Michael and Jaspenelle

A Year as a Stay-at-Home Mom

Why did I decide to become a stay at home mother? I almost feel a post about this topic needs some kind of disclaimer. Something along the lines of:

Warning: Do Not Get Your Panties In A Knot If You Are A Working Mother. I Have Nothing Against You, Your Child(ren), Or Your Decision. I Am Sure You Are A Wonderful Mother. The Following Post Are Simply MY PERSONAL Reasons For Making A Different (not wrong, but different!) Choice.

Seriously, to be or not to be a SAHM (stay-at-home mother) is a hot topic in the mommy communities, sometimes the debate gets downright vulgar. I have been told more then once that I am a disgrace to the feminist movement and setting “the cause” back decades by being a stay-at-home mother. I hope that most working mothers do not feel this way, I definitely don’t think that working women are inferior. Can’t we all just get along? Anyhow…

Several factors contributed to my choice to be a stay-at-home mother. What was my husband’s opinion? Was it financially feasible? What did I want from my life?

Michael would have supported me either way but in the end, I feel he is content with my decision. Both his an my mother stayed at home, some one could argue it was only a natural decision for us to make. I think it is more then that though. As far as some are concerned, staying at home makes me a doormat. I am certainly not a doormat at the beck and call of some man who lords over me as though I am property. Michael and I make a great team, we are lord and lady of this household and share in it duties. Sure, I do more housework, but then he goes to work everyday and does money generating work. I say it is a fair trade-off. My mother or my mother-in-law fall into the doormat category for that matter.

Financially, it actually made more sense for me not to be employed. Since I lack a college education, my entire wage would have gone towards childcare anyways, which seemed pretty pointless. Besides, to be honest, I really do not like working for someone else. At home, I am mistress of my domain, which is really pretty sweet. Sometimes I do miss the social interaction that comes with service industry jobs, but then I remember the enormous amount of people who were rude to me. At least I only have one person throwing food at me now, and he is a heck of a lot cuter (and doesn’t drink hot coffee…) In the end I could always join a parenting group or walk to the park if I need to find someone to chat with, or call one of my friends of course.

I suppose in giving up a job I am giving up a certain amount of “Me” time. During a workday (lunch hour, breaks, on the way to and from work) I could grab that haircut or do those little errands that are way more challenging as a stay-at-home mom, but it does all balances it out in the end. Michael gives me little Mommy Time so that I can grab that soaking bath, or weed the garden, or whatever I need to do to center myself. Damian and him had a guys afternoon a month ago so that I could go buy some clothes with my friends which was wonderful. Sometimes I spend Damian’s nap time working on a personal project (like knitting, drawing mandalas or blogging.) Yes, it is harder to find me time, but I have also found that it is less important then I initially anticipated too.

What do I want from life? This is the trickiest question of the lot. I want to be happy of course, but what does that mean for me? Can happiness be found at work, going back to college to learn a new skill, dedicating my entire day and night to the nurturing of a child? Seriously, all of those have their pros and cons, but I chose to stay home because the thought of leaving my child with someone every day was just to heart wrenching for me to contemplate. I don’t want to miss one milestone, not the first smile, the first step, the first word, even the first big bump and bruise. I want to be the one to kiss those young and tender hurts away and cheer on the accomplishments. Is that selfish? Maybe. Does it make me happy? Usually. Is Damian happy? I think so. I feel I am fulfilling his needs the best I can because of my decision to stay home, and that makes me truly happy.

There use to be a commercial on tv that said “having a baby changes everything” and I didn’t realize how true that was until we brought Damian home. No transition that big is easy, choosing to stay at home or not is only one aspect of the many choices that factor into life-after-labor. There have been moments where I have wanted to throw a mommy tantrum and run screaming from the house to find “real people” to talk to, but truly, those moments have been few and far between. I feel really blessed that I have been able to chose this life. I feel like I am where I suppose to be and I think that ultimately that is really what matters.

New Site Design

After a few months of work, largely interrupted by Damian’s birth, the new website design is finally up. The previous design had been around since 3/31/2007, so it was well past time for a new design. This new design is intentionally lighter and more clean. I plan to add more Web 2.0 features to it later to make things a bit more slick. The theme is nice enough, I might clean it up a bit and release it for general use. Anyone want to use this theme on their own blog?

Introducing “Video”

I’ve been working on a new website for about 2 weeks, and now it’s ready to share with the world. Quite simply, it’s a catalog of our home videos. Jaspenelle’s Dad bought us a video camera for Christmas, and we have made several videos.

Video by michaelandjaspenelle.com

Most people would use YouTube or some other video sharing site. I considered using them, but I prefer to host web-content myself whenever possible. If you are using a third-party, like YouTube, you have to agree to their terms and deal with their servers and their policies and restrictions. I don’t like being restricted.

