Building Camelot Guest Post

The second installment of Bringing Home a Second Baby is up at Building Camelot.

In this multi-part series, you will read all about:

Helping your first child understand what’s about to happen.
The first meeting between the two children.
The first time time you actually bring the baby home.

Read the first installment of the series on Bringing Home a Second Baby.

You will also read some great stories by Chris from DadOfDivas.blogspot.com and Jeff from Daddy’sToolbox.com.

Search Engine Traffic

Google Analytics is a valuable source of information and fascination. One of the facts you can glean is what keyword searches brought visitors to your site. The usual suspects like “dad blog” and “babies in the 21st century” show up regularly. This is the craziest search term that brought a visitor:

“Problems digesting corn.”

Whoever it was stuck around for over a half-hour and visited 12 pages.

RSS Feed is Now Ad-Free

If you get your 21st Century Dad fix through your feed reader, this is hardly news to you. The change has been in effect for a while now.

It finally dawned on me to subscribe to my own RSS feed. I can’t even say with 100% certainty that the RSS Feed is ad-free. I haven’t seen it with my own eyes. I put faith in my act of unchecking the appropriate box on Feedburner’s control panel.

Ads have their place. Ads fill a need (like the hole in my wallet left by diapers). I don’t need to blast my readers with ads on the site and in the RSS feed. Part of the fun is to see what kinds of ads are served up. AdSense seems to think my readers want to know about mail-order brides whenever I write about biracial issues. I also see ads for 21st Century Insurance.

Now that my RSS Feed is ad-free, it’s just like having TiVO for your favorite blog. You can skip the commercials.

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I just realized that I exceeded 100 posts to this blog while this one languished in its incomplete state in my Drafts folder. What blogger has the attention span to write 100 facts about themselves in one sitting? I made this list over time, and had forgotten about it.

Doing a “Top 100″ or a “100 things about me” list is pretty common for the 100th post. I’ve already passed 114 posts. Just pretend that 15 of my posts are utter crap and not worth reading.

Okay, there are a few gems in this list, but you’re going to have to click through to read them. I’m not going to blast the front page with 1634 words. Yes, that means you too JoJo. I know you never click on “Read the rest of this entry” when you’re blog-hopping, but this is too good to pass up.

Read the rest of this entry »

Some of you already know that Portnoy has not been doing well. At the vet’s recommendation, we were planning to have him put down after a few days, so we could say our goodbyes. Fortunately, he wasn’t in pain, just feeling “blah” all the time due to anemia. I was afraid that I would find him curled up in a dark and quiet corner of our house. My fears were confirmed on Tuesday.

Portnoy and his litter mates were abandoned at a construction site. One of our friends took them in and found new homes for each of them. Portnoy found his way into our home and our hearts in November of 2006.

Portnoy is named after Mike Portnoy, the drummer from Dream Theater. I have been a fan of the band for over 15 years, having seen them in concert multiple times. I have even met Portnoy’s namesake on a few occasions. He was always friendly and outgoing, just like the cat named after one of progressive rock’s greatest drummers.

Shortly after bringing Portnoy home, we arranged for a checkup with the vet. This is when we learned that he has the feline leukemia virus (FeLV). At first, we were admonished for taking such a cat in, but the vet fell in love with him too. We were told that his odds of surviving the first year were slim. He lived to be almost two years old.

Portnoy loved to groom himself

Kittens are fast little buggers. They’re hard to catch. He seemed to teleport from one part of the room to another, so we called him “Teleportnoy.” We started appending names and words with “noy.”

• While Renee was pregnant, I called her “Pregnoy.”
• When Twilli would go on her serial breastfeeding binges, we’d call her the “Nursenoy.”
• Portnoy started off as the smallest of the three cats, but grew to be quite large. Sometimes we called him “Biggernoy.”

