Category: Daily living

Livin’ ain’t easy

Two or three times a year, I get stuck in a funk. It’s usually around March. (Heck, it usually IS all of March.) September isn’t my standard time for murky thoughts — I like it too much. But I’m in a sort of gap at work (our new organizational structure gets announced Friday — my projects are going without much intervention, it makes no sense for me to ask my old boss for work and my new boss is too busy to delegate until I actually report to them). I hate being bored at work. Hate it. I complain about it when I’m working hard and barely have time to check my email, never mind craft long-winded blog posts on long-winded books. But I actually greatly prefer that to “looking busy”. I hate looking busy. I like BEING busy, as long as I get to go home at the end of the day.

Anyway, that’s the only external factor to my funkosity. (Well, that and the small hurts of life that young boys accumulate. Thane currently has a heck of a shiner, and Grey has a minor issue that I’m not going into on the internet.) Life as a young parent is hard. I’m sure it’s always been hard. Every time I go to complain, I read the Economist about childhood malnutrition rates, or catch the news about the violence happening 10 miles south of here, or read Herodotus with all the uncertainty and violence they experienced. I’m never unaware of how extremely and supremely lucky I am — joyfully married, two fantastic and healthy kids, two great jobs, a house with minute but existing positive equity that we really like, great neighbors, and excellent church that isn’t doing the horrible political blowups you sometimes witness, good health. Really. I know I have it all. (And I’ve read enough medieval literature to know that when you’re at the top of the Wheel of Fate, there’s only one direction to go. Fortunately, I’m not King yet.) But it’s still hard sometimes. (And yes, mom, I am getting exercise. I ran two miles yesterday and worked out on Monday too. So I’m bummed AND sore.)

A similar parent on my blog roll was writing this week about the tradeoffs of being a working parent, and it’s true. There’s a constant negotiation. There’s a constant option to feel like you are shortchanging someone. Most of the time I keep my balance, like a woodsman balancing on a log in the water, constantly running to stand still. Every once in a while I miss my footing, fall in, and have to climb back out again. I say this as a statement of fact. Not as a plea for help, or an excuse. That’s just where I am and what it feels like. I don’t know yet if it gets easier when you (they) get older. I’ve heard it doesn’t — that you trade food-throwing and tantrums for soccer practice and tantrums. I prefer not accept the conventional wisdom on older children. My husband and I were both pretty good teens (I’d say very good but there were about 6 months of my youth that were a touch rocky). Why should we necessarily assume our kids will be tougher than we were? Both our sets of parents either have amnesia, or seemed to rather enjoy being our parents. We can hope the same will be true for us.

Anyway, to sum up, I’m blue. I anticipate ceasing being blue next week, when I will resume being busy.

To get you out of the depressive slump I’ve just put you in, I offer Camp Gramp portraits! The pictures this year were done by the talented Coelynn McIninch. I’d like to commend her work and professionalism. She did a great job with the kids (no easy task) including the two big kids who are really hard to get to sit down for pictures (yes, I am speaking of my parents). If you’re in Massachusetts, I’d wholeheartedly recommend her for your portrait/wedding/baby needs!

Sating your car-related curiosity

I’m sure you’ll all be super-relieved to hear the outcome to our car woes. Well, at least part of hit. After three weeks of attempting to fix the fact that driving Brunhilde bore an uncanny resemblance to riding a bucking bronco, she is finally fixed! The transmission place replaced a solenoid and now it’s happy. I don’t know what a solenoid is, but I do know that getting ANYTHING fixed on a car for $275 calls for a celebration. So now she’s had all sorts of codes fixed by Midas, which, um, I’m sure will be great AND she’s stopped lurching around. Huzzah! Now to bring the other car in for the $500 missing trim…. really soon. I swear. Then again, duct tape is attractive….

In other completely fascinating and expensive news, we’re bringing in a contractor to work on the rotting wood on our window frames. You know, I knew that owning a home would involve expensive maintenance, but I’d never guessed just how BORING the expensive maintenance would be. I imagined, you know, redoing the bathroom. Or something. Not window frames. Ah well.

