Terribly Happy

I went to Winston-Salem / Wake Forest University this week, which as near as I can tell specializes in tobacco legends and beautiful campuses with sexy trees. I will tell you about that in a bit.

First, let me fill you in on what I’ve been working on the last few weeks on these, our very best Internet delivery systems.

Last week, I did a Digital Savant column explaining how to get up and running on Tumblr. Tumblr, which I have sometimes derogatoraliciously compared to Livejournal, is actually a really great, simple blog platform and if you are already a Tumblr Pro, this will probably seem pretty elementary to you.

I started a Tumblr blog a while back when we were still doing Age of Lasers and a second one I set up with just my name lay fallow for a few years, Tumbled, if you will.

So I revived it and got back in there, tickling the Tumblr until I felt satisfied I could properly discuss it. Your own satisfaction may vary.

That same week, I did a Digital Savant Micro about WordPress, the software running this here very blog thing you are just now mind-melding with. Seems like those two things would go well together, like peanut butter and … a butter knife?

I wrote about Yellow Cab Austin’s new tech upgrades (which will be part of a future column on Austin transportation stuff) and tomorrow’s column is about how we Photoshop ourselves online. The Micro for this week is about Apple’s new Passbook app in iOS 6.

You may have noticed in there that statesman.com and austin360.com have been completely redesigned. It’s part of an entire content management system upgrade we’re doing that has been the subject of lots of training and discussion in the newsroom. It’s a lot to get used to, but we’re all trying to keep our heads up through so much change this year.

We also made the transition to have our pages laid out elsewhere and the lights went out officially on our copy desk. I would talk more about this, but honestly it would just make me incredibly sad and blubbery. I’ll just say that some of these people shifted into other jobs and that’s fantastic, and other people left and that sucks so hard that every one of us working there feels it, badly.

It happens every now and then that someone will ask me in an email to go somewhere to talk (or to ask questions so that other people can talk while I nod with understanding).

Often, these conversations end abruptly when I say I can’t do it because it takes work to go somewhere, even if the talking itself is not as much work as the going. Things usually break down over travel, which I try to avoid when it involves being away from home for more than one night, or money, which is frequently not offered at all.

Sometimes, I’ll get asked what it will take to get me to go somewhere and I’ll throw out some information and then never hear back, as if the information was trapped in a bottle thrown to sea.

But maybe once a year, all the details work out and I actually go somewhere.

This time, it was to North Carolina to moderate a forum on cyber-communication.

At one point, I wasn’t sure if this was to be a solo presentation or if I were going to moderate, but as the weeks got closer, I double checked to make sure I didn’t need to be spending many backbreaking hours in the PowerPoint salt mines (salt mines with a very bland border and text that slides in from the right) or that there was no A/V I needed to work out on my end.

This thing, it turns out, was more geared toward radio as it was a public radio station (and the generous Forsyth Education Foundation) brining me in. They were more concerned with getting decent audio than showing faces on a screen. So I did a pre-interview with the station (click here to hear me ramble about tech and kids for five minutes).

I coordinated with the other panelists over emails, putting together a list of questions and when I arrived, we went through everything again, resulting in what I thought was a really good panel covering a pretty broad set of topics, from cyberbullying to online defamation to what the future is for digital natives. You can hear and read some highlights from the panel here.

As for the trip itself — you guys! Have you been to North Carolina?! It’s totally beautiful and awesome! Everyone was super nice and the trees were all clumped together and endless and I ate shrimp and grits while two charming older people regaled me with tales of their college years and the place I stayed was a B&B in Old Salem, which is like hundreds of years old and… wow. For the fewer than 20 hours I was there, I just kept wishing I could stay longer to check out the bakeries and walk around and just experience it a little more because what I saw was great. I saw a statue of R.J. Reynolds! The Nabisco guy! (He’s not the Nabisco guy.)

I mean, check this out:

That thing pumps real water!

And this fire station probably predates actual fire!

My breakfast was a really great feast, which this photo only shows a fraction of. See that? That granola is homemade, yo!

The fun continued after the panel when my hosts took me out for drinks. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t drunk. I mean can you get drunk from two mint juleps? Oh, you can? If you’re a gigantic pussy?