The website was actually developed quite quickly - because of several existing open source solutions, I actually had a working (albeit not very pretty) mockup working after a few hours of coding. The remainder of the 2 weeks of development was making things nice and experimenting with different features. It’s built using the following technologies:

Linode

condor.garjasp.com is a Linode 360, a UML virtual server. This let’s me micro-manage everything about my hosting environment, and run any services or software that I need or want.

Ubuntu Linux

The OS is Ubuntu 7.10 Server Edition. I would have used Debian, but they are always out-of-date. Previously, this server (when it was known as manticore.garjasp.com) ran Gentoo (of which I was also a developer), but that became too difficult to keep up-to-date and secure.

Apache HTTPD Server

Only the world’s most popular http server. I have an intimate relationship with this beast, and have tamed it quite well. All configuration is pulled from LDAP (using a set of PERL scripts to autogenerate the config on startup) and is highly optimized to the server environment. For the video site, I have some mod_rewrite magic to create the pretty URLs.

PHP

The website backend uses PHP5. This is used to check for a valid video file, generate and read metadata, get a list of available video files, and allow for different templates based on the URL. It will be quite easy for me to extend the video site to have Categories, RSS feeds, or anything else I can come up with.

FFmpeg

After videos are uploaded to the server, they are encoded to FLV by FFmpeg. It is also used to generate the PNG thumbnails.

Flowplayer

Another great piece of open-source software, flowplayer plays the FLV files generated by ffmpeg. It’s highly customizable and scriptable, so I was able to make it do exactly what I wanted.

Yahoo User Interface Library

YUI provides the core scripting components to make the Web 2.0 features easy to create. I use it for easy DOM access and for dynamically loading the video metadata.

Carousel Component

This is an add-on to YUI that I use for the neat scrolling of available videos.

Blueprint CSS

In the past I have used YUI for designing websites and CSS design. I recently heard of Blueprint CSS, and it works pretty well for what I wanted to do. I’m not actually using much of the CSS framework directly - most of my CSS is actually a modified form of it’s classes. It provides a nice reference and jump-off point that YUI just couldn’t provide. YUI requires too much HTML bloat, and that’s something I’ve always disliked about it.

Currently, the code for the website is not in a releasable state - some things are very specific to the current environment. Over time, I hope to get it cleaned up, add a nice admin interface (right now all administration is done via WinSCP and SSH), and make it more configurable, then I may release it to the general public.

Let me know what you think!

Upgraded

So, I finally got around to upgrading to the newest wordpress, version 2.5. It was quite a pain due to the way I have this site setup. I keep everything in SVN to make it easy to make changes to the code from anywhere, without having to mess with FTP and such. My first attempt at merging the changes failed miserably, and I had to restore it all from backups and start over. The second time, I skipped the svn integration, I’ll have to fix that later, but it’s working for now.

Jaspy want’s a cloud, and to get rid of the categories, so that will be my next project - but not tonight, I need some sleep before I get sick again.

The testament of backups

I had a wonderful birthday. I really did. Jaspenelle pampered me all day (not that she doesn’t pamper me all the time anyways, it was just more so that day). I relaxed, played with the cats, we went to a movie (The Reaping - great movie BTW, you should see it it you haven’t) at a new movie theater in town. All in all I had a good time.

It was just when I was about to go to bed that the disaster struck. I was trying to upload a video of Aos to youtube (check back friday for the feline friday if you want to watch it) when suddenly the internet stopped working. I came into the studio where phoenix, our beloved [web server|file server|router|desktop|beast of a machine] is kept. To my horror, 4 of the hard drives in the RAID array were showing Orange - they had died. Unfortunetly, that was just one too many. To the credit of linux, it was still running - just not very well. The filesystem was giving I/O errors for most operations, and had moved itself into read-only mode. The routing part of it wasn’t really down, just the transparent proxy I had setup that needed to be able to write to disk.

I gave phoenix CPR for a few hours and decided that it was a goner. I shut it off, reconfigured the network so that phoenix wasn’t required as a router, and started to come up with a plan to get our personal websites back online, and allow both myself and Jaspenelle to work on the computer at once (with phoenix gone, we were down to a single desktop: mooncougar).

From 2am to 8am, I pointed the DNS entry for our local computer (local.garjasp.com) to my hosted server. Because all of our personal sites hosted locally used a CNAME to that one entry (actually required because my dynamic DNS can only update one entry - local.garjasp.com), I was easily able to put up a message letting people know what happened:

Server Crash

Our beloved server, phoenix, has had another massive hard drive crash. This time, he signed a DNR, so we are letting him die the death he wishes. Our personal websites will be down until we get another server set up, and our online time will be limited, as we now have to share a single laptop.

