Hows my little Facebook quitter?

Recently I’ve been having this rather large and incredibly corny debate in my head and with other people regarding the world’s largest social advertising network. It all boils down to me realizing tired of facebook and I think I should leave it once and for all. Most of you might remember I’ve done this twice now. I’m probably turning into the boy who cried wolf, but that was then, before facebook had over a billion users, before businesses were pretty much required to have a page, before ads, before those stupid one dollar gifts, before farmville, hell it was before newsfeed was added. That was back when the facebook was solely about connecting you with people.

But now that I’ve connected with everyone I’ve begun unconnecting with them too. I think I left college with three to five hundred “friends”, many of whom I simply attended high school with or met in college classes, I didn’t even have an interest in their ongoing lives. It took a few years but I finally paired my friend list down to around 150. Which to me sounds like a lot of people but some of those friends have over A THOUSAND (facebook) FRIENDS! Which is totally cool, but how can you be interested in that many people’s lives? Maybe you can. Anyway. The reason I’ve stayed with it since moving to Illinois is that it was a great way to keep in touch with the people I like without actually keeping in touch with them. This is just the way life is now, so I won’t bitch about that too.

So here is where my disdain for facebook starts. I’m a guy who just wants to use it to know what my friends are up to. Lately thats been what they’re drinking, where they are, who they married, and what kid just fell out of a vagina. Which is awesome, that’s why I’m connected. But there is also a vast scourge of regurgitated unoriginal content having little to do with anybody’s lives (I’m looking at you ecards). I’ve become a professional at hiding game notifications and requests. I’ve even unliked businesses and other pages because if I want to find more info I’ll just check their page at a relevant time, or I’ll sign up for their e-mail newsletter. 

On top of all of this I have another major issue. Most of what I consider to be my real life closest friends on facebook, the people who I’d like to know what’s going in in their lives, no longer participate aside from the occasional ‘like’ because they are friends with too many people to share their ideas and thoughts. Professional lives have crossed into their personal life, and pictures and opinions are now too dicey to share socially. Facebook made these cool friend lists to prevent such happenings but they are apparently underutilized.

Lastly I hate that newsfeed sorting constantly reverts back to top rather than new. For some reason this isn't a permeant setting and it drives me up the wall. To me, the top post sorting doesn't make sense. Plus I hate when people I don't know bring old posts back from their order by liking or commenting on it days, weeks, or even years later.

I’ve taken great pains to make my facebook time shorter and simpler so I don’t waste so much time on it. I’ve been largely successful but even with all of my efforts of friend lists, unliking and unfriending I’m not getting the same easy straightforward experience I once enjoyed with this social network. 

Which is a roundabout way of saying, maybe I should quit facebook once and for all, I don’t like it anymore. If you’ve read my rant this far you’re probably thinking this blog post has been a lot of whining about one of the most lame and insignificant parts of someone’s life.

Which brings up another point, facebook is no longer insignificant. There are over a billion users. Hell, people in some parts of the world consider facebook the internet. Some businesses opt just for a free facebook page rather than a webpage. Bands announce tours, share links to early releases. Stores announce sales with offer codes available only to people on their page. Authors announce book tours and release dates, newscasts air comments and posts. Not to mention all of the pages just for pushing news, teaching, and entertaining. So leaving facebook can disconnect a person from some of their favorite things in the world, having a tool that makes it so easy to consume this information is rather useful, some might even say necessary. 

So in our digital age can someone feasibly quit?

Of course! But at the same time you have this tool to remain connected to the world. A tool that is relatively easy to use, so quitting just makes life a little more challenging for you. But only a little. So right now i’m not sure if I’m going to totally nuke my account by changing my password to something I’ll never remember and log off for good, or if I’m just going to go inactive to pop on occasionally to check out something I need to know of. What I can say for sure is facebook as a platform isn’t about connecting people any more, its about connecting money to facebook through people and I’m not enjoying myself anymore. 