Well, that’s me, I guess, because I went back to my room and started Tweeting strangely about how much I love the trees in Winston-Salem.

I’m not saying I’ve had a little too much to drink tonight, but I AM going to attempt to kiss every tree in Winston-Salem. TOTALLY DOABLE.

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) September 28, 2012

Listen, North Carolina. If you want me to stop kissing your trees, you’re going to have to make them a LOT less sexy. #treekissnight2012

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) September 28, 2012

I also sent some @replies that probably sounded even worse to anyone who saw them out of context:

@emmalabizarre can’t talk. KISSING.

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) September 28, 2012

@thescottcsmith No, in Oregon I get to third base.

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) September 28, 2012

@gigastacey I’m kissing trees. … WHAT?

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) September 28, 2012

The next morning, I may have expressed some regret.

Oof. Head hurts and my mouth tastes weird. Did I… did I kiss some trees last night?

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) September 28, 2012

And… finally:

I think you’re great, North Carolina trees. I don’t regret anything. Let’s not make things weird, OK?

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) September 28, 2012

So all that happened.

And I got a pretty photo before I left.

I haven’t forgotten that I promised you a funny car story. That’s coming, I swear, very soon.

Something else is coming, not sure how soon, but it’s on the way. Here’s a little visual clue:

‘Do we look too hot for this apocalypse or what?’

I’m having fun lately — not, Oh my God, that roller coaster was insane! fun — but some satisfied fun, the kind I can allow myself when I feel like things are rolling along and I’m not somehow lagging behind.

I hit a goal on the writing project I mentioned earlier and I started working on something with my brother that we hope to roll out in a little while. We’re going through some big system/software changes at work, but this time the stuff we’re being trained on seems to me like a pretty big improvement over some of the things we’ve gotten used to and in one big way, it’ll offer me a lot more flexibility with how and where I do my job, so that’s nice.

So, I’m not doing cartwheels or anything, but I’m pretty happy. OK, I did a cartwheel. One cartwheel. Just now, I’m sorry you missed it, it was a tiny cartwheel, you shouldn’t have blinked.

Part of the fun has been settling in to a rhythm with the Digital Savant columns and the newer Micro mini-features we introduced more recently.

This week’s column allowed me to flex my dormant TV critic muscle in talking about the new, ridiculous, kinda wobbly J.J. Abrams-branded pilot episode of Revolution. It turns out that I haven’t forgotten how to write about goofy, earnest fantasy sci-fi, and in this case my editor had the great idea of writing about the show’s plot of a mass blackout in terms of how we live with technology.

What I did not anticipate was how badly the show wants to be The Hunger Games.

I mean, look at this guy. Just LOOK:

Last week’s column was about Mike Daisey’s one-man play The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which he performed in Austin for three nights.

Photo by Kevin Berne, courtesy of UT-Texas Performing Arts

The phone interview we did was good, I thought. Daisey was generous was his time, thoughtful in his answers and only a little cagey and indirect when I asked him whether he regretted participating in “Retraction,” which is how the column ends.

What surprised me much more was seeing the actual show, more than a full week after I’d written the article. I didn’t have any obligation to review or follow up the column, so I was able to attend the show without a notebook in front of my face and to just see it as a theatergoer.

It was funnier than I was expecting. I was expecting a depressing, searing lecture on human rights abuses and that does come toward the end and sprinkled inside some pretty amusing thoughts on what it is to be a geek, an Apple Fanboy and someone suddenly thrust in the spotlight and suddenly interacting with people like Steve Wozniak.

It played to about half an audience; the night I went it had the bad luck of being scheduled at the same time as an away UT football game and the theater was on campus.

The play had some very recent updates, including mentions of a recent Chinese student labor scandal and some thoughts about the iPhone 5 launch. Daisey suggested at the end of the show (after accusing all of being complicit and not doing enough to stop Apple and Foxconn’s shoddy labor practices overseas) not that we stop buying Apple products, but that at least in the case of the iPhone 5 that maybe we should wait a few weeks. Big product launches tend to be where the worst of the working conditions take place and not rushing to be the first to own the new iPhone might relieve some of that pressure.

