Also, a hat-tip to Burly for a blogging renaissance of sorts. I hope to join him in it.

I'm ringing in 2011 with a new urge to blog, so here I am. Not much news for today, but I wanted to get on the board for Jan.1.

We celebrated Christmas in Utah this year. I had to come back early for work, but Brooklynne and the kids will be back Wednesday, so I'm kicking it alone for the next couple of nights.

The Wasatch Front got 18 inches of snow on Thursday, so we took HJ skiing for the first time. She did pretty well. She could manuver and keep her balance, but had trouble stopping. I asked her what was her favorite part of the day and she told me "riding the magic carpet." The simple pleasures....  

As many of you have probably noticed, I have been in the blogging duldrums lately. I guess that's not technically correct since I have plenty I'd like to post about, but just not a lot of time to do it. Beyond lack of posts, the blog has fallen into general disrepair, and it is in desperate need of a major sprucing up.

So... I'm going to revamp the site, tune up the engine, and get ready for a renewed blogging push this fall.

You may be asking yourself, "how will life go on without a post to read every 3 months?!"

Not to worry--while I'm getting this house in order, I have another house to get in order as well. Brooklynne and I finally bought a house this summer. It's a fixer-upper and I will be keeping track of our progress as we do a major renovation this summer/fall/eternity. However, since I'm overhauling TWJ, I will blog at another address, http://www.31for31.com.

Please update your feed-readers, links, and bookmarks accordingly... I'm talking to both of you.

Hey guys. I know you've all been working hard to keep up with the 31-Day Challenge, and I've been impressed by the outpouring of blog entries that have come out of this thing. I'm actually pretty impressed that so many of you have stuck with it despite tight holiday schedules and occassional bouts of blogger's block.

You've done so well and you only have 2 days to go! Keep working hard to the end of the week. You can make it!

If you are one of the challengers and you have kept up well, I will need your home address. I have info for most of you, but either way, please send your snailmail deets to iamawinner@31for31.com. Prizes will take some time to get out, so look for them in mid-January.

As of now, we have seven eight nine ten eleven challengers including myself, but it's not too late to join in the fun (as long as you post something to your blog today). All of these folks are linked in the sidebar, but just for convenience sake, here is a list of the other participating blogs.

• Our Own Little Happy Place
• The Spicy Redneck
• In Medias Res
• The World According to Kristy
• Uncle Moustache
• Still Waiting for the Dawn
• The Travis Skinny
• b-u-r-l-y-f-a-m-i-l-y
• The Gearys
• This Classical Life

Happy blogging!

Brian just informed me that the comments were not working on the site, so I fixed an error (which I made a few months ago) and now all my readers can comment again--both of you.

I wonder how many great comments I've missed?

I'm announcing the first December 31-Day Challenge. In order to participate, you simply have to post here in the comments that you are taking up the challenge, and then post to your blog at least once every day for all 31 days in December. I will be doing it whether or not I have any co-bloggers. If you join in the challenge and make it all 31 days, I will send you a prize at the end. But don't forget to comment here if you're participating. Good luck

TWJ is not moving--at least not for now. I ran into some speedbumps moving my entries to WordPress, so I'll have to live with MT for a little longer. TWJ will still move eventually, but it will probably be more like October before that happens. Since I've wanted to start blogging again for a long while, I'm not going to wait for the switch.

Today's topic: ten thoughts for the day.

1. Reading Rainbow aired it's last show. I always hated RR as a kid, but I felt something sad while I was listening to the NPR story on why the show was being cancelled. It turns out that a big reason was that the Dept. of Ed. put pressure on programers to focus on shows that actually teach fonics and other reading skills, and not on shows that teach the enjoyment of or reasons for reading. What a sadly practical world we live in.
2. I am pulling for Greg Paulus at Syracuse. I know we (tarheels) are supposed to hate him, but I don't. I don't hate most Duke players once they're through, especially not the ones that seem to be generally disliked by their own fans. That's why I also pull for Jeff Capel at Oklahoma (besides that both have brothers who are part of the tarheel family).
3. Small group has been particularly good for the past few weeks. Last night we discussed the balance between expecting in faith that our prayers can change the world around us, and knowing that our prayers are not always in line with God's will and should thus change us instead. Thoughts?
4. Beau is as long and heavy at 4 months as Halleigh was at 8.
5. We're headed to New Orleans to visit Ben Sept. 4-8. Here's the list of things I hope to do (in no particular order):
• Eat muffuletta.
• Eat beignets.
• Eat crawfish.
• Eat gumbo.
• Eat jambalaya.
• Eat etouffee.
• Eat fried shrimp po' boy.
6. My favorite sports season is coming--the college football/baseball playoff season. The Dodgers are limping toward the playoffs and Carolina is looking good. I'm cautiously optimistic about the Heels because I'm hearing the right things from the coaches, and I think we're just enough of a darkhorse to play with a chip on our shoulder. The key to the season will be the O-line, which everyone says is a weakness. From what I can tell, the O-line is fine, but thin. If we avoid injuries, the young receivers will be good enough to keep defenses honest and Shaun Draughn should rush for 1,000 yards.
7. I bought a jointer off Craig's List and I'm ready to start churning out some hurricane furniture.
8. I have been running 4 miles 2 or 3 times per week this summer and I've brought my time down to a respectable 29 minutes. I plan to run in some road races this fall. Anyone up for training/running with me?
9. I've joined an African American history working group based at UNC.
10. The Mountain Cabin is coming along.

The Travis Web Journal is going to be moving to a new address, mostly because I've finally decided to ditch MovableType in favor of WordPress. There are certainly a few ways that I like MT better than WP, but MT just can't match WP in its user community, which affects the availability of plugins and themes.

A secondary reason is to simply kickstart my blogging again.

Anyway, I know alot of you read my blog through feeds so, you'll probably need to update those in the next few days, following the migration to the new platform.

When the new site is ready, I'll post the new address here so you can find it easily.

Raise your hand if you were a TWJ reader when my theme looked like this:

I loved that theme (circa 2004).