My So Called Life

Updated Blogging Timeline

/ Shane / Leave a comment

The end of the year/ beginning of the new year is always a time for looking back over the past year and reviewing. So, since I didn’t do any end-of-the-year type post, I’m doing this one instead. I originally posted a “history of my blog” timeline here. However, many important milestones have happened in the last year or so, since I originally posted it. So I am reproducing it below, and then adding the new things at the bottom.

[EDIT: I totally forgot about almost kind of being mentioned on the radio once, see 6/5/2008!]

2/17/2004 – My first post ever. Not very exciting.

8/3/2005 – This was my first post back after a one year blogging hiatus. This was significant, not only because I resumed blogging, but also because it marked a new era. Previous to this, my blog was more of a personal journal, after it became more of a “best of the Internet” aggregator and link place holder, which is more or less what it is today.

8/2/2007 – Announcing the birth of Evie. This post straddles the line of important event in my life vs. important in terms of the blog. However, I think it is safe to say that Evie has had a big impact on blog, both in terms of giving people a reason to check here, and for giving rise to the “Evie Update” category (138 items), and the “From the Mouths of Babes” category (86 items).

3/26/2008 – My first post on WordPress. I can’t say enough how much better WordPress is compared to LiveJournal. LiveJournal has some advantages, particularly in the facebook type community aspect, but in terms of pure blogging power, there is no contest. So switching over to WordPress had a big impact on how the blog evolved after that.

6/5/2008 – After a friend and I both blogged about eating a delicious cupcake named after a radio host, said cupcake was discussed on the program and the host mentioned that two bloggers had talked about him and his cupcake over the weekend. OMG, that was totally us!

6/21/2008 – Childhood hero of mine, Commander Mark Kistler, comments on my blog post about him.

6/23/2008 – A title mishap (in which I may have implied their product causes rickets) brings me to the attention of Bob’s Pickle Pops, ultimately leading to them sending me some free samples. This was the first and only time this blog led to any sort of compensation.

8/25/2008 – Someone from my favorite store ThinkGeek comments on a post. Of course it is the one and only time I am bashing one of their products (for something that was totally not their fault, mind you), but hey, I’ll take it.

1/3/2009 – First post of the 3rd incarnation of my blog, in which I started blogging every day. It wasn’t exactly formal, I was just sort of testing myself to see if I could do it, and then I just kept doing it. At first I planned to blog 7 days a week, but I eventually settled into a M-F pattern. Coming up with 5 topics a week is extremely difficult, and I was worried that the quality would drop off. I don’t think it really has, though I might not be the best judge.

1/21/2009 – My 500th post.

2/17/2009 – My 5 year blogiversary.

2/24/2009 – My 500th comment.

5/21/2009 – The first post after I started to push my posts out to Facebook (and then later, Twitter). This was significant because I think most people I know didn’t really know I had a blog. So this opened us up to a much wider audience.

10/5/2009 – My post about Chicago getting passed over for the Olympics gets picked for the front page of WordPress.com. It was a wild ride which resulted in 10,384 visitors to my site for the month, about 4 1/2 times more than my highest regular month.

4/12/2010 – Oliver’s birth announcement. As with Evie’s birth, I expect many future blog contributions due to this. Of course this spawned the “Ollie Update” category.

11/11/2010 – My 1,000th post. Interesting how it took me 5 years to get the first 500, and less than 2 years to get the next 500.

11/17/2010 – Moved the blog to shanehalbach.com, and also changed the look of the blog for the first time in 2 years (and the first time I changed the color scheme ever, since I started blogging).

11/29/2010 – I had a guest post on the food website Cheap, Healthy, Good. Although it didn’t bring that many hits to my own blog, it was still fun to put a post of mine in front of a lot of unfamiliar eyeballs. (According to this, at the time of my guest post, Cheap, Healthy, Good was getting about 15,000 hits a day…significantly more than what I got in my best MONTH, which itself was way higher than an average month)

Oh. My. God.

