Some friends and I have started out own company.  It’s a little hard to describe, but it’s sort of an interactive agency.  We do everything from iPhone/mobile apps to website to social media installations (Chalkbot, upcoming installation for P&G at the 2010 Winter Olympics) to Chumbys (Chumbies?).  I am working with two (sort of three) fantastic guys.  You can check out more about us at http://www.gorlochs.com.  We (my partners and my family) are all very excited about this new opportunity.  It’s a relief to finally get out from under my previous job (which, to put it politely, I loathed with the intensity of a thousand suns).  I get to work on great projects with great people.  I’m away from home more than with my previous job (since I was telecommuting, there is no way for me NOT to be home less), but everyone is coping with it pretty well.

Sebastian is doing fantastic!  He’s sleeping most of the way through the night now (8pm – 5:30am or so).  He’s talking in short sentences now (four words or so), and he’s as rambunctious as ever.  He loves trucks and trains and his TwoPuppies and fuzzy llamas/alpacas.  He likes getting eggs from the chicken coop and just the other day showed his friend Sylvia how to do it properly.  No photos for this post (it’s late and I need to get to sleep), but I FINALLY found my Flip video camera, so hopefully we’ll take some videos of Sebastian.

Oh yeah, he had his second birthday!  We had a grand day this past Monday.  We woke up and went to the bakery and Sebastian had an entire (gourmet, black current) doughnut.  Then he played a bit at the kids gym.  Then Juliann brought him into my new office in the Pearl District (a large, shared loft space attached to my old company, Wieden+Kennedy) and we went to lunch.  Then he took a three hour nap (!!!!!!!).  We all cooked dinner together, played a bit, then he slept through the night! YAY!  I forgot about having frozen custard in the afternoon. YUM!

That’s it for now.  Bye!

We went to Yachats on the Oregon Coast for a three night stay a few weeks ago – we all needed the R&R (including Misha, who got to come along, but not the chickens, who had to stay at home).  We got a house right on the beach and pretty much just alternated between sitting around relaxing in the house and running and digging in the surf and sand outside the house.  Fun was had by all.  Sebastian did much better than we could have hoped for both the drive to and from Yachats (3+ hours away) and staying in a new place.  He even slept for over two hours on the drive home, which made the whole trip a breeze.

For all you all who are sitting on the edge of your seat waiting for our kitchen to be finished, you can (almost) rest easy.  The butcher block counter top was installed (reclaimed wood from African shipyards – talk about recycling) and the shelves were built and installed (no upper cabinets, just shelves).  All that’s left is installing trim around the windows and doors, and baseboard moldings (mouldings?). Oh yeah, and picking out light fixtures.  We also might switch out the door to the basement (which is in the kitchen), but maybe not.  The next project will probably be starting on the basement.

Here are some photos from the trip.  If you want to see all the photos, check out the photo blog.  Also, don’t forget to keep an eye on my tumblelog, which has random photos and such from here or there.  It’s more of a quick post site.

What else is going on?  Well, it was my birthday a few days ago – I turned 39 years old. Who would have thunk that I would have lasted this long, eh? 39 isn’t that bad an age because it’s divisible by 13. 37 was good, too, since it was a prime number. 38 not so good. 40? I haven’t made up my mind on that one yet, though my best, and longest lasting, friend and I are planning a kickass trip somewhere crazy.  I’ll keep you up to date as next year rolls around.

Sebastian is doing fantastic. He’s starting to talk (vocally) now.  He has a ton of signs, probably 40 or so that he understands, and then a handful of signs that he made up on his own that we had to decipher (we’re still working on one or two of them).  He’s as curious as a cat (a real cat, not Misha, he’s not curious at all).  He loves pushing buttons and turning knobs petting the chickens and eating strawberries and all sorts of other things.

As far as the house in concerned, we’re still waiting for our kitchen to be finished. We have a fridge and a range (YAY, natural gas!), but no cabinets. The main floor is pretty much finished except for some trim and the kitchen. Oh, and the bathroom. We need to finish painting the ceiling, and then we can decide what to do with the horrible plastic tile in the shower, the lack of trim, ad the mismatched door. We also will eventually start working on the basement (after we unpack most of the boxes and get rid of a lot of stuff).

OK, time for the photos.  Here you go:

Sebastian Rolling Along

Let me know if you can view this or not.  Sorry that it’s not embedded directly in the page.

