About

The blog


I’m Neal Call. I started this blog on April 13, 2012. I'd just graduated with a B. A. in English and film studies, and I was looking for a new creative outlet. My wife Lindsay had a blog, and I thought, “Hey, I write stuff. I should totally start a blog. It would be way cooler and way more popular than hers, too.” Possibly I said that out loud. Possibly my wife threw something at me.

The blog started as just a place for me to put down some of my thoughts about being a dad. In our current household hierarchy, I’m the primary caregiver to our three-year-old, while my wife works as an online university instructor. I’ve usually got the kid from when she wakes up until around the end of business hours, and then my wife takes over while I write either soul-baring love-letters to my daughter or celebrate the scatological ups and downs of our days. I post at least once per week here on the blog, except for when I don't. On a daily basis 
on my Facebook Page I document our frequent bizarre conversations, where I also upload all my comics into a single photo album:



Pretty soon after starting the blog, I tried my hand at drawing comics using Microsoft Paint. I'm old-school like that. I’m not very good, but I try to make up in humor what I lack in talent. If you compare my first attempts with the more current generation, you’ll see that I’ve improved from really bad to just sort of mediocre-bad. Since the early days, I’ve actually gotten encouraging feedback on the comics, so I try to include one with each post. If you’re really a glutton for punishment, you can pay for my poorly drawn comics on mouse pads and coffee mugs over at my store, at http://www.zazzle.com/thecomics* :



Buy enough stuff, and I’ll take my wife on a date. That’s right, you can help keep our spark alive.

You can also find me on Pinterest, a site my wife hates. That's the main reason I'm on it, really.



A lot of what I do here is just for fun, but ultimately this blog is most important to me as a record of fathering my daughter. I think it’ll be both entertaining and meaningful to her someday; and in the process of transferring my experience from my head to my keyboard, I know it’s meaningful to me. I’m working on understanding what it means to grow up, both for her and for myself. We’ll see who gets there first.


Us

Addison -- Books: Mo Willem's Knuffle Bunny, anything by Bill Peet, and princess stories. Movies: The Little Mermaid, Dora the Explorer, and Toy Story.

Lindsay -- Books: Toni Morrison's Beloved, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, and Michael Lewis' Moneyball. Movies: The Sound of Music
The Shawshank Redemption, and The Philadelphia Story.


Neal -- Books: Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. Movies: Lawrence of Arabia, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Groundhog Day.



This page was updated on April 13, 2013. For the original "about" page, click here.