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I went out to Missouri this past weekend for the baptism of my twin nephews. I am now Sam’s godfather. I doubt I’ll ever really be called upon to give him much active spiritual guidance, but if I am, we’d all better get started praying for him now.

Alex (my singleton nephew, age 1.33 years) has developed a lot since Christmas. It took him a while to warm up to me, but I’m told it was partly due to his cold. Letting him play with my cell phone was a real icebreaker.

We also went to see the house I grew up in, which is now for sale and had a timely open-house showing. Well, the “grew up in” part isn’t quite true, because (a) I’m not sure how grown up I am even now, and (b) I was even less grown up at age 16 when we moved out of it. But we lived there for about ten years, which is twice as long as any other residence I’ve had so far. It looks pretty different now, but it felt so familiar, not at all like someone else’s house, in spite of all their stuff being in there. Some rooms seemed a lot smaller than I remember, others actually seemed bigger. The walkthrough sparked an odd assortment of memories, including some total surprises. Like the first time I was busted for swearing. Or playing wiffleball in the backyard. Or singing with my sister on our makeshift stage (the downstairs fireplace hearth). I’m really glad I got the chance to go through and remember these things.

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My sister had twin boys last night! It was a pretty extreme pregnancy, I’m glad she’s through it. The boys are Samuel Charles and Jack David. Each weighed under five pounds, but that’s to be expected with twins. They were a few weeks early, but they’re doing fine so far.

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My step-grandmother had surgery today, to remove a tumor in her lung that fortunately seems not to have spread anywhere else. The prognosis is as good as it can be, given the diagnosis.

She married my grandfather when I was just starting high school. Bonding over the piano helped us to hit it off right away. (She’s self-taught, and has written some of her own songs.) She comes from a small family, and it was a big adjustment to marry into a large one—there are nine of us in my generation of the Graves—but she fits right in. She’s got a good sense of humor, and a fairly thick skin, which seems to have come in handy from time to time when dealing with Grandpa. She’s a pretty straight shooter, unafraid to be honest. I admire that about her.

She’s in some pain, but she and Grandpa seem to be optimistic. They’re not sure how long she’ll need to stay at the hospital, but I expect she’ll want to go home as soon as possible. After all, someone needs to keep Grandpa in line.

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My number one resolution this year is to keep in better touch with my family. This is extremely similar to last year’s resolution, the main difference being that it’s vague enough to be easily attainable. Last year I made very specific goals, and then basically forgot all about it. Which brings me to my next topic: memory.

Visiting with my grandparents over Christmas, I listened to them telling stories of things they’d done years ago. Grandpa quoted a few lines from a speech he had given while taking the Dale Carnegie course. My grandma talked about the time they were flying back to Kansas in grandpa’s plane and had to make an emergency landing in an alfalfa field.

It occurred to me that I won’t have as many stories of this type when I’m their age, partly because my memory is kind of leaky. I don’t really understand the algorithm it uses to determine what’s forgettable (e.g. entire years of childhood, apparently) and what must be kept (e.g. names of members of the A-Team), but there’s got to be a misplaced decimal in there somewhere. So I’ve decided that I need to be posting here more often, just as a memory aid.

However, the other reason I won’t have as many good stories is because I don’t exactly generate a lot of good story material sitting at a computer all the time. So I’d also like to get out more and have more experiences that would actually have some meaning to someone else if I were to explain them. So hopefully, my posts won’t be as dull as they are frequent. I don’t think I’m off to much of a start on this one.

I’m usually kind of noncommital when New Years’ rolls around, but this year I’m considering these to be secondary resolutions. Wish me luck.

Hmm, I guess I could have been updating after all.

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All right, time for an update, even though the things I desperately want to be able to report still have not happened, including my much-delayed divorce judgment finally coming through, and the ensuing celebration.

So what has been going on for the past month?

  1. Insane amounts of snow. I enjoy snow each year for about five minutes. This snow has been around for, let’s see, about three weeks now.

    Actually, all that’s left now is sooty remnants of formerly huge plowed-up mounds. I really shouldn’t complain, my friends in Ottawa have it much worse. But surely they handle it better up there, just because it’s more routine. Here’s an example of novice snow handling.

    My apartment complex overlooked the actual parking spaces when they “cleared” the parking lot. So everyone had to dig out their cars, and where did they put the snow? In the spaces other cars had left behind. So before long, many of the parking spaces have four feet or more of snow in them. Night falls, everyone returns, and somehow there aren’t enough cleared spaces to hold all the cars that were in there when the snow first fell.

  2. My grandmother’s 75th birthday party, which I didn’t get to go to and therefore moped about for a while. It was in my hometown, I would have had to fly to get there. I wish I could have. Grandma is the standard for kindness by which I measure everyone, and is definitely one of my most positive influences. She loves me a lot, and all through my life I’ve never had to doubt that for a second, which has helped me get through times of serious self-doubt.

  3. A new appreciation for my job. Or, to be more precise, it’s an appreciation for my career in general as a technical writer; my current employment situation has little to do with this. In fact, it has more to do with my dissatisfaction.

    My friend and fellow tech writer Ashley, whom I worked with in New York, recently started at a new job and has been asking my advice on lots of things. It’s made me realize that I really don’t feel appreciated by my current colleagues, and I miss that a lot. I’ve really felt helpful lately, and it feels good.

    I also miss feeling like I was doing important work. My old boss was really great at making it feel like a mission. I’ve gotten into some heavy WebWorks Publisher customization work, and it’s been interesting enough that I enjoy working on it. I’ve made some enhancements that other writers would find useful, and I posted them to the user group on Yahoo. This has come closer to the sense of importance that my work used to have, so I’m glad for that.

    Anyway, sometimes I consider switching into programming, but I really do enjoy tech writing. I’ve just had job blues for the past couple of years.

  4. An excellent TMBG show in DC. Already seems like ages ago.