I thought I should say a little bit about the lack of posts on this blog. I’ve not kept up with my recent rate of posting once a week. It would seem to be easy to micro-blog with brief comments on what I’m doing or thinking, but I don’t want to make posts too trivial, either. Some recent posts have been long, including those that I’ve done for Locally Grown Northfield, and then I seem inclined not to post for a while as I attend to other areas of my life.

Those other areas have me very busy, of course: family life, work, home maintenance and housework, church, and volunteer work on bike/ped advocacy. And more.

My test development work has been more involved lately, as I’ve taken on additional projects with stricter deadlines.

I’ve wondered whether I should end the blog or possibly move it to a free service such as wordpress.com. I’m a little bit frustrated that I’ve not learned more about maintaining my own web site. For now I’ll keep it and try to post at least once a week again.

My wife went back to work full time in September, and I only managed three blog entries last month and none so far this month, which is almost half over. My main excuse is that I’m caring for our 4-year-old daughter and our 9-month-old son. We have less child care than we did last school year, because we didn’t want to put our son in daycare yet and we have not found a baby sitter who can come to our home part time. I also remain chair of the Northfield Area Task Force on Nonmotorized Transportation, which can be demanding at times.

I continue to be struck by how demanding parenting is. I don’t have time to do many of the things that I used to do, and there are many other things that I can do less often. In that sense, there is loss in parenting – the loss of old habits and activities. But much is gained, of course, including being witness to developing children and giving and receiving their love. I must remember and be open to those rewards, which are easy to ignore among the many demands of daily life.

Being a stay-at-home dad has also made me appreciate the sacrifices that women have made over the eons as they have raised children and managed households. It can be a very difficult, even isolating task, and it is one that men have too often shirked. No doubt one purpose of patriarchy – the rule of men – in many societies has been to push the burden of child rearing onto women’s shoulders.

Although I’m willing to be a stay-at-home dad and generally enjoy it, I do wonder if women are generally happier caring for children than men are. My experience and intuition tells me that, on average, they receive more joy from being close to children on a daily basis.

Still, this dad receives a great deal of joy from his children, and there is much to appreciate in working under their demands rather than those of a boss or employer.

We’re in the process of doing some updating and overhauling of Northern Letter. Most of the work is being done by web designer Michael Blaha of Organic Arts, who now hails from Taos, New Mexico.

This is still an ongoing process, but it will most likely include the following:

• transferring the web hosting to Dreamhost
• updating WordPress and its plug-ins
• adding the capability to subscribe to comments via email
• improving the backup functions
• incorporating Google Analytics for site stats
• adding “Now Reading” to the sidebar, which links to Amazon.com
• adding a Paypal “donate” button

The latter two options, along with the existing Google ads, may provide some revenue for this site, though I expect any proceeds will remain small. As an “Amazon Associate,” I would receive a small percentage of the sale of books bought through the links to Amazon.

It occurs to me that selling books through Amazon is not exactly a way to support my local economy (unless the author lives here). I wonder if there is a way I could advertise the books for sale at a local bookstore?

In any case, I appreciate the skill of Michael Blaha in making all this happen. With his help, this site is improving. If you have other ideas, just let me know.

I apologize to readers for my absence from the blog. A wife ill with a cold and coping with her own deadlines, children requiring attention, work chairing a task force, travel – all these have kept me from writing new posts.

Meanwhile, the world has gone on. Minnesota has moved into spring. Earth Day arrives, and with it much concern about our world.

Thunder claps in the night here, the first thunder since last fall, I believe. The rain is falling hard.

This writing feels like rain watering my life.

Hardened soil loosens, waking dormant seeds.

It’s been too long since my last post. I was preoccupied with work connected to our city’s Task Force on Nonmotorized Transportation, which I chair. The group organized two October 3 events: Walk to School Day at the Northfield Middle School and a community meeting on biking and walking that evening.

I’ll report more on those events in another post shortly.

This blog is now featured in a blogger “spot” on the Northfield.org sidebar, under “N.org sponsors.” You’ll only see it occasionally there as it rotates through a number of different spots. Thanks to Adam Gurno for including me in this. See the Northfield.org blog and feed aggregator for a complete list of the Northfield blogosphere.

About the picture: yes, the bike helmet never comes off. You can never be too safe.

Another major Northfield web site, Locally Grown Northfield, run by Griff Wigley, alerted me to the Northfield.org update. Thanks, Griff.

This development has prompted me to add to my short list of blogs on the left sidebar. Thanks to those who have done the same for me!

In writing the previous entry I was delighted to find that the New York Times has an option for permanent links to its articles – that is, links or “permalinks” that do not expire or require the user to access a restricted archive. This is something I’ve wanted from newspapers, and according to The Next Net, the Times started doing so at the end of last year (2006). With Times articles, click on “Share” near the beginning or top of the article on that page (on the right), then “Permalink,” and you’ll have the link you want. The Times even has this cool “link generator” for finding permalinks to its articles.

From what I can tell, the StarTribune, the principal newspaper here in the Upper Midwest, does not have permalinks for its articles. For example, when I wrote about a biofuels study in an entry a few weeks ago, I linked to a Dec. 7 StarTribune article on biofuels. When I click on the link for the latter now, I get this “file not found” message: Read the rest of this entry »

This site’s Selected Entries page has been updated over the last few months. See especially my interview with Bruce Anderson of RENew Northfield, an energy visionary. That interview got me started doing advocacy for nonmotorized transportation.

I’ve also added a page for links, which has a modest two so far (!), including The Glebe Cow Drooled, a new blog by my friend Richard Cretan, who is a wonderful writer. The title is from a sentence in Thomas Hardy’s anti-war poem, “Channel Firing.”

I’ll be on a bit of a summer break for a while, enjoying a slower summer pace. Hope you can do the same if you haven’t already.

Thanks to City Pages Blotter, which included this blog as “Minnesota Blog of the Day” on July 25. It’s now listed on the City Pages Minnesota-Based Blog Directory.