Pocket Universe

My dad just had coronary bypass surgery. My daughter starts kindergarten this week. My wife and son are starting home school, and I need to clean out the former computer nook to make room for the new home-school area. I got a new TV, along with a stand that I haven’t put together yet. And my blog posts have been sporadic at best.

So with all this going on, what’s the first thing I do? A site redesign, of course!

To be fair, this new design has been in the works for quite some time. Ever since my upgrade to Movable Type 3.32 nearly a year ago, I realized that my old format wasn’t taking advantage of the new features. I set up a test blog to try out some design ideas, but the TypeKey comment authentication wasn’t working correctly. Since reducing comment spam was the main reason I upgraded, I didn’t want to switch to TypeKey until the problems were fixed. It appears to be working now, but if you have trouble registering or commenting, please email me at andy@babybates.com.

In case you’re wondering, I took my new color scheme from Mark Rothko’s painting Red, Orange, Tan and Purple, which can be seen here. You may be interested to know about how Rothko has influenced other people.

As for the other life updates, I’ll give you the quick rundown: My dad had coronary bypass surgery last week, after one of his stents began clogging again. The surgery went well, and he is recovering nicely and should be returning home today. Meanwhile, my mom is doing pretty well (or as well as can be expected, considering the cancer), but she has been sleeping a lot lately, which concerns me. I am hoping that it might be related to blood sugar or medication.

Molly starts kindergarten on Wednesday, and is very excited about it. Meanwhile, Marcy will be starting Trevor in home school. There are many reasons that home schooling would be better for him, personality-wise. We will see how things go over the next few months, but we are all very excited about this new phase.

And finally, through an abbreviated version of One Red Paperclip, I turned an iPhone into a new HDTV. The Xbox 360 looks amazing on it! I’ll post pictures once I get it set up.