## "FORT. NIGHT."

They yell. Not in the way that teenagers rushing home from school to dominate their friends yell but in the way of innocence. The yell of the joy of dad suggesting that we build a fort together.

To build.

I love building things with my kids. Whether it's a pinewood derby car (where the adults do most of the work cause... saws) or lego sets or snowmen or pillow and blanket forts in the basement, it's all... everything I've ever wanted.

I love building with my kids. Watching them get overjoyed at the simple and peculiar things. Like taking all their blankets out of the closet, ripping the couch cushions off to stack them juuuuuust right.

We also enjoy playing zombie / monster attack in the basement. The lights go off and the flash lights come out, trying to find the zombie / monster that's roaming the basement, scratching the walls.

YouTube entered into the equasion this evening

Youtube helped expand the sense of adventure. I threw on some monster sound effects (suuppper creepy) and then set the phone at one end of the room.

Slowly... creeping to the other side while they were confused (in the dark w/ flash lights) about all the noises and wondering how I was making creepy sounds like that... I snuck slowly over to the other side of the fort.

Just as a flash light revealed my true, dad form, I lunged at the fort, chasing the children back inside.

## What I really live for

It's not all the code. It's not what powers this website even though I may talk about it a lot. It's those two crazies. "Our crazies" as my wife and I often say it. They keep us young, fun, silly, and smiling all the time.

If I do have any selfish motivation for making this technology it's this -- I want my boys to not only know how much their dad loves them today, but in the future when they come across all the things I've written about them. About our time together. About how they've made me a better person.

I've tried four times to accomplish that now. Four, different, blogs, all just trying to catalog my journeys through life, sometimes to stop and have an outlet when I'm in the middle of an emotional break (see, Dood ). It took me several hours over multiple days just copying, pasting, reformatting, and correcting those blog posts. My own work. In systems I understood.

## Not again.

This is the last migration. To a format that's pure and simple HTML, with web components to orchestrate it all. It's not some cheesy transition from talking about my kids into talking about our tech. It's reality.

When we build tools that make our lives easier, more able to share and express what we experience, others can join a conversation previously not possible. Living through many systems now I can tell you that permanence needs to be just as at the front of your mind as ease of use. Will this last. Will it stand the test of technologies.

I can finally say that I've landed some place that I can write all about my boys and our adventures without worrying it'll go away. I'll still keep everything pretty vague (I value their anonymity so that they one day may do the same) but I want you to know, they are my world, and they make me the insane, caffeinated person you see at events.

They motivate me every day by wanting to build something together.