Back up!
...but did you even notice I was down? :)
...but did you even notice I was down? :)
'Nuff said on that subject...
So as an update, I'm a father! I mean, again. Three kids now. "Table for five, please." And he (numero tres) is such a beautiful boy. But I'm supposed to say stuff like that, biased opinion and all that, so I'll stop there...
Or rather, digress into the articulation that struck me a few days ago on the subject of having three children. I think it deserves it's own entry. Stay tuned...
Just an administrative note: I am now cross-posting my blog to LiveJournal. My main blog Hyperbole still remains here but all entries I post there are being cross-posted to LJ.
Props to Chip Marshall for his LJ Crosspost Movable Type Plugin.
Okay, gotta get my blog back on...
To the beneficent administrators of this box, I have upgraded MT to 3.2, basically eliminating my spam problem (and the CPU bandwidth it chewed up.) Current comment policy is TypePad only, let me know if you have alternate suggestions.
So I've scrapped my old templates, and totally reimported the data (rather than dealing with a painful migration), so I'll have to build up what I want in my templates again.
At any rate, I'm back. Now to get real.
So I shipped my Canon PowerShot SD400 with a cracked LCD back to Canon, and they fixed it gratís. They sent back a note saying basically "the damage to the camera was not covered by the warranty, but we fixed it anyway. Just don't do it again, okay?"
Woohoo!
Whether or not you heard about this:
Scripps plans to buy Shopzilla search engine
it's worthy of mentioning this:
Shopzilla Acquisition Completed
As a result, my kids get to go to college. This is Very Good News™ for my family. We are essentially debt free. I hardly even know what to do with myself...
Praise God for taking care of my family!
I haven't written anything... for awhile. I keep thinking of blog entries, but not writing them. Time to catch up for all yous. (All 3 of yous.)
Okay, so we don't give a hoot about Boxing Day here. But every day it seems more and more like our baby will be here the next. And now we've had a wonderful Christmas, enjoying watch our son and nephew open their presents with joy. Now the baby can come whenever he/she wants...
I've lost track of myself again.
I've done this before -- I can't seem to learn this lesson.
After months of ignoring myself, of working 16 hour days, of giving my non-work time to my family (mostly my son), I've lost track of myself. The 16 hour work days are over now -- but I'm still in the rut. This has gone on for far too long now -- and now I'm overthinking the whole process.
I need to remember how to just "be" again.
What do I want to do for my birthday? Want? What is want?
And yet, because of my lack of self-care, in a pinch I act with extreme selfishness -- an unconscious reflection of my inattention to my unconscious.
What's worse, in this time I have buried my innate compassion with cynicism, pessimism, and despair. Maybe I should write an entry on all the things I think are fucked up about this country. Maybe if I just get it all off my chest I'd stop sitting on my hands and start doing something about it.
Maybe someday I'll find my way back to the work of tikkun olam -- the repair of the world. Maybe I should first rake the leaves in my own backyard...
Yes, it's true -- I've joined the large and varied ranks of the glasses-wearers. Today is my first day as a full-time spectacale.
It's a very strange experience -- my brain is attempting to compensate for the new "visual information" in very interesting ways. Because the vision in my left eye has become so poor (20/80 + astigmatism) my brain has primarily used the information from my right eye. Now it appears that my brain is overcompensating, preferring the left eye. Unfortunately, this is leading to strange depth-perception effects -- my perception of what I see is skewed -- for instance, my computer monitor appears to be a set distance away, but shaped like a trapezoid instead of a rectangle, with the left side being the shortest line with obtuse angles leading to the right. I assume my brain will someday (soon) learn to properly render this image on my brain, but in the interim it's very trippy. Also, despite the fact that my right lens has very little correction (vision is 20/25 without astigmatism), items solely in my right eye's field of vision are a little blurry. (This is entirely the opposite of how it is without the glasses.)
The brain is a strange creation indeed...
My life has slipped out of balance again. Seems like this happens every so often, some times worse than others. In many ways is only manifests as a feeling -- like I'm not fulfilling any of my roles as completely as I should -- and like I'm constantly feeling I need to catch up in everything I do.
I know the way out of this is to increase/rearrange my organization -- I've done it before. But somehow I wish I could just get it right, so I don't end up in this place again.
There's always the "systems", but I've always internally rebelled against them. I've read much of the Covey _...Effective People_ book, and though I identify with the foundation he's building upon, I just can't bring myself to join the unwashed masses of Franklinites. Every so often I run across an alternative system (most recently this, mentioned in the most recent issue of the storied TidBITS 'zine (err, mailing list.)
I don't believe the answer is that I'm "doing too much" -- many have done more with less and still manage to get in a full night's sleep. I think I'm just out of balance.
...as wonko refers to it in his blog. It's been tough to keep up with this, what with buying a house, moving, working insane hours, and (most importantly) watching an infant. Still, those are lame excuses, right?
Anyway, my lame excuse for today is my parents are in town this past weekend and next weekend.
At some point (if the fancy strikes me), I'll talk about the homebuying experience. For now, I don't have the time (though I'm not working insane hours any more fortunately.)
Derelictè?
Today, I am a homeowner. I can not tell you how harrowing this experience has been, but I'm glad it's finally all over. Now on to moving (tomorrow) and unpacking, and.... living again.
At some point, I may blog more detail about the last several weeks. At the moment, I'm swamped, so it will have to wait.
Yesterday, I signed my life away. That is to say, I signed the counter-offer made against the offer we made on a house in Torrance. (No one has yet been able to tell me what to call myself after I move there -- I'm currently an Angeleno.) I guess on Monday, when we meet with the mortgage broker, I'll sign my life away again. I look forward to the next few months being a series of life-signing-away events. But now I'm "joining the club" of homeowners. (Which it seems for most has a lifetime membership.)
This is a scary time for Jannean and I, but also very exciting. We are full of ideas on how we can make this house even better, and can't wait to start. Of course, we're not going to be flush with cash when we move in, so we're going to have to be choosy about which projects we embark on at first.
Here are some pics of the house, snarfed from the MLS site.
Finally, this bit of humor to put things in perspective (in case we forget who really owns the house.)
Given the fact that Jannean and I have chosen irony as the moniker for our lives (well, for our domain name, at least), I feel compelled to blog the following article published in The Guardian: "The Final Irony"
I have to say that Jannean and I have seen our share of "Situational Irony" in the last year. We found out Jannean's 19-year-old cousin was pregnant (oops!) a week before we found out we were (after 3 years of trying.) The week we found out we were pregnant was my first week of unemployment last summer (which lasted almost 3 months.) We were SURE we were having a girl -- wrong again!
Throughout all of these things, we laughed. We were more than amused by these events, because we appreciate irony. And these are only examples!
So that's our ironic life.
Check this out: http://discover.npr.org/rundowns/segment.jhtml?wfId=1314813
This is probably the funniest thing I've heard on NPR for a long time. I was literally in stitches. Truly Mr. Rumsfeld has raised obfuscation to a form of high art.
(NPR audio can be heard with either RealONE player or Windows Media Player.)
Today is my first Fathers' Day where I am to be honored as a father. It's still pretty weird to me -- in my mind Fathers' Day is still for "old people", I'm supposed to just honor them. I suppose I'm going to have to get used to it -- but I can't help but feel out of place. I guess it's part of being a Gen X Parent -- I'm not sure when exactly I was supposed to have grown up, and yet I'm fully responsible for another human being, indeed, a defenseless child.