So now that you’ve suffered through reading about my car and house woes, I reward you with pictures! Of cute kids! Only some of whom are mine! (And a bok choy.)

http://picasaweb.google.com/fairoriana/September2010#

Cars and trucks and things that go

Vehicles have been consuming a disproportionate amount of my mental energy lately, and not just because my youngest feels the need to narrate as we drive by. “Bu car! Red car! Big truck!!!” About two? Three weeks ago? I posted about how both of our hitherto reliable vehicles had simultaneously developed urgent problems.

The elder of our two cars, a 2002 Saturn named Brunhilde, has the less driveable of the problems. There’s something with the solenoid or warp drive or some such thing that causes it to lurch every time it shifts (it’s an automatic). So far she’s been to:

Midas: $500 for unrelated issues. Never actually checked to see if it worked.
Midas: Said, oh, the problem actually requires skill so we can’t fix it.
Transmission place: told us to go to the electrical place
Electrical place: said the electrical was fine, told us to go to the transmission place
Transmission place: said that they can look at it in a week. Maybe. It’s now at the transmission place and we are holding out high hopes that maybe someone will actually look at it sometime this year and tell us how much to fork over for fixing it.

Of course, it’s a 2002 Saturn with over 100,000 miles on it that is already nearly 2 car payments deep on repairs. I reckon it has about another $3000 of repairs before the repairs are worth more than the car. So there’s a chance that the transmission place will call up and say, “It’s a warp core breach, cap’n. I canna fix it!” And then poof! We will be in “So we’re buying a new car this weekend mode.”

I don’t wanna buy a new car this weekend. But my family motto is “Nuquam non paratus” which translates to “Boldly go where no mom has gone before”. Or “Never unprepared”. One of the two. So prepared I must be. (My husband’s family motto translates to “Never a good one among us.”)

This is one of the those all-to-frequent moments when I wish you could just write a sql query against life. It would look like this:

SELECT Car, Price, Fuel_Efficiency, Number_of_Passengers, Cargo_Space
FROM 2010_Cars
WHERE Number_of_Passengers >= 5
AND Cargo_Space >= (SELECT Cargo_Space FROM 2007_Cars WHERE Car = ‘Toyota Matrix’)
ORDER BY Fuel_Efficiency DESC

Right there, that would give me everything I’d need. Do you have ANY idea how hard it is to compile that database manually? And then there’s the fact that I know this exact database (or its corollary) actually exists, and I’m totally duplicating effort. But nooo…. they have to have these “friendly user interfaces” that bury the key pieces of information on page 6 and clog up the pages with pointless pieces of non-information like “sporty feeling”. Bah! You know, it’s really hard to even track down how many can be seated in a particular car!

What I really want is a car that can be converted to seat 6 (those rear-facing seats that can flip up), has about double the cargo capacity of our Matrix (our camping trips are like the space shuttle launch in terms of what we have space for), gets 30+ mpg on average, and costs about $17k. Is that so much to ask? (She asks rhetorically.) So I know I’m going to have to give on one or more of those, but I want to play with the give and takes. For example, I’ve been daydreaming about the Toyota Highlander Hybrid, but the mpg isn’t actually THAT great and the price is about double what I want to pay. It’s remarkably difficult to find a place where you can just enter in your criteria and they’ll shoot back a list of matching vehicles. Cars.com, for example, asks what make and model you want. I don’t care! I care about features and functionality, not branding! How should I know what makes and models have the features I want?!!?

Anyway, hopefully it’s all moot. I’m sure the mechanic will call back and say that the grand total is $120, and they filled the tank and detailed the car while they had it. And then I’ll go collect my free flying unicorn. And schedule an appointment to replace the bits of our other car, Hrothgar, that have, you know, fallen off.

When programmers work out

You might wonder why the stereotype of a programmer is a rather largish person. Here’s the real reason: we can’t stand doing hard things that don’t have data associated with them that we can measure and make pretty graphs about. So let’s say you, normal person, go for a run. You think, “Wow, I’m tired. That was a good run!”.

