My wife’s head is tilted at a precarious angle; she can’t be comfortable. Our nine-month-old dosing peacefully in her lap is the image of comfort. I’ve got a ten pound head in my lap. Every couple of moments, the body attached to it squirms a little.

My family is making what is turning out to be our bi-annual trip to Mother Russia. After a few days of frantic running hither and yon, our plane ride is half over. I really should be sleeping as I’ll need every ounce of strength in me for the next leg of the journey. But I’m not. The orangey poke in the sky, 35,000 feet above the Atlantic caught my imagination.

There is something ethereal in the air before the sun bursts onto the day. Even on a plane full of unknown people, the magnetic strings of the mood suck me in.

Now the shapely stewardess, wearing her smart red uniform is coming down the aisle, wielding a curled duty free catalog. And with a few downward thrusts, the window covers are closed. And with them, my mood.

Maybe I’ve got an opportunity to catch a few more winks after all. Wait, what’s that whimpering sound? Nikita is stirring. And something tells me my winking will have to wait for later.

Soon we’ll find what fun it can be to ride the Muscovian Metro during rush hour on a Friday afternoon with two large pieces of luggage, two children, and a pram. Why? Alexei loves riding the metro. Silly parents, next time get a cab.

I’ve been an early bloomer throughout my life. For Christmas in the fifth grade, my dad gave me an electric razor. Naturally, I didn’t know how to use it properly and wound up giving myself the razor burn of my life on the first shave. Technology hasn’t been much different. When friends or family want advice on some new gadget, they ask me. Now, with this whole social networking thing, I’m happy to report that I am the slow guy in town.

In Russian schools, people go through their entire primary schooling experience with one set of classmates, assuming their family doesn’t move. The Russian word for your section of a grade is odnoklassniki. Odnoklassniki.ru was launched in 2006 and has quickly become the de facto social site in the Russian-speaking world. Anastasia has been on it for awhile, but with her mom here visiting us, she has had a little extra time to spend chatting with her girlhood friends. The thought crossed my mind that maybe I should enter the English and Russian social networks at the same time, so I asked my wife what she thought. The answer was a big fat no on both accounts. I decided to go along with her halfway. As of yet, I’m not on odnoklassniki.

Yesterday, I finally joined the masses, according to my brother, and got a Facebook account. Technically, I’ve had one for over a year, but never visited it or anything. Part of the reason I haven’t wanted to get into the MySpace or Facebook phenomena is that it seems like it would waste a lot of time. Besides, I like owning whatever it is that I do. With this site, for example, I can make a backup of everything and be assured it is reasonably safe. With Facebook, Google, or anything else in the cloud, I don’t know for sure. Chances are that things are backed up much more regularly and better than I would, but still there is this nagging deal of ownership in the back of my mind.

My Facebook strategy: one account for work, one for personal stuff. I realize at the outset that it is impossible to segregate one’s life like that, but I’m going to try. (Generally speaking, I’m actually in the majority by having two logins.) When I want to kick back and do some facebook-stalking on my old friends, I don’t necessarily want to see my work associates’ shameless self-promotion of their wares. To (hopefully ) decrease the time investment, I’m not going to ask anybody to be my friend, but wait and see how long it takes for people to notice me.

Twitter. I like the idea, but need to get my personal prose back up to par. For that, I much prefer the blog format. However, a few weeks back I opened up an account for my son and future daughter. I figure once Mommy heads back to work, it will be nice for her to keep tabs on what we’re doing. As Alexei starts talking, it will hopefully become something he looks forward to doing…some form of early literacy, I suppose you could say.

The upper limit of friends I would ever have ten years down the road is what my brother Trevor has now. As of this writing, he has 700. I am not he, and likely have fewer real friends than that, but that’s beside the point. Realistically, I’d guess that by the beginning of summer I’ll have somewhere in the range of 100-200 ‘friends.’

At the end of Day One, I had eight friend requests. In addition to that, I asked the two brothers that hadn’t noticed me yet to grant me friend status to boost my visibility. I’m waiting to see how long it will take my father to notice me; I’ll give him to the end of the week. A few months ago he got Facebook and quickly became a junkie. My mom got a surprise from some friends when they asked her if everything was okay between my father and her. She had no idea what they were talking about…it turns out that my dad listed himself as ‘in a relationship’ because my mother isn’t on Facebook for him to say he’s married to her.

Probably nobody cares (I know I don’t…); here is my friend tally:

• Day 1: +8
• Day 2: +10
• Day 3: +8
• Day 4: +7
• Day 5: +2
• Day 6: +3
• Day 7: +2
• Week 1: 46
• Day 8: +3
• Day 9: +2
• Day 10: +1
• Day 11: +1
• Day 12: +2
• Day 13: +0
• Day 14: +0
• Week 2 = 55
• Month 1 = 60
• Month 2 = 69
• Month 3 = 77
• Month 6 = 96
• Year 1 =137

Note: I’ll be updating this post periodically over the course of the next year.

Edit: It turns out I was wrong about how long it took my dad to notice me. It was one week and one day.

Edit: And there you have it…the final tally is 137. That many people asked me to be their friend over the past year. Although if I count the number of people on my business facebook account, that number jumps to 152.

The wife comes charging up to me and demands to know why I stole pictures from her aunt. Not liking to be accused of something I didn’t do, I tried to not be too defensive. I calmly explained that she told me to bring those pictures. That didn’t go over to well.

“No, I did not tell you to bring them”

“But honey, don’t you remember…?”

“You just weren’t listening!”

It’s always helpful to be reminded that no matter how sure you think you are you heard something, its always a good idea to double check that you heard correctly. Especially when talking with your spouse. Extra-especially when not talking in English.