Tim Gunn Was My Spirit Animal

So, last summer, I got to experience something I've never experienced before: I got fired. Let go just shy of twelve years at my employer, suddenly and unceremoniously. I was home with my son while my wife and daughters were across the country visiting family, and so had to balance the panic and fear of a destabilized routine with the projecting the calm, cool, fatherly assurance of Everything Would Be OK. I am a software developer, and I am living in a part of the country absolutely thick with software developers and development opportunities. But after just-shy-of-twelve-years, I'd also been insulated from some of the hype and glory of the industry. I'd traded a daily commute into San Francisco for a local position so I could be home more often and be "dad" more often. My elder child was about to start school, and the then-youngest was about to start talking. Priorities were priorities, and I walked away from a lot of excitement for stability and proximity.

When stability disappeared as it did last summer -- twelve years and a third child later -- I anguished about the change. I don't cope well with change. I'm a software engineer! We're practically the textbook definition of autism spectrum in my field: people who generally find it easier and more satisfying to spend their days unpacking logical puzzles than to interact with illogical humans. I'm sure there's more than a few in my field who wish we were Kirks, but know deep down we're Spocks. So I reacted in the most Spock-like way possible, looking for exactly the same job in exactly the same area so I could have exactly the same life.

And then, thank goodness, a few amazing coincidences happened.

First, a massive ego boost because of this:



I commented on some new pulp-style covers his publisher had done for re-issues of his novels. It was a total bit of fanboy sycophancy, though the sentiment was genuine. The first was for American Gods, which is an excellent, and deeply weird book. I love that this cover looks like it was pulled off a shelf of vintage paperbacks in some funky secondhand shop with a pay-what-you-like public coffeepot and a pair of bookstore cats.

The cover announcement came the day of my dismissal. I think this tweet was the day after. Mood: elevated.

And then this bit of also-fanboyism from J. Michael Straczynski ("JMS" to the Internet) who is a creative force and a writing wonder. He has touched many mediums over the years, and right around the time all this was happening in my life, he revealed that he was leaving behind comics because of severe vision-related medical reasons
that he had mercifully managed to get past, and was now literally and figuratively seeing things in a new light. I could relate to the fear and the worry that he felt, and then just to kick it up a bit, he gave a talk with a Q&A session in which an audience member presumably asked a question about "advice for the recently fired."

JMS' response was so excellent, so personally relevant, that I transcribed it, overlaid it on a still from the talk, and carried the quote with me to interviews. Here it is:



Mood: illuminated.

Seeing this clip, and writing these words, and feeling all the many, many feels finally clicked something in my mind. I missed San Francisco. I missed the ugly commute, the semi-permanent smell of urine. I missed the weirdos and the tech bros and the hipsters and the hippies and the tourists. I missed the energy of The City. I missed being in with "my tribe." I missed it, so very, very badly. One interview convinced me, and subsequent ones reinforced it. I wanted back in. I missed my spectrum tribe.

And it took a lot of time, and a lot of trips, and a lot of anxious night-befores and nervous whiteboard exercises and code tests and reviews and refreshers and tutorials to really lock that in my mind. And now I had the wisdom of those twelve years, plus the eight before when I was surfing dot-com 1.0. I'm better attuned to sniff out the dreamers from the doers, and hopefully am better at navigating the whole Professional Developer process. And I was also humbled. Laid low by interviewing with coders half my age, asking about now-hot skills that simply passed me by in the 'burbs. Keeping my chin up and the search going through screening after screening, interview after interview, and the dreaded "we appreciate your time, but..." email.

Spoiler: I did, in the end, find a job. A job I'm very happy with, with people I like very much, being challenged and pushed and poked out of the comfortable rut I'd worn for over a decade. I reassessed, but I reassessed on my terms. With the code-test for my current job, I did what I thought was more Kirk than Spock and made it my own Kobayashi Maru. And I thought of Tim Gunn, one of the co-hosts of our household guilty-pleasure TV Project Runway.

Tim acts as mentors for the contestants, who get gradually more and more stressed and sleep-deprived as the season progresses. Every few days, they are called upon to create a piece of clothing out of a limited budget, sometimes out of ludicrous "unconventional" materials, and often to play nice for a judge. They have a day to do this, are judged severely, and those who pass the judging move on to do it all again in a day or two (a week in TV time.) The show casts right along reality-show types: the Outspoken One, the Quiet One, the Sassy One, the Old One, the Young One, etc.. They're all trying to win, and win big, and keep their sanity in front of the cameras. This season especially, I felt I could relate. Through it all is the kindly, guiding voice of Tim Gunn, reminding the designers to stay true to themselves, regardless of the absurdity of the challenge. And so when the code challenge crossed my desk, I did just that -- stayed true to the skills and experience I had, and presented something I was proud of.

It didn't get me the position, but it gave me more confidence in the interview, more persistence to keep calling back over the holidays, and I'd like to think those lined up for a second interview for something else entirely.

Today was my first official payday in six months. Mood: relieved. Six months to the day since I stuffed the last box in the back of my car, shook hands with everyone, and drove off. Six months of stress and worry and snug budgets and tight belts and lower thermostats and postponed haircuts and resume after resume after resume.

Totally worth it. Thanks Neal. Thanks JMS. And thanks, Tim. I made it work.