Judging from what pre-orders look like, it’s a message hardly anyone heard or heeded.

The Digital Savant Micros are starting to feel a little more substantial and newsy when we can make them so, like one we recently did explaining Reddit and tying it to an event that was in the news. This week, we did a Micro about how you can tell why a website’s not loading tied to last week’s GoDaddy outage. (Which actually did affect a website I own, but since that site gets single-digit traffic per day, I’m sure nobody noticed.)

Other recent stuff I wrote included a follow-up on Ken Starks, a man I wrote about two years ago, who has been having some health problems and got some much-needed support from the Linux community and, of course, a wrap-up of the iPhone 5 announcement. (And no, I’m not upgrading this time. Perfectly fine with my 4S and my wife, who is out of contract, has no interest in getting a new phone right now).

Every year I always lament the passing of summer because here in New Braunfels, that’s when all the fun stuff seems to happen (except Wurstfest. Oh, Wurstfest, you cannot get here soon enough).

This year, we went to the beach, I got to go tubing, we made plenty of trips to Schlitterbahn and it was a mild enough summer that we actually got to go outside and even got some rain, not like last year’s endless drought.

So instead of complaining that the cool weather got here too soon and that the season is behind us, I’ll just enjoy these pictures and be glad that as the girls are getting older, they’re getting to enjoy more of the summertime as they start transitioning into school every August.

Oh, one more thing. I have a story about my car that I’m going to save for next week. I would write it tonight, but something else just happened and I want to see how the story turns out tomorrow before I put it into words. But it involves a collision, a court appearance, a missing antenna and several other twists and turns.

You won’t be able to put it down! Or click off of it, or whatever.

There was a little bit of worry that the euphoria bump from some recent trips might go quickly away, that things would settle back into the pre-trip rut before too long, but that’s not what happened.

Instead, in a really nice way, that renewal held and, just as shit has a way of snowballing downhill, so do good things move the opposite way if you’re willing to get behind the boulder and push a little.

For me, pushing has meant going from, “I just don’t want to write anymore” to writing a lot and not feeling so drained by everything. I pitched an article idea to CNN for the first time in ages (more on that in a minute), started feeling more energized about Ye Olde Work Blog and had an annual evaluation with my editor that left me feeling really supported and appreciated through some tough work times.

All those good things led to other good things and suddenly, things feel normalized. Or stabilized. Something “lized,” for sure.

It’s hard enough to clear your head enough to let your mind wander around an idea for a while and to generate something, and nearly impossible when you feel low on energy and your head is buzzing with a bunch of other stuff. But the recent clarity (and some fortunate early holiday deadlines) allowed me to spend some real time working on this Digital Savant column about the echo-chamber effect of social media.

My editor and I had been talking a while about how we might approach a story about the 2012 election cycle without repeating the obvious stories about the campaigns using social media and What That All Means. So instead, over several weeks, we chatted about it in our meetings, brainstorming out loud about our social media habits and what we were/weren’t seeing and the column is a direct result of those conversations.

One post-note: the day after I wrote that column, but the day before I put it online, my Twitter stream suddenly was flooded with Tweets about the Republican National Convention, including posts from one person who I had to unfollowed when he (of course it was a he) dropped the C-word in reference to a female politician on TV. So, perhaps I wrote the column a tiny bit too soon, but I think what it has to say about how we silo ourselves within our social networks applies to a lot more than politics.

Paired with that column, which runs in print on Monday, is a Digital Savant Micro about the humble USB Flash Drive, which also goes by other names. There was also a video game review I did of “10000000,” an iPad game that I was completely hooked on while on the trip to NYC. Sorry to pass along this crippling addiction if you choose to download the the game.

Now, about that CNN story. Like a lot of people, I’m obsessed with Breaking Bad and at some point in mulling over a recent episode, I had the idea that Walter White’s empire building reminded me a lot of Apple and that his rise to the top was only going to make things more dangerous for him and his family.

I wrote up a few paragraphs of notes and pitched it in an email to my CNN editor, fully expecting that this was going to be too zany an idea and that I might need to consider pitching it elsewhere or publish it on my own here. Despite my editor not being a Breaking Bad fan, he greenlit the column and it ran on Friday after a few days where I nervously wondered if the piece would get sidelined before the half-season finale.

