I recently moved this blog onto DigitalOcean. For years it has been hosted on WordPress.com, and as a guy who writes software for a living, that’s kind of like cheating. I work primarily on the Microsoft stack, and I wanted to dabble in areas unknown. There were a few hosting options I considered. Just about any cloud platform can run WordPress, but I wanted to own and manage a box running on a Linux distribution.

Last week we lost the Kia. Jen was driving through an intersection when an oncoming car turned left, directly into the vehicle holding my wife, my eighteen month old daughter, and the best dog this world has ever known. Jen suffered the bruises and abrasions you get from seat belts and air bags, but was otherwise unharmed. Our daughter was perfectly fine. The car seat did its job wonderfully. Our dog, Piper, fared the worst.

Things have really dried up here lately on account of this whole having-a-baby thing. I used to be as wordy and noisome as a teen on tumblr, writing nothing of consequence beyond random musings and whatever irreverence was on my mind. And here we are now, all that extra energy being swallowed up by the maintenance and training of a toddler. The blog is barren, bereft of content except for commenters who have recently undergone PRK surgery and found out they could no longer see, or other people searching for meaning in that fucking Heaven is For Real movie, the one about mentally challenged American country folk who still believe in Santa and angels.

It’s nearly been half a year since I’ve visited the ol’ blog here but I guess that’s one of the parts about being a new dad. There really isn’t a lot of time for much else. Last we met, I was coming off a two week high of newborn-induced insanity and hallucinations. That was back when I still had waking dreams of baby-related activity. The last time the sleep-coddling happened, I was gently rocking my weeks-old daughter to sleep in an effort to calm her, holding her in my arms and swaying back and forth.

This endeavor of early parenthood is at once both sorely trying and utterly fulfilling. The mind runs through the full gamut of emotions in the blink of an eye, as this new life we have created, who was only moments earlier screaming questioningly to the gods about her very existence on this cold and dreary slab of rock, now slips off the breast into a sleepy revelry; one punctuated by small squeaks and twitches emanating from an otherwise unconscious and completely lifeless little rag-doll body.

We now have three nights under our belt at home with our newborn, and I think we’re becoming a little more comfortable with this whole prospect of parenthood. I’m no longer reeling in disbelief that the hospital staff trusted us enough to send us home unsupervised with a brand new human, and I’ve become hopelessly attached to this little sleeping bundle of digestive functions and rudimentary fine-motor skills. She has become much more adept at the act of feeding, and while we had a thirty-six hour period of no bowel movements which was slightly worrying in itself, she has since become a pooping machine, and we’re pretty stoked to see that all of her digestive tract features are coming online and functioning properly.

Parenthood, here I am! We’re now home from the hospital with our brand new daughter. There were a few bumps along the way, but we made it through the delivery with a healthy and happy daughter and mom! The staff at Holland Hospital are simply amazing. So far, our little daughter has been pretty laid back, only crying when being changed or swaddled or otherwise poked and prodded by the nurses and doctors violating her personal space.

It’s the end of 2012, we’ve survived yet another apocalypse, and my baby daughter is a few days away from being born. Our due date is now only six days away, today is the 31st of December, and my wife hasn’t had any contractions yet, so I can probably kiss any chance of a 2012 tax-break baby bye bye. Oh well, we’re really just hoping she pops out healthy. Since we don’t have a baby yet and my wife is off working this fine New Years’ Eve afternoon, I figured this would be a good day to grab a beer down at New Holland Brewing and run through my mental catalog of pre-baby preparedness while I still have the mental capacity of a childless adult.

Today marks the fifth anniversary of having the outer layers of my eyes melted away, then zapped by lasers, only to heal again over the next three months into near perfect vision. Five years ago, I had PRK surgery and blogged about my experience. It’s funny how you forget about all the little things you had to worry about before the surgery. The daily rituals of inserting and removing and cleaning contacts, the additional pain and effort involved when having a foreign object in your eye next to your contact, the way you couldn’t read the alarm clock at night without squinting or moving extra close, the way you were screwed if you lost a contact while skiing or after getting punched in the face at the boxing gym; I haven’t had to think about those things in years.

I took a break from my normal porn this week to indulge myself with a little bit of today’s most popular porn, a book by the name of Fifty Shades of Grey. It’s a purportedly wild fuckfest involving a rich guy and a naive narrator. What more do you need? Obviously not a story-line. Genital fondling will have to do. I normally would give you a spoiler alert, but in order to spoil a story, you must first have a plot.