Time Lowers all Bars

By the anticipatory vibratings of my youngest child, I can only assume that Halloween is nigh, a night promising sugary riches in exchange for minor scares and occasional suburban mirages. (One year: a horse dressed as Pegasus being walked on a lead.) Finishing touches on costumes are being applied, reworked, and revamped. Pumpkins have been agonizingly rejected and selected, sliced and scooped, carved and positioned. Careful attention is being paid to playlists: blood-curdling sound effects before or after the Disneyland Haunted Mansion music, and how much Danny Elfman is too much? It's more logistics than most military manuevers. As a parent, I'm obligated to carry bags and flashlights and hoods when they get itchy, and masks when they are too hard to see through, and (very likely) tote umbrellas, too. My rate is one Reese's cup or mini Baby Ruth per block walked, payable at the stop sign at the corner. I think this is being more than reasonable. And sometime after we've all walked about two blocks too far, and the kids are cranky, and the parents' arms are tired, and at least half of the group needs a bathroom stop and/or coffee, we call it a night, say farewell, and close our eyes on October.

And wake to November.

Of course I'm NaNoing again this year, marking a decade of dubious novel-writing (or the writing of dubious novels.) I "planned" my first year on Halloween night, set off into November with high hopes, and came thisclose to a full crash and burn before the end of the month. I had high hopes and grand plans and good intentions, which was all but inviting Disaster and Doubt onto my laptop for thirty days. I had not then had the experience I have now: the knowledge of just how "rough" a rough draft can be, of the power of free writing, of both the pain and the pride of a good edit. Our family grew by a child, faced all the usual things young growing families face in a ten-year span, plus the outliers. I've learned to be more flexible in my personal life, less self-critical, more outgoing. I've tried to get back in touch with my creative side, and take better care of my professional side, too. And I don't know if I can lay all of that at NaNo's feet, but I put a lot of it there, for certain.

Facing a Big Scary Thing once a year has been like a booster shot for life. My family and I have faced Big Scary Things together in these ten years, things that we anticipated and things that we did not. I'm reminded of these when we pull the big costume bin out of storage every year and remember the Octobers past, the people our kids have been, and look to who they've become. I think about all our annual rituals and how they anchor us even when we're being tossed around, and I can appreciate the importance of keeping those rituals alive even when we'd Rather Not This Year. And this year especially, we've recited our mantra of This Too Shall Pass to help us keep perspective on what matters, and what we need to do to get by. Rarely will we ever get anything right on the first try, and rarely do we need to. A best effort is better than no effort at all, and it's possible to get through even the most overwhelming task if you sit down a little every day.

I'm way off on my usual planning routine this year, a fact I've bemoaned in the NaNo forums. Ten years ago I didn't think I needed to plan. Ten years later I believe it. The bar to winning NaNo is set very, very low if you think about it. It's just words, one after the other. It's not life. It's not even a walk down the block in the rain. But you can bet there's going to be candy waiting at the end.

In Which Change is Experienced, Resisted, and Begrudgingly Embraced

SO...

This has been an interesting month, as in the old proverbial curse "may you live in interesting times."

Our family dynamic is shifting around, as my firstborn is now attending college, a reality that seems unreal, as it can't have been long since I graduated college and (mumble mumble counts on fingers) ah, yes. Well, it's a change, anyway. And I have explained this to my children endlessly in true Expository Dad Fashion, that as a parent, it is very difficult for me to separate the reality of the child/teenager/adult standing before me with the memories of this same person as a smaller child/toddler/newborn. It's as if all that time is compressed on top of their being, and I am unable to stop the temporal disconnect when I look at them (to wit: "where has the time gone," "I remember your first day of school like it was yesterday," etc.) This mental timehop is the reason that I call the children by the wrong name. That excuse is less believable when I call them by the dog's name.

And so that's changing. Letting go of the oldest one as he does his best to push away and define himself, while I unhelpfully respond by clinging all the harder. Why can't we stuff all those reality-genii back into the bottle? I demand a do-over! We're adapting to this change in our own ways (I choose denial.)

Personally, the bigger change for me is that I am right now between employers. This is a situation I haven't been in since... well, since the older one was starting school, over a decade ago. I've been feeling untethered and buffeted in these weeks, a balloon come undone into a stormy sky. There's more people depending on me, and the world has changed, and my field has changed, and old Mr. Imposter Syndrome comes a-whisperin' in my ear his little hurtful lies, like: the only thing that hasn't changed is me. Tiny stinging lies are the specialty of Mr. I.S., and they are extra sharp when you're already a little raw watching some young adult stride off to college with a small backpack while you're also seeing him skip off to kindergarten with a giant one.

Parents of school-age children, be warned: the school-Feels are deep and poignant. After their twelve-year slumber, they emerge like soppy emotional cicadas right up on your face. #UglyCry

I am not a believer of signs and portents, though numerous found pennies have crossed my path, and inspiring and courageous words are popping up right when I needed them most. Maybe I'm just more attuned now. Like our sleepy cicadas, I also feel that I've been dozing for years, and now I get to shed the skin and start over. It's a messy process, and I have to confess that more than once I've thought about retreating to the same familiar hole I've just come out of. But holes are dark and close and hard to move in. I'm out in the sun now, flexing my limbs and hardening my skin and even singing my own song. There's a new melody to it, one that I didn't realize it had before. It's louder than stinging lies.

And through all this change, I've found support in the likeliest place, though not the first place I would have turned. My son was there, though he's dealing with his own life changes, his own new job, and the scattering of his friends to all points. He was there for me, backing me up, and is seeing me off to my own new adventure.

So thanks, buddy, for everything you did, for everything you do. For the kid you were and the man you've become. And I'm sorry I keep calling you the dog's name.

Some things never change.

