Sunday, February 19, 2012

The Long, Long Week

One look at my planning calendar told me that this week was going to be busy. There were scheduled events for all seven days, in addition to the launch of our new site and video, and the usual job search and housecleaning tasks. But even my planner didn't prepare me for this week.

It actually started before Monday (the start of my planning week); William had been at a friend's house to practice a magic act they are doing together for the school variety show. William was a little out of sorts that evening, because he was getting sick. No school Monday or, as it turned out, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday either.

That took the Monday Den meeting off the calendar, and William is an easy patient to look after, so I got a fair amount done. Tuesday was supposed to be a night out for the family for Valentine's Day. We took William to the doctor Tuesday because his cough didn't sound too good and we wanted to make sure his lungs were clear. Good news: they were. Bad news: he was still too sick to go out to dinner. Worse news: we got a call while we were out that Danny was in the nurses office feeling lousy.

So for the rest of Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, I had both boys. But William was well enough Thursday night to attend the monthly Book Talk Club. Good thing, too, because despite the poor turnout (basketball conflict), it was a wonderful meeting and William and I enjoyed it very much.

The boys went back to school Friday, but Danny's school was having a winter fun day at the local ski area, and he just didn't have enough energy for it.  So I had to go pick him up. Tom looked after him and William (after William came home on the bus), while I went out to dinner with Karen (which is often scheduled Friday around taking trash to the dump and paying money toward property taxes).

But although my two boys are pretty good about taking care of themselves when they are sick, it still takes up a fair amount of time. Despite that, I managed to put up a video for Karen's site, and set up Twitter and Facebook accounts to help promote it. (As I write this, the video has been viewed more than 125 times; not bad for the first video in the first week.)

Saturday was the Pinewood Derby. We did surprisingly well, considering that a great deal of the work on the cars, including all of the work on the vital axles and wheels, was done that same morning. William came in third in his Den, which means he gets to make his third visit to the district race. Daniel didn't show in his Den, but his car was right there in the pack, and I think it might have actually been faster than William's (the Pack has a new track with a display that shows that actual race time to the nearest millisecond; William's Den, the oldest group, had the slowest times overall, and none of them made the top three).

Today we attended a birthday party for the son of one of Karen's friends and coworkers. All of the other children were younger than William and Daniel, but they had a good time and were very helpful with the younger kids. The party was at a place with bounce houses and climbing walls and cars to scoot around an indoor track. So the boys are exhausted tonight.

And so am I. But no rest for the weary. Yet. I have some photography to do, and probably some scanning. All in preparation for production on our next or two new videos, which we are trying to release for the 1st of March, and which we start shooting on Tuesday.

Without, I hope, any children in the house.

Sunday, February 12, 2012

It'll Be a Cold Day In ... New Hampshire

Actually, it is a cold day in New Hampshire, but this being February, that shouldn't surprise anyone. What is surprising is how little snow is on the ground, and how few cold days we've had.

On this cold day in New Hampshire, Karen and I are the proud parents of a brand new baby Web site, On a Smaller Scale, which is not so much a business at this point as a way to reduce the sheer volume of craft materials Karen has accumulated since starting her miniatures hobby before we were married. (I like to say that there isn't any snow around here, but there sure is plenty of accumulation.)

But we hope that it will transform, as we sell off the inventory with no plans to replace it, into a publishing and information business as Karen creates patterns, projects, books, and movies, all of which can be sold in the information age without carrying an ounce of physical inventory (although lot of hard disk real estate—the archive of our first, six-minute video takes up 40 gigabytes of space on my backup disk. That's 40 billion characters).

It's not going to happen overnight, but we have to start somewhere. Neither of us has had a lot of luck getting employers to pay us for what we know; maybe we'll fare better with customers. Unlike our last business venture, this one won't cost us much to try out.

Meanwhile, now that we've launched the site, I'll have a little time to return to the poor, neglected Brooks Bunch site, with some pictures and a few stories about the upcoming events in our little family's life.

Stay tuned.