kungfuramone

Overlooking

2012-02-05T20:48:00.000-08:00

We're having the annual false spring in Oregon. It's in the mid-50s during the day, sunny and blue, with confused plants and elated confused people everywhere. It was rainy enough in January that I'm tolerating it so far, but the precip better return within a week or so or I'm going to start...uh...well, silently grumbling. So I guess there isn't much at stake, really.

Anyway, we took advantage of said false spring to go on our first real successful walk in the neighborhood since we moved here in November. Plan C was highly resistant to her stroller for a while there, but she seems to have grown out of that phase (happily.) We live in the Overlook neighborhood. We found a really neat park about a mile south of the south overlooking Swan Island, which is the industrial park / train yards of north Portland, as well as the Willamette. Here are four pics of the occasion:

I have a thing for water towers. There are a lot of really neat ones around here.

Plan C. This is how she rolls (i.e. with a bunny hat.)

Swan Island, St. Johns Bridge in the distance.

A bunch of locks hung on the chain link screen deal on the Concord Ave. pedestrian bridge.

Right, Then

2012-01-28T08:39:00.000-08:00

I think I've mentioned this before, but the way it works is that I have about an hour a day, some days, during which I could theoretically record the day's events and/or thoughts in this blog. What I like to do instead is sit in the basement and play video games. My brain gets its one chance per day to relax the otherwise-required laser focus. Then the Slammer* and I go to bed.

I'm at my mom's. We're down for the weekend so that she and my stepdad can soak up the toddler time and so that I can install the wireless router I got them for Xmas to replace the steam-operated, cast iron wireless router they've been using for the last five years or so. Despite the stupid, just-long-enough-to-suck drive between Portland and Eugene, it's very nice to be here.

The best thing: Plan C has been in a really, really good mood for the last week or so. She's gotten over a developmental hurdle with language...there's still lots of undecipherable babbling, but every day there's more decipherable babbling along with real actual words. It's fall-off-your-chair-and-hurt-yourself adorable learning what's actually going on in her head. Statements like "two berries!" and "bear goes here!" and "more O's!" - that kind of thing. I'm finding that the whole Stockholm Syndrome adoration of one's child gets a huge charge from actual communication.

We had our annual coast trip w/ the gang two weeks ago, which was great as usual, but it also brought home to me in no uncertain terms that babysitters are in C's future.

Here's a summary of the rest:

Work: SAN with dedicated stacked catalyst 3750s, IPsec tunnel to the offsite facility, wireframes and project management.
Band: Ransom and I realized that we were way better 11 years ago. But then, 11 years ago we had time to practice once a week. Still fun and sounding better as time goes on.
Game: 4th level rogue, 2nd level fighter, bitches! All of the essential archery feats along with two-weapon fighting.
House: so comfy, so awesome. Dinner parties coming up. Trying to find good big storage racks for the basement so that we can start cleaning it up.
Friends: as attractive and debonair as ever.

* This is B's new nickname. I'm encouraging everyone to use it as much as possible. Say it with me: "The SLAMMER."

Sartorial in the New Year

2012-01-08T10:39:00.000-08:00

There are an awful lot of things that have gone down Chez Moi of late. I survived the flights and got to see family back east before during and after my grandmother's funeral. Plan C's babbling is rapidly turning into Plan C's actual talking. I have an elaborate plan to be less stressed out in ought-12 as opposed to ought-11. I keep getting sick - I'm on my third cold in about a month (could have something to do with the mold in the basement, I guess...gonna go after that shit with some serious bleach in the near future.)

But! None of this matters to you, dear half-dozen readers. You want to know what I'm wearing these days! The answer: classy...stuff, dude:

Yep! A fancy new pea coat that even came with a fancy scarf! And yes, that's totally me in the picture.

Yes indeed! New Dr. Martens wingtips! They cost as much as my mortgage (roughly), but damn are they slick. And comfy. And slick.

In other words, I'm trying to start 2012 off in a dapper kind of manner. I'm doing my part. Ask yourself: are you doing yours?

Kicking Off 2012 with Dread

2011-12-31T14:27:00.000-08:00

I don't usually like to post about anything personal, but I don't think there's a reason not to mention that my grandmother passed away the other morning. I'm not going to say anything about that except that I'm very sad about it, but that sadness is mitigated in knowing that she had lived a very long, very rich life.

Needless to say, my brother and I are heading back east (New York) for the funeral. This is where the dread kicks in. I've managed to avoid flying anywhere since before Plan C was born, almost two years now. This isn't one of those flights you can pretend is almost over the whole time, either; it's something like 7 hours from Portland to DC, then there's another hour-long hopper from DC to NYC. I finally managed to break through my apprehension a little bit this morning and just try to be rational about it, but the fact remains: waking up at 4:45am tomorrow and spending all day doing the thing I fear and loathe the most in the world is bumming me out.

At least I never gave a shit about new year's, anyway, since I seriously hope I'm well asleep by midnight.

Further Notes and Observations

2011-12-17T13:33:00.000-08:00

Plan C loves to play with the Maglite. One must be very, very careful while one's baby plays with a Maglite.
Speaking of my kid, there was an explosion of adorable last night when C + J brought over their tiny little girl (P: now 7 months old) and the two babies babbled at each other and stole each other's toys.
I unfairly got a pretty bad hangover from the visit and couldn't sleep. I ended up curled up on the couch in the basement at about 5:00am. To repeat an old refrain: insomnia is proof that humans are defective.
I work hard for the money, so hard for it honey, so you better treat me right.
Band practice was solid last week. I wrote a song that T suggested be titled "Sleepless in Cialis," but I think I'm going to opt for "Entry-level Position."
The slog on the house continues. Right after I finish this, I'm going to try to sort some shit in the basement (i.e. where I'm sitting right now.)
My class is done. Could be the last one for a long time. We'll see.

Honestly: This is Bullshit

2011-12-12T20:45:00.001-08:00

http://www.wunderground.com/US/OR/006.html#SPE

I JUST WANT IT TO RAIN DURING THE WINTER IN OREGON LIKE IT'S SUPPOSED TO.

