Sadly, after 20 years of loyal service, my surplus combat boots have sprung a leak. The sole of the left boot is cracked open to the point where my foot got very cold and very wet this morning on my way in to work. Actually, I was going in to a farewell breakfast for a colleague, so my normal commute was extended by a 6-block walk to the harbor through puddles of mushy snow, and on our return I began to notice the leak. I’m not entirely broken up about it, though—these boots are better suited for dry weather anyway, because they have lousy soles for winter grip (read: none) so I only wore them about 1/2 of the year anyway. My hiking boots, which date back to 2000 or so, are literally falling apart at the seams, so the timetable for wet weather footwear has now been moved up dramatically.
I took Finn shopping with me this weekend to give Mama some time to work on a big catalog job; one of my favorite things these days is to spend time running errands with my girls, because we get to be out of the house and exploring together. As she and I traversed the aisles of the Giant, avoiding the other holiday shoppers, Never Tear Us Apart by INXS came on over the store radio. Now, this is not the first time we have heard this song together, and I can never resist the temptation to serenade my daughter and make a fool of myself in public if it makes her laugh:
We got some smiles and laughs from the other shoppers as well as a few puzzled looks, and a woman who hurried away from us after snatching her soda off the shelf, but it was worth it.
We also had the good fortune to be invited to a pre-holiday party on Saturday evening, hosted by some new friends, and found it (and them!) to be warm, funny, and engaging. Candles set a cheery mood, Interesting people mingled, tasty foods were assembled, wine and beer flowed freely, and children of all ages ran underfoot up and down the stairs. Finn is getting to the age where she’s beginning to explore and socialize more on her own, and before we even got her coat off she was wandering inside to check out the scene.
This is all new territory for Daddy, because I’m used to chaperoning her relatively closely. At this age I’m not afraid she’ll eat the sofa cushions, but lately she’s been very interested in building towers to get up onto the dining room table and bringing us random items from previously inaccessible locations. When faced with a household where other children her age live, I figured the breakable stuff was already put away, so Mama and I hung back a bit in an unspoken agreement to see how she would handle the situation. Apart from a request for some hors d’oeuvres, she spent a good bit of the evening out of our direct eyesight, which was nice for Mama and I, even though we each admitted to keeping at least one eye peeled for her. And mostly, it went really well. She mingled and played and found things to do with new kids she’d just met. At one point she went upstairs to play with the bigger kids and apparently got very scared by something; luckily Mama was coming up at that exact moment to check on her and Finn came back down with us until she felt a bit safer.
I find myself going back to my internal argument about being a helicopter dad vs. letting her experience things on her own, and peeking in on her as she watched and played with the other kids in the living room filled me with a heady, sickening mixture of love, fear, hope, dread, and bittersweet sadness. She is the most amazing creature on this earth, and I will do absolutely anything for her. I also realize she must try and fail and love and hurt on her own, making sure that I am nearby to pick her up, brush the dust off, dry her tears, and send her back out on her own to try again. The urge to wrap her in my arms and protect her from everything is overwhelming, but I know I’d only do her more harm in the long run by fighting her battles for her, and the knowledge that she’s growing up so fast and gaining independence with every passing day is both a source of pride and an ache in my heart. On the day when she is too big to ride on my shoulders and play with my ears, laughing, as we stroll to the park, I’m going to have to find a nice quiet spot by myself to be alone for a while.
It’s cold and dreary in Baltimore (again) but that didn’t stop me from driving the Scout in to work yesterday. The soft top is back on for the duration of the winter so the cabin is relatively warm, and with the heat turned up the only cold chill I feel is on the back of my neck, which reminds me of Chewbacca in the old days. After work I drove up to MICA for the first evening of a figure drawing class, something I’ve done on and off for the past ten years. It was kind of strange to be back on the third floor of Main building for the first time in 20 years. The class went well, even though I was positioned poorly for the first half and the better model was doing the long pose (the other model was a disagreeable woman they’ve used since I was an undergrad).
Finn is in a state of serious separation anxiety, or perhaps suffering from the lingering effects of a cold. Everything has been “Iwantmymama” followed by uninterrupted crying jags for about the past week or so; any refusal to provide service immediately results in hysteria. We could be in the Terrible Twos or fighting off the flu, but it’s hard to tell when proper sentences can’t be formed.
