This is my second blog post from Jekyll. I’ve been going through 20 years of blog posts fixing formatting, updating broken links, and deleting some posts that could have been tweets.
I used to blog several times a week. This was before a lot of microblogging social media platforms existed. The blogging platform would automatically email my friends. But unlike social media feeds, my blog persists. Hopefully with it hosted on GitHub these archives would even survive me.
The thing about posting from a Markdown file is you have to maintain your own ID and you have to manually create your own timestamp etc. in the “front matter”. Sublime Text has a plugin for UUID generation so that’s helpful.
---
id: 2952
title: 'Ava is now at driving age'
date: 2024-12-24 11:20:00 -0800
author: 'Aaron Lord'
layout: post
guid: '1616be20-fb94-4f71-a399-2b1fc57b7081'
permalink: /2024/12/24/ava-at-driving-age/
cover-img: '/assets/img/2024/12/IMG_3360.png'
footnotes:
- ''
categories:
- Family
- Parenthood
tags:
- Ava
- christmas
---
If you want to add a picture, you can’t just copy and paste like in a blog app with a UI. You have to open up an image editor and resize it from its 24 megapixels, export it to a web-appropriate format, save it in the right place, and type in the new url appropriately.
You also have to run Ruby so you can verify stuff on localhost before you push it to main. This is all fun stuff for me because I’m a software developer. But there’s no email notifications. You have to go old-school and subscribe to my RSS feed.
I’ve said that I’d be posting on Medium because the Wordpress organization is now unstable. But Medium isn’t—or isn’t any longer—a blogging platform. It’s for long-form content that is considered “high quality”. So I will probably post book reviews and high-minded thoughts on deconstruction there, but it’s not appropriate for journaling updates on my life.
While going through my old posts I realize I have a category called Parenthood that hasn’t been updated for a long time. It could use to have some photos of my son’s recent football season. (I just edited a post of Ava’s ultrasound.) But there’s a new parenting milestone reached just yesterday:
Ava is now old enough to learn to drive!
Here we are at the DMV in Oroville awaiting our appointment.
We used a paid app called Aceable for her to study and get certified for driver’s ed because they don’t teach it at her school. She did really well with it and it was worth the price. But we also have to find an actual individual certified driving instructor with one of those special cars with the brake on the right side and the obnoxious yellow “Student Driver” sticker on the back. She didn’t pass on the first try, but she’s been doing well in the practice tests and can’t wait to try it again. There’s an 8-day waiting period between attempts and on the 8th day—New Year’s Eve—she is going in to get her wisdom teeth out! Fortunately we’re in a good spot to afford it right when she needs it (I was pushing 30 I think when I used a credit card to get mine removed).
I’m very proud of her.
Christmas is tomorrow. I have high hopes it will be a good one for our family this year. I hope the kids have fond memories.