/ Shane / 1 Comment

When a company goes out of business, in addition to all the people losing their jobs, there are a lot of other unintended consequences. For example, if back taxes force a poultry farm into bankruptcy, what happens to all the cute little baby chicks?

Well, you have to dispose of them somehow.

Baby chicks were dumped into barrels outside in the winter air before water was added to drown them. Adult birds were thrown into a pit and buried alive with a tractor.

This article is ridiculous. It describes the workers tasked with destroying the 400,000 baby chicks, sobbing as they did it:

“It was breaking my heart seeing the little ones die like this in the frost,” said poultry worker Svetlana Grivko. “We worked round the clock to keep them healthy and comfortable and now we are killing them with our own hands.”

They tried to sell some or give them away, but there were a total of 1 million birds to be disposed of. And the worst part? There’s still another 3 million birds left. The disposal is just beginning.

If this is not the saddest story you read all day (or at least the pictures in the article), then I don’t know what to tell you.

The Creeper

/ Shane / 5 Comments

I renewed my license today. Apparently my serial killer’s license.

 

The last face you'll ever see

Obviously the hooded sweatshirt didn’t help, but it’s the creepy smile / stare combination that really does it.

So, the good news is I’ve renewed my driver’s license. The bad news is, this license only entitles me to drive windowless vans.

Christmas Extravaganza

/ Shane / 1 Comment

We went to church on Christmas Eve, and Evie was really excited. However, we’re still struggling to find a Christmas service that both starts at a reasonable time, and is around an hour or so long. They tend to draaaaag. I understand, you want to get your big choir in, and read all the best readings, and have a Christmas play, etc., but it is very, very stressful to try to keep Evie entertained and quiet while all of this is going on. Especially when you factor in that you have to get there 30 minutes early if you want a seat.

There were still some good moments though, like Evie playing peekaboo with the president of the Cook County board, who sat right behind us. The big thing for Evie was singing Christmas music. Of course, she likes the more commercialized songs and the church ones tend toward the religious. She asked me if we were going to sing Deck the Halls and I was like, “I don’t think so honey.” She likes Hark the Herald Angel Sings, so I thought we might have a better chance with that. However, when we looked in the program, sure enough, Deck the Halls was on there! Who would have thought?

Of course, once we opened the door to Deck the Halls, as far as Evie was concerned, everything was fair game:

Evie: “Are we going to sing Santa Baby?”

Of course, Deck the Halls was at the end of the service and Evie didn’t quite make it. It was a big relief to me when she fell asleep, since I didn’t have to threaten her anymore, but I knew she would be disappointed that she missed it. The first question she asked when she woke up was, “Was it beautiful?” Then she made us all sing it when we got home in reenactment.

As far as the presents go, there were so many under the tree that the meager additions from Santa sort of went unnoticed. The presents I was most excited about were the balance bike, the sizable donations to college funds, the “my first bacon” from Uncle Nathan, and the beautiful, amazing doll house that Sara and Anna had when they were little (which Evie adores).

The bacon, in particular, has caused quite a stir. I can’t tell you how many times someone has said, “I’m bacon!” in the past few days. It was a present for Oliver, but Evie is the one who keeps playing with it.

Evie: “Mommy, shh! Bacon is sleeping!”

However, there were two presents that really take the cake.

Well, the first wasn’t technically even a present. For months now, Evie has insisted that the only thing she wanted for Christmas was a new bed upstairs where everyone else sleeps. Her bedroom is downstairs, by itself, and she’s terrified. It makes me feel pretty bad. So naturally she wants to sleep upstairs where everybody else is, and who could blame her? So, since Santa gave her a bed last year, she figured he’d be good for another one this year.