One question we often got was, “does he complain a lot?” Most people know the title of the Philip Roth novel, “Portnoy’s Complaint,” but don’t know the story. It’s one of those quips that get diluted with repetition, just like the E.T. references I endured all through grade school. Those who actually know the story got a hearty laugh when I said, “no, he doesn’t complain, but we were sure to get him neutered.”

This is especially difficult for me since Portnoy is the first cat I’ve known since he was a little kitten. I never had pets growing up, but got introduced to James and Boo when I met Renee. I call them my “step-cats.”

Renee thought a kitten might allow Boo to call upon her maternal instincts. Instead, James took on the parent/mentor role with Portnoy and they became best buddies. James and Portnoy slept at the foot of our bed every night.

Portnoy enjoys his nap.

Portnoy will be missed. He was such a great cat.

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Portnoy - He Actually Doesn't Complain Much

Portnoy’s Complaint

I took Portnoy to the vet earlier this week and the end is near. The feline leukemia virus has ravaged his body. He has already beaten the odds by living nearly 2 years with the disease. We thought we were in the clear when he grew to be the largest cat in the house. Now he has lost nearly half his body weight.

I was really hoping he’d stick around. I always thought that when Twilli starts talking more, she’d try to say his name and end up mispronouncing it “Porno” or “Po-Po.”

The Busy Dad Blog

When I first found The Busy Dad Blog, I thought, “cool!” I’m not much of a drinker these days, but hanging out with certain people suddenly increases my alcohol tolerance consumption. I imagined Busy Dad could be one of those people to me.

So I start getting connected with Busy Dad. We follow each other on Twitter. I checked out his StumbleUpon page. I started to see even more similarities. This is getting eerie. He loves to cook, plays the guitar, and he likes country music too? How many Asian dudes like country music? I’m having a hard enough time finding anyone I know who likes country music. Everyone you’ve met who says,”I listen to everything,” usually follows up with, “…except country.”

It hit me the last time I was at Panda Express to get my Orange Chicken fix. I go back home to see the reference to the double order of Orange Chicken on his site. Just hit CMD-F and type in “Panda Express” to find the reference. You PC folks can hit “CTRL-F.”

Last week, I made a flippant remark about The Busy Dad Blog being the Chinese knock-off of 21st Century Dad. Hmmm…

Links and Stuff

• Jeremy at Discovering Dad is spreading the word about this extraordinary cause. He’s been a very busy dad lately, with a newborn and 2 children home for the summer. It is something we hope we never have to prepare for. The Joseph Salmon Trust Fund was established so they can help families that suffer through the worst loss imaginable.
• There’s a great article on Parenting Squad on Questions to Ask a Potential Pediatrician or Family Doctor

• Digital photography is a passion of mine. Sometimes, things get a little too digital. This is one of the coolest photography related things I’ve ever seen. It exceeds the cool factor of even the most advanced digital cameras today. I love it when something old is new again. Thanks to Strobist for bringing this to my attention.
• The NHL released the 2008-09 schedule. Although I am a long-time fan of the game, I still can’t get excited about the Winter Classic. The Panthers will probably never host one. An outdoor hockey game in South Florida might present some technical difficulties.
• Read about the best hot dogs you can get on this side of the Lincoln Tunnel.

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I feel like such a blogger. I’m sitting here in a hotel lobby updating my blog. Just finished up a full day of work with a client on-site at their humongous corporate meeting with their people from all over the country. I might as well get some things accomplished here and wait for rush hour traffic to subside.

Last week, Tyler from Building Camelot asked me to contribute to his series on Bringing Home a Second Baby. Tyler and his wife are expecting any day now!

In this multi-part series, you will read all about:

• Helping your first child understand what’s about to happen.
• The first meeting between the two children.
• The first time time you actually bring the baby home.

Follow the link here to read the first installment of the series on Bringing Home a Second Baby.

You will also read some great stories by Chris from DadOfDivas.blogspot.com and Jeff from Daddy’sToolbox.com.

Subscribe to my RSS Feed!

Subscribe in a reader

Subscribe to 21st Century Dad by Email