In the meantime, we cranked up the heat at the house for the first time on Monday to battle an early cold snap, which has me considering replacement windows in certain key locations. The biggest offender at present is the west window in the attic, which currently holds a vintage air conditioner of dubious quality and indeterminate weight. Last year I wrapped the entire thing in plastic but that was only a temporary fix. Off the shelf replacement windows can be had for as cheap as $88 at Lowe’s but I would need to get a three-story ladder to place it properly from outside (Or I could just cheat and do it from inside, which is more likely).
We’re also waiting on replacement windows and doors for the side porch, which have been on order since before our vacation. I need to block out time over this coming weekend to clean off the side porch (top floor) and do as much demolition as possible before Mr. Scout is ready to start, which will most likely be in the middle of October. The trick will be getting it hauled out, which I may try to do in loads with the Scout.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
I’m exhausted for reasons I won’t get into here, but hopefully it will have been worth the loss of sleep. Between company on Saturday and Sunday, Finn’s nightmare early Saturday morning (“I scared of frogs under the bed, daddy”) and a large, time-critical project, I got a total of about 8 hours’ sleep this weekend. But it was all good; the house is clean, we have a new (used) snowblower sitting in the garage waiting for reassembly, and we hosted my brother in law and his beau for lunch on Saturday and our neighbors and their daughter for dinner on Sunday.
Somebody in Baltimore thought it would be a good idea to host a Grand Prix race downtown in 2011, which means they’ve been blocking off and ripping up giant swaths of concrete and pavement throughout the neighborhood where my office is located. All of this means A. I won’t be in the city on the one day they run the race, and B. my commute has gotten interminable because every available artery coming north from I-95 is down to two usable lanes or clogged with people like me trying to find alternate routes.
Yesterday afternoon, after a gaggle of older screaming kids had finally vacated the neighbors’ pool, I called over to see if I could bring Finn for a swim. She knows that Aloha means “hello” because we talk about it when I put on her pink swim shirt and she literally vibrates with excitement when we get near the water.
I set her down on the steps and we both got in slowly, basking in the afternoon sun, until she was up to her chest and I was floating in front of her. Instead of free swimming the whole time like we normally do at the Y, she was content to sit on the steps and watch as I crept up to her toes underwater and surfaced with a loud “Boo!’, which sent her into fits of giggles. Then she would stand up, hold her arms open, yell, “Ready!” and jump into my arms for a brief tour of the shallow end before practicing her paddle back to the stairs, and we would do it all over again.
There was a moment when the sun hit her face as I knelt in front of her, and her blue eyes looked deep into mine, right before she stood up to jump into my arms again. In that moment, I saw the trust she had in me, knowing I would be there to catch her as she made her leap, and I made a quiet promise to myself that I would never let her down. And as her arms wrapped around my neck, the sun warmed my back, and her giggles filled my ears, I felt like the luckiest man on earth.
Yep, I’m still here. I haven’t had a whole lot of time to write lately, and by the time I’m settled down enough to write I’m usually out of things to say. I haven’t been doing much picture-taking either, so I guess I’m just falling down on the job all over the place.
That having been said, life is good. The girl is talking up a storm, work is rolling along smoothly, my efforts to organize and structure my life are slowly bearing fruit, and I feel better about everything in general. Stick with me, guys; I’ll get back to a reasonable writing schedule soon.
The weather finally broke here in Baltimore, and 90° suddenly feels downright balmy to me. Which is a sad state of affairs, considering the load we’ve put on our air conditioners in the month of July.
It’s been exceptionally busy the last couple of weeks, which means Idiotking.org is a quiet place. I’ve been juggling baby duty while Mama is recovering from a monster infection, helping remodel and move my daytime office, and also reorganizing my day to day life in order to be a better husband, father, and employee. No mean feat to be sure, but I think it may be easier to accept sweeping change when everything is in flux.