There are a few good things to come out of all this. We are forced to go out to eat a lot, so we are exploring the neighborhood, meeting people, and trying out a lot of restaurants. We will eventually have the kitchen that we want (if a bit small) with a kickass refrigerator, gas range, counters, butcherblock and fir floors.  The walls were painted and they are fantastic (let me know if you need a Portland painter).  We learned that just about everyone who lives around us had a friend or relative (or both) that was interested in buying our house, but we ended up snatching it up before anyone knew it was for sale. We’ve met more neighors and talked to more people (in restaurants, walking down the street, in the park, etc.) in the past couple of weeks than I met in seven years in Decatur. Sebastian loves the new house and has adapted superbly to the move. I think he might miss the stairs a bit from our rental, but we have lots of stairs outside the house for him to get his fill from. I can go on and on about how wonderful a place this is to live, but I don’t want to make you all TOO jealous. Did I mention the amazing refrigerator that I found on Craigslist?  I showed up to look at the fridge and I ended up talking to a complete stranger for almost an hour about kitchen renovations and refrigerators and countertops and a host of other things. Me. Talking to a stranger. I put a down payment on it (just as someone else was calling to set up a time to look at it), then showed up a few days later with my hauling/landscaping guy (who also builds fences, and does a whole host of other things, like play congas in some local bands). Well, I told the woman who I was buying the fridge from about how wonderful James is, so he gave her his card and now I got him some more business (after getting the fridge moved for chump change, because that’s how James is).  It’s a small world when everyone is so friendly.

So, the move. The Day of Dread. One day to move a house filled to the brim with stuff. And by stuff, I mean junk. We had probably 50 boxes in our basement that we never emptied out after our move from Atlanta to Portland. I went down there to tape up and label the boxes last week and I realized that most of it is just plain junk. Some time in my past most of these things were sentimental to me. I tend towards nostalgia. But after looking at all these things, I realized that I am the owner of 50 boxes of mostly junk.  Sure, the photos and mementos from my grandparents are very important to me and I’ll always keep and cherish them, but those things really are a small percentage of the whole. I know that when we finally start to go through them it will be difficult to throw a lot of the stuff away. How about my old bowling trophies from when I was in high school? My father kept his bowling trophies from when he was younger (oh yeah, I have those, too), so why shouldn’t I? I’ll probably keep them (on the off chance that my son will one day find them cool enough to want to carry them from house to house to house).  But crap from old jobs? Ancient, decaying paperbacks that I read in high school that probably weren’t even good back then?  Is there any reason to keep these things? It’s hard to throw away books, but I think a large majority of these will be taken down to Powell’s or some other used bookstore and sold off for 10¢ on the dollar (if I’m lucky). And it’s not just the sentimental stuff and books that are clogging the tubes, it’s every room in the house. How many pots and pans and dishes and bowls and knives and forks and glasses and mugs do two people need?  Whatever that amount is, triple or quadruple it and you’re approaching the number of that we have. Luckily our kitchen is small and the storage space smaller – we’ll be forced to make choices on what we are able to keep.

Oops, that was supposed to be about moving day.  OK, moving day.  One day to move a house filled to the brim with junk.  We did the best job we could to pack the house up. Of course, the more we packed, the more it seemed we needed to pack. The first half of the boxes are easy: books, LPs, clothes. But as you pack more and more, the stuff you have leftover suddenly doesn’t really fit neatly into boxes. Ugh, just thinking about it gets me angry (and anxious). Then there’s the piano. And the motorcycle that hasn’t been started in over a year (since Atlanta) that doesn’t have any brake fluid. Thinking about those two things kept me up a number of nights. I’ve had the piano moved a handful of times and every time I tell them that it’s probably the heaviest upright piano that they’ve ever moved.  I get the same response from everyone: “Pianos are our specialty! It won’t be a problem. We move heavy pianos all the time!”  Then they try and move it.  Oops. “Wow, that’s the heaviest piano I’ve every tried to lift.”  No duh.  This time, the mover’s ramps didn’t extend all the way to the top of the stairs so six of us (SIX!), only four of which were movers (James was the fifth and I was the sixth) managed to lift the piano up several stairs. Twice. A piano that probably weights close to 1000 pounds. Crazy. But we did it. It will never move from it’s living room position for as long as I am its owner, which is as long as I own this house. I’m through lugging this piano from house to house to house. It will be sold with the house (and probably the humungous safe in the basement, too, since that probably weighs about the same, if not more). I was also worried about them not finishing in time, since we had to be out of the house the next day. Little did I know that they worked until they were finished. The movers said that they’ve worked past midnight on occasion. “We work till we’re done,” is what they said. I wish I knew that before I spent nights worrying about it. They showed up at 8:30am and wrapped up by 7:00pm. They ended up making two trips, which actually was a huge boon, since I got them to put the motorcycle on the truck with the second load so I wouldn’t have to spend all day Sunday trying to get the brakes working and then have to drive the four miles with an expired Georgia tag. Crisis averted! Then Juli spent most of Sunday cleaning the house and packing the last things that were strewn around the house. After the landlord had the gall to complain about a little shmutz in the oven (after they didn’t even clean the house before we moved in), Juli talked her into giving us our full security deposit back, all thanks to her single-minded cleaning frenzy and her ability not to curse at the landlord (two skills I have yet to master).

