I’m just saying. I mean, really.

I’m not typically one for resolutions. A resolution, to me, is something you choose to do – usually something borne out of guilt – not because you want to, but because you feel like there’s some necessity to do something like that sometime around this part of the year. I don’t buy it, not for a second. If you want to be a better person, don’t make a resolution to do so. Just be a better person. Change your life. Don’t resolve to make a fix, but choose to change. For all your life, and not just the first three weeks of January. Resolution is a dirty word.

So on that note, there are a few things I am continuing to do and some major life events coming in the immediate future. This is a ridiculously exciting time in my life. And I can barely even see past the first half of 2011 right now what with how full it already is.

January: get my PMP, go to ARUBA on our babymoon. Eff. Yes.

February: 2 year wedding anniversary.

March: Last month of training for my ten mile race, and inevitably some major blizzard.

April: I turn 30! Amanda turns 30! And we both die of anticipation waiting for…

May: The big D-Day. D as in DUE, that is. 5/7/2011, as it stands currently.

And then we both have nearly the next three months off to spend together with our baby girl. Paternity leave – SCORE.

All that is just half the year coming up, and doesn’t even account for all the little (and big) unexpected things that are bound to come up. While I am absolutely enjoying this time in my life right now (yes – I said it, I am *enjoying* my wife being pregnant – it’s true, I swear)… the future can’t get here fast enough.

Bring it on, 2011.

The resorts have opened up, and snowboarding season is officially upon us. We even got about 2 or 3 inches of snow on the ground here in Northern Virginia last Thursday – enough to get me out of the office early but not really much else.

I’ll be heading out for a day trip this Thursday to hit the mountain and dust off all my old gear. In the meantime here’s a video I’ve got to share from last year, when I learned to snowboard in my backyard. We had two feet of snow on the ground for the majority of the weekend, and I live in a spot with a large-ish (large is relative) hill on the side so of course I had to take advantage of it. My filmmaker friend Zak, who I’ve known since high school (middle school?) put it together for us.

This video evidence of my learning to snowboard may or may not be partially responsible for my broken wrist last winter that I got when I headed up to an actual resort.

The class is going well. I’ve learned much. But man, my brain is about full. I’m trying to fit in as much daydreaming as possible.

In 2007, I took Amanda to Ireland with me. It was our first time to Ireland, and her first time to Europe. We traveled there in June – rented a car, and spent three weeks circling the island. The occasion for our trip was our second dating anniversary, and secretly also… my proposal.

We landed on the west coast, in Shannon, and traveled through hotel and B&B while we made our tour of the beautiful country. We stayed in Killarney, Cork, Kilkenny, Dublin, Westport, Ballynahinch, and Inis Mor – with a few places in between here and there. I proposed in Ballynahinch, where we spent two nights in a castle over the anniversary weekend.

I have countless favorite moments from this trip…

That last spot there is the view from the place where I proposed. The castle on the river is where we were staying. It was a beautiful day.

Which is why I’m in training for it. All day, every day, for 5 days.

I don’t talk about my job much here but I’ll give you a few brief details since the occasion kind of calls for it. I won’t be writing much else this week on account of the training.

I’m an application development project manager. Which, to the layman, means I work in IT managing projects to develop software (mostly web based) programs. I do a little bit of code myself on account of a small tech department at my job, but for the most part my work is based in planning and communications.

Okay so PMP = Project Management Professional. It’s a credential that I hope to achieve after taking a week’s worth of training and passing an exam (and having been a project manager for three years). Really the worst part is probably the application to take the exam in the first place because I will have to catalog 4500 hours worth of project management responsibilities – which, I’ve completed – for sure – but… well… catalogued, not so much.

Anyway, I’m stuck in a hotel conference room all week (eating terribly shitty food) with my nose to the grindstone. I haven’t yet finished my application – but after doing so, it should take about a week for review and then I can schedule my test. My goal is to take it either late December or early January – but at the same time I don’t want to sacrifice my holidays to studying. So, we shall see.

Due to the major impending life event looming just so slightly over the horizon, the wife and I have been digging up some old baby pictures of our own so we can know ahead of time JUST how cute and adorable this baby is going to be. It doesn’t suffice for us to just figure “oh, it’ll be cute enough” – no, we are bona fide control freaks. You didn’t think it was a coincidence Amanda’s not going to be suffering through a pregnancy in a sweltering DC summer, did you?

So of course we had to pull out all the old photos we could find and compare and contrast our favorite – or not-so-favorite features. And seeing as how blogging is all about over sharing, I thought you might like to take a peek too.