The comments were exactly what I expected this time: a few notes of support and many more decrying the ridiculousness of the piece and CNN’s silliness in running it. To one commenter, who said it was just more flotsam on an Internet full of junk, I ended up replying, “I stand by my flotsam.”

The thing is, I know the article is a stretch. I’m comparing the world’s most successful company to a homicidal meth kingpin. But that doesn’t mean the TV show doesn’t have some things to teach us about greed, about karma, about how bad decisions can doom even the best of intentions. Once I pitched the column and got to writing, I was terrified that I wouldn’t have enough material to pull it together. Instead I wrote about 300 words past my word count and had to stop myself from including more threads of comparison.

Right before I started writing this post, the piece was posted on the front page of Slashdot. It’s been fun watching the reaction from some of the smartest people on the Internet (it was also on some of the Apple news sites and on Hacker News), even the ones who think I’m an idiot for writing the column. Call me an idiot, call me wrong, call the entire premise absurd, just read it and talk about it and I’ll be over the moon for days.

Another reason I had a little thundercloud trailing overhead all summer was because I dreaded, absolutely dreaded, the idea that starting in August, I was going to have to get my ass up super early, which I may have mentioned last time.

Is has not been so bad! I mean, it’s not great, but my kids have been handling it well and on the nights I’ve been able to get to bed, it’s been pretty OK. 6:30 a.m. is still much lamer and darker than 8:30 a.m., but the advantage of dropping my kids off so early is that I get to go back home and either nap for an hour or hang around and make some eggs or check email and get a jump on work or do pretty much whatever I want until traffic dies down and I head to Austin.

I’m in a lot less of a rush and the day feels longer. So, perhaps the early risers kind of have a point. It’s not like it’s up for debate. This is the new reality for a very long time and in just a few days, my kids were already fully adjusted to the new rise time. I’m still not quite there, but it’s not the disaster I thought it might be. The kids are too tired at that hour to put up a fight about their clothes or breakfast preferences and Lilly has been enjoying kindergarten too much to make her dad miserable in the morning.

In fact, the only tears came on the first day of school. Not from her. She was beaming. Her dad, though, may have gotten misty over how grown-up a 5-year-old can already seem.

We went to the beach and even though I didn’t do a lot of swimming, I could still feel the salt and the cool gulf water cleanse away a lot of the residue that this year has left on me.

Not that I was in a bad way or needing saving or anything like that, but this has felt like like a very rough 2012 for a lot of people I know and although my year started badly and a few curveballs have been thrown my way, I feel very lucky overall.

But the trip to New York City and now a trip we just took to south Texas for a wedding and a beach trip to South Padre Island both cleared my head to the point that I could see how foggy things have been in there for months. We hadn’t traveled in a very long while and I hadn’t taken a proper vacation in so long that I was just in a really bad way creatively and feeling completely uninspired in a lot of ways. I didn’t even want to write anymore for a short time; that’s how bad it got.

But the break from the routine and have a change of scenery both with the girls (beach fun!) and without them (NYC!) really helped. I’m just in a better mood, and a little more inspired and my energy to create stuff, which felt completely sapped for most of the summer, has returned.

In the week since we got back from South Padre, I wrote 10 new pages of the “Project,” successfully pitched a column idea to CNN (which I’m both nervous and excited to write this week) and got back in the routine of saving time for myself to jot stuff down and have real time to write instead of wasting my night in front of the TV or skimming Twitter and starting up way too late at night to get any real stuff done.

The beach itself was a very short time — we were only at South Padre Island for a day, but it was the first time Carolina had ever been to the beach and only the third time Lilly had seen it. They loved it, just as we expected. It’s deep in their genes to love that place. My wife and I both grew up near there and spent big chunks of our childhood on that sand, playing in those waves. It was very important for me that the kids gets to visit it this summer, no matter what hassles might be involved in a road trip with two kids who are not the most patient travelers.

We ate lots of seafood, let the kids run back and forth to the surf until the sun was setting and wished we could stay three or four more days. We’ll be back, I know.

