Mark is coming home today!

Some of you were out of the loop, sorry about that -- but I thought it best not to post that Mark had left for his trip until he was on his way back. He is coming home today in a few hours :))

He went over half the midsection of the country - through Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming and Colorado. He did a stopover at a family friend's store in Utah to talk about some merchandise and maybe partnering up for some shipping and supplying later on.

He saw the Very Large Array in New Mexico, and the Hoover Dam, and took some pictures.

I hope I have everything ready for him to have a nice hot bath, Southern style tea and a good steak dinner when he gets home, oh -- and a crushing bear hug from me ;)

Heard on the News: I heard something interesting on the radio (NPR) yesterday. Think you've seen more babies this year? (I was surprised to hear my brother's wife was pregnant, but so were they) and Rhiannon is expecting a baby boy, after her sister also had a baby last year. Quote: "For the first time since 1971, the nation’s overall fertility rate rose past the replacement rate, increasing 2 percent in 2006 to 2,101 births per 1,000 women. Women of almost every age had more children last year than the year before, except girls under 15 and women over 45." From this news article

Mark's family's friend Bert had a beautiful thing to say when he heard about Esme: 'You're replenishing the Earth, that is the way it should be.' Those words resonated in me when I looked at Esme today. Someday, she'll have her own baby perhaps. I'm sure my mother thought the same thing when she held me nearly thirty years ago ;)

Getting Ready for Mark's trip and backstory on the move

Mark has been getting things ready for his trip - and we're getting to where he will probably take off sometime this next week. He now has a mobile internet connection, as well as new tires on the vehicle, updated driver's license (his birthday is in the first week of December) and will be looking into getting his glasses updated before he travels as well.

The mobile internet connection was quite a big deal. That should let us do our Ebay auctions from anywhere in the country.

That leads into this:

For several months, (nearly a year by some measures) we have been telling Mark's father he does need to get a new tech to manage the network system for his company. Up until recently, we also ran our Ebay pictures and some email off that same system. That system has been breaking, systematically, over the past several years. Usually Mark creatively 'tapes' the sytem back together or buys parts out of his own pocket to fix it if he can't get money for parts from the company.

Our computer network is a complicated beast - it has lots of different parts that all run together to make the whole. A few months ago a major hardware part of the system broke, and right on the tail of that, another machine began to fail as well. They didn't affect immediate productivity (everyone still had email, internet, and most of their files), but they have affected things more and more as time goes on. We can't fix them, without a lot of scrambling and restructuring. We just don't have the time or energy to do it anymore.

Mark's father has looked some for that new techie, but hasn't found anyone yet who can and will take on the job. Two weeks ago Mark stopped monitoring the things that are breaking. He had been watching system messages since September 1997. He can translate the messages from the system (attempts to connect, files not found, errors, memory allocations) into potential risks and alerts... This is no small task - as it requires constant diligence. He said it is terribly depressing to know what was breaking when he couldn't fix it. He will also be gone for several weeks and not here to fix it even if he wanted to. He shut down the messaging terminal with all that in mind. So, we are no longer fixing things OR monitoring the broken pieces.

Mark's father called last night with another problem on the system and we really couldn't tell him anything. I felt bad, but he really needs a new tech to be able to call. Mark is going to be gone for several weeks - and I wouldn't know how to fix problems that deep in the system anyway -- I'm a software and internet geek, not a hardware geek. This system needs both. Most of this equipment is over 10 years old and running custom code and open source software. Some of it uses more electricity and puts out more heat than you could imagine. But, for the most part it works - and like a car held together with Bondo - it has done what it needs to do long enough to get us here.

*sigh* but basically, this is the time we ALL (us and them) have to learn how new systems work, and how to get the same jobs done with whatever is out 'on the market' nowadays.

We're doing that with our cellular modem and laptop. Mark's father will have to do that with whatever new tech he finds. Hopefully, this won't affect our family relations. If we continue to try to scrabble up fixes for the dying network with as little resource and time for other things -- that will surely break us down. And it won't help them in the long run either - as eventually we won't be here to call up and ask for repairs.

If we don't stop doing things around here sometime, when will it ever become someone else's job? That sounds harsh... but there isn't any nicer way to say it.

For years Mark lived what he describes as a 'monkish' existence. He thought he was building equity in a family business that had an honorable and attainable goal. He was helping provide technology services (internet publishing, email etc) to people in the property rights movement, to help them get their message out to the public. This was back in the very early 90s, when lots of people still didn't know about the Internet or how big it would become. Their family's website and magazine gave a voice and a forum to people who wouldn't have had it otherwise. He worked 24/7 on maintaining and monitoring the website and office network. It was a job that required constant upkeep and quick response time, and he gave it his all for ten years.