A Cat Named Abraxas: the Mythos Continues

I'm not sure what brought it on, but the witchy gift prepared for my youngest last fall finally paid dividends with an outbound letter left on the porch last night full of questions in scrawly pencil. The response letter is below.

If nothing else, it's a chance to play with calligraphy nibs, which don't have nearly enough opportunities for use in day-to-day situations.





With a nine-month gap, this may be the slowest interactive fiction experiment ever... but it's still a lot of fun.

Weeding Wednesday, and the Battle of the Bloat

The task at hand

This morning I made a start on one of our summer obligations: working service hours at our local swimming pool, as per our membership terms.[1] Ten hours in total of some upkeep-related activity is required, and we habitually choose the weeding/sweeping of the parking lot. Done in the early morning, it's cool and vacant, and given our normally dry summers[2], once weeded, it tends to stay weeded for the duration of our duties, only needing the weekly sweep to keep it looking nice. Little maintenance is required if you do a good job up front.

My entertainment -- and the above photo -- is provided in the form of a hand-me-down smartphone from a relative that was mouldering in a drawer (the phone, not the relative) after being outclassed and out-spec'ed by the relentless advance of its successors, marching to the beat of Moore's Law. As urged by several articles on the Internet, and after being assured at how easy it would be by following the step-by-step instructions, I did what any sensible person of my technical background would do: wasted a lunch break or two trying to unlock it, then surrendered and handed it to my teenager, invoking the ancient ritual of "Root the damn thing for your incompetent father and I'll take you out for burgers." A day later, he dropped it off in my hands with the appropriate response ("Double-Double with an extra large vanilla shake and fries") and lo, it was good. Evidently, so was the burger, shake, and fries.

I've recently been in the phone market, since my current one is now at death's door, and, as the Son gleefully points out, "It's so old the keypad is in Roman numerals." Smart-assery aside, he's right. And thanks to a good decision by the federal government, the market for phones is as broad as the Internet itself. After researching and comparing, I've bought a phone online (Arabic numerals) and picked a carrier, and am getting hooked up. I'll miss my old phone somewhat, as it's dead-simple and survived much neglect at my meaty hands, not the least of which is frequent drops (the new phone is also rugged.)

Alas, in this enlightened iEra of iSmart iPhones, even a "feature phone" as mine is classed is not free of that most dreaded of infections, bloatware, aka, crapware or (politely) handy software add-ons from your truster carrier. Thanks to the "unlock law" cited above, the vendor for my phone is actually not my carrier, so not only am I stuck with applications that I don't want, but they are applications I can't use, since they are tethered to a service I don't have.

The Son was, as expected, not impressed. "Ugh, Facebook? Twitter? What's this 'YP' thing?"

Yellow Pages, I explained, and then I had to explain the notion of a phone book[4].

"Well, can I root this for you?" he asked, angling for another free meal.

"I don't think so," says I. "It's not Android. It's a proprietary closed OS. It's not like there's factory images out there." This is me, trying to salvage my own failure with the music player setup by recycling some jargon I read. It sounded good.

The Son handed back the phone and unconsciously wiped his fingers on his shirt, like they were soiled. Pah.

What's worst, of course, is that he's right. Bloatware really is a nuisance, taking up limited memory on an already low-power device, and I bought the damn thing. Thanks to the FCC, I even was able to snip the software tether that tied it to the old carrier. But the traces remain. Unlike the logo on the faceplate, there's no easy way to pluck out all the weedy code that's infesting my new device. Given my fruitless experiments with the supposedly open Android system. I know that if I suddenly lost my senses and wanted to blow a mortgage payment on a carrier-subsidized phone, it, too, would be saturated with useless and immortal apps and "features," testaments to a business partnership that may not have any relevance to the customer.

I know this is my usual sour-graping. I basically got the new phone for free, by converting piles of loose change from my drawers into online store credit. I'm only one phone-technology generation behind the curve, and because of my inherent cheapness and utter lack-of-being-a-teenage-boy-ness, I am squarely in the boring demographic of phone plans.[5] And this whole discussion is so #firstworldproblem that in the grand scheme, it makes little difference.

But dammit, I want my space looking nice.[6] I want to weed this silly thing down. Every time I have to jog past some useless icon -- looking at you, "YP" -- it's an automatic reminder of the automatic obsolescence that surrounds us, and the silent pressure that we're all faced with to stay ahead of that march. Eventually the teenagers will grow up and move out and buy their own burgers, and then where will we be?

---

[1] Unlike the pools of my youth, which were public, this part of California at least is very big on members-only neighborhood pools, usually the nexus of the other local phenomenon of neighborhood swim teams. "Our" pool is mercifully swim-team-free, which is why this dramatic low-angle photo of the parking lot shows no cars. Swim team practice usually starts at Ungodly O'Clock in the morning. This would have been packed if we had a team based at our pool.

[2] Except this morning, when it was -- and is still -- lightly raining. This is cause for celebration in our drought-stricken state, and especially coming a few days after a patch of baking heat. I have learned to appreciate water like no other resource since becoming an adopted Californian. [3]

[3] Can you tell I've been reading David Foster Wallace lately, he of the meandering footnote?

[4] And then a digression on public pay phones, and how it was amazing to me the first time I saw a major metro-area pay phone with a massive book suspended from a don't-steal-me chain, between those thick black plastic covers. The "Appliances" section alone was easily larger than the entire directory of my hometown. The Son tuned out about 3 seconds into this digression, as I'm sure you have.

