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Holwerda Worldwide

9/30/2010

From my site statistics...
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In my own defense (or, Make it work)

Courtney works nights, and one of the things I've learned from being a night shift dad is that most people have a sliding scale for parental expectations.  There's "good" and there's "good for a dad."  If you're hustling the kids into church so that you can make it in time for your Bible study, and you're holding sacks of McDonalds, nobody judges you for feeding your kids junk.  They're just amazed that you, a lone dude, kept the babies from starving and even brought them to church!

I like to flatter myself that I'm more "good" than "good for a dad," but the one thing that repeatedly puts the lie to that is having to dress a little girl every morning.  With experience, I've grown much better at it, and I can at least pull Ava's hair into a passable pony tail that stays in place until one of her preschool teachers is kind enough to redo it in the middle of the day.  The problem now is that just as I'm getting good at choosing her clothes, she's grown an opinion.

This is the very cute pink dress I tried to put her in this morning, followed by the outfit that she ultimately got her way and wore.  I tried to talk her into wearing some green shorts instead of the skirt, but she wasn't having it.  I decided that a purple skirt and tan long-sleeve shirt with cowboys on it was not the hill that I wanted to die on this morning. 
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The ones that didn't make the cut

This is actually the third time that I've attempted to keep a blog, not counting blog entries that I made on MySpace (back when I had a MySpace) or notes on Facebook.  Before we get too far into the shared experience that will be Look What Danny Made!, I'd like to take a moment to solemnly remember those who went before.  (Also, this gives me a good way to test my subscription feeds for those who have signed up, without giving them a post full of "Ummm, testing.")

Ocean Size: The closest I ever lived to the ocean was College Station, TX, which is still a good hundred miles from the coast.  Fellow fans of Jane's Addiction will recognize this as the name of the second track on Nothing's Shocking.  Here was my thought process in choosing the name:
What to call this thing?  Well, I like Jane's Addiction.  I'm a big guy.  And that song Ocean Size has the lyric, "Wish I was ocean size / they cannot move you, so no one tries..."  That is deep.
I think in Helvetica block quotes, by the way.

I started this one when I was still pretty fresh out of college.  I'd just moved back to my hometown and started my first job as a programmer.  It was exactly as exciting as it sounds.  There just wasn't much material to write about.  I think I made about three entries, mostly about how I was sorry for not writing more.  Then it sat untouched for a year before I deleted it.

Dispatches from the Western Front:  My friend Laura has kept a LiveJournal since like 1999, and she's great about posting this really honest, funny, searing stuff.  This was back in the day when you needed an invitation to join LiveJournal, so she hooked me up with one and told me that I should try starting a blog, too.  My thought process in choosing this name:
I don't really want to make this blog about any topic in particular, just kind of occasional updates.  I live in Texas, which is West of many spots in the US, or at least still considered as part of "the West."  I have recently seen Patton for the first time, and love it a billion, so I will also try and tie some kind of military reference in to the name.
Voila, Dispatches from the Western Front.  This was the early 2000's, when I was learning how to use CSS.  For non-programmers, that's Cascading Style Sheets, a method of giving your website a very uniform and attractive look across all of its pages without having to code it into each individual page.  It's also very easy to irreversibly screw-up your entire site, as I quickly discovered when I tried to customize the CSS on my blog template.  Goodbye, Dispatches from the Western Front.  I'm sorry you never got a single post.

I can promise you this - in these two instances, you're much better off for not having looked at what Danny made.
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Look at the what now?

First things first, right?  Why did I choose the name Look What Danny Made! for this blog?  This isn't a craft blog, and it's not like I really "make" anything outside of dinner or the occasional ridiculously attractive child.  Actually, the ridiculously attractive children kind of play into this.

My favorite kind of joke is the running joke.  This is why regardless of what the fortune in my cookie at a Chinese restaurant actually says, I will always, always read it out loud as "You will be eaten by tigers!?!"  After the birth of each of our children, as Courtney and I left the hospital, I would hold their tiny little bodies up above my head, Lion King style, and call out to anybody within earshot, "Look!  Look what I have made!"

It took a while to think of something to call this site, but once I burned through all of the faux-deep and annoyingly cute names I could think of, that one stood out to me.  My family is a huge part of who I am, and I'm sure they'll make the pages of this blog pretty often, so it seemed to fit.  Although it's still kind of in development, I hope you'll stick around for more of what I made!