First day of school - Today was the first day of school. For Abigail it was her first day ever. She's been asking about school ever since Claire's first day three years ago. It has the unfortunate side effect of having Michelle be home alone with just the boys all day long. Oh how the tides have turned since five years ago when I always came home to a household of women! Abby seemed very happy when she got off the bus today, so we're assuming the appeal hasn't worn off yet. I took several pictures this morning but couldn't work on them tonight because ... Well, that brings me to my next topic
Painting - Michelle doesn't tend to care about computers. She's completely the opposite of me in that regard. She has no interest in writing. She doesn't have the time to scan the news headlines. She isn't interested in online hobby or theme oriented websites/discussion forums. But this past week she's been online more than I've ever seen her. She's discovered that all of the major wall paint companies now have highly, highly interactive websites where you can pick a sample room style and paint it with a wide variety of contrasting and complementary colors. (Examples: Behr, Benjamin Moore, Glidden) Michelle loves to paint rooms and this is just feeding the fire. Michelle was online again tonight after the boys went down until she went to bed. I suppose I could have done some remote picture editing using the laptop, but it's not quite as nice. Besides, I wanted to catch at least a little RNC convention coverage. Did you notice that USA Today pulled pundit Ann Coulter from writing about the DNC convention because she was too "right wing" but has no problem with Michael Moore covering the RNC? Hmmmm.... Actually, I think both are too rabid to be doing coverage for a paper like USA Today.
The Passion - On a completely different topic, yesterday Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" came in the mail. Another coup for Netflix by delivering a rental to my mailbox on its opening day. It turns out that 4.1 million copies of the DVD sold on its opening day. It was an amazing work: the settings, the actors, the music. I was a bit concerned about what my reaction would be, given all the pre-release negative publicity about its levels of violence. I found the violence stomach-able because they kept using flashbacks to pre-Passion events.
Website - In the next week or so there may be some instability in this website as I transition to the just released version of MovableType. Version 3.1 was announced yesterday. I had held off on 3.0 because it was officially titled a "developer's release". I made plans to hold off until 3.1 because it would give thousands of developers time to kick the tires and squash the major bugs. It also has two major features that I've been looking for.