Excuses, Excuses...

This is going to be one of those posts where I just make excuses about the lack of updates on my blog. But, the genius is I can hammer out a quick post and feel all... productive.

Anyway, if you care more about photography than my life, you may want to skip this one. There's nothing photography related in this post.

So, with that out of the way, I want to give my readers (Hi Mom! Just kidding, even my mom doesn't read this blog) a heads-up that I'll be dropping down to about a post or two a week for a few months. The reason is best explained with a list of my activities lately:

• Found and signed a contract on a rental house. That may not seem like a big deal, but when you need to deal with commutes, school districts, open houses, craigslists ads, ten families showing up to each open house ("Bid up" the agent says), and finally the fact that on paper (and in real life) most rental houses have a monthly rent of 90% of our pre-tax income, it is a time consuming task. But, all that is simplified now that we've signed a contract for a house that ONLY costs $2,495 a month. And doesn't have a refrigerator. Which brings me to...
• ... we need to move our family of four (and about twice as much stuff as most families have) in two weeks. Assuming we can even move in on August 1st, which is not guaranteed.
• Right after we move, I present at a conference in Korea (South Korea of course, hold your jokes, please), my wife starts her full-time school program, my son starts at a new school, and my daughter learns to babysit herself starts at a preschool. Which brings me to...
• We need to find my daughter a preschool.
• This whole time, I've been putting in about thirty billable hours a week for my SAT prep job. Which is the equivalent of forty hours a week when you consider travel and prep time. Luckily that will drop off a bit after this week, which is good, because we'll be moving. Either way though, I've been spending a lot of time on the road, which brings me to...
• ... we just bought a new (used) car. After realizing that my wife would need to be able to drive to school each day and it isn't going to be practical to swap the minivan back and forth (plus its gas mileage is less than ideal) we started a quick search for a second car, mostly for commuting. We ended up getting a '98 Honda Civic EX for $4,000 pictured at right from Harry at Auto Best Buy (click picture to see the details). As far as used car dealers go, Harry is as honest as they come and he has a good selection of lower-priced Japanese cars. We still spent about four hours in his lot...
  
• ... and now I have a sun burn. Ok, I guess I'm whining at this point. I'll cut myself off.

My point is, I've been busy and will be busy until I get back from Korea. Actually, I'll probably remain busy after my trip since fall is prime SAT season and I'm considering submitting a paper for a September deadline.

On the positive side, I'm aiming to bang out the autofocus post tonight, so hopefully that will get posted early this week.