A Little Braggadocio

2011-11-23T08:05:00.001-08:00

Sorry, but here it is:

MY NEW HOUSE IS AWESOME. It has floors! It has a yard! It has garbage and recycling service! It has space! It has gas heat and a gas stove (new oven, new furnace!) This morning I took the Max* in to work and it was basically door-to-door service from the stop two blocks from my house to the stop one block from the office. I even have that which I have dreamed of for so long: a desk in the basement with a desktop computer hooked up (via a network cable, not wireless) to the interwebs.

My friends are a stalwart crew. We had 14 people materialize to help with the move on Saturday and the whole thing was done in 4.5 hours, including refueling and returning the Uhaul. We had so many people helping that we had bottlenecks loading up the truck and (on the other end) loading up the house. Thanks, guys.

In addition, I am pleased to report that Plan C loves the new digs and that Pesto is happily running bunny sprints between the dining and living rooms.

If only me-living-in-Santa-Cruz could see me now...

* To non-Portlanders: the Max is the municipal light rail. It is a speedy whooshing train of efficient transportationing.

Movin'

2011-11-18T22:03:00.001-08:00

We're moving into the house tomorrow. I have to drive yet another gigantic truck, although this time it's only across town, not from central California to the Oregon - Washington border. Pics and crap to follow.

Striking Observations

2011-11-07T20:19:00.000-08:00

Let's begin, shall we?

First of all, I hate daylight saving's time. I don't care if you're springing forward or falling back, it's always a bunch of bullshit. I have a hard enough time with the whole sleeping concept without arbitrary agriculturally-inspired clock maneuvers.
My rap name is henceforth Duquan the Captivator. Take heed, sucker MCs.
I really need to e-mail my scattered grad school homies. I miss them and would like to hear about the goings on.
It's Audit Week '11 at work! Today went well enough.
But then the bus broke, so I sat in the cold and graded midterms until the next one came. Then I was 10 minutes late to my own class and had to walk in, put down my bag, and start in on the Weimar republic and the rise of fascism...a-just a-like a-that.
Plan C is WALKING! Today she was pretty much charging back and forth giggling up a storm. Holy cow, it's pretty cute!

Brief Retrospective

2011-10-30T12:40:00.000-07:00

Kiddo's still asleep, although I doubt for much longer. A few weeks ago she spontaneously abandoned her second nap of the day, so now we're down to one little respite from around 11am - 12 or 1pm (depending on how merciful she's being...)

I was thinking about work, about how tough it's been carrying the burden of preparing the company for the big security audit (on top of teaching), and I found myself thinking back to grad school. For six years I slept in until 8am almost every day and just kind of drifted from seminar to discussion section to the library and back home. I worked faster but much less hard than almost all of my friends/colleagues in my programs. I broke out in a terrified sweat every time I was forced to speak a few words of mangled French to anyone. I wrote my dissertation at lightning speed and, looking back especially, the result was pretty half-assed.

It's a relief to look back on it now and know 100% that it doesn't matter; I did end up a competent teacher, so if some twisted path leads me back that way in the future I feel all set to return there. It will never matter, though, that my French sucks and I got bored trying to "master the literature" and just played video games most of the time. In so many words, grad school amounted to a mostly-fun and very interesting way to spend my mid-late 20s.

Before I went to grad school, during Portland V. 1.0 for B and me, I resented it enormously when my job made me work harder than I thought was reasonable. The company I ended up at was truly awful, but I also just hated that I was expected to do anything beyond my 8 hours a day for them. Now, it's a lot easier to reconcile. The thing is, I haven't done this before, worked really hard and made (some) money and bought a house and so on...it's kind of neat to try it out and I am beyond excited to finally get to move into the damn place in a few weeks.

As ever, no point to speak of here, just that despite the intense exhaustion and the kind of bleak feeling I have after weeks of this nonstop, I'm still happy about how things played out and the decisions I made. So: yay for me.

Haters Gonna Hate

2011-10-15T20:48:00.000-07:00

I've been eating a lot of kale.

Just a note on one of the best shows: True Blood. It's this one show about vampires that is on HBO and it also on the, uh, internet. B and I finally got around to watching the finale of the latest season last night and it was splendid good fun. It's like a really smart teenager made up a funny show and hired incredibly good-looking actors for it (case in point: "Eric Northman," above, and "Jessica," not pictured.)

Thing is, lots of smart and media-savvy internet people like my homie K really hate True Blood. There are whole smart, media-savvy blogs devoted to hating on True Blood. That is good! Because their intense hatred somehow only makes the show more...succulent and robust. I do wonder a little if they're missing the point:

They think that it's a show that's kind of tongue in cheek but fails and is just stupid. BUT what if it's a show that is SO tongue in cheek that it knows the first layer of irony is just silly but that the SECRET layer of irony makes the shit work?!

Anyway, here's to True Blood. I recommend that you and an attractive person get together with a few bottles of wine and watch it.

My recommendations are not to be taken lightly.

Ergh..damn...collapse

2011-10-12T20:40:00.000-07:00

You know what's boring? Talking about how tired you are. Too bad, suckers.

On the days I teach, I rock a 12-hour day from when I'm up to when I get home. Work is still going really "well," but I'm both the lead guy in getting us a major technical security audit and I'm trying to figure out how to be a software / business analyst. Having the house is beyond awesome, but we don't get to move in for a month-plus because we have to have the upstairs floors refinished and the floor guys are weeks out until they're available (side note: this part will be expensive.)

And the kiddo...oh, jeebus, the kiddo. She's adorable. She's learning new words literally every day now and is actually making some progress on the walking thing. But holy pooping damn, she demands 100% attention 100% of the time. Obviously, B has to deal with this all the time, but my part is getting home after the stuff noted in the first paragraph and having to be the paragon of father - husband virtue instanter.