Also I’m quite certain 95% of my readers of this blog follow the link through facebook so I do have that going against me if I quit. The irony of automatically sharing my quitting facebook blog post to facebook is one I enjoy.

EDIT: I wrote most of this over two weeks ago. Since then I’ve taken all my shortcuts from my phone and computers away so I'm not unconsciously checking. I can honestly say, I haven’t missed it. The only time I needed it was for work, I can just make a work account and nuke my personal one. I’m done folks. Done for good.

After having a conversation with someone else who very recently quit I realized I’m engaging in an uphill battle towards simplicity and straightforward updates which isn't the facebook platform any more. 

I guess you can find me on instagram but honestly most of you have my email address and phone number, I’ll still be around.

Hows my little eclipse?

Last Saturday Laura, Lilly and I got up before the crack of dawn to watch the lunar eclipse. We set the alarm for 4:45am and trucked out to Sleepy Creek to watch the moon disappear. I got a fancy new camera before Lilly was born and now I'm excited about taking pictures of things again.
So I did a little research on how to take pictures of the moon, which is surprisingly tricky, even though it's pitch black outside you're still taking a picture of a great big light source, so my shutter speeds were actually similar to a daytime photograph. When I was reading about this it didn't make sense to me so I went out with more of a trial and error approach. After about 20 minutes of internal panic because I was taking pictures of just a great big ball of light and the eclipse was underway I decided to employ the advice of my research, and sure enough, the people who were experienced in this subject knew best! Shocking!
I ran back and fourth from the car to the camera every ten minutes for about an hour and a half to capture this lovely little stepped eclipse shot.
We were expecting a blood moon where the moon turns red after it disappears but the sun was rising and the moon set over the horizon before we saw any of that. Oh well.
It was a fun night, and now I'm even more excited to take some pictures of stars and to try some more moon photos, next time I'll frame my shot a little better and have something a bit more exciting to look at. In the meantime, if you missed the eclipse I've brought to to you.

It's more interesting if you zoom in.

Hows my little Baby?

Last week was quite exciting for Laura and I.
 
It all started last Sunday at about 8pm Laura had a Gallbladder attack. After lying around the house wondering what the hell was going on (they didn't sound like labor pains) we finally called the hospital and they said, "Chest pain is a sticky thing, you should probably come in, just to be safe." Since Laura was pregnant it seemed like a good idea. After a fun couple of hours, several tests in the ER, and a doctor telling us 'we'll probably have a C-Section but we'll wait to see what L&D says.' We weren't excited but we were remarkably calm about the whole situation.
So we headed up to Labor and Delivery to monitor baby. We were awake for almost the whole night with various tests, a noisy blood pressure cuff, and the false hope of labor. Our nurse thought Laura's cervix had dilated while we were there but had stopped, this seemed fishy only after I had notified everyone we were probably having a baby. After the Doc came in and confirmed she was dilated at 3cm but was not in baby pushing labor, but rather some other mild form of labor with contractions. On that news we went home for some much needed sleep that whole afternoon. That was Monday.