Even though I was on vacation for a few days the Digital Savant column continued like a mechanism with a ticking clockface. Last week’s column was a back to school tech gift guide where I tried to steer away from the more obvious laptop and tablet choices toward accessories and other must-haves.

The Digital Savant Micro that week was a definition of “domain names”: what they are and (to some degree) how they work.

The next column, which runs in the paper on Monday, is an explainer about the South by Southwest Panel Picker. Every year there are lots of misconceptions of how it works (and discussion about if it works), so this was an attempt to demystify it a little and explain why it’s next to impossible to go through all the proposals. (I usually just wait until the actual, finalized programming is announced since I don’t allow myself to vote for or against panels anyway in my role as someone who covers the fest as a journalist.)

This week’s Micro is a definition of the term “YOLO” as it appears online.

The CNN column I mentioned, if all goes well, should run at the end of this week. It’s tech-related, but it’s timed to next Sunday’s finale of Breaking Bad. Trust me, if I’m able to make this piece work, it’ll all make sense soon.

The other big thing happening this week is that Lilly starts kindergarten in the morning. That means I have to go to bed, like, 10 minutes ago. I have to get her to school every day by 7:45 (or earlier), which given my morning crankiness seems like a superhuman feat. Her daycare was much more lax about such things and the girls were only required to arrive anytime before 9:30 a.m.

7:45 a.m., it sounds like, is much earlier. I don’t really know because I have very little experience with 7:45. It sounds awful, frankly. I don’t know why people put up with such a horrible-sounding time of day. Are there better donuts at that hour? Public nudity? Something I’m not aware of that makes consciousness at that hour more rewarding than an 8:30 wake-up?

I think I only have to keep doing this, the getting up far earlier than I would like, for something like 10 more years, so… we’ll see how that goes.

I did a weird thing I haven’t done before which was to mix a long-awaited week of vacation with a self-imposed writing/reporting assignment. While traveling.

I do not advise it.

We went to New York City, which I love, my wife, our good friend Jessica (of last year’s super fun Vegas trip) and I.

The timing of the trip was for the big BlogHer conference, a convention for women bloggers, which I decided I should attend. And here’s where things get complicated.

I work for a newspaper and do freelance stuff for other outlets but the decision to go to BlogHer and write about it (without even knowing for sure whom I’d be writing for in the short term) was entirely my own. And here’s where we need to discuss something I’ve intentionally not talked about here or anywhere else publicly. I feel like I’ve told many of my friends, my family, some of my co-workers and pretty much every person I met at BlogHer, when they would inevitably ask, “Wait, why are you here?”

And that thing is this: I was at BlogHer because I was doing research for a writing project. If it were finished or much further along, I would call it a “book,” but it has been such a struggle and there are not nearly enough pages yet to call it a book, so it is a “project” until it gains some respectable paper weight. It’s about mom bloggers.

The other part of this thing is that it’s actually been something I’ve been working on for a while. A long while. So long that I don’t even want to say how long it’s been given how little progress I feel has actually occurred, writing-wise.

But, and this is the part that’s been keeping me sane, I’m not doing it alone. A while back, when this whole idea started, I approached a good friend of mine, Tracy O’Connor, a woman I’ve known and been penpals with since I was 15, about working with me on this. She’s a great writer, she’s very funny, she ran a message board with lots of proto-mom bloggers on it, and as a mom of five boys, she knows a lot about culture of these online groups. Together, we’ve had lots and lots of conversations, done research until our eyes were ready to fall out and have done quite a bit of actual writing. Unfortunately, we had to put aside a lot of it when we realized we were going to have to start over due to some plotting issues. This happened earlier in the summer. It was a bit of a confidence rattler.

This summer in particular, as I’ve watched several friends go through the process of completing and publishing books, has been tough. I keep screaming in my own head, “Why can’t you do this? What the Hell? What’s stopping you?” And the only answer I have is that it scares me. A lot. The bigger the writing assignment, the more I freak myself out about the scale and scope of it and the less I end up just enjoying the process and letting the good vibes and word counts flow. It’s started to affect my other writing, where I just want to avoid the keyboard altogether (like this delayed blog post, for instance) when the thought of writing in general begins to fill me with anxiety. Which it shouldn’t. I mean, come on. I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve written millions of words. But I was unprepared, probably, for what a different beast something like The Project could be and how much you have to commit. I’m used to writing things, sending them out and moving on to the next thing. When the things I write are done, they are done. Living with one piece of work for so long has really messed with my head in unexpected ways.