[5] You know it's bad when the salespersons look at your current phone, shudder visibly, and then point you towards the Carrier Aimed at Seniors, with Very Basic Phones containing No Sharp Edges and having Large Easy-Read Buttons on them. And you know, I really did consider it.

[6] "My" meaning "really I'm licensed to use this device and theoretically don't own it, due to some Byzantine click-through contract, oh and by the way, the carrier now owns my teenage son in perpetuity under the terms of the Family Plan." They're welcome to him, I say. He's expensive to feed, and awfully smug.

Love, Oncology Style

Let me preface this by saying: everyone involved is now fine and healthy.

Please refer back to this phrase in case you feel yourself freaking out at some point in this post. I freaked out just writing it, and needed this reminder.

Now then...

My eldest child developed a strange and persistent lump of skin that didn't respond to any sort of topical treatments. The lump was dubbed “It,” and It had to go. So last summer during school break, we had It removed. As a parent, it's disconcerting to hear your child's doctors essentially throw up their hands and say “we don't know what this is, but It should come off.” So, there was a minor bit of outpatient surgery that left us with you-babble-while-anesthetized stories that will serve us for years. Off went the excised part of my child for a biopsy, and home came my child, bandaged, sutured, and drugged, and glad to be rid of It at last.

Until the phone call.

Suddenly we're getting a call from the lab, the technician reading off the very long medical name for It, which sounded like blah blah blah lymphoma blah blah blah, followed by phrases like “pediatric oncologist” and “radiation treatments” and “start immediately.” 

It turns out that cancer is a wonderfully clarifying disease. You are either the type of person to fall apart, or the type of person to get into ass-kicking mode. I'm pleased to say that I married the latter.

My wife drove from school to daily radiation treatments, with the other children in tow. We'd meet up at the end of the day: child-in-question exhausted from the radioactive assault, other children exhausted from the daily trips through San Francisco Bay Area rush hour traffic, my wife exhausted from driving and worry, and me exhausted by association. August, September, October... these months are blurs. Somehow, my child managed to keep it together, managed to stay strong enough through the treatments to stay awake at school, managed to keep spirits up despite missing sport practices and not having the energy to make it past 9:30 at night.

Somehow, it all worked out, and everyone involved is now fine and healthy. The lump was benign and rare, treatable with excellent recovery odds. “If you must get cancer,” said the oncologist, “this is the one you want.” Yay?

My heart goes out to parents of patients dealing with worse incarnations of this disease. We got off lucky. Oh sure, there's now qualifications. A six-month oncology followup soon, and lifetime annual checkups with a dermatologist. Watching the sun exposure, especially on the site of the surgery and treatments. And parents remembering what matters, and refocusing.

Eldest is on the cusp of adulthood: just celebrating a major birthday, learning to drive, even thinking about life beyond high school. Around midsummer last year, my wife and I were sufficiently Freaked Out about any and all of these, because “Motivated” is not a term we would have applied to this child. We have not yet seen one leave the nest, and I'm always afraid that we're somehow screwing it all up. There are plenty of things to worry about when that first child is ready to stretch their wings. I hope, for all of your sakes, that you handle it better than we were.

Post-op, these things don't seem to matter as much. There's still the usual background-level worry that every parent has for their children, and we always reserve the right to Third Degree when the situation arises: we were teenagers once, too. (“Who is going to be at this party? Where is it? Who's driving? How are you getting home? Do you have your phone? Call us any time.”) But now we're fretting less about grades, less about future plans... fretting less about a lot of things, in fact. It's a good feeling, the non-fret.

I'm generally anti-New-Year's-Resolution, but I did privately agree with myself to try to be more easygoing in general at work, at home... at life. Smile a bit more. Agree a bit more. Stress a bit less. Stress a lot less, because my capacity for stressing out has been both increased and drained by last year's activities. Also: take regular vacation days, simplify whenever possible, spend less money, read more library books. Maybe, like most resolutions, these will fade away in the months to come. This blog is littered with a thousand good intentions and projects-started, after all. I'm no stranger to a lack of focus.

So that's kind of where I am right now, and where we are, and a sort-of explanation for why the extended silence here. After getting through the holidays, and getting the official “OK” from the oncologist, we have also been able to stop, and breathe, and look at each other and realize: that completely sucked, and we don't ever want to do that again. On a day devoted to love, we are taking it. Appreciating what we have, what we did, and that where we go in life is not always where we planned it. Thanks, cancer! You sucked, and don't darken our doorstep ever again.

* * *

One administrative note: I'm turning off comments for this post, not because I don't like my three regular readers, but because we're still suffering a bit from empathy fatigue. We generally didn't say anything to anyone until after the treatments ended, and as such, extended friends and family didn't hear about it until we put a very condensed version of this story into our annual snarky-and-weird holiday newsletter. You could pretty much track the US Postal Service's efficiency by the phone calls we received as our cards made it across the country and the recipients went "OH MY GOSH CANCER" and then called to comfort us. Our response to all: "It's fine, we're all fine, treatments were done in October. Relax."

So if you have the urge to freak out, here's some alternative actions:

1. Say this aloud: "It's fine, we're all fine, treatments were done in October. Relax."
2. Consider donating to a reputable anti-cancer charity and help kick this stupid disease's ass.
3. Hopefully nobody is on the fence about this, but please vaccinate yourself and your children. I can now officially say that I was the parent of a temporarily immunocompromised child, and we had to contend with endless hand-washing, carrying around alcohol gel, and worrying about colds rocketing around my child's school. Now measles -- freaking measles! -- is in the Bay Area. Please keep the population safe and get your kids their shots.
4. If you have kids, hug them, and if you have a significant other who has shown amazing strength, courage, and keeping-it-together-in-the-face-of-insanity, please hug them more. And if you have neither, please hug a nurse, oncologist, or radiologist (with permission.) Double hugs for the pediatric variety. Hugs for everybody.