Here’s what a programmer thinks:
1) Calculate length of run (Google maps)
2) Calculate number of strides executed (pedometer)
3) Measure time elapsed in run (watch)
4) Take samplings of heart rate (???)
5) Calculate calories burned by run (web app)

Really intense programmers might also capture relevant variables like “Hours after eating the run occurred” or “Ounces of water consumed on day of run” or “Mean temperature and humidity during run period” or “Health on a scale of 1 to 10”.

For each run executed, one of those numbers needs to change in order to demonstrate progress. To measure that shift over time, a programmer might chart it all in a nifty spreadsheet/database. Hmmm… maybe that database needs a web front end. I think I could whip that up in jQuery pretty fast. But if there are multiple runners, I’ll need to change my data model. I bet I could turn this in to a great iPhone app….

Man, that’s a lot of work. You know what’s less work? Sitting here at my desk, eating a Snicker’s bar and making my existing data dance. Dance data! Dance!

This is why programmers have trouble exercising. And I am no exception.

Fortunately for me, I’ve found some exercises that throw off the lovely, lovely data I crave. Our elliptical machine at the gym here, for example, is a delight (if only it had some sort of wireless interface so I could download my data!). It gives me length of workout, strides per minute, resistance and heart rate. So if I do the same workout with the same strides per minute at the same resistance… if I’m getting in better shape the heart rate should go down. Mmmm… data.

Today, being an exceptionally lovely day in New England, I decided to go on a run. The last 3 times I did this run, I did not manage to run all the way. I am told it’s about 1.6 miles. I know I am out of shape. But today! Today! I ran the WHOLE WAY. Look ma! One of the variables improved! It’s satisfying to note that nicely empirically-proven improvement.

Maybe next time I’m on the elliptical I can get my peak heart-rate under 180 a minute while holding all the other variables the same. Wheeeeee!!!!!

Grab bag

It’s sad. There are two things you need for a blog post: time and topic. But any time you have a topic, it means your life is busy and you don’t have time. Conversely, whenever you have time, it’s often because your life is boring. Granted sometimes you lack both time and topic, but that stings less.

Ah well. This past week has been a paucity of time and a plethora of topic. This leads to a blogging style of bulleted vignettes. So, without further ado….

  • I just wrote a birthday party invitation to Grey’s girlfriend. She apparently likes Star Wars. I approve of this as girlfriend criteria. Also, he pretends to die whenever he sees her — on the rare occasions he doesn’t run away. He seems extremely satisfied with his relationship.
  • I’m always surprised when I’m the biggest geek in a room. I mean, in my social life I hang out with video game developers and people who go to Gencon. We had Talk Like a Pirate Day at work today, with costume contest and scavenger hunt. I won “best Piratical attitude” and the scavenger hunt, and some people were shocked by my geekitude. You have no idea, folks. And these were programmers!
    • Camping boys
    Camping boys
  • Camping with the boys was awesome this past time. Thane’s fixation on cars makes him much easier to manage. Granted, he attempted to drown himself about every 2 minutes while we were swimming, but that’s pretty much standard operating procedure. The boys were fun, the weather was great, we actually could relax and read, and I love Kindles. We got Grey a set of mostly wordless comic books called Owly and I got complete wish-fulfillment as he sat glued to them and reread them multiple times.
    • What Grey thinks of camping (from school)
    What Grey thinks of camping (from school)
  • I’m reading Herodotus right now. We’re reading it for our humanities book club. It’s like 600 pages long, so I kind of thought a head start would be a good idea. I’m also attempting to read project management books, a book on Kelso vs. New London Development Corporation (it’s weird to read a book about people you know in a place you know at a time you were there), and Owly. (Hey, you have to keep on top of what’s up in your kids’ life!) At least I finished the one on the strategic importance of Field Service.
  • Ooh! Ooh! I got to do actual code this week at work! Java on struts with Hibernate handling the data connections using ANT for builds with Subversion managing the codebase in the Eclipse IDE. My contractor was explaining all the ins and outs of the system I’ve managed the building of. It was very exciting. It’s astonishing how quickly I’ve lost all confidence that I know what to do around code.
  • The Red Sox have given us an awesome season, given their constraints, and would be winning the AL West. They’re still making it fun to follow the games. I’ve also decided to become a football fan this year. Um, go Pats?
  • I made another batch of plum jam. This was spiced plum jam, which is totally different. In many important ways.