Mama is recovering from her illness, and I will be giving back the keys to the swanky babyhauler tomorrow (mainly because I have a dentists’ appointment in the morning, not because she’s at 100% yet) but I’ve enjoyed my mornings with the girl. Even when it’s been an hour before my alarm clock rang. She’s getting so big so fast. To see her walk a set of stairs, upright, by herself fills me with an immense surge of pride and a wave of sadness, because there’s no better feeling than to have her reach up for my hand and circle one or two of my fingers with her little palm, and there will soon come a time when she won’t want my help with the stairs anymore.
We’ve just finished remodeling our offices at work after about four weeks of work, and it feels good to be settled again. What was once a large space subdivided into tiny offices has now been expanded into an open-plan area with expansive desks, exposed brickwork (my suggestion), new carpeting, and better lighting.
In order to keep costs down, we all pitched in to help paint, move, assemble furniture, and organize the space, so I spent much of the early part of this month at the office after hours pitching in. The payoff has been immediate, though; I feel much more motivated and focused on my work being out in the open instead of holed up in my office.
On that same note, I’m trying a new method of personal organization, which involves a smaller, lighter notebook and a resolution to keep using it. I’m pairing this with my own basic version of the Getting Things Done Methodology that is in a state of kaizen, and I’m really going to work hard to make this stick. I’ve also started using Mint.com to track my personal finances and start setting some specific long-term goals for the future; I’m hoping to dovetail this in with all the work Jen has done on household budgeting in order to save more money than we currently do.
So, in a nutshell, I feel more optimistic than I have in a while, more motivated, and at peace with a lot of things in my life. The trick will be to maintain that peace and forward momentum.
Tomorrow morning I’ll see the dentist for the first time in ages, which is a good feeling.
An excellent, excellent link provided by my Illustration professor via Facebook: Everything You Need to Know About Global Warming in 5 Minutes. His postscript:
[Jeremy] Grantham is an institutional investor who other institutional investors read. He invests based on data and is one of the few who does not politicize facts.
People who find themselves on the other side of the argument with Grantham reexamine their conclusions because it’s been a bad idea to bet against him in the past.
This is gonna be one of those weeks where Friday suddenly appears and I don’t know what happened to the previous four days. It’s already the end of Tuesday and I feel like it was the middle of the weekend a few hours ago-and I still haven’t gotten enough sleep.
Our neighbor is a real nice fellow, and his driveway faces our backyard, so we usually see him at least once during the weekend—usually as we’re humping bags of mulch or dragging hose from one end of the yard to the other. Saturday afternoon he flagged me down as I was mowing the lawn and asked me if I was a “fixer”. When I asked him to elaborate, he asked me if I like to fix things. I pointed back at our house and said, “Well, if the house counts, then yes.”
He pulled a huge green bicycle out of his shed and asked me if I could fix it, and if so, would I like to have it. I took one look and fell in love.
It’s a two-seater Columbia tandem that’s at least forty years old, if not more. When I guided it onto our back lawn, it was covered in dust, grease, bird droppings, and a light coating of surface rust that begged for a scrubbing with some brillo. He’d mentioned it had problems shifting, and that the front chain had a tendency to drop off the sprocket, so they’d laid it up in the shed, and there it sat.
Sunday afternoon I gave it a quick scrubbing with some auto detergent and a shoprag after airing up the tires. The dust came off quickly, and most of the rust scrubbed off with a little more work, so steel wool should shine up the chrome almost immediately. I tightened up the chain tensioner at the bottom, returned the front chain to the sprocket, oiled the running gear, adjusted the brakes, and took her out for a quick spin on a flat stretch of road across the street. Like butter! It shifted through the gears effortlessly, and the front brakes gripped almost immediately. The rear brake is a setup I’ve never seen before, and it took a minute to recognize it for what it was: a big CNC’d drum.
Jen came outside after changing into some warmer gear, and the two of us took it for a spin around the block. Riding/driving a tandem takes some getting used to, and we developed an alarming wobble early on until we got our pedal synchronization down. The other major issue is that of mass and speed: the bike itself weighs a ton, and with the two of us onboard it takes a lot of effort to slow down. So some upgraded brakes are in order. As is a basket for the front handlebars, and a child seat off the back fender for Finn. I have a vision of the three of us pedaling down into town to the Farmer’s Market on the weekends for vegetables, bread, and other goodies, and it makes me smile.