This year the season is hitting us particularly hard with pollen counts that are killing me. I am even giving up having more than a single beer—gasp—in an effort to keep myself from becoming a slobbery mess.

The problem is that I have absolutely no desire to stop getting outside and enjoying the weather despite the dusty yellow film that seems to coat everything—the car, the sidewalks, the dog (as if she wasn’t allergenic enough).

So in honor of spring, and Earth Day, I’d like to list a few recent outdoor conquests:

• Biked the kids to school… check
• Biked to work… lovin’ the Xtracycle still
• Walked into town for a nice lunch with the wife… check (excellent recuperation for her recent concussion)
• Walked the dog… not as often as I should
• Built garden beds… all done but the final layer of dirt and planting, which is planned for this weekend
• Helped out at a baseball practice… check
• Took my daughter on her first “park ride”… check

In honor of that last accomplishment, here are a couple of photos.

I want an iPhone just so that I can play with this. Nice.

Food worth writing about would come later when we finally arrived at my parents’ house in Smyrna, just outside of Nashville. Mom is a great cook and had a full meal of German noodles with pesto (fusion cooking at its best), oven-roasted vegetables, fried okra (damn, I love that stuff), and baked chicken. It is great to see my family after such a long time. We only get together a couple times a year at most. This is the first time in nearly four years that I have traveled here.

Day two, we rolled into in Jackson, Tennessee—the place of my birth. We are staying at a Holiday Inn where my dad’s side of the family has joined us.

Holiday Inns in the South don’t have the same amenities I have come to expect. Where the heck is the WiFi? And Diana and I are suffering through the lack of good coffee. We are kicking ourselves for not packing some Stumptown Hairbender.

Last night’s dinner was at a Ryan’s in Jackson. Nothing like a buffet restaurant to remind you of the weight problem that plagues the United States in general and the South in particular. All-you-can-eat is not a good idea people! I was also a little disturbed by the dental health of our waitresses—almost comically crooked and gold teeth abound. Really, it was weird. I’m not being mean; I was just freaked out by it.

Day three, we are going to my great-aunts 90th birthday party. This will give us a little more time with my aunts, uncles and cousins. It has been a little confusing and overwhelming for the kids. There are a lot of faces that they’ve never seen before. Not too mention the fact that some of my relatives talk a little “differently” than what my kids are accustomed to hearing.

Below is an example. Please note, this is not an actual relative. This guy works in the warehouse at the company where my dad works. I’m sure I have an uncle that has attempted something similar at sometime—it just hasn’t made it to YouTube yet. Enjoy!

YouTube – Grasshopper vs Redneck

Hey UplinkEarth, I know it can be hard work to provide good support for a cheap price, but what the heck! Today, I was treated to the following issues:

• The database does not reflect the data that was present as recently as last week. All event data is gone for the moment.
• The files seem to be at least a month old—I had recently updated a couple of files with new code, so I know what they should have looked like.
• Several files were not restored to their proper directory outside of the webroot (www). My site relied on that data as it was written in Coldfusion and used an application.cfm file, components, custom tags and a bit of magic to serve up a pretty decent custom app.
• Also the “shared” folder is no longer mapped to the shared SSL cert that was related to the authentication scripts on the site.

It has been a crazy first month at a company that is in the midst of some interesting changes and rapid growth. I’m really looking forward to the ride, though I can’t say I felt that way two weeks ago.

For those of you in the midst of change, give it a few weeks. It is amazing what you will learn if you allow yourself to go through at least one month worth of change with a group of people. I am really impressed with the team I am going to be working with. I can’t wait to see what we create.

Technically, the actual 2.5 upgrade went off without a hitch thanks to WordPress Automatic Upgrade. Everything in my template just worked, which I couldn’t say after the 2.3 upgrade earlier this year.

So what is my favorite new feature? Well, so far it has to be the automatic plugin upgrade, but I am looking forward to using some fo the media features and the media browser is a clear improvement.

My goal by the end of this summer is to have a highly productive front lawn. The first step in that plan is the walkway seen in this photo.

Next is a rock retaining wall so that I can level things out and start planting.

Now who’s going to import it? Clever Cylces? This seems right up their alley.

[via TreeHugger]

The answer is PublicSquare. This is a subscription-based service for creating an online magazine with a community component. I’ve always like the layout and general functionality of Boxes and Arrows and now I know what they use to serve up their content.

I plan to look into this a bit more as the idea of a subscription-based magazine CMS intruiges me. I would have signed up for an account today, but it turns out that they have an expired security certificate on their account sign up page. I wonder if they know that?  (It expired on December 6, 2007.)