For anyone who doesn’t know, Emma’s been posting for a little while now at The Daily BedPost, which is Em & Lo’s new blog for Conde Nast, updated 3x daily on weekdays with all kinds of good sex & relationship news, stories, advice and polls.

The site’s not actively being promoted yet, though that’s supposedly coming soon. (Don’t get me started.) But anyway, it’s great, funny and (cough cough) constantly updated. Check it out, and leave the ladies a comment if you feel so inclined.

Emma and I took Baci for a walk at Poet’s Walk this afternoon. It’s one of our favorite Hudson Valley activities, as well as part of our package tour for any friends we’re secretly trying to convince to move to the area. (In the case of JoLo, our plan worked perfectly. We’re still slowly pulling other friends into the Upstate vortex, unbeknownst to them.)

It’s beautiful, lush and green in the spring, but almost equally stunning in winter. We strolled a mile or so to the top of a hill overlooking the semi-frozen Hudson River. This is just about the spot we were sailing through last summer.

Down by the river there’s a trestle, which affords some unobstructed views of the icy Hudson waters. It’s hard to tell from the photo, but some of those slabs of ice are well over ten feet across.

After climbing back up the hill to where Emma and Baci were waiting on the bench, I started the camera’s auto-timer for a group shot, ran for the bench, then unwisely tried to make it back to the camera to adjust something. Emma and Baci were amused.

The second time was the charm.

Well, we’ve been doing a lot of sitting around and waiting… as well as enjoying our last weekends of sleeping in and reading the paper, yawning and wondering what time we might wander over to Tivoli for a late brunch. This will soon be a distant memory.

We had a big night out last Friday with some great friends in NYC (which I somehow neglected to take a single photo of), put together some shelves in the nursery (now by far the nicest, most livable room in the house), oh… and I know what else: I found the greatest chicken stew recipe ever, which I cooked a massive pot of that we ate for days when the bone-chilling temps held us captive over the 3-day weekend. (Seriously, try it. I used bacon instead of lardons, and cranberry instead of red currant.)

Coming soon, some photos and maybe videos from my friend JJ’s new Muay Thai gym in Kingston, where I’ve just started training after a long break from the sport; photos from a riverside walk we have planned for this afternoon; and then sometime between today and a few weeks hence, photos and videos of what’s-her-name. I seriously feel strange calling friends or family at the moment, because they inevitably answer the phone with a good deal of anticipation, saying, “What?!? What?!? Any news?!?”

Not yet. But soon.

We’ve been busy readying ourselves for the impending arrival of our yet-to-be-publicly-named baby girl. Some quick, unordered points of note:

• Emma informs me that we now own yogurt that will expire after the baby comes.

• The baby has belatedly but assuredly turned downward for her final approach (meaning we aren’t locked into a c-section, thankfully). I figure she must be some kind of genius, knowing how to do this in the dark and under water.

• My dad continually refers to the baby as “Olivia,” swearing that he saw some sort of “tell” on my face when he called out guesses during Thanksgiving dinner. He’s wrong, though “Olivia” was a Top 3 contender for a good while. Emma’s sisters refer to the baby as either “Chardonnay” or “Shalissa.” Emma and I still mostly call her “It.”

• Emma and I took a course in infant CPR last night at the local hospital. Emma did great, but was not super keen on the bit where she was supposed to call out, “Help! Help! I need help!” in front of the class. Her mumbled plea for help made me laugh right into the CPR baby-dummy.

• I’ve learned (yet again) that the Internet is the single best/worst source of information imaginable. In trying to help Emma figure out best measures for pain relief during labor, I came across tiny scraps of very helpful information in the midst of heaps and heaps of vitriol spouted by people who are apparently very emotionally invested in other people’s choices (surprise!) It’s not just that you’re insane to get an epidural/intrathecal (or not), but that you’re a bad person to boot. Emma’s leaning toward being a bad, insane person of the pro-modern medicine variety (which I think is a good, sane idea).

• I figured that babies needed changing 2-3 times per day, but someone in the know just informed me that it’s more like 12 times daily. I hope this was some kind of sick joke, but I fear that it wasn’t.

• I don’t know much about what’s to come, but I’m pretty sure that a month or two into this whole parenting thing, I’ll be super sorry for a lot of stuff I said to my mom as a teenager.

As seen on weather.com:

Some days I wish I didn’t have to work inside all day. Today is not one of those days.

UPDATE Jan 10: Six days later, it was 66 degrees. T-shirt weather. I don’t pray, but it seems my thoughtless mutterings against the cold were answered.

I went out in our New Year’s Day snowstorm to shoot a few frames of the house and surroundings at their wintry best. The following shabby little clip was the result of my trying to learn the iMovie basics yesterday morning. Creating the clip took just a few minutes, but exporting, trying to figure out how to de-interlace the video, and generally muttering curses at the screen took a bit longer. (Just trying to get all my curses out now, before the baby comes.)

Anyway, once I was able to drag some clips onto the timeline, it turned into the Baci show, which amused me enough to make it worthwhile.

A friend of a co-worker sent me an interesting link today. It’s the first time I’ve seen a blatant rip-off of my design work.

Here’s my design for the Getty Images homepage (scaled down quite a bit):

And here’s Hypeful.com’s Top 27 Albums of 2007 not-so-original header graphic:

At least he put his own touch on it by adding reflection to the type. I think that’s a bad call, but hey, he’s the designer.

UPDATE Jan 3: The Hypeful.com website seems to be down is back up. I sent a polite email to the site’s owner to see what gives. We’ll see if he responds….

UPDATE Jan 4: Well, I didn’t receive an email response, but as of this morning, he has swapped out the pilfered graphic for something else. ‘Nuff said.

UPDATE Jan 10: I eventually received a very friendly and apologetic email from Lucas, the site’s owner. It seems that an acquaintance of his created the graphic, and Lucas was unaware of the design’s origins. Coincidentally, I’ve really been enjoying Lucas’s excellent music site, so plenty of good has come of all this.