Hope for the future consists of the following: the bulk of the audit will be done, for better or worse, within a month. My class ends at the start of December. Because we don't get to move right away, we get more time to get things sorted and the small things moved and stashed in the basement (and we know that the remaining repairs / setup will have enough time to happen before we're actually living there.) Must...keep...going.

Got a House

2011-10-08T11:12:00.000-07:00

Yep...it's official! Our house is two blocks southwest of the corner of Killingsworth and Interstate in north Portland (it's in the Overlook neighborhood):

It's Just About Here.

That was one crazy process. Here is our timeline, for your edification:

Early July: get financials going.
Late July: loan pre-approved.
Late July: start looking.
Early/mid August: put in offer.
Through late August: insanity with repair addendums. Finally walk away from house.
Early September: start looking again.
Labor day weekend: put in offer on another place.
Next day: counter-offer. Counter-offer accepted.
Through mid-September: inspections and new repair addendum. Repair addendum accepted.
Repairs ensue
First week of October: everything wraps up, we get the keys yesterday.

Of course, now comes the carpet ripping-up, the additional crap that needs to get done (i.e. we have to pay more people more money), appliances purchased and installed, then the big push in two weeks with the truck and the friends and the pizza and the beer.

Pics will be on flickr within the next few days!

Another Big Saturday Morning Where I Can't Sleep In

2011-10-01T07:39:00.000-07:00

Getting old is retarded.* It's like this ongoing, low-level feeling of physical unease coupled with a weird starvation diet of sleep. What I mean by the latter is that it becomes impossible to sleep much, ever - even when you're asleep, you're just drifting at the edge of waking up the whole time, anyway. After enjoying pizza and wine with homies R+R last night, for some (fucking) reason I turned my alarm on (apparently it's purely reflexive at this point), so it went off at 6:20am like usual this morning. Now, young me would have just turned it off and gone back to sleep. Old, current me turned it off and failed to go back to sleep. Hence blog post.

Work is going pretty well. I got a semi-promotion to start doing business analysis / project management (with adult supervision in the form of one of my bosses), which is a step in the direction I want to go involving doing full-on project management in a tech context. Why would I want to do such a thing, you possibly impulsively think for a quarter of a second before getting bored and thinking about something more interesting, like anything else at all, ever? The answer is that doing project management seems to be less stressful than doing IT but pays more. My mama didn't raise no dummies, you see.

I'm teaching again, too. I mean to write a blog post about my big ultimate take on having spent six years earning a doctorate and then promptly returning to a variation on what I was doing before I went to grad school in the first place instead of doggedly pursuing a teaching career...but this post ain't that. Suffice it to say for now that teaching is still fun, I like those silly kids in my classes, but it is also pretty exciting to be signing the papers on our new house next week.

Speaking of, and forgive me for the weird species of bragging, but these are things our house has:

5 years in to a 30-year roof.
New siding.
New furnace.
(now) New sewer line.
(now) New circuit box and a bunch of new electrical.
New Windows!

This latter one is huge. Everyone we know who owns a house has gone through the window replacement thing in the last few years and it sounds brutal. We are some lucky shits to be moving in to a place where the guy before already paid for it.

* Retarded is the last socially unpalatable term I insist on using sometimes. I'm sure I'll get in trouble for it eventually and be forced to just mutter it under my breath when I'm alone.

Ain't Got No Subject Line 'Cuz She Done Me Wrong

2011-09-15T20:51:00.000-07:00

That's how a blog post would start if I sang the blues, only I'd say it twice.

Anyway, there is nothing new. See here:

Buying a house a kind of painful process. Have I mentioned that? Yes, I have.
The heat last week just about killed me. I was unprepared for a super-hot in September. The advent of gray skies and cool winds made me fall over in happy relief-edness.
I start teaching again ridiculously soon! Weird!
Plan C is one crazy 16-month old. We had a lovely reprieve tonight after she took an actual nap and was in a good mood for the rest of the evening. This was not coincidental.
You know what I like to eat? Kale. God being old is weird.
Mostly I like to eat runny eggs, though.
We're going to H+M this weekend! Gonna maybe buy me some more pants!
Have I mentioned of late that Pesto is still truckin' along at nine years? She is one awesome bunny.

Accidentally Called my Co-Worker a Jerk-Off Today

2011-09-08T20:59:00.000-07:00

Despite the ridiculous and completely evil late-summer heat wave that I hate like death, I rode my bike to work today. On leaving, I discovered that the owner of the next bike over on the rack had U-locked my brake line to his bike and the rack. Thus, I could not depart. Nor, however, could I just take the bus home, because that would entail leaving the bike there all night and it's my homie E's bike - not mine to chance to the tender mercies of Portland's nocturnal bike goblins! I went back up to the office to get a sticky note to write on and announced to everyone that "some jerk-off" had done this thing. My co-worker J commiserated, saying he had suffered through precisely the same predicament in Boston this one time. Then he asked what the bike looked like and (this is where I skip to the obvious conclusion to the anecdote) it turns out it was him.

I was greatly relieved because I got to go home and I also felt kind of bad for accidentally calling him a jerk-off. Everyone in the office thought it was HI-larious, however. I am basically a morale officer.

In other news!

My old ska band is playing a reunion show tomorrow evening (an evening which just happens to be my birthday) in Eugene. I feel bad for missing it mostly because it's a tribute show for the old drummer, a remarkable guy who died tragically recently of a heart attack. I would have also liked to have seen the old gang, people who were really important to me during those formative late adolescent years. But...I can't. My non-working time is dad time, and house-buying-stuff-time, and it just wasn't in the cards. Here's hoping they rock it third-wave late 90s skinny ties and docs style tomorrow.
Seriously leaning toward getting a single-speed bike. I just hate gears! They suck!
I am now becoming a sort of apprentice project manager at work, along with being the systems guy and the QA guy. One of my bosses referred to me as the "leatherman" of the joint, but I don't think he realized that my alternative lifestyle choices don't so neatly subscribe to a single encompassing category like that. (get it? get it? I'm being funny!)
Birthday weekend plans! B's being a stud and letting me play D+D and have band practice! Hot damn!