But I’m also filled with determination to see this through and to do my best writing (and self-editing) with Tracy and see what we end up with. The earlier draft we did, the one that ended up pointing in the wrong direction plot-wise, I actually really liked. We were writing at a good clip and more than 100 pages were produced, pages that we were genuinely proud of. I know we can do it again and push it through the right way.

So that’s what’s been in the works: a “project” about mom bloggers. It’s fiction and we think we know where we’re going, but boy have there been setbacks and writer’s block (which I used to say I never got; ha ha, good one, brain) and frustration, but also in many ways it’s been very fun and challenging to get into someone else’s head and explore a world that is in very few ways my own.

Tracy has kept my spirits up at times when I would have just packed it in and moved on to something else and my wife at one point asked, “Isn’t rewriting and starting over normal for something like this?” I had to confess to her that I had no idea. I guess? Yeah. Probably. Damn.

I’m glad we’re sticking with it and I’m glad I went to BlogHer. It was a huge help seeing for myself a lot of what’s at the heart of what we’re trying to write.

But trying to balance a for-fun trip with a for-work conference that I was already really nervous about attending completely wiped me out. I was stressed and not sleeping well and came back from the trip more exhausted than when I left.

That’s even with eating lots of fantastic bagels, going to the Top of the Rock for the first time and doing some enjoyable Times Square people watching when I did have time to go out and enjoy myself.

Tell me this doesn’t look like fun:

OK, it wasn’t all nearly naked guys in Times Square. We did have time for a little sightseeing and delicious pies from Pie Face.

As for the conference itself, I laid out most of my official thoughts and observations in this week’s Digital Savant column, where I discuss the state of blogging through the prism of the conference.

I could have written a lot more (hey, maybe a book’s worth!) about the conference, really. There were lots of great insights in the panels I attended, a frenzy over products and swag I couldn’t quite get my brain around, and many good conversations I had with women who — when they learned what I was working on — offered not only great advice and stories, but who pointed me in the right direction to other bloggers, websites and events that I should look into.

The organizers of the conference allowed me to attend as press, which made the whole venture much more official for me and allowed me to go into work mode while I was there. I took lots of notes, shot photos and tried to remember as much as I could so I could share with Tracy later (she was unable to attend).

As much as I tried to blend in and observe, it was never far from the surface that I was one of the few men attending the conference. There were others, of course; BlogHer has more than 5,000 attendees, including expo exhibitors and they’re not all women. But I was so in the minority that my presence itself became a topic of conversations I had. I kept getting asked how it felt to be there with so many women, jokes were made (not by me!) about the estrogen levels in the rooms and, especially at the evening party events, I became very aware of how outside I was of these groups of bloggers who have made a pretty large, diverse community for themselves.

I can sit in a panel and absorb presented information like anybody else, but I can’t go to a party and pretend that I don’t know a single person there.

I had been warned by friends who’d attended before that the conference would be overwhelming and that the parties and swag are out of control. I’m not sure if that’s true since I wasn’t invited to some of the more private events, but I did witness an awful lot of grabby-grabby at the one swag event I was able to crash and in the expo halls, where everything from health supplements to iPhone cases to brightly colored dildos were being given out like Halloween candy.

It was fun to see some of the veteran bloggers react incredulously when bloggers who haven’t even been writing for more than six months asked why they don’t yet have a big audience or sponsors. The stories of successful bloggers who’ve quit their day jobs to do it full time have become so typical that everybody thinks they can do it. I’ve been getting paid to write for going on 20 years and I still don’t have the guts to do that. It’s hard out there and even the pro bloggers are killing themselves trying to keep the money coming. Yes, they get free trips and lots of product samples and ads on their sites, but my sense is that even for that top tier of bloggers, the money is not nearly as plentiful and the lifestyle as carefree for them as people might think.