And that's about all the room I have on the soapbox today. Expect a resumption of the usual, intermittent programming soon. Some things never change. I need to tell you about pens!

My Daughter is Kicking my Ass

...at games, that is. My youngest child (age seven) is on some kind of massive board game bender right now. We don't have anything Hallmark-y like an actual Family Game Night or anything, but we do have numerous bookshelves, and at least one of those shelves is jam-packed with games. As the kids have aged, the selection has improved. I will be a happy man indeed, for example, if I never have to sit through another round of Candyland ever, ever again, and my eldest's much-loved Toy Story Monopoly Junior is buried in the back of the closet where it will hopefully remain out-of-mind until the heat death of the sun.

Gradually, gradually, we have been able to replace these games of chance with more strategic and less luck-based fare. Mancala is a great one, because the rules are dead simple, and it contains a good mix of surprise and strategy (sometimes with directed help from dad. "I'm about to take these pieces unless you move them...") I know it gets disparaged for being the token "wacky" card game, but all my kids honed their ruthlessness to a fine edge playing endless two-player hands of Uno during sibling soccer games. We pulled Sharp Shooters out of storage recently, which is basically Yahtzee with more visual scoring and the pleasure of being responsible for sixteen dice. And we've even been playing Sorry! quite a bit, once I learned that it goes from a boring luck-of-the-draw game to a ruthless slapdown simply by dealing out a small hand of cards to every player. It was a revelation. Castle Keep is quick and easy, when the dog doesn't decide to lay down in the middle of the playing space. There's little want for unplugged entertainment at our house.

When any of the kids seem to be having trouble sleeping, my wife and I joke -- not untruthfully -- that they must be in the middle of learning something. We saw this when they were infants, discovering their hands, and rolling, and learning to crawl. We saw it when they were walking, and "talking" with us via baby signs (yes, we are those parents), and we see it now and then when they're mastering the bigger concepts: multiplication, vocabulary for their Spanish class, some new piano piece. You can practically hear the gears turning in their little heads.

With the exception of my 5am NaNoWriMo ritual of me + typewriter + dog + weaponized coffee, I have been sleeping soundly. Not a peep from the kids at all, which is why this sudden turn toward games and gaming has caught me off guard. We've been spending hours lately, moving tokens, dealing cards, or hoping for a six in Catan: Junior (because a six lets you move the ghost pirate, duh.) It's becoming something of a mania with the child, and of course we want to encourage this. It's harmless, is probably honing some skill or the other, and it's good for her to learn how to lose gracefully, because if there's one thing I do not do, it's coddle the kids. Once we've put Plumpy and Mister Mint and Gramma Nut and all the other horrors back in the box, the figurative gloves come off. I may point out weaknesses in the defense... for a little while. I do not play Daddy's Little Princess checkers. You want non-competitive? Do a jigsaw puzzle (though I get the last piece.)

So not only has the youngest been playing ever single game she can get her hands upon, and asking about those she can't (Monopoly, garrrrgh), but she is completely kicking my ass. Either the dice hate me, or she's skimming from the bank when I'm not looking, or she's genuinely, actually good. Is it possible to be a prodigy at Uno? Any scholarship opportunities in this? I'm asking for a friend.

I'm not even talking about video games, where my dwindling reflexes and Lack of Caring render me helpless to all three of my spawn. (Lego Pirates of the Caribbean, I'm looking at you.) I'm being outclassed and outgunned by a person still waiting for her permanent molars to come in. She's learned a victory dance from her mother. It's brief, but it stings, oh, how it stings.

I couldn't be more proud.

Magic Redux: A Gift from the W.W.W.W.W.W.

The "witchbox" project came to a close this morning, as my youngest tore into her stack of presents. Front and center on the table was the gift in question, which my wife and I denied all knowledge about. You learn very quickly as a parent that lying and messing with your child's head are two simple, but deeply satisfying joys. So let's follow the deception train to from start to finish:

If you read the post from the start of the week, you'll know that my wife and beloved co-liar were informed recently -- in the matter-of-fact way that six-year-olds have -- that my daughter, was, in fact, a witch. As she kept scavenging scraggly, splinter-laden sticks from the yard to wave at us and her siblings, we figured this was a fad that was going to stick for at least a little while. Since she's been using the laundry soap cups to mix up sand-and-leaf "potions" in the yard, and since we're tired of sand-and-leaves in the laundry, we set out to make an inexpensive witches kit for her birthday. We pulled this together in about a week and a half, with inspiration nearly completely stolen from Dante's Wardrobe and her excellent faux package projects.

Step one was sourcing replacement bottles for the potions. Assorted bud vases from local thrift stores supplied these:



Tip: the more exotic-looking the bottle, the better the effect. That tall white bottle with the faded gilt (?) designs was the hit of the day.

Since they are secondhand, and some are a little past their best days, I had the idea that these would be a gift from a real witch, made up of some of her leftovers. Co-conspirator was tasked with finding a box big enough to hold all these, which she did with excellence:




It's difficult to tell but this is a decorative book-shaped box made from heavy cardboard. She also picked up some fancy tissue paper and ribbon, and raided the papercrafting aisle and our own craft supplies for more items to include. Here's what it looked like last night, minus the bottles, which are off-camera.