Did Get a House

2011-09-04T15:59:00.000-07:00

Thursday: house comes on market.
Friday: B sees house.
Saturday: we see house together. Offer is made.
Sunday: counter-offer made by seller. Counter-off accepted.

And that is how you do it.

Obviously, this is pending the inspection and all that jazz, but we're feeling good about this one. It's on N. Concord, close-in North Portland, a block from the Max line. It also has almost all new stuff, including the unheard-of new windows. It's right at the tippy-top of what we can afford, but not over said tippy-top, so we're okay.

With any luck, the place will be ours in early October and we'll be moved in by Halloween. Ain't that some shit.

A Stupid Thing to Do to a House

2011-08-31T20:45:00.000-07:00

We saw our first house that had been staged for flipping (yes, people still do that shit in this economy, somehow...) It had been HGTV'd to the nines, with granite counter tops and new floors kind of stapled onto the existing structure. The location was awesome and it was still a good house; we may well have made an offer on it except that...

...THEY SOLD THEIR BACK YARD.

Yes, part of the flipping thing is selling off the yard, which was just barely big enough that some dickhead developer is going to come in and build one of those obnoxious tall n' skinny townhouses that are springing up like deadly nightshade all over Portland. It was a huge bummer, because it immediately made even considering the place a non-starter.

So: to developers and house-flippers: please go run into something sharp.

Cheers,
-KFR

Didn't Get The House

2011-08-29T21:15:00.001-07:00

I haven't had a generic newsy post in a while, so here I go...

We've been going back and forth with the seller of this one neat house in North Portland for the last two-plus weeks. It's a cool place in a nice neighborhood. It also has a lot of big-deal problems, so the negotiations had to do with making sure that he'd fix 'em before we bought it. We finally reached a point today where there was just too much of an unknown potential money-pit factor (four foundation repair inspections later) and we bailed.

We are bummed, but also excited to look at other places armed with the knowledge gleaned from this particular $700 misadventure (the cost of all the inspections - the would-be buyer has to pay for those...)

All subsequent houses we consider putting an offer down on must have the following characteristics:

Gas heat.
No not-necessarily decommissioned old oil tanks buried in the yard.
No foundation issues.
More than a few feet in between us and the neighbors.
A basement that is not too cavelike; actual stalagmites especially not okay.
A neighborhood we'd be down with walking in.

Anyway, better luck next time, us.

So You Want to Know How I Do It?

2011-08-22T20:29:00.000-07:00

Well, I shall TELL you, then!

Pasta.
Two fried eggs with runny yolks.
A bunch of shredded extra-sharp cheddar cheese.
Olive oil.*

And I am good to go.

* Why the crap do chefs on cooking shows always specify extra virgin olive oil? Of course it's extra virgin! Would I purchase extra slutty olive oil? I think not!

I Love Bureaucracy. No, I Really, Honestly Do.

2011-08-20T08:54:00.000-07:00

We're in the midst of full-on house-buying crazytown, a quest that took me to the Bureau of Something Something near PSU last week to look for old plumbing permits. While there, I was reminded again of the grace of professional bureaucrats and the ease of navigating a huge bureaucracy. Want to know the secret? Here you go:

Be really nice to the bureaucrats.

These people spend their professional lives in front of spreadsheets and/or the public, both of whom can be bitches. Bureaucrats do not hate you; what they want is to have an easy time doing their jobs. What they want is a nice, polite person to make reasonable requests of them and to then follow the rules in having those requests fulfilled. They want you to be patient and understanding. If you do these things...they will DO WHAT YOU WANT IN THE CONTEXT OF THEIR PROFESSIONAL CAPABILITIES AND CAPACITY. They will get you that permit! They will process that request! They will transfer your child to the other school! They will DO THESE THINGS. Sorry to e-shout.

In short, to brag, I always get what I want with bureaucrats, because I am nice to them.

Verily Shall I Endeavor!

2011-08-15T21:14:00.000-07:00

...to do the following things!

I shall ignore the fact that I am on a bike, miserably racing past dorks in their silly bike clothes and dodging traffic. Note that this willful ignorance will not preclude me from due caution.
I shall eschew the three hours of video game leisure I have per week in favor of maybe closer to 1.5 hours of it, along with 1.5 of something more useful!
I shall write some new tunes for The Nervous. For lo, at some point shall we practice yet again!
I shall continue my miserable fucking workout routine, in the vain quest of...what? Who knows?!
I shall continue diving head-first into technical challenges at work about which I know...precious little.
I shall blog slightly more frequently!

Big-Time Update, You Guys

2011-08-10T06:58:00.001-07:00

House! An offer we made was accepted on a pretty neat house off of Rosa Parks in North Portland. Tomorrow is the inspection, and if that goes well, the days after are the other inspections (sewer, radon, Indian burial grounds, etc.), then comes the appraisal and title verification, and if we don't explode into bloody stains from the stress by then, eventually we write the biggest check ever written and become Dr. and Mrs. Zoidberg, homeowners. Crazy.

Bikes! I am the only person in Portland who has realized that you go much faster if you stay in the hardest gear on your bike (as far as I can tell. This is just the evidence talking.) Also, it's official: I kind of hate commuting by bike, but the exercise is so good and the price is so free that I can't stop doing it. Gotta be heart-healthy! Gotta burn those calories! Gotta have a good excuse to eat more Pad Khee Mao!

Babies! Plan C is equal parts brilliant, adorable, and totally bloody lazy. No walking, still. Little talking, still. Oh, she CAN talk if she wants to, she COULD finish learning to walk if she wanted to, but she's only just getting around to having more than one tooth, so she doesn't feel like doing much of anything but stealing hearts when she goes out and pointing at things and saying "buh?!" when she stays in.

My wife! Is hot. She gets sick of me telling her that, but it's the truth.