Slowly but surely things are shaping up. I will celebrate the day when we’re done with this initial phase and we can settle in and start unpacking in earnest. It’s a wonderful house in a fantastic neighborhood.

And one last thing: we have three new additions to our family to announce: chicks!

We’re heading to the Coast for a day, so I should have some new photos to post shortly.  And, as always, check out the photoblog for some recent photos:  http://www.literalshore.com/zenphoto

Sebastian update!  He’s walking like a crazy man.  He has four teeth and he’s cutting two more.  He love eating blueberries, Swiss chard, Italian kale, risotto, beets, oatmeal, bananas, sand, turkey pastrami, pancakes, and, most of all, peaches.  Food he doesn’t like: mashed potatoes, any turkey that isn’t turkey pastrami, chicken, beef, and fish.  He still has his mother’s eyes and his father’s dimple.  His light brown hair is starting to get curly in the back, but it’s still mostly straight like his mom’s.  He got totally freaked out by a couple of ants that he saw while he was taking a bath and he occasionally gets offended by a stray piece of food that is sitting too near his foot.  His signing vocabulary is around 30 words or so, but he hasn’t spoken anything more than mamamama and dadadada.  His tormenting of Misha has picked up of late, much to Misha’s chagrin.  He loves playing ball, which consists of him running around with a ball and sometimes handing it over to one of us, or sometimes just swatting at it randomly around the room.  He gets very frustrated very easily when he can’t do something on the first try (I have NO idea where he got that trait from…).  He has slept through the night several times over the past month and has been better in general about sleeping, but with him cutting new teeth, his sleep progress has been interrupted.  He is definitely moving in the right direction when it comes to sleeping, but it’s a slow process.  He loves airplanes, and signs ‘airplane’ and looks up at the sky every time he hears one (which is often, since the airport isn’t more than 15 minutes away).  He’s pretty good at sharing with other kids, though he also thinks it’s totally within his right to go up to a kid and take whatever they have away from them.  Sebastian is a very active kid; he doesn’t sit still for too long (remind you of someone?) and he has to touch EVERYTHING.  He is, as the music teacher noted at the music class that he goes to, a kinesthetic learner.  If you look at the traits of a kinesthetic/tactile learner, it pretty much describes me to a tee.

For the past four months or so, Juli and I have been house hunting.  The housing market crashed, the interest rates dropped through the floor, and we had already sold our house in Atlanta and renting in Portland.  The only way we could have timed it better was if we sold our house 6-9 months before we did, otherwise, it was prefectly timed.  The houses we were most interested were in the worst school districts, so we started looking in SE Portland (as opposed to N or NE Portland, which were our first choices).  The only reason why we weren’t looking in SE is that we weren’t familiar with it.  It’s not like it was far away, it was only one mile south of where we live now, but if you lived in Portland, you would understand about how the five different quadrants of Portland are very different – North, Northeast, Northwest, Southeast, Southwest.  East and West are separated physically by the Willamette River, but also separated by a lot more psychically.  So we started investigating SE and found out we really liked it.  In addition, it seemed that all the school districts were top notch, plus they had some great charter schools (an environmental charter school and a Japanese charter school, for example).  We eventually found a house in a nice, quiet neighborhood that was owned by the same woman for 40+ years.  The main floor is about the same size as our house in Decatur.  In fact, there is a lot about this house that is reminiscent of our house in Decatur, except better.  For you geeks out there, it’s Decatur++.  So, the main floor is about the same size, but it’s a three bedroom, one bath.  The kitchen is smaller and crappy, but we’re tearing it out and renovating it before we move in.  It has sliding glass doors onto a concrete patio in the backyard.  The living room is much bigger than our old one, and the flow of the house is much better than the Decatur house.  The big bonus to the house is that it has a full basement with excellent height (7’6″ or so).  It has a two car drive under garage, but one of the garages was turned into a workshop, so there is no garage door there anymore.  The rest of the basement is partially finished, but our big plan is to tear everything out and renovate the basement into an office, a bedroom, a media room, a bathroom, and….drumroll please….a sauna.  We should be able to get 900 sq ft or so out of the basement.  The office will be where the old garage was and we’re actually going to put a garage door back into it (since the opening is still there, but just roughly closed in with plywood and framing), but we’re planning on putting a glass garage door that will eventually open onto a little garden area.  That’ll be my office (since I work from home).  The yard is smaller than the one we had previously, but we’ll have room for the chickens that we’ve been wanting and a nice vegetable garden and space for Sebastian to be able to play.  The other great thing about the house is the neighborhood.  The Decatur house was half a mile from Oakhurst village and a mile and a half from the Decatur square.  This house is 1/4 mile from an area like Oakhurst, but with shops and restaurants that we’re actually interested in going to.  And best of all?  Two record shops!  LPs!  Vinyl!  BOOYAH!  Another 1/4 mile past that is another group of shops, including the best grocery store in town (New Seasons) and a grocery co-op with a weekly farmers market that goes all year round.  The house needs a little work (thick carpet and crappy wood paneling abound), but it will be fun to shape this house into Our Home.  (Did I mention the carpeted bathroom? CARPET IN THE BATHROOM!  That’s up there in Top Three Disgusting Things You Can Find in a House.)  The bones of the house are excellent – thick 6×6 beams, solid concrete foundation, and one of the driest basements I’ve ever been in.  We even had the sellers put on a brand new roof as part of the sale.  I’d post photos, but until I have before and after photos, I think I’ll hold off – with the carpet and panelling, it’s pretty scary looking.