For wands, we have a couple of pieces of leftover dowel rod from the garage, sanded down a bit and sprayed with scrapbooking sealant containing glitter. Clear plant marbles went into an old bag we had around. Given her steadier hands, the missus volunteered herself to fill up the tiny glass vials of "potion ingredients" (glitter, flakes of paper, tiny beads) while I worked on wrapping and packing up the bottles, and the small mortar and pestle that's packed up here in cardboard and tape.

I brought all my Tetris skills to bear:



...while a lot of careful funneling and filling happened next to me...



Pack into the open space with some remaining tissue, and add a few feathers... "phoenix down," suggested my middle child, a Harry Potter fan. Better than my suggestion of "squished owl."



And seal it up with some more ribbon, which we were surprised to discover was two-tone:



To provide a cover story for this assembly, and because I always relish an excuse to play with pens, there was a letter enclosed (click for more readable size):




My only regret with this letter -- beyond my penmanship -- is that I did not include "Wizard" in the organization name, because seven W's in a row is just that much funnier than six.



The unboxing was a great success:



Grizelda's letter was read aloud by the recipient, and I'm pleased that she both laughed and said "ew" at all the right places. Clearly, my target audience is seven-year-olds.

---

Our goals for this project were do amuse and delight, on a budget, and to get nature out of the laundry room. Did we succeed?

Amusement and delight are a huge yes. As I was packing up for work this morning, youngest was already preparing to mix up some concoction in the back yard. I expect we'll be finding gold glitter and mysterious purple powders in our lawn for years.

On a budget is an optimistic maybe. There were a number of new items in the mix, like the glitters, the box, ribbon, the tiny bottles. Everything purchased was on clearance or came from a discount or thrift store. Some of the items were things we had around the house. That tall white bottle that was so awesome cost all of 25¢  Kids of this age don't care.

The old adage about "time is money" applies here, too. If we had started sooner, I bet we could have sourced more of these things at lower cost. Those tiny vials arrived about 10 hours before the package was actually opened, for instance... but they are the same bottles for sale at the craft store across the street, which I could have snagged with a coupon. Admittedly, it's hard to plan around the whims of a 6 year-old, and who knows where we would have hidden everything in the meantime.

In general, though, I'll say we got far more for our time and money than the standard pink plastic playset. It's easy to pick something off the shelf and hand it to your kids, and I will be the first to admit that we've done that on more than one occasion. We are not a Pinterest-type household. But I also see the worth, and yes, the magic, in doing a project like this, especially an open-ended one that encourages imagination. Already we're wondering how to write a thank-you note to a witch.

I'm certainly glad we did it, and I don't even feel a little bit like a liar.

That Magical Age

Typed on a very Muggle-ish 1952 Skyriter


It's alarming to me how out-of-practice I've gotten at typing. Typos, dropped words... you'd think we were in the middle of NaNoWriMo. Which, incidentally, is approaching at an alarming pace: even faster than my kids are growing, it feels like. I hope to get some more limbering-up typecasts in during the next month.

Moon Moon Moon

Anybody else stay up late/roll out of bed to see this morning's lunar eclipse? We had high clouds right up until a few minutes before totality, and then the breeze picked up, the sky cleared, and this...



Seen from my suburban driveway, and a handheld shot with the camera pressed against a fencepost for support and the digital zoom fully engaged. I watched for about 20 minutes, posted the pics, and then went back to bed. This morning I was half-convinced that it was a dream.

The post's title is taken from this song, which was a favorite of my daughter's when she was an infant, and was one of the 2am "please go back to sleep" songs that all parents must discover on their own. I caught myself humming to myself early this morning as I stood in the dark in pajamas and bathrobe, fumbling for the "low light" setting on the camera.



Now this same daughter is talking about being an astronomer. I approve! There's another eclipse in October. If we have clear weather, maybe I'll sing the harmony part next time.

His Nibs

Life for the past five days or so has been a whirlwind as my older child and wife both came down with a nasty respiratory flu, leaving me ostensibly in charge of meals, laundry, homeschooling, and also juggling work and starting our youth team's track practice. I've lost a few days in there, but as my beloved is slowly getting back to health -- and the youngest child spikes a fever, sigh -- I'm getting my head up again, and going "Holy crap, it's February already" and "it's ITAM, I should type something."

Today was my first day back in the office after that unexpected bout of home-care, and while I try to fend off the coughing from my coworkers* I made the pen decision that got postponed. The final purchase was... a Pelikan M205! As much as I covet the vanishing point, I realized that I'd be sad if I didn't check out a pen that's so highly praised, that requires no fuss to refill, and is designed to be modular -- don't like the nib? Unscrew it an pop in a new one. That's pretty awesome.

It should be here in a week or so, and I had enough left over to pick up a Safari, too. Also highly praised, it meets my criteria for being durable, carryable, and not so precious that I'll freak out if it's dropped (cough Speegle cough.) Also, when our local Borders books was on the verge of closing down, they had about a few boxes of Lamy cartridges in a clearance bin that have been waiting patiently for a pen to juice up. I'm just as excited about this as the Pel, honestly.

Finally, when I managed to get the household stabilized enough this weekend to run out and pick up some groceries, I swung through a consignment store that's dangerously close to my house. Most of the wares are not to my taste or wildly overpriced but what's that down there in that cabinet?


Shiiiiiiny

So, to recap -- set out to pick one pen, wound up with three. Seems about right.

