Maybe I should go Amish

Oh iPhone, oh iPhone, why do you burn through your battery so? You were fine just a few days ago. What have I done anger you in this way? I swear, all I did on Friday was download one app to help my nephew with his Flat Stanley project for school.

A visit to the Genius Bar at “Steve’s Store” suggested that the problem was more likely hardware than software. I tried doing what the fellow there suggested; restore the system from backup to clean out any software that is stuck or settings that may be bad. So far, that’s proved fruitless.

In my mad dash to make the appointment (parents of toddlers seem to so rarely be on time for anything), I lost the soft case for my Ray-Ban Sunglasses (from Costco). It fell out of my pocket. Now I down both an iPhone and useful case for my sunglasses.

Perhaps I should just go Amish. Hats. Beards. Mighty fine barns. Somehow I don’t think the wife will go for that.

Not my best moment

I shared this with a few folks on FB earlier today, and I thought I’d preserve it here:

I gave Baby G. a grilled cheese sandwich and a few tater tots for dinner tonight. We were both tired, him from a a nap strike yesterday and me, from well, everything. All went well until I turned my back, he got hold of the salt shaker, and suddenly there was a white coating of salt all over his food, all over the table, and starting to work its way to the floor. Even as I said “Baby G. Stanley Cornelius! What are you doing!” too loudly and anxiously, I could hear my mother’s recent advice: “don’t yell at him, he doesn’t know any better”. And really, I wasn’t yelling at him, because she’s right, he doesn’t know any better. If I was yelling at anyone, it was at me for leaving the salt shaker within his reach. He didn’t know that… a for a few minutes, he started to cry. It was but a moment, but not one of my best.

They say that life is what happens while you are waiting for your plans to come true. Today feels like parenting is what happens while you are waiting to get some more sleep.

Phantom voices

I got up at about 1:45am the other night because Baby G. was stirring and mumbling in his sleep the other night.  Mrs. Geek pulled this duty the night before and expressly asked me to get up if I heard him in the middle of the night.  When he did, I got out of bed, walked down to his bedroom, found a pillow, and stretched out on the floor next to his crib.  After a short while, I fell asleep.

I had a dream of the sort that I usually don’t have.   I dreamed it was dark and I was walking through rooms in my parents house that don’t exist.   I started in rooms that were indistinctly filled with sleeping people in bunk beds, through a series of doorways, doors, and chambers that became progressively less used.  Each next room seemed to be filled with several people indistinctly mumbling, only to fall silent and uninhabited as soon as entered.  I stopped in a room, looking for corner where I could curl up and sleep.  A disembodied figure passed through from behind me onto the next chamber.  I took it to be my father.  I asked it/him if these rooms were ever used.  He responded “If I ever told your mother that they were, I’d never get any sleep around here.”   I lay down in the corner of that room and went to sleep.

After that, I awoke saw from the clock that it was almost 3am and went back to my own bed.   For some reason, that passing from room to room with the next room full of indistinct conversation that then fell silent… that’s stuck with me since.

It’s been ten years… really?!?

I happened to look down at the Archives list on the blog the other day and realized that it’s been ten years since I started blogging. Looking back at the early entries, it certainly feels like another life. I was about 2.5 years out from finally leaving graduate school and going to working for Company O. The job there still seemed shiny and new, and I was generally happy with it. Mrs. Geek and I had been in a dating relationship for almost a year, and were a couple months away from making that relationship more permanent. The Second Iraq War started.

I’m trying to remember how I actually found myself at Diaryland (the first home of this blog). I think it was due to the band the Asylum Street Spankers. Wammo had a blog on Diaryland that I found through the Spankers web site, and I started reading that regularly. From there, I started following a few other bloggers… among the first (if not the first) being Mrs. Roboto. From there, it just blossomed over the next five to six years, through my wedding, the first couple years of my marriage, and buying my first home.

In the process, I became the “imaginary friend” of a group of people I still associate with on Facebook. Looking down the Diaryland favorites list, I see Harri3t Spy (she eventually became not imaginary), who introduced me to Lass, Jeanne at Necromancy Never Pays, JoyHowie at The Crooked Line, and Freshhell. Mrs. Roboto introduced me to Eve Roboto(also not imaginary.) Through her, I met her husband and got involved with their web site Geeks of Doom until my day job and parenting responsibilities made it difficult to keep up with the pace of their growing web site. I wrote some popular early articles there, and feel proud that “I was in the room” when that web site was born. I also met Ariadne518, Teranika, and Eleanorio. I also get the odd, once in a while, update breadcrumb about Ilonina. Finally, I started reading the blog lionessden. I think there are three or four Ph.Ds conferred to that group in the decade (joining my own), a few moves across state lines (and occasionally international boundaries), a successful web site, a t-shirt I wish I hadn’t sent, some mix CDs both from me and to me, and a lot of very wonderful words.