    • Finally, I met a new person last Friday. He wasn’t very talkative, but he was pretty awesome. I see us having a long and fantastic friendship.

    Listening to singles' ads
    Listening to singles' ads

    Top ten reasons you should move to Stoneham MA

    So I’ve been waging a not-very-subtle campaign to get some subset of my friends who are “thinking about buying a house maybe some day” to consider doing so within convenient walking distance of my house. This is entirely selfish. It’s simply much easier to have a social life when you have friends on this side of the Big Dig.

    Pony ride during winter fair on Stoneham Town Common
    Pony ride during winter fair on Stoneham Town Common

    In support of this attempt, I thought I’d put together a top 10 list of reasons you should move to Stoneham Massachusetts.

    10. The local paper is hilarious. It assumes you already know everyone important in town, exclusively covers potlucks at St. Patrick’s church, and used to feature a safety column by Officer Rotondi, who was rotund. The safety column was excellent, with advice like “Do not put your credit card on the internet. Many criminals are now using the internet.” Best of all is the crime blotter. Every third entry has to do with someone calling the cops on the “youth” who were found to be loitering. One person called the cops because they saw a deer.

    9. The Middlesex Fells reservation is part of Stoneham. Who knew that we had such an extensive quasi-wilderness area in sight of Boston? There are miles and miles of trails. You can take an all day hike, with excellent views of the city skyline. It’s close enough to Stoneham Town center to be a reasonable walk, or a quick bike-ride, and is open for cross country skiing and snow shoeing in winter.

    The Fells in Stoneham
    The Fells in Stoneham

    8. Melissa’s Main Street Bistro has quite possibly the best menu I’ve ever seen anywhere, ever. Better yet, they deliver on the promise of that great menu. They mix an incredibly powerful martini (and delicious!) but the great news is that if you live here, you can just walk home.

    7. We’re right at the corner of I93 and I95. You can find no better location for an equally inconvenient commute for you and your partner. We’re also 10 minutes from the end of the Orange Line (depending on where you are in Stoneham, it’s possible to get closer).

    6. Stoneham Town Day! September 11th this year! (You can find this actually helpful information buried on page 6 of the newspaper….) There’s carnival rides, booths from every organization in town, balloons, politician’s kissing babies, raffles and fried dough. Fun for the whole family!

    5. My neighborhood has a Walk Score of 80, which is very walkable. Grey can easily walk to: a grocery store, pharmacy, library, bank, post office, police station, park, ice cream parlor (2), about 15 restaurants, live theater, mechanic, bike store, hardware store, furniture store, homepathic store, dance studio, martial arts studio, 5 salons, and best of all, the Book Oasis. And more! As far as I can tell the only things you can’t walk to are the hospital (4 miles) or a movie theater (5 miles).

    4. Local politicians actually walk around and knock on doors to personally introduce themselves during election season. I find this both charming and useful. I’m sure it happens other places, but I promise it never happened to me any other place I’ve ever lived.

    3. The town square. It’s un-selfconsciously exactly what you imagine New England towns that predate the Revolutionary War to be. It has the bank, post office, funeral home, church, fire station, police station, town hall, park and Honeydew Donuts clustered around it. The church carillon plays music every hour on the hour between 9 and 9. Stoneham Town day is held there. During the summer they hold concerts on the Band Stand. Santa comes to visit in the winter. And every Tuesday in summer and fall we have a Farmer’s Market! You can see people taking strolls, sitting on the bench, or playing Frisbee on unscheduled evenings. Charming!!!