Over about a month’s time in 1981, my mother gave birth to her third son while Amanda’s mom gave birth to her first daughter.

I was two weeks late, which meant not only was I huge (10.5 pounds), but also a bit ahead of the game development wise.

So I pretty much came out smiling. And holding my head up? Oh I got that.

I had that at about 2 weeks (I think typically the neck/head muscle thing comes around 6 weeks).

For a brief period in my youth, I considered a career as a hand model. But then I fell asleep.

A budding interest in food.

Ruined from the start.

Cake rules.

Meanwhile, Amanda came about a week early, and she wasn’t quite as happy about it.

At the time, Amanda’s dad was in the hospital recovering from a plane crash. A pilot in the Marine Corps, his plane malfunctioned while taking off from a carrier and he had to eject straight out in front of the ship, which then promptly cruised right on over him. He was away in recovery when Amanda’s mother gave birth, but ultimately had only broken a leg and was soon back in good health.

And my favorite…

5 more months…

Thanksgiving! Wasn’t it great? I hope everyone had a fantastic holiday, I know I will be daydreaming about it for some time to come. We had a fabulous long weekend with Amanda’s family just a bit further south from here.

Right before the week long planning and coordinating that was Thanksgiving began, I had an opportunity to take a respite with a few friends at a burgeoning vineyard called Cobbler Cellars. Cobbler Cellars is owned by some family of mine, and is a little over an hour out west from DC. The proverbial “doors” of the business are not officially open just yet, and distribution has yet to begin. But, this past October was the first harvest of their vines, and next year they will be selling a Chardonnay in the spring and a Cabernet Franc in the fall.

In the past several years, they have put their life’s effort into revitalizing a farm property that has been passed down through generations. This included far more than just fixing up the property itself, it meant also loads of legal wrangling, property line and zoning issues, as well as resolving the question within the family what to actually do with the place.

Eventually everything started falling into place. Jeff and Laura, who own and live at Cobbler Cellars, started to design the home they would build and prepare the fields they would sow. Last year their home was completed, and it is just beautiful. And now this year, the first grapes are harvested.

So I took Amanda, Ali (of Three Baking Sheets fame), and Bryan (who also got some awesome pictures) out to spend a day there in late November. Here’s a little of what we saw that day.

That mountain on the right there is Cobbler Mountain. The namesake for the vineyard.

First order of business was to hike a bit of the way up the mountain to get the lay of the land. Laura and her daughter Olivia led the way.

We happened to pass a perfect sitting rock on the way. Ali and Amanda took a moment’s break before we headed back down.

After taking a brief walk down a long driveway, we came to the old farm house – still in very decent shape even after 100 years. There is talk of there one day being a B&B that inhabits this space, but as you can see it’s still a couple years away.

We then came back by the house, and…

…we visited the chickens…

…while Daniel and Olivia played with their dog Corky, and we worked on getting some good shots of the family together.

We decided at this point that we would save the actual vines for another day, as they are a bit of a hike away from the house and we were already losing our light. Cobbler Mountain sits almost due west from the house so the sun sets on this farm a little earlier than you might anticipate. On top of that, there wouldn’t be much to see at this time of year. So we made a group decision to bag that part of the tour, and come back in the spring instead.

Of course, we could still go see what was in the cellar…

In addition to the wine, they had some hard cider going (the farm is peppered with old apple trees) which had pretty much fermented, turning it into a kind of apple wine. It was tasty, but a bit tart – no surprise there, I suppose.

Jeff was a generous host and let us sample the wines as they were in production, and even so young you could tell it was going to be really good wine. It was fresh, it was flavorful, and it was delicious. I can’t wait until the whole operation is fully up and running.

We concluded the day with some wonderful chili that Laura had been cooking for us, some rice, and some cornbread I brought along – followed by a pumpkin bread dessert and Ali’s chocolate gingerbread cookies. It was a beautiful fall day and such a nice way to spend it.

It’s really a fortunate thing to have something like this in my family, especially when it’s really just a short drive away. I’ll say again I’m terribly eager to see it take off, and I’m sure I will be writing about Cobbler Cellars again in the near future.

Happy Thanksgiving!!!

There’s been an ongoing conversation in our household for a couple months now, which I imagine is a conversation most expecting couples have around this point in their lives. Although I guess for some it’s not really much of a conversation, if they already know and agree on what they want.

Do we want to know the gender of our baby before it’s born?

