Dad on the Rise

Posts Tagged ‘Lifestyle Changes’

November 30th marks the finish line forNaBloPoMo, National Blog Post Month.  I did it.  I actually posted everyday for the entire month.  It was extremely hard and tedious, but I am so proud of myself.  My wife helped a bit I must admit, but the two or three posts she did where posts like adjusting picture alignment and posting Thanksgiving pictures.  3o posts in 30 days, not too bad considering I probably posted half of that in the last year prior to November.  Though I know I will not posted everyday, I am certainly found an interest in blogging.

It is frustrating to have a daughter and everyone being so locked in to the whole pink vs. blue societal construct idea.  Why can’t my daughter play with foam swords, race cars, or airplanes.  I don’t see anything wrong with the fact that she was a football player for Halloween.

When did we as a society stop evolving?  The 1900s were about change and progress.  Voting rights, racial equality, and such all issues combated and improved upon in the 1900s.  Here we are in the new millennium and my daughter cannot play with a blue helicopter without receiving a look or snicker.  Go to a fast food joint and order a child’s meal and ask for the boy toy for your daughter and when you get to the window they will look at you weird.

I am so happy that I have a wife that shares my view and doesn’t put our daughter in a box.  She is probably even worse than me as she was a bit of the tomboy growing up.  Would I feel the same if I had a boy?  I feel confident that I would be open-minded, however, I must admit that I wouldn’t be as progressive.  If my son wanted to be Dora, for instance, i would be fine with it, but if he wanted to be Snow White, I wouldn’t be able to cope.

Hopefully, we all can continue forward and not backwards.

Our family was selected by Panasonic to be one of there Living in HD families.  We are in fact LiHD family #66.  The equipment, which includes a 50″ plasma HD TV, BluRay entertainment system, HD digital video camera, digital point and shoot camera, digital SLR camera, portable BluRay player, toughbook laptop, four BluRay movies, multiple SD cards, and all cables.  The equipment was even installed free of charge.

We have have been playing with our new toys for two weeks now and have loved every minute of them.  The great pictures taken on Halloween were taken using the Lumix point and shoot camera.  My Wordless Wednesday selection was taken with the Digital SLR camera.  My XBox360 looks incredible on the 50″ plasma and NCAA Football 10 has such vivid color and I can actually read the text.  I have upgraded my Netflix to include BluRay discs whenever possible because watching National Treasure 2 on the BluRay player has me hooked.  The movie looks almost 3D as you can really see depth in the picture.  The Tornado and I watched Ratatouille on the portable BluRay player in her room and it too had such a sharp, vivid picture.  Both movies were given to us by Panasonic.

All this great stuff was not given to us without a price.  On Tuesday we were visited by four members of Panasonic, two from the New Jersey office and two from the Osaka office.  They all were very nice and we all had an in depth discussion for over two hours about mainly the television and a little about the BluRay entertainment system.  The purpose of the discussion was to see how easy it is to operate the equipment and to see where improvements could be made.  My wife mentioned how it felt like we were being quizzed and we both remarked that we were failing as we didn’t know how to use all of the features of the television.  The representative handling the conversation was great and even commented on the fact that we had only a week to figure everything out.  And I tell you the tv does a lot.

Our guests took pictures and sketched the setups and proceeded to leave and back to playing we went.  Though, next time we have the Panasonic reps over we are going to study and make sure not to fail the quiz again.  All and all it was a great experience and we look forward to more visits.

My wife,  Kristina Brooke, designed a new blog site for me and I am sure you will enjoy it as much as me.  To celebrate the new digs I have joined my wife in NaBloPoMo for November 2009.  By doing this I am pledging to post to my blog at least once a day for the entire month of November.  Please wish me luck as I am very bad about posting.  Hopefully, I can become a more consistent blogger.