First, I’d like to apologize to the blogosphere for my absence the past 9+ months. Second, I’d like to apologize to my billions of fans. I’m sure you all were lost without my semi-monthly ramblings. One of the main reasons I have been absent from the ink tub has been because I’ve discovered the social networking site, Facebook. To me, it’s like a constant blog of daily, if not hourly happenings. I think with the addition Facebook in my life, after this one, my blog posts will be a bit more brief than in the past. I’ll try my best to sum up the past 9 months of my life without boring you to death.

Me: I’ve been keeping busy at work and home, both in a good way. I feel full on both, but I don’t feel overwhelmed or overstressed, which is a very good thing. I got promoted to Graphic Design Manager at work. I oversee the 2 full-time graphic designers, the student graphic designer, and a work study student. Being a manager is humbling and challenging, but I’ve learned a lot so far and continue to learn new things daily.

Holly: She’s exhausted and is getting sick pretty often because she’s so wiped out. Benji doesn’t allow her to sleep very well since he is still sleeping in our bed. I hope that we can get Benji on a more rigid schedule so Holly can get some more sleep and be able to take control of her life.

Benji: He’s doing great. 23 lbs., running around, learning new things daily. He loves stars, bubbles, owws (cats), and giving kisses to “Mama” and “Dada”. He has recently shown an interest in “drawing”. We got him some bath crayons and a magnadoodle, which he seems to love. Right now, he has some more teeth (has 16 now) coming in, and is fussy because of it. He’s been going to daycare now since March or April (I think) and seems to really like it. On the other hand, we don’t like how he’s constantly getting sick. He’s had at least 7 ear infections since he started at daycare. We will be contacting the ears, noes, and throat doctor this week to see when we can get an appointment to see what they say about ear tubes. We’re hoping they will help and fix his permasickness.

House: We moved in to our new place in April and got settled soon after. It’s really nice having something to call your own. We have yet to get everything in place and 100% set up yet, but we are getting there. If you need our new address, send me an email (brian@shedpress.com).

Cars: I’m still rocking my 03 A4 avant and Holly is still driving her 07 Rabbit. They’ve been treating us pretty good the past few months. I had to replace the clutch and flywheel on the avant over the summer. I also picked up 6 mk1 (first generation) vws; 5 being Rabbits and one being a Caddy (rabbit pickup truck). I had intentions of fixing up the caddy, but it proved to be too rusty for it’s own good, so I recently have started to turn it into a trailer. I picked up another caddy over the summer in Atlanta. It’s a 1983 VW Caddy with a 2L bottom end, 1.8 GTI head, a single counter flow carb setup, 5-speed manual trans, and maroon in color. I hope to get it started soon so I can start on pulling the engine and trans so I can rework some things in the engine bay and in the interior. There was some interesting (read: stupid) things that previous owners had done to it that question their abilities, or lack there of. Anyways, it should be a fun little truck once it’s together and running.

Cat: Well, our dear little Selena has made her way back to our house. Holly’s mom had kept her for about a year since she needed to be given medication 3 times per day and we weren’t able to do that since we we work. She seems to be doing well now, although does not appreciate Mr. Benji chasing after her, pulling her tail, and laying on her. I’m pretty sure that’s how she will die. Death by Benji. Seriously though, he really loves her. He’ll wake up and the first thing out of his mouth is “Owwww?”, because he wants to know where she is.

Shedpress: I vended at two shows this past season (Volksfest and H2Oi) and went to one day of Waterfest as a spectator. It was weird not vending at WF this year, but I still hadn’t come up with new designs yet and didn’t have the time to design and print all new shirts. I did manage to get some time after Waterfest to come up with nine new designs, which I have yet to put up on my website (wow, I suck). The new designs sold pretty well, so I was pretty pleased about that. I’m currently working re-designing the website. It will be a brand new look which should make ordering (for the customers) and updating (for me) easier. I’ll also be designing some new shirts to replace some of the older designs that will be retired. I’m just sick of looking at them, so they must go away. Over the summer, I filled out the proper forms and got shedpress incorporated and got a business bank account as well. Look for some (hopefully big) changes for shedpress in 2010.

Misc.: Holly’s mom is moving closer to us. She recently sold her current house and bought a house in Floyd, VA, which is much closer than her current location. It will be nice to have her close by in case we need a hand with Benji. I’m sure Holly’s boss will also appreciate it too since she stayed home from work with Benji when he was sick.