Thursday we had a few things to do in Champaign, we started off by getting our carseat installation checked out at a place that does it for free. I learned that we picked out a good car seat AND installed it correctly! Apparently something like 70% (or more) of carseats are installed improperly. Later we had a regular baby checkup appointment and baby wasn't really moving on the ultrasound so we scheduled a followup for Friday, just to be sure everything was cool. That afternoon we saw a movie in the luxury theatre with recliners, and went out for lunch, it was a great relaxing afternoon together. That night we had a breastfeeding class and learned a lot of basics.
Friday morning we headed back into the Doc and Laura was again hooked up to a monitor and had another cervical exam, about halfway through it our doctor popped her head up and grinned a giant grin and said, "I'm going to stretch your cervix" After some very uncomfortable wiggling from my wife the doctor said you're going to have your baby soon. She had progressed to 4cm over the week.
We hopped into our car and made the 35 minute drive back home as Laura started having her first uncomfortable contractions. By the time we got home they were already about 5-6 minutes apart. I realized I had to take care of some things at work that I didn't want to describe over the phone so I helped Laura inside where her water broke. Back at work I had a bunch of boxes from an Amazon order that I grabbed quickly and turned back to the house. One item was a back massager I thought was going to be necessary for Labor(it wasn't). Laura and been home for 20 minutes tops when the rest of her water burst out with a gush. Again, we hopped back into the car and drove 25 minutes back into town to the hospital.
We got to the hospital at about 11:00am and at about 12pm she decided her pain was too great to manage on her own, she got an epidural at about 1:30pm. It helped for approximately one contraction. She had a second epidural an hour or so later. The second one alleviated pain greatly, but didn't eliminate it like they supposedly do. After about two hours epidural number two slowly began to fail. It wasn't doing anything by the time she began to push, she was now feeling everything. Apparently out in the nurses station someone quipped 'that poor woman needs an epidural', and when they said she's already had two there was a lot of sympathy pouring over from them.
Laura pushed like a champion for about an hour and a half and Lilly Lynn was born at about 5:53PM on Feb. 27.

The rest of the evening was a blur of pictures, food, walking around, calls, texts, and little baby cries. Altogether we had a great experience from the hospital staff and we are thankful that Laura had a relatively quick labor and Delivery.

I like this one for her limp noodle look.

Making the first call home!

First bath in the nursery!

Grandma and Grandpa Davis came the next day for a visit.

Discharged. Hurray

Which brings me to an exciting transition. One of my greatest pet peeves is when People let their kids take over their online presence. After looking from outside into the parenthood box for a long time and now living inside it, I get it, little things that seem adorable are what you want to show your friends and family. Except that I am your online friend, not your kid's online friend (in real life we're all friends). I feel so strongly about this that I'm not giving up my little blogging space for monthly or daily photos of our new little girl. Yes I love her to pieces and yes I think she's adorable and yes, when she shits again I'm going to be happy about that too. So FatTonyTCL.blogspot.com is going to still be full of stories of our lives, random thoughts, and my sometimes weird ideas/observations about the world. Just like when I got Jinx, and when I married Laura the stories will have them involved too.
So if you want to keep up with how little Lilly is growing and changing head over to http://odysseydays.blogspot.com/. I'm very excited to maintain this space with Laura in a similar vein as Scott and Brandee have with their kids. It's already linked over there on the top right box, it's called A Family Journey. This is one of the rare posts that will be the same on both pages.

Hows my little roommate?

Someone recently told me a baby only needs three things, Milk, Diapers, and your love. Which is mostly true. But on those words do not uphold the capitalist America that I know and love. So Laura and I have been busy keeping the economy afloat and preparing for our new person to impact the world.

Last year I set a new low for number of blogs written, getting our baby's things and room put together had a very large impact on that. I could've written a blog on why I thought the Motorola MBP36S was the superior baby monitor on the market, but honestly who gives a shit. Now a blog about a room transformation, that my friends, is something someone will read!

This was probably one of the bigger undertakings Laura and I have set-fourth to conquer around our house. We had to basically gut, clean, paint, organize, and relocate everything in our oversized closet masquerading as a guest room. Thanks to my parents moving (twice) I found many treasures I didn't know of, forgot, or didn't want but left tucked away still existed in this space. But also do you remember moving in your early 20's thinking, why do I have so much shit!? Well combine those things and you have what lurked in all of the nooks of our guest room.

So this was it before we started our uphill battle. It is considered "clean".

 From time to time I would project PS3 games onto the blue wall in glorious surround sound.

One of the first things we did was replace our dresser in our bedroom with two tall chests to hold all of our clothes, this got our clothes out of the room. We were also able to finally donate this ugly dresser to an equally tolerating home.