Like I said in the column, it was a really well-run, well-structured, professional conference. I’m glad I was there and when I returned, I felt a rush of confidence for The Project. We have a lot more material to work with now.

A few other things: the column the week before the BlogHer thing was a collection of reviews, one of the Telltale “Walking Dead” video game (really good, surprising and well-written) and Sphero, a robotic toy ball.

There were also Digital Savant Micro features about what display mirroring means, one about RAW images and one this week answering a reader question about getting old photos scanned to digital.

Before we left, we had a small, early birthday party for Lilly. Weeks later, this last Monday, she turned 5.

It’s been easy to get distracted parenting her because she has a younger sister and the two of them have built their own little world of playtime and fights and giggly jokes. Unless we physically separate them, it’s sometimes hard to remember what it was like when it was just Lilly and how laser-focused we were on her, on every little milestone of growth and development.

With two kids, it now feels like those things just fly by as we’re barely able to keep up with each new thing.  It seems so recent that Lilly wouldn’t give up the green plastic pacifier or that we were still struggling with potty training, but when I look at the calendar I realize that was actually a lot longer ago than I remember and that her sister dealt with those things on a completely different timetable (longer on the potty training, much shorter time with the paci).

Time seems so short that we rarely even have time to look back on our family photos and videos and see what has changed.  I’ll admit that sometimes I don’t like to do that.  It just reminds me how quickly it’s happening, how many stages the girls area already past (Lilly was a newborn, then an infant, then a long stretch where she was a toddler; now she’s 5. She’s not a baby, a toddler, any of that anymore.  And I miss it.)

I see in comparing the pictures that even her face has changed. I have to just marvel at how cruel it is that these changes pass right in front our eyes in ways that we can’t even see as they happen.

Sophia Rayne Cavaliero. Photo provided by Cavaliero family.

It’s about the horrible phenomenon of children left in cars who die of heat stroke. It happens 33 times per year nationwide on average and shows no sign of abating despite calls for more awareness and efforts to incorporate technology into vehicles that could prevent these cases from happening. In 2010, the number peaked at 49 and as of this writing, 15 such deaths have already been reported for 2012.

My goal was not to write any kind of definite article about this because that has already been written. The heartbreaking, rigorously reported, Pulitzer Prize-winning 2009 Washington Post story, “Fatal Distraction” by Gene Weingarten is the starting point for any discussion on what happens. (And if you are one of those people who believes as a parent that it could never happen to you and that parents who lose a child this way accidentally should be prosecuted as criminals, please read the Weingarten article before commenting.)

I also found the transcript of a live chat that Weingarten held after the story was published to be incredibly helpful. And by helpful, I mean that my wife came upstairs asking if I was OK when she heard me upstairs in the office gasping and crying halfway through the original article. It’s a tough read, but also a must-read.

Instead of rehashing that excellent piece, my article was meant to look at the tech aspect of this — why there hasn’t been technology built into vehicles yet to prevent such accidents and if such technology does exist, why it’s not selling like gangbusters to parents who otherwise buy every safety apparatus out there. The whole article idea started when I was emailed by a local inventor hoping to sell just such a technology and that led to the other sources in the story.

As I say in the article, I’m haunted by the idea that something like this could have happened to me in the hazy, forgetful, incredibly stressful first year of parenting (and even after that) and I think writing this story helped me deal with that fear to some degree. (You can also read the Statesman.com version of the article here.)

I’m on vacation right now.

It’s the first official vacation on the books I’ve taken all year and by around June I was getting really, really antsy about needing a break. I was also sweating quite a bit, but I bet that had more to do with the start of summer than stress.

Later this week, I’m attending BlogHer to do some writing research, but also hoping to have some great food and enjoy New York. My wife and a good friend of ours are going and we’ve already got tickets to The Book of Mormon and plans to eat bagels until we can’t walk.

I worry that we’re trying to cram too much into a trip where I’m already booked up for two solid days at the conference, but I don’t care. I miss traveling so much that I’ll take it.

I have a bunch of stuff I wrote in advance running in the paper over the next week, but I’ll wait till I’m back in town to go over all that. For now: NYC! Excitement!