Thanks everybody, for putting up with me this long and for letting read about your lives in return.

Finding my laugh

I haven’t felt much reason to laugh over the last three to four years. Some wonderful things have happened during that time (Baby G. being the most important of them) but I haven’t found to much reason to laugh. Work at Company O. kind of killed my ability to laugh for a while. As a child, my Mom would ask me “why are you laughing? are you re-living some joke again?” and often I would be. I had the ability to hold some bit of laughter in my memory and let some of it out simply by replaying it. For the last few years, Mrs. Geek would show me something and say “What? No chuckle? Anything? That’s funny!” and I often didn’t have the laughter in me. Everything around me seemed so serious and so depressing… putting my mind into a laugh inducing state of mind was hard to do.

With a change of job has come a change in temperament. Mrs. Geek says that there is a quietness and calmness about me that she hasn’t seen for a few years. Certainly an angry, frustrated core of emotion is gone. With that replaced by something more relaxed and genial, I was wondering if the ability to replay laughter might return too.

It did when I saw this not long ago:

I know. This bit of Photoshoppery, it’s wrong, so very wrong. Yet I think about it and giggle a little bit every time.

Experiments in sleep deprivation

It turns out that toddler sleep, like American football, is a game of inches. In this particular case, the inches are the difference in height between the mattress and the crib rail and the distance between the crib and the nearest thing to which a toddler can climb. For Baby G., the crib rail was just low enough that he could swing a leg up to the top and a “mock Swedish” home-assembled storage cabinet (from a certain company with bright blue stores and a four letter name) was just close enough to provide a platform for escape from the crib. Given that Baby G. is turning into an avid climber, this suggested that the winds of change were blowing during this past week, and that we should get ahead of them.

Fortunately, we purchased a convertible crib. The crib first transforms into a toddler bed by replacing the front crib rail with a low guard that protects about half the length of the mattress. After that, it is possible to buy bed rails that turn the front and back crib rails into the headboard and foot board of a full-sized bed. Baby G.’s room is too small for anything more than a twin bed, but we figured that the crib to toddler bed conversion would be useful. When Baby G. actually got out of his crib a couple of times last Tuesday, we figured the toddler bed was worth a try.

The actual timing of the conversion caused some friction. Mrs. Geek was hoping that I’d convert the crib sometime before work on Wednesday morning. I was just feeling on the better side of a cold and had a company potluck luncheon to prepare for that day (I brought Texas-style chili con carne) and decided to wait until the evening. We were both a little worn out and irritable by the end of the day, and she was disappointed that we weren’t able to try the toddler bed out for his afternoon nap. This turned out to be just as well; we’d misplaced some parts needed for the conversion and a trip to the hardware store was required to find replacements. That was easily accomplished on Wednesday evening, and could not have been accomplished that morning.

Bed time that night and the following three nights were not, well, a disaster… but it wasn’t a picnic either. Baby G. has always been good at settling himself for the night, but it’s always been a SLOW process. We could put him in a crib for the night, but he doesn’t fall asleep right away as a rule. He usually takes 30-45 minutes of rolling around, walking around the crib, and sometimes chattering for him to calm down for sleep. Take away one wall of the crib, and he wants to get up, walk around the room, play with toys, and start climbing things. These new possibilities also excite him, so he stays up much later with the toddler bed than he would with the crib. Mrs. Geek and I eventually took 15 minute shifts trying to keep him in the bed… and he wasn’t always happy about it. With an 8pm bed time, he didn’t calm himself until about 10:15pm on the first night. He got to sleep between 15 and 30 minutes earlier on the other nights. His naps weren’t much better. Mrs. Geek and I got tired and irritable from playing “bad cop” for about 2 hours each night and an hour or so during the afternoon. It became a cycle of decreasing returns… where all of us just became more and more exhausted.

So today we decided to withdraw and regroup. The toddler bed is now a crib once more, with the mattress set the lowest it could go. The crib is now a few inches further away from the toy storage cabinets, because the crib is now closer to the wall and the cabinets have been moved as far away as some wall bracing will allow. Baby G. fell asleep on his own in about 10 minutes for his nap this afternoon, and in about 45 minutes without intervention from his parents this evening. The lower mattress and the larger spacing between furniture bought us some time… to consider our next move. The events of the last few days taught us that this needs to be a proactive, not reactive, process.