Up until a year or so ago, he didn't even take salary above his household bills, assuming he was paying into the mortgage on the property he lived on in lieu of other compensation. That made for some interesting and frustrating financial problems for him, then and now.

Now, he is disillusioned about the equity and partnership he was originally told he was participating in. He can't get a straight answer about things that were once said, and doesn't want to wait any longer for others to decide what they want to agree was the actual case. He is also upset that his father always wanted him to make his projects happen smoothly, but Mark's ideas and projects never got support. Or, even worse, the support was pulled from them after Mark had done a large amount of the work. It made him bitter and frustrated. This house we currently live in is one of those projects, although the building itself was successful. Mark built it on his own design, as the place he would live and work. He also put his own handwork into its construction. Now, he is told it isn't 'actually' his. He cannot get a deed to it because it 'belongs to the company', and was paid for partially by a grant given to the company.

It has come down to the point Mark just wants something he knows is his, that he can put his hard work, heart and soul into and know that someone else can't take it away arbitrarily. He has 'burned out' on this dream, and I want to help him in finding one we can both share. With Esme, we feel we have to take that action now, and start building a solid future.

Living the Minutes and Not the Hours

I told Mark a few days ago I can't believe Esme will be two weeks old soon. I said: 'Ever since those first contractions started, I feel like I've been living the minutes and not the hours.' He agreed we both are. The actual time we record in our minds has slown down immensely, yet the days somehow keep passing by almost unnoticed.

And it's not just this beautiful baby that is making us pay attention to every little thing while the hours somehow slip away in the process... although she is the majority of it ;) We have a task list a mile long, and only so much time to do it in.

We're transferring our store over to a new computer system, which means a lot of juggling in the next week or so. I have to learn the new system before Mark travels. I'm still not too good with the car, but I did drive the truck (also a stick shift) to the store yesterday with little problem.

We're working at being independent at a time (new baby) when most people we've known were leaning on others around them for much more than ever. But, we know we have to do this, because we want something that is ours, totally, that we know we can continue doing together on our own ambitions, with less chance that it could be pulled out from under us unexpectedly.

So far, we're doing quite well, but we're feeling the crunch coming up. We're stepping up our already busy days to get ready for the move. I'm almost ready to do that, but not quite yet. I'm sleeping better at night and Esme is on a much more regular, almost predictable schedule.

Milestone: Esme's umbilical cord stump fell off last night. She was having a 'digestion fit' at the time, when her belly hurts her and she has to fuss until something settles. I told her: 'Hey little one, be good to your new belly button, you only get one!'

A Big Move - to Where?

Asking for advice!

Mark and I are looking to open a brick and mortar type retail shop. We've been discussing this since last year (well, January of this year actually), but there have been several things, besides Baby Bazooka, that have kept us from making any decisions.

If we had been able to tie those things up before, we wouldn't have waited so long. Now, we're waiting for Bazooka to arrive, and trying to make plans on what information we can get through the Internet and friends. We're not even sure exactly what region of the country we would like to be in yet, but we do have some criteria. One of the hardest things is I can't travel very far to check anything out, and probably won't be physically able for a month or so after the baby is born. However, we would really like to know where we are going before December rolls around.

We would like to be have our store near a population center but live a little further out of town in a 'farmland' type area, on an acre or more. If we could have the store and house on the same property (say off a highway exit or intersection) that would be ideal.

Our store would be a mixture of computers, electronics, coffee shop and workshop facilities. It would be a unique kind of place, with both parts and materials to buy, coffee and snacks to hang out in the lounge area with, and maybe classes and projects going on by local artists. Think about sitting in a coffee shop while people next to you build a Rube Goldberg machine in one corner and other geeks take turns between LAN gaming and fixing their machines with shop tools. There might be a 'yarn bar' and an assortment of basic art materials for sale, as well as promotion of local artisans and in-house reference materials on a variety of crafty and technical subjects.

Of course, this would be our ultimate goal. We'll have to start small. Our Ebay store is already getting to the point where we can rely on it for a little bit while we get settled. Where we go will definitely direct how much we can do how soon.

But where to go? Neither of us have real strong feelings about location. We've been looking at a few different regions of the country but would like suggestions!

So, here are the criteria we are working with:
Near high population but still some rural land nearby.
A welcoming environment, we're both eccentric geeks and we're hoping to attract other like-minded people. Maybe near a university or technological center, people who want to learn and tinker with things. Moderate temperatures, not too hot or cold. I grew up in Minnesota and can't take really high heat, while Mark grew up here and places more Southern, so he avoids the colder weather as well.

Suggestions please!
Invite your friends to give us some ideas too!
We'd like to hear your opinions about different areas!