Facebook as a Pseudo-Journal

I have been such a slacker as far as blogging goes for the past few years.  In high school, I kept a LiveJournal (friends-only) and updated several times a week.  I'd come home from school and write.  My friends would read it and we'd interact online.  Then I went to college and I still wrote, but not as much.  Then I got married and I wrote sometimes.  Then I had kids and basically stopped writing.  I think I need to start writing again, but I don't really know where to start.  Ha ha!  Isn't that life! =p

Also, Facebook has kind of ruined my journal-writing.  I can just post something about Carmen or my life and I feel like, "Oh, that's the recording of my life for the day!" .... So I think I end up updating Facebook too much (some people post a million times a day, some people only check Facebook a few times a year, I generally post something daily and put pictures up for my family ... so I'm sure I drive the less-active Facebook people crazy) and never write in a journal/blog.  It's probably because I feel like it's easier to spend a few seconds updating Facebook than it is to spend several minutes writing up a blog post, constantly being interrupted by small children.  I have a hard time stringing coherent thoughts together these days.  It seemed to get better after Carmen was a year or two old.

ANYWAY, LIFE!

So we moved into a house in September.  It's amazing how much breathing room we have now that we've doubled our living space!  Mace is no longer sleeping in the closet, the piano is no longer behind the dining room table and I actually sit down and randomly play it for fun, etc. ;)

Upstairs, there's a loft.  We've dubbed it "Carmen's playroom" and have put all of our games and the kids' toys up there.  We also set up a bed in the back of the play room.  The mattresses we bought for the bunk bed way back when came with box springs, which we've kept for the last 3 years, so when we moved into the house we bought a third mattress and set it up on top of the box springs.  Sweet!!

The nice thing about Carmen having her own play area is that now we can keep the main living areas clean.  Or at least cleaner ... unless I'm doing laundry.  Then it sits all over the floor.

We also now have a two-car garage and two cars!  But only my car fits in the garage because Mark bought a big weight set and set it up in the garage so he can work out in the mornings and give up his gym membership.  I won't give up my membership because I love going to the gym and being able to drop my kids off at the day care.  I go to this super-fancy-schmancy gym (LifeTime Fitness) and if I'm too tired to work out, I can nap/read books/etc on the couch in the fancy-schmancy locker room.  Most gyms are kind of grimy and sweaty and you just go there for a class or whatever and can't wait to leave.  The day care might be kind of sketchy.  But LifeTime's day care is awesome - they have several different sections for the kids (there's a baby area, a place for toddlers and young kids, a computer lab, a covered outdoor play area, a playland-type area with a slide, tables for coloring and crafts, and a basketball court-type place in back with those multicolored padded walls for playing) and I loooooooove all the people in the day care.  It is so worth paying 2-3x what I would pay for a Gold's Gym membership.  I just feel good every time I go, and I WANT to go.

Another thing that has happened since we've moved is Mark has a new job!  He was kind of unhappy with his old job ... he was kind of isolated from his coworkers with the projects he was working on, and his managers didn't communicate with him often and basically had no idea what he was doing.  Mark discovered his values were different from his company's values ... to me, it sounds like he didn't like updating/debugging/working with super-crappy code that was thrown together just to "work" but was impossible to work with/update/add functionality/etc.  Better coding practices would be good in the long term, and if they *didn't* implement good coding practices, they'd be ahead in the field now but far behind in the future because another company could easily enter the market and catch up to and overtake them. ... but ... you know ... I'm not an expert on the software-aided engineering market. ;)

Anyway.  Mark found a job with a small company called DataStax and ended up on a Quality Assurance team ... which ... well ... basically sounds like Mark to a T. ;)  He'd do a better job describing his job than I would.  He gets to work from home, since most of his associations with his coworkers are done through chat.  He goes in to work on Wednesdays because they get free lunch (apparently) and the office is downtown, near 6th street, so the food options are pretty awesome. ;)  He also adores his coworkers because they are nerdy in all the same ways he is.  While he was interviewing, I believe they talked about Dungeons and Dragons characters/campaigns they've done in the past.  OH YES THEY DID.  And they get together and have game nights every so often at the office.

PS. Austin is awesome.  Great food, great music, great people, great culture ... I love it here!!

We spent Thanksgiving in Austin this year, and we are going to spend Christmas alone here, too.  We are kind of remote from our families (my family's in Seattle; Mark's parents moved to Orem last year) but you know what's great about here?  We don't have to deal with the misery of snow!  We'll go to Utah and Washington in the summer when the weather is nicer there, but I think we are going to spend every year trying to pressure our families into coming down here for the holidays. ;)