I’ve maxed out my Picasa account, so I moved on to Flickr. From my research, it looks like Flickr is a bit more flexible than Picasa and allows hotlinking, which I use often in the online forums I frequent. Here are links to both to see what I’ve been up to:
Picasa
Flickr

Well, I think I’m going to get some sleep now. Like I said earlier in this post, I hope to check in more often with more brief posts. Night.

Categories: Baby, Cars, Misc., Screen Printing, cats, house
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Another month+ has gone by…dang, time has been flying. All of us are just getting over our respective colds. Holly and Ben have gotten over theirs, but I think I’m about half-way through mine, which really sucks.

Benji has been adding some new skills to his bag of tricks this past month. He now rolls over with ease and seems to like to be on his stomach for more than a minute. He’s continuing eating “solid” foods (rice cereal mixed with either banana or peaches) and has started drinking juice from a bottle. In turn, he keeps getting bigger (20 lbs now). He’s working on pushing some teeth out, too. He has 2 bottom teeth that are looking to pop at any moment. Benji’s also been working on his speech (“Da” and “ba”). He does say “da da,” but he doesn’t always say it when I’m around, so I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know the meaning quite yet. I will continue to coach him in hopes of “da da” to be his first word. We switched his infant car carrier over to a convertible-style baby car seat. We went with the Recaro Signo. It got a lot of really good reviews and was comparable to the Britax seats, which have a very good reputation. The build quality of this seat is really impressive and well-thought out. We felt some of the other convertible seats in Target and they seemed like they were rock hard compared to the Recaro, which is rather plush. Benji went on his first play-date a few weeks ago (2/21) with our friend’s Emily and Tim’s daughter, Reese. She was born 4 days after Ben was, so it was his first interaction with another baby so close to his age. They were very cute together and Holly joked that they were going to get married. Here is the link to the photo set. Holly recieved a call to have him participate in a study yesterday (3/13) that measured eye movement in 6 month-old babies. The first part was a video that showed moving shapes and a clip of a woman saying “ba” and “da” over and over again. They had a camera that was watching where he was looking. Their computer crashed mid-way through this part of the test (go figure…it was a PC, not a MAC!) and Benji started to fuss once the second time around…so no data for that one. He settled down enough to do the second part of the study. He had to sit in front of a special monitor that had infared sensors on the bottom that measured where his eyes were focusing and where he was tracking. Since I was holding him, I had to close my eyes or the data would have been skewed. It was pretty interesting. I think he would have cooperated better if it would have been a little earlier in the day. Here are some photos I took of Benji over the past month and a half. Here’s a link to the full Picasa gallery.

In other exciting news, Holly and I have been shopping around for houses for the past few months and have made a decision. We’ll be closing on a house in Christiansburg on April 3rd. We had an inside track on this one since it is currently owned by our landlord’s Lance and Julie. It’s a split-foyer style that was built in 1972. 2400 sq. ft., .4 acre lot, brick exterior, 4 bedrooms, 2 baths, 1 bath roughed-in, and a 2-car garage. Eventhough this will be my 7th move in the past 5 years, we are extatic to say the least. We started packing boxes a few weeks ago, but I’m expecting this move to be the least amount of trouble, seeing that it is less than 10 miles away from our current rented house. We are very fortunate to have plenty of friends and family that have volunteered to help us with the move. I’m extra excited since I’ll finally have a place to set up my press again.

Speaking of the press (and the business), I have been thinking about a plan for the upcoming show season. I think what I’ll end up doing is selling off my current stock of shirts, retiring most of them, and come up with all new designs to replace the old ones. I’ll most likely go to the four shows that I normally have gone to in the past. Volksfest in PA, Waterfest in NJ, VAGfair in PA, and H2O in MD. There are plenty others that I could go to, but the distance to travel and the size of the shows doesn’t always make sense to make the trip. I have also been slowly working on the redesign of my shedpress website. I’m just going to have to make time to get it done. Afterall, it’s not going to magically build itself no matter how I wish it would.

Well, I’m going to wrap this post up. I’m on Benji-man duty and he looks like he could use a nap. Until next time…

Categories: Baby, Screen Printing, Uncategorized, house
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