Finding New Ways To Lose Sleep

The “terrible twos” have arrived at our house (along with a new two-year molar or three). Baby G. has been more moody in the last few weeks, and prone to throwing tantrums in which he screams and either throws himself on the ground or tries to bonk his forehead into something if he’s unhappy. He’s moved from “2T” to “3T” between October and February, and he seems taller every time I turn around and look at him. All this change has got to be unsettling. Add to that the fact that he’s still not talking — he can now perform a variety of simple tasks if you ask him, so there is plenty of language cognition but he has little interest in mimicking others (for fun or not) and is very selective in how he vocalizes — and he’s got to get plenty to be frustrated about, I’m sure. Since he doesn’t talk and can’t ask, we don’t bother to explain what is going on even though he could probably understand some of it. Mrs. Geek and I need to be better about that.

Things were particularly bad two weeks ago. Baby G. was waking up in the middle of the night a lot. He also seemed to be want to cling to Mrs. Geek or myself than usual. His appetite was off. Mrs. Geek took him to a “newborn to toddler” parenting class in which the parents meet in one room while the kids have (supervised) playtime together in another room, and he had a pretty bad meltdown. This struck us as rather odd, because he’d attended the class during the previous two weeks and everyone was very impressed with how easily Baby G. was able to separate from his mother.

The reasons for his apparent bad mood became clearer to me a couple days later when Mrs. Geek was at a scrapbooking event for the evening and I gave Baby G. a bath. I happened to peek into his mouth and saw a new two year molar breaking through in the back. If it wasn’t “problem solved”, it was “problem better understood” at least. He continued to be grumpy, and up occasionally overnight all through the following week. It felt better knowing why.

If all this wasn’t enough, the alarm system panel at our house started making these sequences of six beeps every few hours during both the day and the night over this past weekend. I first noticed the problem at around 3am on Saturday. Baby G. was up again at around 1am, and I’d brought him with me to the sofa in our living room where (thankfully) we both fell asleep again fairly quickly. So that got me up for a second time with a front row seat because the alarm panel is only about six feet from the sofa. By late morning, I’d done some searching online about the problem and figured out that the system has a small lead acid battery that it uses as a backup power supply. That battery was dead or dying, prompting both beeps from our control panel and signals to the alarm company. Those alarm company signals resulted in robo-calls to our house saying “your alarm system has a low battery”.

I tried at various times during the day Saturday to call the alarm company to get advice on what to do. That initially proved fruitless. The robo-calls we got referred to a web site, and the web site referred to a 1-800 help line that called an automated phone tree. The phone tree eventually tried to call a number that prompted one of those “You have dialed a wrong number. If you reached this number in error, please hang up and call again.” messages from the phone company. After a few more episodes of beeping alarm panels during the day, I stepped up my efforts by looking at the contact numbers available on our monthly bills. One of those connected me to a human right away, and I finally found myself taking apart the alarm panel at around 5pm with the help of someone on the phone.

Getting at the battery proved fairly easy, but finding a replacement was less so. About the only place where I figured I could find such an item after 5pm on a Saturday was the local electronics megamart chain. It’s a great place to go for absolutely all things “technology geek”, but their customer service is absolutely horrible and their business practices cut every corner possible. Yet, they are a “one stop shop” with a lot of stuff you can’t get elsewhere, and cannot be ignored for that reason. I follow two rules when shopping there: 1. don’t call and ask if they have something because the sales drones always lie about what’s in stock, and 2. never buy anything “previously opened with manufacturers warranty” because all returns seem to be put back on the shelves at least once, even if parts are mangled, broken, or missing. Knowing that this might involve a journey, we decided that I should wait until Baby G. was fed, bathed, and in bed before I departed.

I finally began my quest just before 7:30pm. I headed to the nearest store for the battery, which the chain web site indicated was in stock. As with calling on the phone, I discovered that “in stock” on the web was a relative term. After looking for 10 minutes where on the shelf that the battery was supposed to be but wasn’t, I flagged down a sales drone and he looked at the inventory system. It said that there was supposedly one item in inventory, but the drone happily conceded that it was often difficult to locate an item if there was only one of them in the system. I had the presence of mind to ask about inventories at other stores; he said there was a store 10 miles away with four, and a store 20 miles away with twelve. I opted to head for the store 20 miles away because it was getting toward 8pm and the stores closed at 9pm. I’d rather go the distance and definitely find a battery than stop at a second store only to have to move on to a third and be worrying about closing time.

The further store did indeed have plenty of the batteries, though it took me a while to find one because each store is laid out differently and I hadn’t been to that location for a long time. The replacement battery took about 10 minutes to install and then 24-30 hours to charge. I had it installed by 9pm on Saturday, and the low battery warnings (with the attendant beeps and robo-calls) didn’t finally end until Sunday night. The system did not report that it was healthy again until I got up on Monday morning.

