charlieDEAN’S Blog

I don’t plan to post much over the next week or so — it’s time to be with the family, which means as little computer as possible.  However, late next week I plan to post my  3rd annual book review.  I’m thinking of adding two more end-of-year posts: “my favorite albums of the year,” and “my favorite movies of the year.”

Also, I forgot to mention that December 15 was my 3rd “blogiversary.”  Yippee.

And one last note: those of you that RSS, won’t notice, but I changed the look of my page.  No big reason…just seems lots of things are changing right now and I was looking for something a little different.  It’s a standard WordPress theme called “The Journalist.”

Okay, that’s all.  If I don’t post again before then…have a MERRY CHRISTMAS!

About a year back, I messed around with MySpace a little bit…I hated it.  (now I just get annoying emails from people requesting to be my friend).

Well, last night I decided to join Facebook.  So, if you’re a facebook junkie…find me here…I have a virtual bookshelf, if you’re interested in what I’m reading…as well as a few pictures from my recent D.R. trip.  We’ll see how it goes, but I may disable my Flikr account and just use Facebook for photos…we’ll see.

My apologies for the lack of recent posts.  I actually have a good excuse…I’ve been out of the country for the last week and with limited internet access, I concentrated on my email accounts and communicating with my wife.

Where was I?  Well, I was on a “missions trip” to the Dominican Republic.  Why the ” ” around missions trip?  Well, I don’t know if you paid attention to the news at all, but we met a little thing called Hurricane Noel that changed almost everything we planned.

So, here comes a series of posts…catching you up on some things that I experienced/thought about last week.  We’ll call this series “D.R. 2007.”  (I know…horribly uncreative…but I have some fairly meandering thoughts, so I had a hard time coming up with a unifying title!

some of these are in my Google Reader shared items, but I thought they were important enough to highlight here:

•  Dan quotes from the book that partly caused me to the the loneliness post.  It a very stimulating book
• The Leadership Journal blog Out of Ur, had a great post called Thus Saith the Radio about “radio orthodoxy” that ended with a stellar quote from Brian McLaren.
• These two guys are two of the pastors at Granger Community Church…hilarious.
• Tony Morgan has some great thoughts about vision for you leader-types.

Well, I’m back…kind of.

I’ll admit…each sucessive kid has gotten more difficult (duh) and I find myself more tired.  Right now I have the remnets of a cold and I got just over 4 hours of coughing-deprived sleep last night…so it’s hard to think of clever, insightful, profound things to blog about.

So here’s your chance — what do you want me to blog about?  The more specific the question, the more likely I’ll answer.

Sorry for no posts as of late…it’ll probably be a week or two before I’m really posting again…

Things are crazy, as I’m sure you can imagine.  Actually Madox is probably the easiest Dean kid to deal with right now.  The first night we were home from the hospital, Jaxon had a 102 fever and was up about every hour crying.  The second night, it was Caleb’s turn to have a 101.5 fever.  Saturday night my mom took the two oldest boys (but Gavin was up coughing three or four times at her house), and when she brought them home on Sunday Gavin had a fever.  So everyone is coughing and snotty…and now, of course, Jennifer and I are starting to sniffle and cough.  So, we’re in pretty miserable shape!!

Madox is actually doing really well — he took a bottle at 9:30, then at 1:30am and finally at 4:30…and he slept between each feeding which isn’t too bad for a newborn (of course when he finished his bottle at about 5am, he was wide awake for an hour or so!

The harddrive on my laptop crashed Tuesday afternoon…sorry for the lack of posts…I’ll get up-to-speed in the next couple of days or so.

I don’t want to offend…so I’ll explain…

As I’m working on setting up this new site, I’ve had to re-evaluate my blogroll.  I subscribe to 60 or 70 blogs via Google Reader, and for the sake of simplicity I don’t want all of them listed.  So, if you aren’t in the sidebar, but maybe you were in the past, it doesn’t mean I don’t love you or read your blog.

Mostly, it had to do with volume - people whose links I could put there and depend on it being fresh content most of the time.  There’s one exception…but his RSS feeds (shared items and DIGG items) are so good that I excused his own lack of posts!!  (you know who you are, and we’re cool — I follow your DIGG’s religiously!)

Well, thanks for following me over!  It’s always a gamble to change websites, but I’ve wanted to do this for a while…here were some of my considerations…

• FRUSTRATION at the process of the rollout of Blogger Beta + a lot of “quirks” that I really don’t like
• Better templates for a better look and feel
• From what I’ve seen so far, it’s easier to customize
• All the cool people are here…or at least Dave’s here, and I follow his lead for what’s “techno-cool”!.
• moving all my old posts into WordPress was SIMPLE & and according to the importer, I only lost one posts out of almost 600…I have no idea which one…I don’t really care!

Some changes you obviously notice…

• new title…I’ve hated the title for some time, so I went with the simpler “charlieDEAN’S Blog” and kept the “random thoughts & associations” as a tagline, describes my erratic and random approach to blogging.
• cleaner, minimalist design
• other stuff later…as I play around, I’ll be trying to add more stuff and make it cool…

anyway..thanks for coming over — (all the old posts are here, so you can comment away — on this, or even old posts!)

Oops!
I missed it!
My 2-year blogiversary was on Friday. (Dec. 15)

Anyway…here’s a link to my first post.

• I guess all I want to say is “thanks” for reading — and commenting!
• I’m a little humbled that anyone really cares what I think about anything.
• I’m also a little “miffed” that everytime I post, Blogger loses my formatting and it ends up in one big, run-on paragraph, unless I bullet everything.