Blog News

I have been away from the site for a couple of weeks because my wife had another baby, and I haven't been organized enough to put up a post about it, even just a few pictures. But things have calmed down enough that I should be able to manage to do that at least.

The baby was a girl (this was known in advance), the second daughter after four boys. I'll be 63 when she graduates from high school, and 75 when she turns 30, if I make it that far. I sure hope all of these children will be all right by then, able to make some kind of life for themselves and so on. The general zeitgeist is so pessimistic about this unless the individual person is both unusually talented and possessed of a superhuman work ethic (I suppose it could be argued it is my duty to instill the superhuman work ethic in them, though I am not really sure what the inner qualities and motivations necessary to drive it consist of). I am not quite so pessimistic about this, first because I kind of have to be, but also simply because beyond a certain point the number of young people with a prayer of achieving any sense of success in life becomes so vanishingly small as to become logically unsustainable. What I mean is that the society will have to re-orient its understanding of what is an acceptable or desirable goal for young people, especially those of above-average brightness, to something that is at least reasonably attainable, if it hopes to reclaim some semblance of sanity. I think that it will do this over the next few decades.



The baby's name is Dorothy Harriet. It was tentatively going to be Harriet Dorothy for about a month until it was born, when some reservations about Harriet emerged. I have always wanted to name a daughter Dorothy, though I do like Harriet too. So far I find I am calling the baby Dodo Bird a lot, but this will probably not persist once the child progresses into the early grades of elementary school.

I am backtracking here to Christmas time, which I missed on the site this year. This is all four of the boys at their grandmother's house.

#1 & #4 visit the hospital. With me. This is probably what I look like most of the time.

Completely spontaneous and unposed picture of Dorothy's first homecoming. This was only a week ago. We've had about two more feet of snow and a seemingly continuous decline in the temperature since then. It is not actually unusual for us to get the amount of snow we have had in the last month, but it is unusual to have these kinds of large storms when it is simultaneously 10 or 15 degrees out (rather than say, 29). That's what has really been the story of the weather, to me.

Obviously this picture of my older (age 3) daughter was too much to pass up.