Michael and Jaspenelle Stewart, 21-Apr-2007

My plan of action was simple:

• Buy a new computer (woohoo! birthday present), which would be the desktop that I would work on.
• Repurpose mooncougar to be the local file server/router
• The laptop would become Jaspenelle’s “desktop” as that is what she uses most of the time anyways
• Expedite the setup of a second hosted server that will now run all of our personal sites as well as other sites I host. (In the meantime our websites are hosted on mooncougar, which is why they are quite slow)

We ended up buying a Compaq Presario SR5010NX with Windows Vista Home Basic. (Yes, I’ve returned to the Beast — Windows) for a little under $450. It took me the better part of 8 hours to remove all the crap on it I don’t need, put all the crap on it I do need (Firefox, Thunderbird, Gaim/Pidgin, Gimp, gVim, PuTTY, TortoiseSVN, OpenOffice, and Avast Antivirus — I may have returned to the beast, but I still love open source)

While installers were running and files were downloading, I set to repurposing mooncouger. I had originally planned to just wipe it and start fresh, but when I tried to boot from the Ubuntu CD-ROM, it wouldn’t load (it booted, just wouldn’t come up). It turns out that the CD-ROM in mooncougar is on it’s last legs. So instead, I fired up aptitude and put a minus on the x11 category. Then promptly spent 3 hours resolving the broken packages

During all this (still multitasking), I started unpacking the backups. This is the second time I’ve had to restore from backups this year, and it was a breeze. My backup system Just Works.

This morning, in the hour I had before I had to go to work, I got Apache, MySQL, and PHP configured the same way phoenix was, and reset the DNS for local.garjasp.com to point back to mooncougar. I had to leave for work before I could test as well as I would have liked. But most the sites were working fine. A few tweaks and cache rebuilds here and there when I got home today, and everything seems to be working well.

I cannot stress how important it is to have a daily backup routine. Mine is automated, and well tested. If I did not have it, I would have lost everything - websites I’ve designed, jaspenelle’s art, software that is a work in progress (including the entire SVN history), and much much more. If you don’t have a backup routine, and have anything that you can’t lose, then you are playing with fire. It will burn you one day. Hard drives crash. Technology fails. Be prepared. I was, and because of it, I have everything still.

Recent Site Changes

If you did not notice, the blog has changed in many ways other then the new domain name (don’t forget to update that in your blogroll!) You can click the link below this excerpt to see my whole post or my whole blog now and from the main page see Michael’s blog and all our other sites.

Michael built it all (with a lot of my input!) and posted about it in his blog too, I’ll try not to repeat too much of what he said. I think the new design is pure awesomeness. I adore the layout and colours, which we debated about for quite awhile before finding something we both loved. Its all in one place so I don’t have to go everywhere to find everything anymore. I can give people one domain name instead of ten from now on.

I think the layout is pretty self explanatory but if you have any questions or find anything wrong let me or Michael know. I hope that you like it as much as I do.

New Website

We’ve been planning a site such as the one you are now looking at for over a year, a combined blog and portal to our other websites.

After we figured out what we wanted, it only took about 2 weeks to design from start to finish, and then modify the design to be a Wordpress theme. Nearly every page is easily customizable, and this will allow us to create sub-blogs that have a completely different design.

If there is enough demand, I will clean up the code to the theme a bit and release it for other Wordpress users to use. Let me know if you would like to use the theme for your site. (The released theme of course would not have this custom front page - though if you want a custom front page for your wordpress blog, I am available for hire.)

If you find any broken links, images, or problems, please let me know.

Enjoy!

Comments

It came to my attention a few minutes ago people were getting 404 errors on my blog (people you got to let me know when this happens, drop me an email or something! ;)) It problem is fixed now, let me know if anything else pops up.

Public service announcement

So I fainlly went through the 4000 some comments my blog software has marked as spam… hopefully Michael can upgrade my wordpress (where you comment) so that I can approve people on an individual basis and won’t have to deal with the 100+ spam comments I get a day. My other blog uses that technique and it seems to have a lot less problems.

So Eknock, Eala, Kymba, Raven, Ginanne, Venny, Zyleeth, Shafanhow, Skywing, Velen, Dad, flarecarrot, Meowman, WildeRavan, Silerenth, Rah-Bop. Purrmeow and Opaistt are the people I found in my spam filter.

If you comment does not show up don’t worry it just means it has to be moderated because something landed it in the spam filter. Hopefully this won’t happen again but I will keep a closer eye on my spam filter till we upgrade.

Blog stuff

I added an about me page here for anyone interested. Michael found a neat thing so that I can list the books I have recently read on the main blog page. I am wondering if there is a way I can have my most recent up there and then above them the one I am reading at the moment. Kind of how the blogger of You Who? does it on his. Oh and expect the layout of this journal to change soon because this one is incredably boring.

I need to make a note to myself here too, to ask Michael about I can make some custom fields for the bottom of these posts so I can list what mood I am in. what music I am listening to and what tea I am drinking. Mmm tea.