This week, Janece turned 35 and Amira turned 6 months. To write an essay about what their presence in my life means to me would be like writing an essay about what breathing means to my physical body, but I will at least say this:

Janece, you are the soul of me and have been since we were teenagers. In your company, I feel that I am home, at rest, complete. You provide a high place of love that allows me to survey and grapple with all that I am and do and observe, knowing that I have a context outside myself that is a truer mirror of the world I see than I could see alone. You are not perfect, but perfection is boring — and anyway, when we cling to each other our imperfections can’t drag us down because we are lifted and made better by what we create together. I could never, and will never, love like I love you. The deepest of all my desires is many more years together.

Amira, you are brand new to me but I feel like I’ve known you all my life. You surprise me, but in a way that is so familiar that you are never foreign to me. I see what is most beautiful about Janece and I together in you, and I treasure it like I treasure my life with her. You have both created and filled a desire that I didn’t know I had — a desire to be an awed witness to the blooming of a beautiful human soul. You will always be loved, I will always be taught by you even as I try to teach, and I will always be a strong wall and fortress for you to return to when you are tired from your journey. The deepest of all my desires is many more years together.

I’ve been pulling some long nights, but I’m making headway on my work load and doing well. This is a month for much web-wrangling, but I should be back to a more reasonable schedule by the end of March. Still not enough time for a long thoughtful post on personal topics, but here’s a grab-bag of links for your enjoyment:

• Lord Of The Rings, The Musical: I can hardly wait to see Gandalf spinning like a giddy school girl through the fields of Rohan singing “The hills are alive with the sound of orc horns”, clap my hands along with the rollicking Nazgul sing-along “The Nine Gay Blades On Weathertop”, and get a little misty-eyed at the Grishnakh/Shelob duet “Losing Frodo”.
• MOBA (Museum Of Bad Art) – Art Too Bad To Be Ignored (TM): My quick-glance-favorite is The Athlete, a stunning crayon portrait of a man in neo-classical discus-hurling posture, inexplicably wearing white socks and black shoes and sporting a pink toga.
• Amira, the font: We, the Moment family, are honored that Cyrus Highsmith, typographer extraordinaire, decided to create a font in honor of our sweet baby girl. Thanks, man. You’re the best. (I’ll have to save up the money for it for her first birthday, tho — $300 for the whole family of fonts!)
• Eric Grohe Murals: Got a big ol’ blank wall just lying around uglifying the place? Well, you need to give Eric a call. The man can work wonders with a brush, a couple of assistants, and a big big (big big) canvas. One favorite is the murals in the Miller Brewing Company brewing room. Maybe it will inspire the brewmasters to make a better low-carb beer. One can only hope… On the more serious side, his mural for the Washington State Corrections Center for Women is inspired. The quotes from the inmates brought a tear to my eye. What if all our correctional institutions had areas like this that could uplift and provide solace to inmates through art and beauty?
• sIFR 2.0 RC4: What lies behind that incomprehensible acronym is a revolution in web typography that should become a just a much a regular tool in a webmonkey’s toolbox as CSS, the W3Schools online code reference, and a good JPG compression tool. Basically, it uses Flash to dynamically replace and display regular HTML text on the fly. The result? Beautiful anti-aliased fonts, the power to create gorgeous layouts, and a web page that is still fully accessible, standards-compliant, and completely indexable by search engines. Kudos to Mike, Mark and the other geniuses responsible for it.
• WordPress turns 1.5: More awesome open source software and definitely the king of the free blog world. It amazes me how much cool stuff people give away for free on the web. WP1.5 is nice and modular now, with the display templates being completely seperate from the blog engine, and easy to build and switch out. I’ll be switching over our family of blog sites here soon. (And by soon, I mean “before summer” at the rate I’m going now.)

Thanks as always, thanks to my lovely wife for the diverting reading…

(Warning: The following post is mostly filler in a feeble attempt to keep you feeling like something’s actually happening at this blog.)

Wow. It’s been a week since my last post and 10 days since I posted anything here of substance. Busy busy time. I’m dearly wanting to get some stuff written. I’ve got three good suggestions from y’alls on topics, a bunch of graphic novels to review, and a chunk of other things to process. But, it is not yet to be. My parents are in Portland currently, and they’ll be here visiting from the end of the week until next Wed. We have also been requested by my family in Portland to come down there. All that, and I’m still loaded with work responsibilities… Sadly, the blog is lowest on the totem pole of Important Things, so it will have to sit in lonely silence for a little while longer.

I’ll be back out of hibernation soon. Thx for holding… The operator will be with you shortly.