Applied Procrastination

Well, here in Tucson, anyway. I imagine those on the East Coast don’t think so. But since that’s where my company’s clients all are, as well as our office that deals with them, we’ve been really quiet yesterday and today. Hopefully, power will be back up and people back to work next week, because I don’t know how much of this I can handle.

Well, it seems as though the East Coast has managed to piece things back together enough that I don’t have to worry about being bored at work.

It was a gray, rainy day today. For Tucson, especially this late in the year, that’s a very strange thing. It rained almost constantly from the time I got up until I went to bed, and I’m sure it started much earlier the night before.

It was one of those days when I feel like the only thing really worth doing is making a big mug of tea (of maybe café latte) curling up in bed with wife, puppies, and blankets, and tuning into a nice Raymond Chandler or Dennis Lahane novel.

Work, especially with the most recent set of crises, is a distant runner-up.

I need more fun, dammit. I don’t have enough right now.

Work is not especially fun. Tinkering with this site is sorta fun, but I’ve got things fairly stable right now. Dungeon Siege was fun for a while, but after the first few dungeons, it got kinda tedious. I’m not tempted to pick it back up. Just to say I had, I downloaded the demo for UT2K3, and that was as non-fun as I expected it to be.

I think I might have more fun on its way through the mail, but I’m probably not allowed to talk about that. Tyler taped Fear of a Black Hat for me, which is fun, but I don’t have the tape yet.

What I’d really dig right now is a quality team-based mod for Quake, and enough people for a really good game. Or maybe a nice game of WH40K with somebody or another.

I’ve been quiet. Part of that is all of the fun we’ve been having at work. (Now that we’ve freighted off the servers to someone else’s data center, perhaps now would be a good time to figure out how we’re going to support the product on their private net, hmm?)

Part of that is general life craziness. Among other things, we’ve been looking for a new house.

Actually, we’ve made an offer. There was a counter-offer. We spent most of the day agonizing about negotiations. Finally we accepted the counter, with one small request. But this is easily one of the most nerve-wracking things I’ve had to do. It doesn’t help, of course, that we’re looking at a down payment that is a 5-digit number an order of magnitude bigger than any check I think I’ve ever had to cut for anything.

All that aside, it’s a really nice house. I’m psyched. We’re trying not to get too deep into decorating for, you know, actually owning it. Pictures if they accept, and we get into the inspection period.

We had the inspection of the house I mentioned last week, and that didn’t go so well. Mrs. Me was pretty disappointed, and I wasn’t all that thrilled, either. Place needs a new roof, some maintenance to the rafters themselves, the A/C and water heater on toward their end-of-life, there are settlement cracks in the foundation, lots of little plumbing tasks, drainage issues on the sides of the house….

Nothing by itself was completely infeasible. But that’s still a lot of money, and it was a profusion of stuff, not just one thing. I could see having to drop a lot of money to get it all taken care of, and that’s really not what we’re looking for. So… back to it.

One of the unfortunate realities of the market in this city is that the edges are so much less expensive than the middle. The tract homes out in Sahuarita and Vail are the prime examples, of course, but even close in, the difference can be pretty large. I’m really trying to stay on this side of Wilmot, but it may get difficult.

Yeah, it’s been pretty quiet here, but that’s because I haven’t really had the time to write, or the energy. what with the holidays, and the Great House Hunt™, my attention’s been elsewhere for quite a while.

May have some good news on various fronts soon. When things let up a little, expect the Mega Update.

In the mean time, if you liked Jedi Knight II, give Jedi Academy a try. It’s a little “kewler” than JKII, but has more eye candy, more Jedi acrobatics, and is presented in much smaller bites. I’m digging it, even if I’m afraid that the plot may turn out to be really, really lame.

So, the Mega Update is still cooking (significant stuff just has a way of never finishing, doesn’t it?), but in the mean time, here’s a great tip for you prospective cooks out there.

When baking potatoes, always — and I mean always — poke a few holes through the skin into the flesh of the potato with a fork before putting it into the oven. The purpose of this exercise, as you may know, is to allow the steam generating by the water in the potato boiling as it cooks to escape.

The alternative, apparently, is to not do so, and turn the potato in question into a grenade. I forgot to do this last night when making dinner, and when I tested the fourth of four potatoes for doneness, it literally exploded in my hand. One second I’m standing there with a potato and a fork. BANG! And the next I, and my kitchen, am covered in potato. In my hand is an empty husk that sort of reminds me of John Hurt halfway through Alien.

I am thankful for two things: first, that our oven mitts are the kind that go up to your elbow, and that I was wearing one instead of using a hot pad. Second, that my eyesight is crappy, and I was wearing glasses. That’s not a story I wanted to have to tell in the ER.

You Have Been Warned.

Heh. So how about that Mega Update, huh?

Well, what with one thing and another, getting Moveable Type back up and running on this server never really seemed like a project I was prepared to tackle. But with the new year and all, I resolved to actually get with the program, and fix things.

