It’s been a over a week now and we’ve just started to venture outside. The last two days have given us some sun coupled with clear cold skies and a mean wind. Ronin snuggles into the moby without fussing too much. She’ll quickly become familiar with our little neighborhood. In the past 6 months we’ve hardly left it. A very homey area that stretches form SE 20th to 39th and from Burnside to Hawthorne. Only about a mile across it contains everything we need. The only regular exceptions include weekly forays to the Hollywood Trader Joe’s and Wednesday night juggling at Reed College.

Cheyenne rarely gets more than an hour or two before Ro starts clamoring for a boob. Nestled between our pillows at night she can sometimes go a little over 3 hours before being roused by hunger pains. Woken by hunger, then satiated by feeding which is almost always followed by a huge poop. We are then left with a dilemma; change the couche and risk waking her up or sleep with a poopy kid. Fears of diaper rash usually lead to a prompt changing but we delay it as long as possible to try and catch multiple movements.

Ro spends most of her time napping or staring at the ceiling fan. When she does get cranky there is little to do but offer the breast. Occasionally she can be consoled with my little finger. Great Grandpa Tucker sent us a plush sheep with a noisemaker sewn into the guts. Crashing waves will sometimes do the trick. I turn it up really load to get her attention and then slowly back off the volume as she settles.

Site Talk: Spam Karma went totally berserk swallowing every comment as spam and crashing large portions of the site. Thanks Angelea for pointing it out! I don’t have the patience to fix it and Dave has announced that he will stop maintaining SK2 soon anyway. So… I decided to try Akismet. I’m not totally happy with it but it’s the easiest way to get things back online.

I rescued as many comments as I could, but some may have been lost forever. Thanks everyone, we appreciate all the love you’ve been sending our way.

Also, I forgot that new grandparents would want prints of everything, so I’ll try to remember to link in high res images (click the pictures).

Those of you on dirt roads may have trouble with this due to the large size of the video file. I couldn’t reduce it anymore and still keep it watchable. You can try downloading it to view locally (33 MB).

We woke up this morning to a snow flurry. It only lasted an hour or so before turning to another rainy day in Portland but it was pretty while it lasted.

Merry Christmas everyone!

If you thought we singled you out to ignore; don’t worry, it’s not you. We didn’t send a single postcard last trip. We were never very consistent to begin with but the blog put a stop to even that meager trickle. Personal emails suffer as well because we’ve already used our best material. They tend to be short and fishing. So… Tell me about yourself. It seems repetitive to email people stuff that is already in the blog. You want to know about me? rtfb!

Of course, not everything makes it into our posts. We tend to self censor a little to avoid alarming the mothers and certain things are too personal or incriminating to discus in a public forum. We always assume that anything we publish here will be read by potential employers and homeland security.

Keeping in touch with people is hard. This blog makes it easier for you to find us and for you to keep updated on our lives, but unless you take the time to comment you’re just stealing. Umm… well… not really. I was just channeling a record company executive for a second.

To make up for this lack of physical correspondence we’ve decided to send out new years cards. Next year. Sometime. If you’re not sure if we have your address send us an email and we’ll update our list. Everyone is eligible even if we don’t know you.

We miss you all and wish you were here, or we were there, more often.

In route to Isla Parida, Western Pacific Panama, Christmas 2006

A parting shot for the cruising blog and a christmas present to all of you who arrive by searching for “booty.” Sailing into a warm tropic rain, the easiest way to preserve your clean dry cloths is to simply remove them. Cheyenne said I could only post this photo if I didn’t say whose butt it was…

As I mentioned before we created a new website for the sailing stories that will preserve the original look and feel of this site and include only the blog of cruising the TimeMachine. People who are only interested in our sailing trip can read about it without having to wade through the interstitial stuff waiting for us to get a new boat. As usual we have embarked on a new adventure before we really had a chance to digest the last one.

I’ve manipulated the sitemaps and meta data so that hopefully the search engines will send people to searuner.sv-timemachine.net first when they are looking for sailing stories. If you’ve read this far on the searunner sailing site and want to know what we’re doing now please join us on the complete unedited TimeMachine blog.

We’re taking bets on how many people will be utterly confused and think we’re ending the blog. WE’RE NOT. Read on for more: Pregnancy! Child Birth! Pictures of cows! Babies! Deadly mushrooms! then hopefully Sailing with Children!