When I told my parents about all this on Sunday, my Mom humorously remarked that “all of you seem to try awfully hard to find new ways to lose sleep.”

I did get one consolation out of the shopping trip on Saturday night. The CD selection at the local electronics megamart has shrunk a lot over years (though it’s still better than say, Best Buy or Target) but they still have a rack for audiophile releases like SACDs and DVD-Audio discs. There, I was able to find a copy of the Mobile Fidelity SACD release of Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys. This is a lush, beautiful stereo version (created under the supervision of Brian Wilson in 1997) that made for a gorgeous meditation as it played on my SACD player while I cleaned house on Sunday morning.

Guns, not butter

I have friends or loved ones on every side of the gun debate that is raging in our country right now.  Mrs. Geek is convinced that no one in a civilized society (outside the military) should need a gun with a fire rate of 15 rounds per minute (such as the AR-15.)  My Ph.D. dissertation adviser and his sons apparently think every American should be issued a gun along with a birth certificate and if you can’t defend yourself against bad people, that’s your problem.   A high school friend (and Second Iraq War veteran) vigorously defends the right to keep firearms in the home, even after she and her ex-spouse both had to be removed from the home they shared at the time in handcuffs because they’d pulled out hand guns on each other during a domestic dispute.  Myself, my ideas about guns sit closer to those of my wife than the others, so there are some things about the pro-gun side of the debate that do not make sense to me.

Buying guns should not be like buying groceries.  It’s not “criminal persecution of the innocent” to not be able to say “honey, I’ll go down to the store to get some milk, some bread, and that new automatic pistol you like.”  It’s not a baseball bat or a kitchen knife.  These things have other legitimate uses, wholly unrelated to their ability to cause harm to another human being.  A gun is made to shoot at objects, animals, or people.  Period.  Is it so unreasonable to ask that (at minimum) we have the same sorts of mechanisms in place to handle guns as we do to handle cars (e.g. every gun is registered, gun training must meet a regulated minimum, and the ability to own a gun is denied people who are mentally ill)?

Guns can’t heal people.  People heal people.  The one that gets me most is that there apparently is this notion out there that learning to handle a gun will make you a better person and a better citizen.   The mother of the Newton, CT shooter used guns to bond with her son, who she seemed to feel had behavioral issues.  Chris Kyle, an ex-Navy Seal and sniper, was apparently killed this week by a fellow veteran he was counseling… in part, by taking a trip to a shooting range together.   I understand that shared interests are important and that making someone part of a group can help their self esteem and bring them out of their shell.  Don’t people understand that it’s not good sense to put a gun in the hands of some others?

Someone I know had a FB post up this week that said “Talk to me if you want to learn to use a gun.  I will help you buy a gun.  I will help you learn to use a gun.  I will help you obtain parts and ammo.  Help promote gun use in the next generation.”   All I want to say is: “really?!?”.    Putting a gun in someone’s hand is not like learning to fish in order to feed themselves.  Are you going to get to know this person?  Are you going to make sure this person learns good gun safety skills?  Are you going to be there when this person is feeling depressed or angry at his/her spouse?  Are you going to make sure this person isn’t carrying a gun when drunk?   I also want to ask: “how will you feel if you help put a gun in someone’s hand and they use it to commit a crime?”

Responsible gun ownership currently seems to exist as a circle of trust.  Trust us, the gun owners say.  We’ll monitor sales, training, and membership, they say.  We should really be unregulated, they say.  The government shouldn’t even collect detailed public health information about gun violence because guns are safe, they say.  It is our right, they say.

That sort of attitude only seems to invite trouble for all of us, I say.

What not to do for breakfast.

Hi there. I know it’s been a while. There are a couple things going on. First off, I’m in the middle of a sprint to finish up a development and testing cycle at work to complete the next version of the product I help create for a living. Aside from all that, a full night of sleep is sometimes pretty hard to come by around there lately. Baby G. is waking up once or twice a night most nights, and waking up upset. He is usually almost crying and not willing to settle down without some time snuggling with Mrs. Geek or myself.

We were puzzled about the cause of this behavior for a good while. Was he having bad dreams? Is having the heater on all night bothering him (it’s been cold)? The probable reason came to light earlier this week when Baby G. and I were sleeping on the sofa from about 12:30-2am. After 3-4 weeks of poor sleep behavior, it’s getting to be second nature to grab the kid and curl up somewhere without really waking up too much. So, Baby G. and I feel asleep on the sofa fairly quickly. We probably would have stayed that way until morning, except Baby G. started thrashing and rolling around at around 2am. When I say thrashing, I mean it: he was between me and the back of the sofa, and he would roll on one side, then the other, then flop over onto my chest, then push himself over me, almost falling head first off the front of the sofa. Whatever is going on with him right now, I think he’s thrashing around in his crib at night and hurting himself on the sides. That causes the crying and the need for a snuggle.