So now the content management system is up and running again. I may upgrade to the new version, or I may stick with what I’ve got. But the important thing is that I can start actually posting news again. And I’ve got quite the backlog, as I’m sure you might guess from the date of the last entry.

But I suppose I should get back to the work I’m actually paid for for the time being.

This year was the year of single, big Christmas presents. I got Vicki jewelry, and she got me a Star Destroyer. The LEGO Star Destroyer. The biggest kit they’ve ever made, both in terms of size (37" long) and number of elements (3104, officially, but mine had a dozen or so extras). To scale, a stud on one of the bricks is about 14 meters.

I finally finished putting the ship together on New Year’s Day, but it’s taken me until now to finish taking the pictures, and getting them together. You can find all of them on Brickshelf.

In the words of Ferris Bueller, if you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.

Dear Dishwasher,

Your name is not a mere description. It is a mandate, a call to action. It is your raison d’être.

However, it has recently come to my attention that, of a sudden, you are no longer living up to the expectation formed by this noble appellation. Plates and bowls and silverware that might once have emerged from a mere “light wash” now remain less than clean after two or more cycles through you. I find this distressing, as, indeed, I hope you do as well.

Not to put to fine a point on this discourse, but allow me to point out that you are no longer young. Technology has not stood still in the years since you were made. Your younger brethren are, dollar for dollar, pound for pound, better than you are. So please do not think that — should you force your own retirement — that your service will be regarded with the warm glow of nostalgia for better days now passed.

I would appreciate it if you would get over whatever strange funk lately claims you, and do your job. Fulfill your mission.

Thanks,
Your Owner

So, today was BA’s four-month pediatric appointment. All is well, and he’s solidly in the middle of the size range for kids his age. I left him with the nurse who was weighing him for a moment to run to the restroom, and she couldn’t resist picking him up. He’s that kind of kid. (But doesn’t everyone think their baby is that cute?)

As you might imagine, he’s half of the major announcement I’ve been mentioning off and on for the past year or so. The other half was our new house, which is in a nicer (but still central) part of town, and is almost twice the size of our old condo.

So there you are.

It seems a bit anticlimactic laid out like that, doesn’t it? Well, at the time, as you may imagine, it was really pretty momentous. Heck, even now, sometimes I stop and think, “OMG! You’re a dad!” But all of the drama seems smaller in retrospect.

The house hunt went on for several months. I think we started looking in October or so, and finally moved in last February. In between those two dates, we found houses for both of my in-laws (separately, you understand; and as of a few months ago, they’re divorced), moved them in, had quite a few heart-to-hearts about The Matter of Children, and did a heck of a lot of house hunting ourselves.

Once we were in the new place, we had to sell the old one, which was a frustrating experience. For some reason, we kept getting buyers who were freaked out by minor maintenance in a condo about 20 years old (and maybe not top-of-the-line then, truth be told). So someone would make an offer, have their inspection, and then have a slow breakdown about needing a new sink sprayer or work done on a window. After two weeks, they’d finally bail, and we’d try to find someone new. But we turned a decent profit on the place.

Incidentally, if you’re in the market for a house in Tucson, talk to Jennifer Finger. ☺

So, once in the new place, the Matter of Children is settled. My lovely mom-to-be had done quite a bit of expectation-setting in terms of the process. Let’s just say that this turned out not to be necessary. By early last March, we knew BA was on the way. And last fall, there he was. He, himself, still seems a bit unsure of what all of this bodes.

It’s been quite a ride, and it’s far from over. But now you’re all caught up. And on we go!

“Your son just peed on the dog!”

It really doesn’t seem like it’s been a whole year, but BA is one year old today. (I suppose it seems like even less time when there have only been 3 entries in the last 8 months of that.)

It’s amazing to me still that I’m someone’s dad, because he’s just there, and needs to be taken care of, and I can hardly remember a time without him. The changes are fast in the grand scheme of things, but they sneak up on you when you’re right there, day in and day out. Oh, sure, he walks now, and he’s got teeth (three, and another coming in), and he babbles all the time, and all of that he learned and developed. But it’s not until you look through the baby book that it really hits you how much of a little person he is now, and how different he is from just a few months ago.

“Oh, hey, Batman!”
“Hey, Batman! I give you a hug!”
“Ohhhh, that’s such a good hug!”
“It’s nice to meet you!”
“Let’s hit with spears!”
“There’s spears!”

It’s strange to be reminded that there was, once, a time when you had no real conception of what it was to throw up. (Frankly, I wouldn’t be so sad if that were still true….)

I know that BA has some theoretical context—he’s seen the damn dog puke up so many pairs of socks in his three years, how could he not?—but the look of sheer horror on his face yesterday when that became practical experience was so utterly pathetic. He just sort of sat there, looking at me like, “are you kidding me?” Oh, man.

In other news, he seems to be feeling better now.