack is perfect. Wish we could have stayed up there longer.