Fun stuff! A captcha (the download letters nonsense) the other day was "options typlig," which is my new pseudonym, or at least my new nom de plume. Also, I've agreed with my homie K to greet her by saying "DANGEROUS WEAPONS!"

Music and Pizza

2011-08-06T20:47:00.001-07:00

Part I: Today, the men of The Nervous joined forces to produce the soundtrack for our homie K's 15-Minute Filmfest movie, a mockumentary about a kid who wears wigs all the time. We produced (wrote and recorded) three songs and one background musicy thing in the course of five hours:

A sad song.
A happy song.
A thrash-punk song for the part where the kid burns his wigs.
A weird ambient thing.

As ever, The Nervous were Clean, Punctual, and Efficient.

Part II: B, Plan C and I went to our favorite pizza place in Portland last night: American Dream. I just love that place. We always get a medium pizza with BBQ chicken and artichoke hearts. We also drank a pitcher of Full Sail Amber. Plan C was adorable, saying hi to everyone and being cute as the dickens. What I was most interested to see is that the Indie Rock Hipsters that used to work there back during Portland V. 1.0 are gone, replaced by Metal Hipsters! Those metal hipsters can really make some pizza, though!

Hats

2011-07-26T20:48:00.000-07:00

This is a picture of my grandfather and me last weekend. We have some hats on.

I spent 40 bucks on a vintage pork pie at Puttin' On the Ritz, the decidedly old-school vintage store in Eugene that's been around since the early 90s. It was worth it because now I have three rad hats. In fact, along with being bloody exhausted and not getting to read for fun, the thing I don't like about biking to work is that I don't get to sport a dapper hat every day.

And my hats: they are dapper.

Food Carts I Have Known

2011-07-18T20:54:00.000-07:00

The big thing in Portland w/r/t* food is the food cart phenomenon. There are tons of those guys, packed with mostly really great food for very little money. A few notes:

Until recently, my favorite was Creme de la Creme, a French bistro cart in the pod by our apartment (the pod is at Belmont and about SE 44th.) Croque madames, onion tarts, etc., with amazing salads with amazing vinaigrette. Unfortunately, they started copping some attitude ("best French restaurant in Portland," per Yelp) and they now charge a 50 cent to-go fee, which is a big what-the-fuck since they're a bloody FOOD CART and the whole POINT is that you get it to go. They also charge too much: 8 bucks a meal is 2 - 3 bucks more than I want to spend at a food cart. Still tastes good, anyway.
Thai! I always go to Thai Sky at the square-block-big pod at 4th and Oak, a block from my job. It's in direct competition with two other Thai carts at the same pod, so they're all locked in a "lunch = 5 dollars, that's it" kind of price war. The Pad Khee Mao is just divine. I have yet to get anything else, because why bother?
There are lots of other really good food carts! I already ran out of literary steam, however, as it is 9pm on a work night and B and I polished off some booze and played with Plan C.

Mostly I just bring peanut butter sandwiches to work, but boy do I count down the days in between Pad Khee Mao days. There are six of them.

* "With regard to" - funny prickish abbreviation I got from David Foster Wallace, essays by which I am perusing on days where I don't ride "my" bike but instead take the bus.

The Deadly Spear-Hand to the Throat

2011-07-10T08:20:00.000-07:00

Ha! What the heck am I on about?!

Trying out Chrome instead of Firefox, at least in Windows. Firefox has been dragging ass on my laptop, and I'm weirded out by the whole direct jump from 4.x to 5.x in the course of a month or whatever it was...
I really need to get better about taking pictures and videos. Plan C is adorable. Portland is beautiful. My friends are stunningly good-looking. The world needs to see these things.
Hostin' the in-laws this weekend. Yesterday I basically sat around with my father in-law and drank and talked shit. That's what we do.
Sending in pre-approval paperwork tomorrow! House-hunting to commence shortly thereafter! I saw a five bedroom, two bath house in our price range on the listings the other day (I mean...I'm sure something was wrong with it, but it was still HEARTENING to see that much house for an amount we could afford.)
Coffee's still my north, my south, my east, my west, my working week, my day of rest.

Patriotic Observations

2011-07-04T11:39:00.000-07:00

This was not pre-meditated, but I ended up wearing my KGB shirt (with the above image on the back) today. Happy 4th everybody!

So far, the new season of True Blood is living up to expectations! Naked vampire squabbling!
I really missed hanging out with other inked-up old punks during the Exile. The joint birthday party of H + D the other night was a wonderful return to form.
I almost bought a single-speed bike the other day. B convinced me to simmer on it, especially because E doesn't get back from Germany for about a month (at which point she'll presumably want her bike back. Doh!)
My kid has grown like a fucking FOOT in the last month or so.
Yes, yes, I know I shouldn't eat so much carbs. But...it's like my only vice! Besides the drinkin', I mean!
I like playing Dragon Age on my computer and Dungeons and Dragons in real life. There have also been some discussions of me running a 4th ed. Vampire game.
The really successful run buying pants the other week obviated the need to do anything productive this weekend.

Regarding Those Things I Mentioned

2011-06-27T19:32:00.000-07:00

So, it turns out that I really like software testing ("Quality Assurance"...orperhapsyouprefer "Business Analysis"). It's tricky stuff in that you need to understand complex software at a pretty deep level and you need to be able to apprehend problems from a user perspective and from a development perspective. BUT holy crap is it easy compared to what I have been doing: the constantly-escalating technical challenges and playing-with-live-ammo aspect of production systems management. I mean, I'm still doing that, but at least now there's a lot of totally unthreatening testing in there, too. As an added bonus, my time is billed to the clients, so I'm actually i>making the company money.
Riding that them thar bike! It's like free exercise, you guys!
Also: had a terrific pants day the other day. Pants were located! Pants were purchased! We discovered that the Goodwill on Broadway near Lloyd Center is great. I got an apparently unworn pair of Gap jeans for 10 bucks. I got an amazing green cowboy pear-snap button shirt for 6. ET CETERA. Also: some weird generic Chinese pseudo-cords from Sears for 15. WELCOME TO THUNDERDOME.

