There seems to be a lot of upheaval in moving from one place to the next. Not just in boxing your things up and getting them ready for the journey across town to the new house where they will just become clutter again, but in the emotional journey one takes when deciding to move.

As a people, we invest so much into the space in which we reside. A whole science exists to do nothing but to study how people lived throughout history. One documentary after another filled with theories about how people lived because of what the scientist find when they get there.

To move, one has to make the decision to end part of your life. All the things that happen there will be regarded as a stage. Still, my wife and I will remember something - a story, a funny moment - and in sharing we’ll start with, “remember when we were living at the apartment and…,” the retelling of the memory begins.

To move, you have to decide that you will regulate this home and its times to being a stage in your life. Right now people are walking around my house judging it. The house where my very first son took his very first steps in life, the house where my very first son eeked out his very first words - and they are judging if this home is worthy to be theirs. I wonder when they walk into my son’s room, if they realize this is the place where he sometimes wakes up scared at night and calls out for me to come hug him.

As I looked at other homes that could potentially be mine, I wondered things like, ‘will my children fall down those steps?’ I fell down a flight of stairs when I was a kid and my dad held me in his lap as I cried away the last of the pain. Will a similar memory be created in this house?

But I have to realize that memories don’t stay within a container, a container like a home. Memories are created within the spirit of people and they travel with you no matter where you decide to rest your head.

But I couldn’t help but walk around these homes with some reverence as I looked at the pictures of families on the walls. What memories are etched in this structure? What laughter carried through the rooms? I’ll never know. However, I can respect it by doing one thing for them. Building my own memories in this place. Running to my son’s new room when he wakes up scared because of some nighttime goblin, filling the family room full of laughter when friends visit and cleaning up after one of our dogs when they couldn’t quite make it outside.

In a few weeks, I’m going to be moving all my belongings to another part of the city. I hope that in the stress, I don’t forget the importance of the process and in the chance to start something new.

Because of several circumstances beyond my control, I find myself a first-time homeowner. It’s fairly exciting and I’m glad to finally have something that I can put time and money into and actually expect some return. There are few things in life that even offer the possibility on the return of your effort. Sex and homeownership are the only two that really come to mind. Matter of fact, over the past few days, those are the only 2 things that have been on my mind at all.

The gipper behind this house purchase is that I have never seen the house. Never driven by it. Never seen a picture of it. Don’t even really know the road that it is on. My wife picked it out and told me about it and I trust her. Now to some, that would sound like 1) I don’t give a shit or 2) I am severely pussy-whipped. Well, neither is true. The fact of the matter is that we had to find a place and move all within the past week. The situation we were living in and that my wife was working in won’t sour overnight. We had to get the hell out.

I find myself sitting here at the office wondering how to get to my new home. It’s a bizarre feeling, but I have had it before when I found myself standing in the train station in Amsterdam. It’s a nice sense of empowerment to know that an entire city, a fresh start is laid out before and it’s yours for the taking. Opportunities like this come along once in a while, sometimes we are succesful with them. Sometimes, they crush us under their weighty possibilities.

But as my second religion, college football starts up, I am reminded of this phrase: That’s why they play the games.

At long last, we got our humble little mascot, the little orangutan guy, back on our site. Our little mascot, whom we affectionately refer to as ‘the little orangutan guy,’ has been the subject of emails and questions to us llamas.

Typical question: What’s an orangutan doing on a site named after llamas?

Our typical response: Exactly!

We have been playing around with some designs and have settled on this one, for this week anyways. Sometimes we change our minds faster than women, so I can’t promise anything. If you have layout suggestions that we’ll probably ignore, feel free to leave a comment below.

We have opened up our forums. It’s the basic set up as far as boards go. We haven’t really started working on customizing it yet, but we decided to get them up and running. We’ll be working on bitch-slapping up a style for our forums shortly.

As for when we will start posting on a regular basis, look for that to start soon too. We have been working as we can on the site before we started spamming it. But we do look forward to being in full gear and interacting with our readers. More news shortly.

As you can see, Jetteva has nicely imported some of our columns. More will be appearing on the site as we read through and copyedit them for the first time.

We are still working on getting the forums up to speed and also finishing our plan for the tweaks we want to do here on the homepage. The colors will probably stay similar to what the default Movable Type template has here now, but we may do a few things to spice it up.

Thanks for hanging in there during this time of transition.

As you can tell, this site looks different. Frankly, it’s a little dull.

The reason for that is that we have transitioned our site to the popular and most fantabulous Movable Type Personal Publishing System. It is running off a MySQL DB, so hopefully we can use that to do some interesting things in the future.

So, our little monkey mascot is feverishly working on new templates for the site and the forums. That’s right. We will have new forum software as well. We have chosen the XMB forum software made by some people over in England who might have bad teeth. The software is great and we think that you will like the cleaner look and better features. It is written in PHP and runs off a MySQL DB as well.

We are trying to modernize the site as well as its focus. Please bear with us during this transition period.

As some of you may have noticed, but most of you probably didn’t, Spitting Llamas has been discontinued for the time being. The main reason is that our hosting facility (my former job) went out of business. A secondary reason is that we, the creators of SL, want to revamp the purpose and focus of the site. We want to make the site a little more personal and meaningful and a little less sarcastic. The site you currently see is SpittingLlamas.com as it stood when our hosting died. There will be few updates until the new site launches.

With that in mind, we will still feature our sad attempts at humor and our sometimes laser-sharp views of the human condition. But, we would like to do that by revealing a little more about ourselves and learning something about you at the same time. We want to examine this journey called life whether the situation involves cosmic ponderings of our existence or the simple pleasures of a good book. We would like the site to have a more literary bent and attempt to avoid the pitfalls of pop culture phenomenons.

In the meantime, we are working on a full redesign of the look and functionalities that the site had before. However, our major aim is to get you, the reader, more involved and we hope you find that offer enticing.

Thanks for your readership in the past, and we look forward to seeing you here again.