    2. Housing prices have held up. The median home price is down about 10% from the peak and has risen this year. Stoneham boasts a nice mix of single family houses, multifamily houses for rent or purchase as a condo, and apartment units. It’s a demographically diverse and well-educated community, but not so upper class that you won’t be able to find a place here you could afford.

    And finally, the top reason you should consider moving to Stoneham Massachusetts….

    1. I live here, and you could hang out with me!

    So you think I’m self-confident

    Part of being in your 30s is finally knowing a bit of who you are. You can get rid of that setting for four because you never feed four people: it’s either just your family or it’s a minimum of six people. You can pass on the lovely porcelain figurine you inherited because it turns out you’re not a knick-knack person. You can wear big jewelry and not feel self-conscious because you’re a person who wears big jewelry, and you really don’t have to think that hard about it.

    One of the real joys of my late 20s and 30s for me has been being ok, downright comfortable even, with who I am. I can present at a big important meeting, speak in public, plan a party, sing the Halleluia Chorus, fix plumbing and make a peach pie. I know how to comport myself at an opera, and feel at home in fancy French restaurants (especially ones IN France… YUM!). After a quick look around, I handled a Turkish bath (with all states of undress) just fine. In all sorts of walks of life: from church to work to culture to leisure, I don’t ponder whether or not I belong. I just engage in what we’re there to do.

    There is one huge, glaring exception to this.

    Manicure/pedicure places freak me out.

    This spring I went to get a mani/pedi at a local place. Like every single place I’ve ever been to, it was staffed by a variety of Asian women (I believe they’re generally Vietnamese?!) and attended by a variety of white women, all of whom seem to know everyone and be in media res with the latest gossip. There are at least two tvs on, with some incredibly annoying movie playing. The lady at the counter never makes eye color with you when she tells you to pick out your color.

    The steps of getting a mani/pedi are like this intricate dance. You do the pedicure first. God help you if you didn’t plan ahead and are wearing socks and/or jeans. The person is usually chatting to their fellow technicians, while the other people getting pedicures are talking about all the people they know. There are all these steps to it, and so many of the customers there are there regularly — weekly even — that you feel like the only idiot who has to be told what to do. And there are all these unspoken things… do they take credit cards or only cash? You have to pay before they’re done, or you’ll smudge your fingers. How much do you tip? And you just KNOW that this gaggle of women will not hesitate to discuss any faux pas you may have made after you depart.

    By the time I got out last time, I was nearly a nervous wreck. I felt ill with the strain of it — totally self inflicted of course. Granted, my fingernails looked great, but it just wasn’t worth it. I did my own nails the other night. The outcome wasn’t nearly as good, but the tv on had baseball and it hardly cost me a thing other than time.

    So that’s me. Where are you unexpectedly uncomfortable? Where do you feel like an outsider, and despite your competence in many arenas, avoid?

    Breaking news

    So rumor on the street is that there’s a worldwide shortage of FUDGE dice caused by the emergence of a Dresden Files game using the mechanic.

    I’m happy to say that I was cool and using FUDGE dice years, YEARS before the bandwagon fans did. My house is well supplied with FUDGE dice, as well as enough D12s for a whole HORDE of barbarians.

    D6 gold, baby
    D6 gold, baby

    We have an unreasonable amount of dice. Grey could correctly conjugate die/dice by age 2.

    Ahem.

    In slightly less geeky news, batch 3 of plum jam is popping away on the counter. It still looks darker than last year’s magic batch. I wish I knew what varietal it was. I’m pretty sure these aren’t damson plums, and from what I’ve read I may have to track down some damsons for yet another batch, because they sound awesome.

    Grey brought one of his Star Wars books to school today and read it to his class. I wonder if he pronounced the “r”s? It’s funny what even an open-minded parent like myself won’t put up with.

    OK. Dice shortages and yet another jam update. That’s a sign that I should leave you all to your sweet dreams!