My Cup Runneth Over

2011-06-25T08:49:00.001-07:00

With events! I have been doing things, and the fact that when I'm at work I have to work and when I'm at home I'm hanging out with Plan C means that I don't get to blog much. As a result, the whole world suffers. Here's what's been up:

I went to Sunriver with my mom, stepdad, brother, B and Plan C. We had a very nice time drinking all the wine in central Oregon. Also, there were bike rides and games of Ticket to Ride.
We have been pretty darn social. This means that we eat dinner with people, basically.
I started riding my (borrowed - thanks E!) bike to work. It's about 30 minutes one way, going from 47th + Stark over the Burnside Bridge to the office, then later reversing that process to go home. It's very satisfying, albeit a little scary, and if the first few days are any indication, I am going to be back in cardio-related shape very quickly.
I seriously need some new pants AGAIN.
I'm moving very quickly into QA (which means software testing) at work as the operations stuff sort of starts to fall off.
I have initiated the house-buying process. I've sent off reams of financial paperwork, albeit digitized, to the loan officer lady, and I expect we'll be seriously at it by mid-August or so.
Plan C grew like a vertical foot in a week.

I have pictures on flickr, which is where I put pictures, because I'm wary of putting pictures on Facebook. That is all.

Unequivocal

2011-06-11T09:28:00.001-07:00

So...funny timing on blog posts. I was hired full-time at the software company two days after my latest online bitch-fest. All I can say about it is that I feel completely unequivocal about my priorities; even if this means that teaching becomes entirely a sideline activity for the rest of my life, I really don't care. I find that at 32, with a kid, living in the post-apocalyptic wasteland of American capitalism, I just want to take care of my family and try to keep my head above water.

I was IM'ing with K about it yesterday and she was pointing out that it's also something of a stand on principle to reject the endless treadmill of part-time, insecure and unsupported academic employment (i.e. as an adjunct/lecturer.) The system works because so many people like me / K* are willing to chase after the elusive full-time jobs, sacrificing everything in the name of a career and a system that almost no one actually gets access to.

Looking back, I think I'm most bitter about the attitude of tenured / tenure-track faculty, who treat adjuncts as kind of embarrassing plague-bearers; they walk past them in the halls of academic discourse (virtually and literally) like most of us walk past bearded hobos wrapped in sleeping bags begging for change. Of all the causes academics try to associate themselves with, the fate of the entire profession doesn't seem very important to most of them.

So, fuck them anyway. I'll go fix servers and do software QA.

* K is calling bullshit on this, too. By "people like me / K," I just mean "people with PhDs who are old(er) and want to not be as poor as they have been forever."

Employment

2011-06-06T11:07:00.000-07:00

The setting: since about 1980, real wages in the US have stagnated or declined across the board. The "growth" of the economy has been based entirely on financial and commodity speculation (stocks, real estate, currency trading, and so on), meaning only people who are already wealthy have access to further wealth. The social standard is still that of the so-called full-time job: a 40-hour work week (not counting commute, lunch and breaks, and heaps of unpaid overtime for salaried employees) with a decent wage and modest benefits. Full-time jobs are, however, the privilege of a relatively small elite of educated, well-connected people, and they're always vulnerable to outsourcing / downsizing / restructuring / further corporate euphemism.

The protagonist: a basically well-meaning and friendly fellow with a lot of degrees and some technical skills.

The challenge: can our tinhorn hero navigate the treacherous waters of postmodern capitalism and arrive at the shoals of a semi-secure "full-time job," having despaired of the larger context improving in the slightest? Will he scale the ice wall of technical certifications armed with the crampons of a mediocre understanding of networking and domain administration, or will he skip from stone to stone across the river of community college education, earning barely enough to keep his family fed (to quote the Beverly Hillbillies theme)?

Or will his metaphors get even worse?!

Tune in this decade as we find out if the far-off dream of buying a small bungalow in a livable neighborhood of Portland, going on the occasional trip to a nearby spot featuring a river or something, and modern amenities like new socks once in a while are on the horizon!

The Nervous: Updated Report

2011-05-30T15:02:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the second meeting of the three-man rock n' roll party experience The Nervous. We ran through our "set," such as it is, a couple of times. We tightened bolts and adjusted screws. So to speak. Tunes so far include:

Mental Retard (Riverdales)
Stick Boy (Hanson Bros.)
My Girlfriend's a Robot (Hanson Bros.)
Not For Mary Lou (Hanson Bros.)
IP V6 (me)
Firmware (me)
song that Ransom wrote that I can't remember the name of (Ransom)

I expect we'll end up dropping Stick Boy, because playing a song about Hockey doesn't quite fit the self-imposed / understood genre restrictions, but otherwise it's full speed ahead.

The Nervous: Punctuality, Cleanliness, Efficiency. An Iron Core of Discipline.

Reading (Zizeck) for Pleasure

2011-05-22T10:29:00.001-07:00

I didn't read anything for fun for six years, the six years that happened to coincide with having to read 200 - 400 pages a week of dense academic prose (most of it in French during the latter few years). Now that I'm back in civilian life and I take public transportation every day, I am all about reading for fun. Fun includes the following so far:

The entire Jim Butcher Furies of Calderon series (good fantasy.)
The two amazing novels by Patrick Rothfuss.
The Stupidest Angel and A Dirty Job by Chris Moore.
Zizeck! I'm reading Living in the End Times right now and it's just chock full of radical theoretical giggles. Zizeck is a particularly interesting case for me, because most of the people I studied in grad school loved to read philosophy; they were philosophers who really sincerely enjoyed reading Hegel (which is about as much fun, IMHO, as taking a screwdriver to the soft tissue under your knee cap.) Zizeck is probably the first time I've really enjoyed reading philosophy. Even my dissertation work on Gorz wasn't like this; I liked and admired Gorz as a thinker, but it was still work getting through his stuff. Zizeck is like philosophy candy.

