Dave Update

For the one or two of you still reading this, here's a little update on the expanding jonesian world here in South Hamilton, MA.

mayTen: Isaac David Jones was pulled by the headSholdersAndTorso into this world by Eva, a midwife at Beverly Hospital ten minutes before two o'clock. We got to hold him too; and take him home with us. Ha! Crazy. Since then it's been the kind of go-go-go you feel when you're in the passenger seat of the car, and you're already ten minutes late to a meeting you don't want to screw up. So it's been hard to sit down and write because writing usually calls out for some sort of settledness vis. one's subject. Yet here, even in theory I don't have the mental capacity to settle down around any subject, much less around the subject who just woke up screaming since Andrew is crying because he doesn't want to go to bed because his grandparents and his aunt are here with their computers, their projects, their conversations and their help. No longer mayTen, I know, but how did I get here? Crazy. But beautiful; Isaac is startlingly beautiful because he is here, and because he is my son, and because his head is so incredibly small and well defined that he looks like he is a shrunken 900-year-old man who glowers around the room with his strange expressions.

mayFourteen-mayEighteen: Even though she knows I am an new father, my boss scheduled me to open the coffee shop every day this week. That is, to get up at five-fifty AM after a night of waking up between sleeping. It's bearable for two reasons. First, I know I won't die on the job: I've already passed through the gauntlet of the worst-possible-scenario-actually-happening (i.e. there by myself, ten customer-deep waiting line of impatient stares, wrap order, frappe order, "oh, can you make that two wraps?" and then the register runs out of paper without warning (rendering it useless until the paper is changed)) and didn't die. Two, because I know I won't be working there past the summer. In fact, I have managed to secure a web-development contract (retainer based) with my brother-in-law's branding company in Cambridge, MA. So it's bearable.

mayFifteen- the house my Grandmother gave sold. This is good news because it means I am no longer in debt; though it won't pay off all of next year because the house is in Eureka, Kansas, and who wants to live in Eureka, Kansas? Exactly. So we didn't get very much, but what we got helps.

maySixteen- As I mentioned, I was able to get initial agreement toward a contract with Soldier Design, a branding company in Harvard Square. I am now cramming my head with as much knowledge of PHP and MySQL as possible so that I can begin building database-driven websites. I've gotten pretty good at Flash since I began contract-to-contract work (mainly writing actionscript in flash) and I've done a number of sites and components for Soldier Design with this. The contract will give me a fifteen-hour-per-week retainer so I can quit my other jobs and focus on web development as my sole source of income (which is very very nice).

OK, we're going to watch dream girls now. Maybe I'll add more in the comments soon, depending if anyone signals that they actually read this!