April 2003 Archives

I am back in Vegas for another trade show. This place is strange.

Today we passed a billboard for a concert:

Journey. Styx. REO Speedwagon. One night only!

I'm betting there will be a lot of Camaros in the parking lot that night, yessiree.

Who do you suppose is considered the headliner?

(By the way, that "one night" is May 10th if memory serves.)

As many of you know, I have dialup internet access at home. Lately, my connection speeds have been steadily dropping. Normally I connect at around 28.8 – I am a long way from my exchange – but it started degrading, dropping to 20, and then 14.4, eventually bottoming out at around 10. Holy Smokes, that’s slow – even by my tortoise-like standards.

I was full of theories as to what the problem was – my ISP was trying to push me to finally accept the monthly hit for DSL, or my purchase of a $10 modem was coming back to haunt me. I downloaded drivers and made sure my account was in good standing, but I just couldn’t figure out what the problem was.

In what seemed to be a separate development, last Monday Katy told me she thought the static on our phone line had gotten worse. She called Pacific Bell and they dispatched a technician. He found a bad splice in our line – actually an unnecessary bad splice – which he promptly fixed, removing the static from our phone and miraculously bringing my connection speeds back up.

Oh.

There are many, many books devoted to the art and science of raising well-adjusted kids. Books like this are written with people like me in mind – whenever I embark on a new adventure I run out and get a couple texts on the matter. I’m always curious to see what the experts have to say before I find myself in hot water.

The problem with books about child rearing is that while they are generally good at discussing children as a group, they just don’t tell you the one thing you really want to know – what will work with Your Kid.

A couple weeks ago, Cam and I were having a little trouble. He was getting sassy and talking back to me. The usual discussions weren’t working and so I told him that if he did it again, he was going to get soap in his mouth.

A couple hours later, he did it again. I let it go with a warning.

During dinner, he did it again, and I warned him again. He wasted no time in talking back to me.

At this point I decided I couldn’t not put soap in his mouth. If you say you’re going to do something and then you don’t, well, what’s the point?

I went to the kitchen sink and got some dish soap on my finger. Cam freaked out. He was screaming and crying and covering his mouth with his hands. I had to pry them away from his mouth so I could put the drop of liquid soap on his tongue. Frankly, I’m a little surprised he didn’t bite me.

He started spitting and spewing and trying to get the taste out of his mouth, and I tried to help him - I had gotten my point across, the punishment was done as far as I was concerned. I got him a fresh glass of water and tried to help him.

He didn’t want me anywhere near him. He just kept repeating “I want to go to sleep! I just want to go to bed!” I felt pretty lousy about the whole thing – suddenly I understood the often-repeated parental phrase “this is going to hurt me worse than it hurts you.” Damn. I felt like the Meanest Dad in the World.

The whole episode was pretty upsetting. But then it got worse.

About two hours after he went to sleep, he had an episode of night terrors – he was crying and agitated but wasn’t awake.

He was fussing and talking in his sleep, and he kicked me when I sat down on the bed to try to calm him down. Suddenly, I realized that he was repeating his side of the conversation from the soap incident. He was reliving the whole thing in his sleep.

I felt awful and I was more than a little ashamed. Cam had been a basically good kid 23 hours and 45 minutes that day, and my punishment for the transgressions of the other 15 minutes had caused him such trauma that he was having nightmares. The punishment did not fit the crime.

No book could have told me that Cam would react that way – but that didn’t make me feel any better. I’ll be thinking about my new “23 hours and 45 minutes” rule for a long time to come.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Parenting is not for wimps.

My old high school buddy Dean and I have been swapping music mixes for the last few years.

My last Great Work was titled "One* Each." The idea was to include one track off every CD I owned. In some cases it was extremely difficult to pick the one track to include, but it was an interesting exercise.

The asterisk was added to the title because I redefined "one" as "An Integer Between 0 And 2." Some compilation CDs had multiple tracks that were worthy, and some CDs had nothing worth including. (I suppose I should put the latter ones on Ebay.)

It took me forever to do it, ripping one song at a time. But man, what a mix! I love these songs!

I highly recommend you make such a mix. And then, since I gave you this Fabulous Idea, you should send me a copy. (I'll reciprocate.)

On this day in 1994, Katy and I got married.

Nine years. Wow.

It's hard to believe that anybody could put up with me for that long.

We spent Easter weekend down at Katy's folks. Yesterday morning we got up and went to church, as is popular on Easter Sunday.

We got there a little late and were looking for a place to sit when the opening hymn started up.

I don't know what the hymn was - I didn't save the bulletin - but it was set to the tune of the sea shanty What Do You Do With A Drunken Sailor. Really! My brother-in-law also recognized it - we exchanged knowing glances and tried to keep from laughing.

I am still humming it today.