So now you know about that.

The Nervous: An Initial Report

2011-05-14T13:56:00.000-07:00

Yesterday evening Ransom, T, and I got together for the first official "this time with drums" meeting of The Nervous. We played three Hanson Bros. covers, one Riverdales cover, and an original composition of mine entitled "IPV6." Ransom and I also mostly remembered our favorite Mondale song from back in the day, "Proto Unit V3."

The practice went really well. T is right at the same level on drums as are Ransom and I at guitar and bass. All of us felt tired and a bit beat-up after we were done since we're all out of shape with the necessary weird music muscles. I also determined that it's imperative that I re-remember how to play bass fast properly, playing with my arm and not my wrist. I have proto-carpal tunnel just from one two-hour practice, which is uncool and I must avoid in the future.

After the practice I hung around ate food and drank beers with some of the usual beautiful suspects. We watched a whole mess of funny videos, including highlights from both seasons of Flight of the Conchords and various meme-y songs on Youtube (First Semester of Spanish Love Song, etc.) I tried and failed to find the following video for everyone to watch, by Portland's proudest sons Red Fang:

Wires.

It is really important that you watch that. It is really funny and it rocks super-hard. Now you know.

Bachelor Pad

2011-05-11T13:17:00.000-07:00

B and Plan C are down in California visiting the 'rentals, leaving me to my own wily out-of-control paint-peeling-from-the-walls madness big-money-spendin' ways. They include:

Eating pasta every night.
Watching Sons of Anarchy on Netflix.
Playing a lot of Borderlands. I have shot my way through about 2/3 of the game so far.
Not shaving. I have my scruff-tastic thing going on at this point.
Going to work. Shit!

It sounds like they're having a really nice time down there, aided greatly by the fact that Plan C is sleeping through the night (A.) and pooping semi-regularly (B.), neither of which she did the last time they were down there back in January.

Anyway. I hope everyone is still good-looking out there.

Computer Post 1

2011-05-08T09:09:00.000-07:00

There will be a couple of these, so get ready to get bored.

I was terribly pleased with myself in coming up with this analogy: being a systems guy is like being an airplane mechanic while the plane is still in the air. There were probably three times on Friday when I sort of hovered over something with my mouse, ready to click Apply and watch as either all hell broke loose or everything just kept pooping right along (happily, hell only broke loose once.)

A certain incident on Friday also brought the age-old Windows vs. Linux debate, on the server-side, to the foreground for the first time (for me) in a long time. I summarize the results of the discussion had with a friend/co-worker:

Pro-Windows:

It's easy-ish, because it's (almost) all done through graphical interfaces.
MS has invested bzillions in it, so most of the time what you want is available somewhere, however buried in features.
On a good day, it's pretty intuitive.

Pro-Linux:

Everything is done through the command-line, so you can just have a single terminal window to do 100% of everything.
Thousands of incredibly smart geeky open source dorks have created almost every kind of system available.
It's completely free. You can spin up as many Linux servers as you want and never have to worry about the licensing.
Once it's set up properly, it just works.

Anti-Windows:

A big one here: even though most of it is done through the graphical interface, there are scores of these weird, and weirdly-important, little administrative tasks that happen on the command line. The problem is that they're incredibly obscure and there is no common language or nomenclature, unlike in Linux where the commands are well known and standardized.
It's really expensive.
It does stupid shit for no reason. We added some servers to the domain the other day and wham! The Windows firewall popped up and shut down connections between an application and its database, where it hadn't before, and it took us 15 minutes to figure out what had happened and fix it.
Along with point 1., even the GUI stuff can be strangely unintuitive; it took me a long-ass time to figure out how to add a group as a local admin on a class of machines through a group policy object, and it should have been straightforward.

Anti-Linux:

It can be pretty F'ing cryptic.
Seriously, it's cryptic.
When it doesn't work, it really doesn't work. You have to know how to set it up properly; you aren't going to be able to just click through and magically have it work.

Tune in next time when I tell you about my neat new cheapo PC. Or you could just curl up in a ball on your floor and cry yourself to sleep; either way.

Thrust, Parry, Riposte

2011-05-04T08:12:00.000-07:00

B made these - she hand-burned the lettering in with a little crafty hand-burner/letterer. Hence the Chinese restaurant font.

We partied like it was 1789 this weekend with (many of) our friends and, a day letter, family members. My stance is that you should normally separate friends and family into distinct party arrangements (except at your wedding and/or funeral) - it's just awkward to hang out with other people's family, no matter how nice they are. (Note to my mom: this is a general principle thing; no offense intended.)
Plan C can say things, crawls around like the dickens, and has another tooth coming in. Next stop: grad school.
Speaking of, reading my homie K's posts and chatting w/ her via IM and e-mail has led me to conclude, conclusively, that no one should go to grad school. I mean it. I, personally, had a good run and had a lot of fun, but as a general principle thing, no offense intended, no one should go. You're really better off just trying to find a job you hate a little less and going on trips and so on.
I have adopted an official "fuck it" policy on the stress level at my jobs.
This whole "playing music again" thing is slow going, but progress is being made. Next Friday the three core members of The Nervous will assemble for the first time and play several Hanson Bros.* and Riverdales covers, as well as an original composition I am entitling "IP v6." (That's a tech joke/reference.)

* No, not those Hanson Bros., the punk ones. Jesus, dude.

A Very Joy Division Easter

2011-04-27T10:02:00.000-07:00

I never really knew what goth sounded like, when it came down to it. I went through a fairly brief phase in high school when I listened to a Cure mix tape my girlfriend made me, basically because she was convinced that we had to like the same kind of music or the relationship was doomed (it was, of course, in the long run, but that didn't have anything to do with the Cure, at least directly.) I also liked what used to be called industrial - Ministry, Pigface, F'ing Nine Inch Nails, etc. - I think industrial had some weird, tangential relationship with goth.

