Bring on the Laurel Wreaths

Wow. If I could claim responsibility for getting Franklin to post regularly, the internet shall rejoice and shower me with honors and wealth beyond my wildest dreams!

The gauntlet has been thrown, huh? Well, then, I triple dog dare ya!

NaBloPoMo

I love Fussy, and Fussy says do it! So I'm a gonna do it. Don'tcha wanna do it too? I'm a verbose guy, so I don't think I'll have too much trouble coming up with a post per day, every day, for a month. Saturdays and Sundays count, too. Of course, the month in question is November, so I will no longer be employed full-time, and we all know I post more when I'm, uh, working. Ahem.

So come, join. All the cool kids are doing it. Won't you be my friend? My profile's over here. I would've been I, Rodius, but it didn't like commas or spaces in the name. Join me, and together we shall rule the galaxy.

Looking from the Wrong Direction

I'll spare the details, because database talk, like the jargon of all sorts of other specialties and cults, is boring to the uninitiated. But I had my wee little mind boggled a bit today. A few days ago, I was switched from a Mac to a PC at work. I only realized today that I had lost the useful tool of Applescript when a particular function in one of my databases no longer worked. There was much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments as I lamented our short-sighted, conformist abandonment of the superior machine for the one that plays nicest with everybody else's. Now, I moaned, I'll have to spend hours trying to figure out how to get Windows to do what Mac did so easily. This would clearly cut into my blogging time. I was forlorn.

But after five minutes thought, and about half an hour of actual work, I got the database to accomplish the same thing, and the new solution works on both Mac and Windows. It's simple, it's elegant, it's cross-platform, and it takes advantage of a previously unnoticed side effect of an unrelated function. So, thirty-five minutes. It took me a day and a half to figure out the right syntax for the applescript I was previously using. Funny how I spent so much time staring at the problem from the direction from which I first approached it and never bothered to walk around the other side and see what it looked like from there until I was forced to by the cruel machinations of petty fate.

Things I Think About As I Float Away to My Happy Place While Thumper Expresses His Displeasure with the Level of Customer Service I Provide

I've been wanting to add a feed to this site for awhile, but I didn't know how, or invest much effort into learning. Turns out this Blogger thingy makes it pretty easy. I think it's somewhere way down there at the bottom now. I've also wanted to learn how to link so it opens in a new window, but was too lazy and/or busy to investigate. I think Dooce's error this morning pointed the way. Did it work? It did! Well, there's that done, then.

I've also been thinking I should get my own non-blogspot domain name someday. I bought a domain name for an audio transcription/database consulting website. I need to figure out the income tax and sales tax and insurance implications of that whole idea, too. But if I do get my own domain name, I should, you know, do some actual web design and make this look like my own website and not a template. More stuff I don't know how to do. I used to, in the early to mid '90's, keep up with all the new and improved techie computer webbie stuff. But good God, it all changes so fast, it's hardly worth the time investment. Almost as soon as you really get to know it, it's no longer true. Who has the time? These kids today and their technology!

Now this stuff is somewhere on my to-do list just below committing to a workout program, though I did buy a $50 used Eddie Bauer jogging stroller yesterday. God, I love Craigslist! I don't really understand it, though. How does it survive? How does it make money? Is it some kind soul's or souls' gift to humanity? I should read the Wikipedia entry.

Also somewhere on that to-do list is cutting out some turf and laying out bricks for pads for my rain barrels, which have been sitting in my garage for about five months now. Oh yeah, and putting up actual rain gutters, too. It's just like me to start with the end and never finish the start.

And I need to finish painting the deck Pops and I screened in, uh, eleven months ago. And clean up the garden. And wage war on the fire ants. I've been trying not to lay out poisons all over the place for barefoot children and pets to stumble across, but sprinkling Cream O' Wheat on their mounds just makes them move, so I've spent the summer chasing the little buggers around my yard with a box of breakfast food, and I'm starting to imagine neighbors snickering behind curtains.

And when am I going to have time to set up a dog blind on the roof of my shed from which I can stalk and murder the little bastard that keeps making a special trip to my back yard to do all his runniest poopin'? I sprinkled cayenne pepper all over his favorite spots, and that worked for a couple of weeks, but within 24 hours of my nephew coming over and mowing it all up, the little bastard was back. And it looked like he'd been holding it in all this time, just waiting for his moment. I have visions of slingshots and web cams, and spring-loaded traps of varying degrees of lethality. Bamboo lined pit traps. Noose traps. Cayenne pepper bombs. Why am I cleaning up dog crap? I don't own a dog!

Anyway, these are the things I think about.

I Quit

I'm officially resigned now. The earth did not quake, the walls did not tumble. There was absolutely no brimstone involved at all. I'm kind of disappointed.

I will be working in the same building in a different capacity, though, strictly on a part-time intermittent basis. And the IT Manager said that he would call me back to consult, because he don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' no databases. But otherwise, after 5:30 p.m. on October 12, 2007, I will finally be a stay-at-home dad, or as the Business Manager here describes it, a kept man.

A Few Things

1. "Hey, look! A long blog entry! He must have gone back to work..."
Yes, I have. Today is my first day back after 8 weeks out on FMLA sick leave. I'll be giving three weeks notice today. After that, Mrs. Rodius will be going back to work full-time, and I can finally get a proper start on this whole Stay-At-Home Dad project. I'm a little nervous about resigning today; I'm afraid they'll accuse me of underhandedness in taking FMLA when I knew I was going to quit anyway. Is that underhanded? There's nothing I read in the policy that said I had to commit to any period of work after returning from leave. But still, it feels a little sneaky.