Saturday was Katy's birthday. I did my best to spoil her but I somehow feel like I didn't quite get the job done. I present you this list of pros and cons and await your judgement:

Pro: I left work early on Friday to start the celebrating!
Con: But I got home at the normal time.
Pro: Because I was out buying lots of gifts and cards and wrapping paper!
Con: Which I could have purchased long ago, it's not like her birthday moves around a lot.
Pro: On Saturday I showered her with gifts and made her french toast!
Con: The gifts from the kids - gardening clogs and earrings - were purchased later on Saturday morning.
Pro: But I took the kids with me and gave her some time alone!
Con: And then made her feed the kids lunch and put them down for a nap while I mowed the lawn.
Pro: Saturday night we had a sitter and went out to dinner!
Con: Katy had to arrange the sitter and made dinner reservations herself.
Pro: I baked her a birthday cake!
Con: On Sunday, the day after her birthday.
Double-Con: Which she frosted and decorated with the kids on Sunday afternoon.
Extenuating circumstance: While I was out helping a friend who is facing a particularly hard time right now.
Extenuating circumstance, part two: Which Katy acknowledges was the right thing to do.

So what do you think?

Saturday night we had reservations for dinner at 8 PM. The restaurant is new, but not brand new - they've been open for at least a month. When Katy made the reservation they were medium-persnickety about the whole thing: "Make sure your entire party is there a little early. Bring this eight-digit confirmation number with you." Okay, fine, we'll play along.

When we approached the podium (entire party in tow) at 7:50, we overheard that they were still seating people who held 7:00 reservations. But, "We think we can seat you in twenty minutes or so."

Twenty minutes came and went. When we asked how much longer they thought it would be we got the same answer. "We think we can seat you in twenty minutes or so."

What a crock. Why do restaurants overbook their reservations like that? What's the point of offering reservations when having a reservation means you get to wait an hour and a half for a table? What kind of fool is willing to wait for that long for a table when they have a reservation?

Just what is up with that?

We took our business elsewhere.

I've been out of town.

The NAB convention is a week worth of broadcasting geek heaven - if there is such a thing. This year I was able to relax and enjoy getting the Hard Sell from vendors, for the most part.

Here are a few things that I will share with you, in no particular order:

1. If you are invited into a meeting room at a convention to discuss "solutions," sit near the door and be ready to fake a nosebleed if things start getting out of hand. I found myself lured in by the promise of a chair and a bottle of water but then had to suffer through two hours in a stuffy little room listening to other people's so-called "strategic vision." (Translated, that means "being shown Powerpoint slides of boxes with lines between them.") With a halogen light pointed right at my face. I would have confessed to being Osama bin Laden to get out of there. I hope they all* caught my cold.

2. If you haven't flown much lately, be forewarned that it does take longer to clear security nowadays. Make that "arrive an hour before your flight" into "an hour and a half" and you'll be fine. Don't make it "forty minutes" or you'll be practically running to the gate to have the honor of being the last guy they let on the plane. Not that I would know from first hand experience or anything...

3. When you check "specify and purchase," you get invited to better parties than when you only check "specify." Even if you never actually make the purchase.

4. Las Vegas is no place to get over a cold. If you aren't eating dinner until after midnight, well, you aren't taking very good care of yourself, are you?

5. The corned beef hash in the cafe at the Mirage is pretty darned good.

It is nice to be home.

* my boss excepted

A few things from my yard.

First, here's a picture of the baby hummingbirds. They don't do much but lay there and occasionally poop over the side of the nest, but they are much bigger than they were when they hatched. I'm guessing it's another week or so before they fly.

Here in Southern California, lots of houses are "zero-lot-line." This means that the house is built right on the edge of the lot, and your neighbor's yard comes right up to your structure. Our development is not technically zero-lot-line, but our neighbor on one side has an exclusive use easement in the front of our houses, right up to our house. This doesn't trouble me too much because we have a much larger easement on their lot in our back yard, giving us a bigger space. (Yes, "bigger" is a relative term. The yard is still small.)

What does bother me, though, is that the original owner next door planted trees right up against our house. There's not much I can do about it other than trim them where they touch our house or cross the roof line, which I tend to do with extreme prejudice.

The taller ones had started to scrape against our upper-story gutters, making a terrific noise in Cameron's room when it was windy. So I asked our neighbor to see if his gardener could trim them for him.

Neighbor stated that "the last time I asked them to do that they wanted to charge me extra," trying to use that as an excuse. (No kidding? You're asking them to do more work and they want more money? Those bastards!) So I told him not to worry about it, that I'd take care of it - which is what I had kind of hoped for in the first place.

I went to the hardware store, bought a tree trimmer, and lopped about four feet off the top of the offending trees:

Trimming these trees was most gratifying.

One last thing. We have a Japanese maple in our front entry - a nice red-leaf variety. It leafs out this time of year, looking great, but by July all the leaves are browned and dying. I try to keep it well-watered and well-fed, to no avail. This really bothers me - I really like the tree but it just isn't doing well. Anybody have any tips for an amateur arborist?

I miscalculated my coworkers' reaction to something. Namely, a pair of these:

Last summer I wore a pair of fisherman's sandals to the office now and then. This caused a bit of a stir - somewhere between distaste and outrage - for reasons I still don't understand.

So when I got these clogs, I figured the same people in the office - mainly Mister P - would Freak Out when I wore them. I was expecting spluttering hysteria, I tell you. Spluttering! I was looking forward to the spectacle.

Not so much of a spectacle there, as it turned out. I wore them three or four times before I finally pointed them out to Mike. He didn't think anything of them one way or the other, good or bad. They did not trouble him in the least. Go figure.

I may have been wrong about that, but I was right about one thing - the clog, it is a comfy shoe.