After resorting clothes, and donating some we were able to start digging through things. See that nightstand? Aside from that lovely decorative copper pot there is a desk organizer complete with some game boy games and spare yo-yo strings from 6th-7th grade. Along with some college projects. Out went the junk and into a tomato box and up to the attic went treasures that I couldn't live without.

Much Better. So much less stressful to look at.

 Our cedar chest didn't fit into our bedroom anymore, this was our temporary idea for it's location. This space felt much better. Look at that nice homebrew nook! I thought it was great until Laura said, I hope you know that's not staying in here. :(

Time to paint! Organized room be damned!

Homebrew nook downsized :(

Let the baby thing invasion begin!

We got a crib(right) and a cradle(far left) that Laura's Dad built for her older brother Scott! This cradle is the family bicycle and everyone's had a ride, from niece and nephew to many cousins! Baby J is up next.

Laura searched high and low for a fun kids rug. After she found one, I looked high and low for a place that actually had it in stock. It took a while but we think it was worth it. Jinx doesn't like it though. She scratches at the different animal faces, she doesn't particularly like the rhino but the monkey has never been scratched at. Weird cat.

 Laura's Co-worker's held a baby shower for her and we got some good loot. Thanks to our hard work there is a home for all of it, with room to spare! (for now)

Laura found a good idea on Pintrest to hold some changing stuff for easy access. So I made one! The day I finished painting the baskets it fell off the wall. That didn't make me happy. Especially since it hangs over the changing pad where baby will spend a decent amount of time. After tripling my number of screws holding it together and reinforcing the wall mount as well it's not going anywhere from here out.

We're officially done setting up for baby, we have all the big things, and almost all of the small things. We are now just building anticipation and waiting for little Baby J to make their screaming arrival.

Hows my little holiday traveller?

Laura and I had a very eventful holiday season, I'll show ya in photos:

We picked out a lovely tree, when Laura's parents visited the underside filled up, we were so good!

We went to MN and here is Leo looking ever so dashing in front of my parents tree!

Homemade pizza!

Silly hats only.

My dad and I got serenaded a lovely rendition of silent night. Everyone did good despite the varying amounts of practice.

We met up with Matt, Ashley, and Mr. Chalmers for Lunch.

We also got to catch up with Sarah and her lovely fella Nick.

Unfortunately it snowed and my chauffour decided it was best for us to go home. We frolicked a bit on our way back to the car though.

I take it back, fortunately it snowed. It finally looked like Christmas! Just a day late.

Our local Heifer.

We got a fantastic day in with the Mailey family, they've all grown so much since we last saw them. I miss them so much.

I participated in a Secret Santa exchange online, with strangers. It was actually super fun and we, well actually, jinx made out like a bandit.

 We headed to the State Museum in Indy to learn about stuff, like Prohibition.

This is a piece of the moon.

Look at the Bones!

That night we met up with Justin and Allison and hopped around town. Justin told us of this delicious treat at Oceanaire and it sounded great, and was. Baked Alaskan, YUM! After that we headed over to the Tilted Kilt to watch the big UFC fight, for a casual like me it was one of the most boring fights Ive watched, lots of decisions, not much ass kicking.

We had all agreed to go see a corny but fun thing called Marvel Universe Live! the next morning. Justin and Allison ditched us last minute, so we went on our own. If you're a fan of the Marvel movies, like a circus, lights, fire, plays, or motorcycles driving around going off jumps and flipping, then you should probably see this. I thought we'd be the only kid-free people. When we walked in I was sure of it, but after we sat down we saw lots of other child free people. It was lots of fun, I recommend it.

After they put themselves together we had brunch, beers, watched some football and parted ways. We drove home in some of the worst road conditions I've been in, but we made it safe and sound.

What's next? We're hunkering down and wrapping up the last of our pre baby preparations and are anxiously awaiting D-Day (delivery day).