It’s been about a month and a half since I’ve added anything to this blog. The beginning of that period of inactivity coincided with the birth of our second child, Callie. A shift in the normal schedule occurred whereby the time formerly used for sleeping was devoted to cooing and bouncing and soothing the baby, and the time formerly used for blogging suddenly became time for a nap.

I have spent time working on the website during my absense from blogging. You can find the fruits of those labors in the new version of our photo gallery. (Not to be mistaken with the NUDE version of our photo gallery!) I’ve migrated all the images from the old to the new, but haven’t finished — in fact have barely begun — migrating the comments that go with each picture. I’ll eventually update all the links on the site to point to the new gallery instead of the old.

I’ve also begun a family video project that probably won’t be available online, but I can at least talk about it here. I’ve had a video camera for about a year now, having talked my wife into the idea that we’d want video of Cora’s first words and first steps and — if late night infomercials are any clue — of her first “gone wild” scene. And it worked out okay: I’ve got tapes of the first words and steps. The problem is that this footage isn’t very consistent: I’ll get on a video kick for a couple of days and shoot lots of stuff — Cora eating, running, sliding, sleeping — and then put the camera down again for weeks or more. I end up with tapes that, upon playback, seem like I’m sitting through absurdly long sections of nothing interesting in order to get to the couple minutes of footage that I was imagining when I bought the camera.

So I’ve decided to change my goal. Instead of trying to record “big” events in the lives of our girls that I think we’ll want to play back, I’m going to record events for a monthly family movie. Whatever footage I get for the month will be dumped to the computer, whittled down to what’s interesting, given titles and scene transitions, and then burned to DVD.

Changing the goal from capturing life changing events to capturing some of what was going on at our house in November 2003 will satisfy the desires that led me to get the camera in the first place. When Callie starts talking, I may not get her first words — at least not in the sense that I have 20 minutes of tape showing me trying to coax Cora into saying “daddy” — but I’ll at least get footage of her during the first month that she was speaking. In 10 years that’ll be close enough to the actual event (and far enough from the current reality) to be satisfying. Also, by adding the additional step of selecting the best footage from each month I’ll solve the consistency problems I’m currently having with subject and pacing.

We’ll see how it works. I’m going to officially start in December. That’ll give me Cora singing her first carols and Callie having her first Christmas. I’ll spend the rest of November practicing my video editing and DVD technique on the countless hours of footage I have from the past year.

Here’s an excerpt from the poem April Day in November, Edinburgh by Norman MacCaig. This poem arrived by email today and seems very appropriate with the gusty winds we’ve had turning homeless leaves into a colorful, energetic parade.

For gaiety’s funfair whirls

in the gray squares. Energy

sends volts from suburb to suburb.


	
And April, gay trespasser,

dances the dark streets of November,

Pied Piper leading a procession

of the coloured dreams of summer.

Fallen leaves as the coloured dreams of summer. Beautiful.