The purist/traditionalist in me (which is admittedly a pretty significant part of me when it comes to a number of things, perhaps surprisingly so) says no, we don’t want to know. And I think until we were pregnant I was pretty certain about that, too. At least – any time I ever thought about it in passing, which really wasn’t all that often anyway. I feel technology enriches our lives in so many ways every day, but I also feel like there are many things that are simply best left to unfold naturally. I don’t really know if this is one of them or not.

My wife, being awesome, does not feel particularly strongly about it one way or the other, and so instead she defers to me as to whether we should find out as soon as we can (which, at this point, is SOON) or whether we should wait for the delivery room.

Unfortunately this leaves me with the somewhat weighty responsibility of making the call. And the more I think about it, the more uncertain I am about which way is the way to go. The thing is, I guess I don’t even really feel that strongly that one way is the right way either, surely it’s the kind of thing that every couple must come to their own decision on and what’s best for them is, really, what’s best.

So that’s sort of leaving me at an impasse. I still have some inclination that I don’t want to know until our child actually arrives – that I want that surprise to be there, and to be a part of the actual birth. But I also can’t argue with the fact that it’s going to be a surprise no matter when it happens. So there’s that.

We’ve already decided that, regardless of gender, we will not have a pink nor a blue nursery. So this point is moot. And we’re pretty comfortable with names, too, so no issue there either.

I’m sure that whatever we decide, we will be happy with it. But in the meantime there is much waffling. I have managed to come up with some pretty cute ideas on ways for us to find out early, but again there is still a bit of a nagging reluctance.

What would you do? Or, what did you do?

Why?

A little ahead of the game for Thanksgiving, but perhaps a little too late for ordering a heritage, pastured turkey. If that’s the case, there’s always next year.

Turkeys make a great case study for what’s wrong with factory farming on a larger scale. We can look at what has happened to turkeys as we’ve taken them into the industrial food system and correlate that to all the other animals involved and see a lot of similarities there.

It will undoubtedly cost you a good deal more to buy a heritage breed turkey from a turkey farmer than a broad breasted white from your local Giant or Publix. Mine set me back $80, about twice as much as I would have spent in a grocery store. Nevertheless, there are a whole host of reasons why I am more than happy to have made the purchase.

Of the roughly 300 million turkeys raised in the U.S. each year, 99% of them are from a single breed: the Broad-Breasted White. This is a problem for many of the same reasons that monocropping is a problem – mainly that it reduces biodiversity and therefore strength of species, particularly in terms of disease and pest resistance.

The Broad-Breasted White has been bred for the industrial food system for many generations now – these animals could not survive on there own to any reasonable understanding of the word “survive.” They are dumb enough that they can drown from looking up at the rain. And their breasts get so large and heavy that if they were to survive past expected slaughter date, their legs would be crushed under the massive weight of their bodies. These turkeys are incapable of flying, foraging, and even mating. They can not reproduce! This applies to an extent with most factory animals but with turkeys, the breeding which has led to their large breasts and fast growth had an unexpected outcome – they’re too dumb to know how to have sex.

… and that means, farmers have to artificially inseminate the turkeys. Yep. Every single broad-breasted white, every single turkey you ever see at a grocery store has been artificially inseminated. There are no machines that do this. It’s done by hand. Yes, by hand. All of them – all those 300 million raised in the U.S. per year. How crazy is that? Poor turkeys. Poor dude with that job!

Heritage/heirloom turkeys offer all the same benefits of heirloom vegetables: flavors that can’t be beat, greater disease resistance and pest resistance, and of course scarcity. Many heritage breeds are threatened to the point of extinction, or have long since passed it. Slow Food includes heritage breeds turkey in their Ark of Taste program dedicated to bring foods back from the brink of obscurity by, well, by eating them. And it’s working.

The industrial food system, the system which mistreats and tortures so many millions of other animals day in and day out, is no better about turkeys. I don’t like to write about the gruesome and horrible things that go on at a factory farm very much, I tend to assume that if you’re even here reading my blog you probably know a decent amount about atrocities of that type. But if you want to know more, here’s the general idea.

Turkeys were once, along with the bald eagle, considered a national animal here in the states. It is therefore your patriotic duty to eat, and thereby support and encourage the proliferation of, heritage turkeys. I’m only sort of joking.

A lot of farms take in their turkey orders pretty early in the season, sometimes as early as late spring. But other producers still have some available for order, too. If it’s too late to find a heritage turkey to order in your area this year, make the decision to be sure to eat one for next year. Or for your winter holiday feast.

Need to find a turkey farmer in your area? Local Harvest has a great tool for finding heritage farmers by zip code.