    Ten years ago

    I will be here
    I will be here

    We are in last phases for our trip to Istanbul. The boarding passes are printed. The bag are packed and by the door. The chargers are being slipped into luggage. The debate is raging whether fresh grapes will cause any anguish in security. I am seconds, seconds away from putting the auto responder “You’re on your own, suckas!!!” (or the professional version thereof) on my work email.

    I worked very hard today, and it’s tough beginning to peel my mind away. I’m awash in all the details of two very consuming projects at work. There’s the million and one things I do to keep my household and my family running, “Ok, Mom, Magic needs to get her pill morning and night. Thane eats Life cereal with milk… with his hands. You might want to wait until after breakfast to dress him. And if there are apricots in the farm share, would you mind dicing and freezing half a cup? I’m just short for a batch of jam.” All these things that I carry and remember and think about… now is the time to lay them down. If I haven’t explained something to my mom, well, she’ll figure it out. If I haven’t addressed an issue at work, well, they’ll either have to cope or wait. If I’ve forgotten something, it will have to remain forgotten for a week.

    This is why we go on vacation. Because we must see how much we are laying down, and then when we return we can choose how much to pick up again. Maybe, perhaps, the perspective of that freedom of going away will show that some of those things we work so hard to sustain are not worth the energy they sap from us. On the other hand, some things we deal with as mundane requirements of our day to day life are revealed as the shining jewels of existence they are. (See also: bedtime reading time)

    I am so ready for this. Tonight we will crawl on a plane — the same flight, I think, I recently took to Amsterdam. It feels funny to have Schipol become, instead of this exotic destination across the world, a familiar place where I’ve mapped out the Starbucks, thankyouverymuch. (Funny note: also on the flight will be a friend from church headed to his family in Denmark. The world is a small place.) I promised a colleague in Amsterdam I’d wave as I landed. I have a bunch of Euros from my last trip to unload, so I think some good chocolate at that nice stand is in order.

    Then I start travelling space I’ve never traversed before. Never in my life have I been to Turkey — not even as a squalling bairn (which is, for the record, how I was dragged through much of Africa and Europe). I will set foot on Asian soil for the first time in my life, this trip. We are hoping to visit Hagia Sophia, the underground cistern, the Bosporus. We may take a day to go and visit Ephesus. My husband and I will read, eat, walk, talk, read books, play games and celebrate (get this!) TEN YEARS of married life. Ten years ago this week, we honeymooned in Greece when we did largely the same sorts of things, plus the beach.

    These new things – experiences, memories, contexts – will provide rich fodder for my mind and spirit when I return. I know this. I still draw strength from the joy of our pre-kid trip to Austria & Italy. I’ve packed all these books on Byzantium so I can truly BE there and feel the weight of 1500 years of history. I will breathe Belisarius, Justinian and Theodora. I will hear the echoes in ancient cathedrals. I will, I’m sure, meet new characters from legends I have not yet learned.

    Sometimes, lately, I have felt rather boring. The things running through my mind… they are largely not things you would be interested in. Much of the time I’m not even interested in them. Not that this is why I have not been blogging lately. No no, trust me. I am perfectly willing to blog about boring stuff. I haven’t been blogging lately because I am SUPER BUSY. But even if the super busy isn’t much affected by wandering Byzantium, the boring will be. My mind will have all this new stuff to process — things I have learned and done for the joy of them, instead of for the need of them. I am so excited about this.

    And then there is my love. My husband. My joy. My partner in chaos, parenting and gaming. We are very good partners and enjoy each other a lot… when we can focus on each other. But through necessity, many of our interactions are tactical. “Who’s picking up the kids today? What are we making for dinner? Did you pick up the cat food? Do the kids sound too quiet to you?” I so intensely look forward to talking with my husband about the larger things in the world – those same things I’m eager to put into my mind. After ten years of marriage, I love my husband deeply. I also like him. I can’t wait to be with my friend and my beloved, and to have a great time.

    So it’s time to kiss the kids and wish my parents luck with Camp Gramp. It’s time to shut down the computer for (gasp!!!!) like 9 days. It’s time to fill up a memory card with tourist pictures.

    I will pick you up when I return. May blessings abound.