So my mom had a trundle bed she was willing to give up, so we got that to put into Oliver’s bedroom upstairs. We tried to make it very clear that it was not a Christmas present. It’s Oliver’s big boy bed in Oliver’s room, that he doesn’t mind sharing with her while he’s not using it. Her bed, and bedroom, remain downstairs.

For my part, the grand prize was my new accordion. I have really been wanting to learn how to play the accordion for some time now. I don’t know the first thing about it, but you know what they say: the first step is buying the accordion!

Something tells me you might hear a thing or two about the accordion on the blog in the future…

Doored

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Friday morning seemed like it was going to be great.

Most Fridays, after I drop Evie off at school I have a bunch of errands to do, especially now that we’re down to only one car. Grocery store, post office, what have you. But on this particular Friday, I had nothing to do. I was looking forward to a nice, relaxing morning with Oliver at home.

Fate, as it so often does, had other plans.

I was driving Southbound in two-way traffic on a busy street just a few blocks from the school, when one of the cars parked on the side of the street suddenly opened the driver’s side door. The door opened literally maybe 2 feet in front of me. I slammed on my brakes, but there was no chance at all to avoid it. ::boom:: Goodbye driver’s side door!

After I skid to a stop and I sat there for a minute thinking, “What the heck just happened?” I pulled over to the curb and ran back to see if the guy was okay. It happened so fast I really didn’t know if the guy was stepping out of the car when I hit the door, or if the door swung back and crushed him, or if a piece came off and impaled him to his seat, or what. He was fine and he was like, “How’s your car?” and that’s when I realized I hadn’t even looked at my car.

It wasn’t too bad. Cracked bumper, dented fender and I was missing my rear-view mirror on the passenger side. Certainly drivable. The same couldn’t be said for his car. The guy was actually really cool and we joked about things a little. His was a company car (he’s an exterminator), so he radioed back to base and they said they wanted to file a police report. However, the company was not local, so I called the police and we waited for someone to show up.

Oliver was due for a nap and he fell asleep in my arms pretty quickly, so he slept for the whole ordeal. I was really glad I didn’t have Evie with me. First off, that girl is built out of empathy. She would have wept and wept for our broken bumper. Second off, even though Oliver was heavy, it was a much more pleasant wait than it would have been answering question after question about what was happening and accidents in general.

When the police arrived, they informed us that they would not fill out the accident report because both of our cars were (technically) drivable, so we would need to go down to the station to fill out our report.

Guy: “How can I drive the car, I can’t shut my door?”
Cop: “Can’t you tie it shut or something?”
Guy: “Uh…I don’t have any rope with me.”

Ultimately though, his complaints fell on deaf ears, and the officer wouldn’t fill it out.  The other interesting thing I learned was that there is a law in Chicago that says anyone opening their door and causing an accident is always at fault. This makes sense of course, but it made me feel hopeful this would actually not be listed as my fault, which it totally wasn’t. At this point, I just don’t expect legal things to go my way, you know?

This leaves me with a conundrum though. The insurance company says they don’t care about getting an accident report. In fact, if the guy’s company hadn’t pressed for it, I wouldn’t have called the police at all. I certainly don’t want to drive to the police station and fill out an accident report and all that entails. However, in my experience with insurance companies, they will do whatever they can do to not have to pay for something, up to and including stabbing me in the face. So, when this inevitably happens, do I want to have to say, “No sir, I didn’t get an accident report.” I can’t control much about the process, but I’d hate to have to admit that I didn’t do everything in my limited power to ensure this goes my way.

One more funny thing I wanted to mention was the training of the insurance people. This lady deserved a SAG card! As I’m describing the accident, she was gasping and consoling like I just told her my family was wiped out in an act of genocide. I had a fender-bender, lady! Nobody was hurt!

Don’t think I’m complaining though! I loved it. Although I didn’t need to be consoled, I sure appreciated the effort. In this day and age, with the terrible customer service that we have, and they took the time to pretend to be interested? Well, there are a few companies around here that could take some notes.