2. Thumper will be 8 weeks old tomorrow. He had his two-month appointment this morning, and boy was he surprised when we just stood there and let that lady stick him with needles. Twice. On each leg. He's growing well, and I'm beginning to think all of that colic and reflux and food allergy stuff was just a doctor giving a diagnosis to parents that expected one. I think it may all just be normal newborn digestive difficulties and first-time parents' jitters. We're getting more used to him and his patterns, but with me at work and Mrs. Rodius home alone with him for the next three weeks, we're going to start working harder at getting him into a bedtime pattern. I think Mrs. Rodius is nervous about how these three weeks are going to go.

3. I got to go to the Texas-Rice game with Big Brother on Saturday, and we spent most of the third quarter in the beer tent talking. I hadn't realized how much I needed to talk to someone until I was doing it. It was great to normalize this whole long, weird experience. I really need to interact more with people with kids. I guess when Thumper and I start going to playgrounds and... uh... wherever else it is that parents become acquainted with each other, it'll begin to happen anyway, but friends with kids would be a good thing. Except people with kids are too freakin' busy to socialize anyway. That's whatchacall one of themthere catch 22's.

4. I've been listening to Joseph Heller's Catch 22 as an audiobook whenever I've been in the car the past couple of weeks. There are a few glaring gaps in my literary canon (for instance, I've never read Wuthering Heights, either), and I thought Catch 22 would be a good one to check off the list. I think I would have loved that book when I was 17; it's so chock-full of clever turns of phrase and brilliant comic moments, the reader barely has time to fully digest one before he trips over another. But in my old age, I just find it kind of annoying. There's no story there, and no meaning that I can find. Maybe I need to read the Wikipedia entry. I'm glad to finally know what Catch 22 is, though (it's a rule for the pilots in the story that says if they're crazy, they can be excused from combat missions, but only if they ask. But asking is an act of self-preservation that proves they're not crazy, preventing them from being excused from combat missions. If they're crazy, they have to ask, but if they ask, they're not crazy.) As I listened to the book, I was reminded of Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club, in which the narrator tells Tyler Durden his concept of single-serving friendships with his fellow passengers on his many business flights. Tyler calls this clever then asks him how that's working out for him, being clever. It's sort of a deflating moment for the narrator. Cleverness without meaning isn't really that much of a virtue. So I think I might follow defective yeti's philosophy (at least I think it was his; maybe I'm misattributing it) on books: give it through the first 100 pages, and if it's not working for you, move on. Life's too short to be spent suffering through books that don't click with you.

5. The first person I saw today upon returning to work was the security guard at the back door who said, "Welcome back. You know what happened to you? You gained weight!" And then laughed loud and long as I walked away. It was kind of him to notice. I haven't worked out in, oh, I don't know. Three months, now? And I've been doing a lot of sitting in my recliner watching TV, with a baby eating, sleeping, crying, and vomiting on me. And I've been eating a lot, at all hours of the day and night. So, time to get back to work. I'm thinking I'm going to start over on the run-walk program, and follow the ChiRunning a little more closely. I was keeping the form, but I wasn't doing the warm-up loosening exercises. So hopefully I can work that in three times a week, and finally get to the yoga, too. I'm sure it would help my back problems. Maybe I can fit that in twice a week. I don't know. Maybe I'm setting my goals too high. Maybe I should just try to get in one week of walking three times, then see what I can do. Anybody got a jogging stroller they want to get rid of cheap?

6. "Good God, man, you've been out for 8 weeks. Don't you have some work to do besides writing an obnoxiously long blog entry about nothing?"
Eh, yes, I suppose. As I may have mentioned, I'm underutilized here. They've gotten along without me for 8 weeks, and I'm sure I was barely missed. I could work on a few things, I guess. Oh, yeah! My resignation letter. I better get crackin'...

Grand Unifying Theory

During the pregnancy, I had the epiphany that I should stop getting upset that it wasn't what I expected and just let it be what it was. I've been developing a sort of similar epiphany about Thumper's early infancy, too. Every time I start to think I get him, that I understand him and his behavior and have developed an accurate working definition of What He's Like, he goes and changes on me. Then I get frustrated because what I thought I knew is no longer true, if it ever was. So I've been trying to deal with him moment to moment as he is, instead of bumping up against the places where he's not currently behaving as he was yesterday when I developed a successful working theory about what he does, or what he likes, or dislikes. I've decided there is no Grand Unifying Theory of Thumper.

Similarly, I don't think there can be any Grand Unifying Generalized Infant Theory. But as I've taken Thumper into the office a few times to visit, or otherwise out into public, I've noticed something about the people with adult, or near-adult, children of their own: their need to demonstrate their retention of of their masterful infant care skills. With little more than a glance at the boy, they tell me what he likes and dislikes. They tell me what works and what doesn't. One of my several bosses today, at the first sign of post-feeding goo spewing from the boy's mouth, began to rummage without invitation through my diaper bag, extracting the spit rag and wiping his mouth. Thumper's mouth, that is, not his own. He recalled that babies this, and babies that, and they like this, and prefer so. His youngest child is in high school now, and his oldest is a junior in college. I got the same sense from one of Mrs. Rodius' bosses, and several other parents with kids leaving the nest, or coming close to it. And it occurred to me that it's important to them to demonstrate, to themselves, and to me, and to anyone else in the room, that they still remember what it was like, that they still retain those skills they learned through hard-won experience all those years ago, that there's a pride not only in learning how to do it well, but in showing that you've still got it, all these years later.

Or maybe, with the end of childhood, they're nostalgic for the beginning. Or maybe that's the same thing.