This is an old Sheaffer "flat top" Lifetime pen. "Old," since it's likely from the 1920s-1930. "Flat top" because, well, the end of the cap is flat:



It's also ink-stained, noticeably brassed in places like the knob on the clip, and the sac literally tore in my hands. What was once a bright green "jade" color is now a mottled pea-soup, which are all known issues with these guys. I also really, really like it. It's grown on me, and with a coat of the same carnauba wax that's so effective on enameled typewriters, it's regained some of its old lustre, if not its color. And soon: it'll have some friends to join it.

* Seriously: stay home if you don't feel well. There are no medals for being the office martyr to the plague. Stay the hell home. I get completely germophobic at this time of year.

We Need More Field Trips, a Prelude

I had the chance to get away from the office yesterday and help chaperone my son's high school biology class to Fitzgerald Marine Reserve, just a little south of San Francisco. Despite the mild threats of rain that never came through, we had a fine day out, sliding around on the rocks, checking out various sea critters exposed at the low tide, and likely sending a poor red octopus into therapy by the collective and excited shouting of about 50 boys all pointing and bellowing "OCTOPUS!"

I tried my hand at a little journaling to pass the time on the rides down and back and may transcribe the notes here soon. A bouncing bus full of chattering teenagers may not be the ideal environment to Think Deep Thoughts, but now I have a new appreciation for the kinds of life that hangs along our coast, and how they've adapted to the battering tides.

I also have a deeper appreciation for high school teachers and the battering they get each day at work. As wonderful as it was to get out from the desk and into the fresh air, there's something to be said for the quiet and relative calm of my day job. I imagine Mssrs. Adney and Polt are leaning back in their chairs now, noddling sagely. My salt-sprayed hat is off to you gentlemen. I have to admit that I got a little unhinged on the ride home, sitting on a too-small schoolbus seat, staring at the miles of brake lights between me and home.

I wouldn't have traded the day for anything, though. We need more field trips in our lives.

Balancing Act

I took a day off yesterday to cash in a birthday present from my son. The two of us took a two-hour Segway tour through Oakland, and if you think this sounds incredibly geeky or dorky, then you haven't even begun to imagine me in a bright-yellow safety vest and bike helmet, trying to look in control of a $6700 hunk of technology with grace and poise, though I possess neither. I'd hoped to snap a picture or two, but the tour didn't afford us much chance to stop.

It was incredibly fun. I've only experienced Oakland from inside a car while passing through, usually from the elevated highway that slices the waterfront district from the rest of the city. I don't have a lot of reason or opportunity to go into either of our cities these days. My job is close to home in the suburbs, and the kids have school and sports and activities that keep us within a 5-mile radius or so. My son is purely a product of the suburbs, too, and rode wide-eyed through the various highs and lows that any major urban center has to offer: the bustle of Chinatown and the riot of color for murals both official and "volunteer", "old" Oakland vs. "new" Oakland, the polish of Jack London Square contrasted with the obvious signs of human habitation under the highway, the sunny spectacle of Lake Merritt just two blocks away from homes with bars on all the windows, beauty shops offering permanent makeup, and an all-grillz jeweler. It was good to shake him up a little bit, and give him a taste of life outside the sycamore-lined streets of his hometown.

It was good for me, too. I don't take nearly enough time off from work, which is something I'm reminded off on those few times I arrange it, like yesterday. My own self-balancing mechanism is out of true.

The Segway pulls off a pretty complex technical act to stay upright, and there's a little training at the start of the tour for newbies and vets on basics like getting on and off, and moving and stopping and turning. As a first-timer, you need to overcome your awareness that the machine is standing, impossibly, on two parallel wheels without visible aid... and that it's going to react to your slightest movement in an undesirable way. Hesitation or staring down at the ground is a recipe for disaster. A tour-mate did this, and his body posture made the scooter edge away. I'm pretty sure they can smell fear.

The advice the tour guides gave for starting out was pretty good, and no-doubt applicable to those of us who need to work at maintaining our own balance:

1. Hang on with both hands
2. Look straight ahead, not at your feet
3. Step up with confidence
4. Find your center
5. Relax

Admittedly, there are are other device-centric instructions in there like "don't run into fire hydrants" and "stick out your butt to stop" but that doesn't translate as well to life advice for the chronic workaholic. I'll have to keep working at my own balancing act.

Choices

Typed on "Sadie", 1954 Underwood De Luxe Quiet Tab

Typewriter Day 2013

From L to R: youngest on the pimpwriter, me on the SM3, middle child on a Silent-Super

Practicing the alphabet, a postcard for the insurgency, and a letter to Grandma. How did you spend your Typewriter Day?

Break(ing) Non-News

I'm nearing the end of vacation, slowly shrugging off a self-imposed digital hiatus to see if there's any work-related drama awaiting my return on Monday. We had a too-brief visit with family who report that my 11-year-old niece has adopted a manual typewriter for her memoirs: one can never start too early. I'm staying up too late reading, sleeping in too much, and may turn into an actual slug for want of physical activity. It's fantastic.

Today I took my teenage son out for his first driving lesson, making the obligatory slow circuits around an empty parking lot. It's the route preferred by generations of nervous fathers suddenly realizing that their first child is eye-level and still growing, and that we're far closer to college than crayons. In a tiny, proud way, my heart is breaking.

Happy Father's Day to the dads out there in the Typosphere, new, old, and upcoming. I'll be recharged in a couple more days, but first, I feel a nap calling me from underneath a good book.