We had a particularly bad early morning on Monday. Baby G. woke up and then just wanted to be awake… for most of the time between 2:30 and 5:30am. He wasn’t being particularly upset or agitated, just awake, and kept both of us up taking shifts with him. I awoke briefly when the alarm went off, long enough to turn it off so everyone could sleep in a little bit. I slept for another 45 minutes and then got up.

Since I was up and both Mrs. Geek and Baby G. were still asleep, I decided to get Baby G.’s breakfast ready. My Mom says that some kids can get dressed and then eat in the morning, but I was the opposite. I needed to eat first thing in the morning because I’d be too grumpy to deal with otherwise. Baby G. is like that too. Breakfast had better be ready sooner rather than later in the morning routine. I decided that it might be a good idea to have breakfast for Baby G. ready when he woke up since he was getting up late. He would be hungry. It should be something he likes.

One of the things that Baby G. likes for breakfast is oatmeal. I often make oatmeal for myself on Saturday mornings. It’s a simple preparation: extra thick rolled oats, cooked in a 2:1 mix of milk and water with a dash of salt and served a little butter and a splash of maple syrup. Being the mooch that he is, Baby G. wanted to try what Dad was eating. Once he did, he demanded more. So I now make Baby G. a small bowl of oatmeal whenever I make it for myself.

Baby G. loved the oatmeal I made for him on Monday. He loved it so much that he had two bowls. That’s where the problem began.

After he filled his first diaper, I was still home and I changed it. It was stinky.

After he filled his second diaper two hour later, his speech therapist (more about this another time) had to bring him out of his office to Mrs. Geek in the waiting room for her to change in a nearby bathroom. Mrs. Geek called me after the therapy appointment to let me know how it went, and to remark that “Gee, it’s odd that he filled a diaper during his appointment.”

After he filled his third diaper two hours later, Mrs. Geek put him down for a nap and called me to ask what it was that he had for breakfast because two poopy diapers in one morning are no fun to change.

After he filled his fourth diaper four hours later, Mrs. Geek called me to say that I was not supposed to feed him that much oatmeal again, ever, unless I was home to do all the diaper changing.

Well ok. Lesson learned.

Christmas In My Memory

Christmas 2012 has come and gone. In general, it was a good holiday. I’ve been sick since around the 9th of December, and got some antibiotics for sinusitis on Friday, the 21st. They had me feeling much improved by the time Christmas rolled around (though I started another course of meds yesterday… but more on that later.) We went to Mass at 5pm on Christmas Eve, and then made it over to the in-laws by about 7:30pm to join them for dessert after a big turkey dinner. We opened gifts bright and early the next morning, and then returned to the in-laws for a less formal dinner on Christmas day (fondue and soup.) I made a Meyer Lemon Cake for the occasion that was a rather complicated to assemble — the cake is more a sponge/souffle and the filling is a lemon custard — but the amount of butter and eggs in the recipe ensures that it has to taste good.

Though my in-laws sometimes are sometimes a source of tension around the holidays, both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were largely a lovely time. One individual did briefly stir the pot a bit, as seems to be happening more lately, but two others jumped into the breach with some sympathy and understanding that smoothed everything over.

I believe it was when we were traveling on Christmas Eve that Mrs. Geek asked me “do you feel bad that we don’t go to the Land Of Your Birth for Christmas anymore?” I went home for the holidays for over a decade before I met Mrs. Geek, and we went a few times after we were married… the last time being 2007, I believe. We just don’t do it now. Airline equipment inventory and staffing and our vacation schedules just make it damn expensive and damn inconvenient to travel around the holidays anymore.

It’s more than that, too. The Christmas holiday in my parents house feels like part of my past. I could go back now, but it wouldn’t be the same. The relationship changed. I have my own home, my own family, our own evolving Christmas traditions. I’m sure that a visit at Christmas would be lovely, but parts of what made those Christmases past memorable to me are gone. Time marches on.

I finished a five day course of Zithromax on Christmas Day. By the following Friday, I felt sinus pressure return and sore throat assert itself. Clearly, the Zithromax had only won a temporary battle against the microbes in my head, not the war. A return to the Urgent Care clinic resulted in new prescription for a 21 day course of Levaquin. Take that, sinusitis!