Oh! I almost forgot the two most important things about the house!  The semi-finished basement has a built in bar!  We need to spiffy it up a bit, but it’s a bar!  It’ll go in the media room.  The other thing is that I got the sellers to throw in the safe that is in the basement.  Safe, you say?  Yeah.  A 120+ year old large steel safe with hand painted interior doors.  It doesn’t lock, but it is COOL!  I included a photo at the end of the below gallery.  After I extricate it from the closet, I’ll take some better photos.  Well, I’m going to remove the closet from around the safe – I don’t think that safe is really ever going to be moved.  I think we’ll build the office around the safe since it’s pretty close.  The thing probably weighs well over 1000 pounds, but that’s just a wild guess.

That’s really about it.  We went hiking a couple weeks ago (photos below), but we’ve mostly been staying close to home.  The next month will be taken up by house renovations and packing, with maybe a weekend trip to the coast to celebrate our May 9 anniversaries (6 years since we met, 5 years since we got engaged).

Here are some photos:

Yesterday we took him outside with his cart and he was pushing it up and down the sidewalk with a huge grin.  Ever since Chanukah, when we were lighting candles every night, he’s come to expect us to light a candle up in the window.  So every late afternoon/evening, Sebastian looks up at the candle and signs ‘light’.

For Sebastian’s birthday, we made pancakes for breakfast and a fancy fruit/yogurt parfait that Juliann made for him.  After some technical difficulties we hooked up with his aunt, uncle, cousins and grandparents back in Georgia for some video present unwrapping.  He’s been playing with his new toys ever since.  Oh yeah, he also took a 2-1/2 hour nap in th morning/afternoon, is longest midday nap, I belive, ever.

I’ve attached some photos below.  You can go and see all the birthday photos on the photoblog.  There are also some new, non-birthday photos starting with this one on the photoblog.

Walking:  He’s almost there.  We’re pretty sure he can if he really wanted to, but he’s pretty content to stand, cruise and crawl.  He loves to play what we call the ‘boomy game’ where he stands up, raises his hands over his head, and then slams himself down on the ground/bed/parent.

Teeth:  Done.  His first tooth – bottom left front – popped out from the gum last week.  One down, a lot to go.

Playing:  He’s on an empty-everything kick – books from the bookshelf, pots from the kitchen cabinets, etc.  Unfortunately for us, he hasn’t figured out how to put everything back the way he found it yet.  His newest favorite toy is the soccer ball; he’s really good at rolling it and catching it.  He also loves his wooden sushi set and his bongos that he got for Chanukah.

Food:  He loves oatmeal, turkey, cheese, zucchini, red peppers, pancakes, butternut squash, peaches, mango/banana smoothies, blueberries and many other things.

Travel:  We just got a new carseat for him. He started to outgrow his original car seat, so we bought the bigger, front-facing seat.

Sleep:  He’s slowly getting better.  He has been getting some four hour chunks of sleep lately, mixed in with some threes and twos.  He typically has one nap in the middle of the day, and when it’s time to go to bed, he almost always goes to sleep very easily.

Housing:  Our lease is coming up for renewal in April, and the housing market has tanked and mortgage rates are dipping down towards 5%, so it looks like, if we can get a mortgage, we’ll be looking to buy a house.

War & Peace: Unfortunately, I haven’t had the time to read as much of it as I would have liked, plus it’s difficult to read to him in the mornings now that he’s so mobile and he doesn’t really sit still for more than a minute or two.  I think we’re up to page 179.

That should be it for now.  If I’m missing something, leave a comment and I can add it in.