Lost Place

It should be simplicity itself, but after the e-reader updated its software, it also mercilessly eradicates all traces of your "last read place" in every book in its memory. Not a problem if you're buying books from the virtual bookstore, but very much a problem if you are reading "side-loaded" books downloaded for free from Project Gutenberg. Side-loads are second-class citizens in the e-reader world, and any hiccup in the ecosystem is bound to disrupt the existence of these otherwise innocent files. So: post-update, I have new fonts, but lost wherever I was in Tolstoy's epic War and Peace. (I'm somewhere between "War" and "Peace" at the moment. That's not much help.)

Naturally I thought I'd grouse about this on the Internet, but of course it took about ten tries to get the tablet to recognize the Neo and vice versa: either one was ready or the other, but not both -- a pair of shy dance partners making hesitant steps in a complex USB tango.  That seems to be sorted out now, though I have no idea what magic combination of plugin/unplugging/swearing did the trick. I'm going to capture this entry quick, before attempting to change rooms and get back in range of the home wi-fi router which, inexplicably, is 80% strength in the hallway, but 0% a mere three feet away.

Why am I doing all of this? Because technology makes my life easier.

Last week, our office IT guru took a much-deserved vacation, which was the Secret Signal that triggered various systems in our office to misbehave. Much debugging-via-text-message later, I was glad that in my day job, I generally only have to work with software, and then of problems of my own devising. There are special circles of Hell dedicated to vendors with slightly-but-not-fully-compatible technologies. After last week, I was ready to banish them there myself.

Meanwhile, I've been going through an abridged version of The Wind in the Willows with my youngest child: it's lushly illustrated, and something that I've enjoyed reading, in turn, to each of my kids as they approach age six or so. I'll link to the edition we're reading, if I can track it down online. I can't help but think that the typewriter and the automobile and airplane were seen by Kenneth Grahame were great disruptions in the quiet, country English life. I have to admit to being more than a little jealous of Ratty and Mole, "simply messing about in boats" and dealing with Toad's wild obsessions with speed, noise, and danger. We've lost that place for good, except in books, haven't we?

P.S.

Here's the book, and while moving to the other room to get wi-fi, my wife called me aside to help download a knitting pattern which should have been simplicity itself... but took two adults 20 minutes and, ultimately, a Unix shell window. If that sounds crazy or overly complex, it was.

P.P.S.
The previous was pecked out on the screen, because in the pattern-download-time, both of the devices put themselves to sleep, proving to be lousy dance-partners in the name of energy conservation. More swearing applied in liberal amounts later, and the magic formula appears to be:

* Plug cable into Neo
* Power up Neo
* Power up tablet
* Plug Neo into tablet
* Hope

I'm ready for that picnic now, Ratty.

Dark Horse the Second: the Neo Nano Rhino

As much as I tease AlphaSmart users at this time of year



...I appreciate the combination the pure functionality, durability, and simplicity of the AlphaSmart. This summer I traded in my old Pro model (c. 1987) for the latest, a Neo2, which brings with it the added advantages of on-board USB, two-way file transfers, proportional and scalable fonts, and keys that don't require ball-peen force to trigger. I've used it on and off, and plan to make it my main revision machine for 2012's ever-growing opus.

Today, it got pressed into service as a drafting device, too.



My wife came down with a sudden bout of stomach something-or-other this morning, and since our younger kids are home-schooled, she had to put in for a last-second substitute teacher, which is... me. The Neo has been hopping room to room with me today (sans Rhino), picking up some words whenever the kids sit down to get a lesson done. It's infinitely more portable than all but the slimmest travel typewriters, without all the distracting pecking and bell-ringing that would pull my darlings off-task.

The only downside is that it's so damned easy to count words with a simple keystroke, so I'm trying to not obsessively to that every. Single. Line. (Trying and failing, obviously.) Today's wordcount is going to falter a bit -- yes, Duffy, I hear your snorts of derision, settle down -- but hopefully my Brigadier Cred will remain intact.

Auditions: A Dark Horse to the Rescue

Due to the fact that my typing station is set up in our family room, my Nanowrimo typing time is limited to those few hours when people aren't trying to watch TV, or have a conversation, or basically do anything over the unholy din of me at the Beast: the Royal KMG tucked in its November writing spot behind the sofa.



Such a situation arrived yesterday. My youngest was staying in, recovering from one of those spontaneous fevers that children seem to develop. Using the Beast is out of the question when a kid's in the room, much less a sick kid propped up on pillows watching her way through our DVD collection. And all my auditioned machines are at my office. Drat!

I could have grabbed any of the spares here at home, but since I discovered how well OnlineOCR works for me this year, I'm hesitant to use a machine with irregular type, as many of them do. And of course, being a sort-of collector means that you get to play favorites.

This is when I remembered Gomez, my same-era SM3, who was tucked away on the floor of the coat closet.



I grabbed an old cafeteria tray we have at home, Gomez, and paper, and headed off into the bedroom to work. An emergency type-cleaning with some alcohol and an old toothbrush was all it needed to get the slugs shining. Gomez types at the odd-sized 11 cpi size (picalite?) so every page from that machine is like one and a half from the Beast, and over the course of the day, I ducked in to try to knock out a page when I wasn't swapping DVDs or getting beverage refills.

Gomez was a well-loved machine before I got him from Freecycle. I'd forgotten about the stray marker scribbles on his side and the mysterious sticky something (gum, I hope) on the front corner of his frame. The ribbon cover paint is worn away from being scraped by the return lever, and he desperately needed the gasket-replacement repair.

His looks may not be much, but oh! I am a stalwart lover of these Teutonic marvels. Gomez rescued the day's writing... though not the plot. Nothing in my collection can manage that.

Water Rites

Typed with the Remington KMC