This is my second three-day week in a row. Thanksgiving turned out really well what with the food and family and friends and the day off. Tomorrow, I’m going to be in meetings all day long and Friday will be a day off, which I’ll spend driving up to Palm Springs for a two day photo shoot.

Although the blog has been titled “We’re So Tired” from the beginning, I have to admit that there hasn’t been all that much to be tired of lately. Anna has been sleeping very well for quite a while now. Tara has the occasional nightmare, or early morning wakeup, but Anna can often talk her back down. Sometimes I get up early in the morning and hear Tara jabbering to herself, with Anna trying to get her quiet. A couple years ago I seriously thought that I would never see the day when Anna actually wanted to go back to sleep. Last night was an exception, and Jennifer was up with the girls for a few hours. It’s only because the streak has broken that I feel comfortable mentioning it in the blog; ever other time I’ve done so, I’ve totally jinxed myself.

Getting back to Palm Springs, I’ve been wanting to plan a family vacation lately. Every time we take time off, it’s to go visit family. Don’t get me wrong, family is great, but I’d like to have a “just us” vacation for a change. While I’m in Palm Springs, I’m going to make some time to check out some rental houses and condos. Southern California is a really amazing place, and now that the kids are getting older we really should start enjoying more of it. If I can’t find anything good in Palm Springs, I might expand the search to Arizona–maybe Sedona or the Grand Canyon.

I’ve decided to blog for half an hour a week. I’m a very slow writer when I’m trying to be funny, so these posts are going to be short and funny or long and boring. I can tell already this is going to be the long and boring type. Also, there will be no editing after the post, so typos are staying in. I plan to post regularly on Wednesday evening, but this week will be an exception.

I’ve been planning for the last few days for Thanksgiving dinner. I’ll be cooking as usual, with Jennifer’s cousin stopping by for dinner as well as one of my coworkers. In all, I think there will be about eight hours of cooking involved. The menu:

• Turkey (butterflied)
• sage cornbread stuffing with sausage
• garlic mashed potatoes
• sweet potatoes
• corn pudding
• apple crisp

At least half of the cooking I can do Wednesday (which is why I’m blogging on Tuesday). Thursday, there will be a family & friends football game in the morning, so I don’t want to leave it all for Thursday. I don’t have any plans in particular for the weekend, however the next weekend I’ll be going on a multi-day shoot in Palm Springs. It should be pretty darn interesting.

I don’t remember if I blogged at all about the fitness competition I helped shoot a few weeks ago; I had learned quite a bit from shooting the Hooters pageant in Vegas, and applied those learnings to the fitness shoot. One of the things I learned is that I really need f/2.8 lenses to shoot indoor events, but I think that I’ll just have to wait until Canon comes out with the 5D Mark II, and I’ll hope the lower noise will let me shoot saleable photos at ISO 3200.

I’m not exactly sure what to do with this blog. It’s sort of fallen in a state of disrepair, like an old abandoned house. Nobody lives there, I just show up often enough to keep squatters from moving in and turning it into a crackhouse. I really either need to force myself to post something on a regular basis or give it up entirely. Or to use Flickr as my primary posting site, as it’s quicker to take a picture than it is to write 1,000 words. Lately I’ve been making a concerted effort to keep my focus on what I’m doing, and finding that it’s very difficult to do unmedicated, but I know that it helps to limit the number of tasks that I am working on at the same time. One idea I had was to more rigorously schedule some of my activities. Blogging could be something that I could to in a specific 1/2 hr. period each week. It isn’t much, but really, that’s the amount of free time I’m working with these days.