Anyway, when C gave me all of her records, she included a few that lead me to believe she must have gone through a more substantial goth phase than I ever did, what with the Bauhaus and the Joy Division. On Easter Sunday we hung out and I ripped goth records and we ate burritos w/ my brother in-law. It was fun. It turns out that goth is surprisingly funky rock n' roll...the monotone vocals make it gothy, but the music is actually kind of party-tastic. Let's all party to Joy Division, you guys.

Speaking of parties, P-town homies are reminded that it's Plan C's one-year b-day party this Saturday. See you then.

Oncall and the Baby Can Crawl

2011-04-23T08:29:00.001-07:00

I'm oncall for the software job pretty-much all the time now. Being oncall is this odious, revolting job duty concomitant with IT itself. For a period of time, usually a week or so and usually as part of a rotating schedule shared between people in the IT dept., you are chained to a pager, waiting for something to break so that you can instantly leap out of bed at 3:00am and totally fix it, VPN'd in to the work network and firing off commands and connections to SAVE THE DAY, YOU GUYS! In fact, the way it usually works is just a lot of lost sleep to no productive end (see: my Tuesday night - 3 hours is not a lot of sleep to get.) That said, the oncall situation at this company is infinitely better than other ones I've had to deal with in the past, and it helped cement my place as official systems guy there, so I'm making a tough-guy face and just pushing through.
Plan C taught herself to crawl the other night, finally, one week before her first birthday. She finally concluded that it would be easier to crawl around herself than to just point at places she wanted to go and shout at us. Thanks, little kid. We appreciate it.

Analog to Digital

2011-04-13T10:58:00.001-07:00

Rippin' records to mp3 this morning before I go to campus. Here's how to do it:

Hook your turntable up to a stereo amplifier that has a line out and get an adapter cable that goes from the 2-prong out to a 1-prong in so you can plug in to your computer. Obviously, you need an amp with a proper phono input, otherwise you'll need to buy a phono pre-amp (which are cheap.)
Plug it in to the line-in. I'm doing mine on a cheapo Dell laptop and it works fine; if you want to get all fancy with a proper audio card, party on.
Install Audacity.
Install Lame for Audacity.
Fire up Audacity, play a record and adjust the line-in volume. Mine is super loud, so I had to turn it almost all the way down otherwise the recordings sounded all fuzzed-out.
Hit record and play the record. Once you're done, zoom out (Ctrl+3) so that you can see the blocks of sound that represent each song. Drag over each selection and select File -> Export Selection and save it as a mp3. Do that for each song.

It's fun, albeit time-consuming. The goal is to have a lot of the 90s Pac Northwest indie rock that I got from C ripped by the time she comes over to hang out on Sunday so that I can give the mp3s to her as a thank-you for the records.

Blood Boiling Over. Also, a List.

2011-04-11T13:36:00.000-07:00

Blood pressure ratcheted back up to hummingbird level after a brief respite, following yet another logistical screw-up. Me trying to stay on top of everything is the mental equivalent of one-handed push-ups.
Nice weekend in Ilwaco, WA, staying at one of my boss's vacation pad (i.e. I have three bosses, but said boss only has one vacation pad. Plurals got lost in that syntax.) B and I haven't had a recharging time-away thing since well before C was born.
Fun home-buying facts: you are supposed to earn roughly 3 times your monthly mortgage payment (before taxes), and you need at least a 640 credit score for a loan, preferably closer to 740. A down payment of 20% of the overall price means that you don't need to buy mortgage insurance.
The only kind of beer I really don't like is brown ale. I am a little burned on IPAs, too, but that's just because of over-exposure to hops.
It takes a real man to wear almost-white jeans. I am that man.
Today's lecture is on the iron age and the ancient Hebrews. I love the head-fuck factor of telling the students that the Hebrews only became monotheists about 700 years after Moses supposedly led them out of Egypt (an event with no corroboration from Egyptian textual records or archeological evidence, BTW.) Facts have this wonderful corrosive effect on religion.
Plan C is seriously teething and has been seriously demanding of late. But she's still slay-you cute, so we put up with it. I've always been a sucker for a pretty face.

Man, I Hate Learning

2011-04-02T17:00:00.000-07:00

(side note: when you become a parent, one thing that happens is that you cringe every time an emergency vehicle goes past while the baby is taking her nap. Shut UP, ambulance!)

I did a dumb thing recently, dumb enough that I'm not going to post about the details in a public forum, just a few hours after I had been musing on the fact that it really sucks to have to make the mistake-from-which-you-learn-a-valuable-lesson FIRST to learn the concomitant valuable lesson. My whole personality revolves around valuable lessons that might be learned without making the mistake first; this is called "anxiety."

Also, this morning, I spent a few hours at work (note: it is Saturday) trying to get a Microsoft server thing to work. It didn't at all. It was like the bad old NT 4 days, of clicking a thing and it saying "ok!" in the dialog box but nothing actually happens. No errors, nothing in the logs, just a pure vortex of utter blackness deep in the machine's memory. Up yours, Redmond.

I am done with learning for a little while.

A Few Too Many Jobs

2011-03-26T11:53:00.000-07:00

Post for the sake of posty posting...

I got another editing gig with the textbook people I've been working for, on and off, now and again, for the last nine months or so. The money is great, so I can't really justify turning the jobs down when the come up.

But...three jobs at once is a lot. History 101 starts up again tomorrow, with the big introduction / talk about the syllabus / I recite everything that happens from hominid evolution to the early middle ages to an incredulous band of community college students. I'm pushing hard at the software company, trying my damndest to make myself invaluable so they'll hire me full-time and I can more actively dream of things like home ownership. Now I've got 400 questions on American history to edit by Friday.*

And then there's Plan C. 11 months old in two days, adorable and hilarious as ever, but so lazy. She still can't crawl, although she walks if you hold her up while she does it. Her mode of locomotion is to point at where she wants to go and then shout at us. It can be pretty exhausting. Oh, and now she is officially teething, too.

* I do not know anything about American history, but I do know how to read a textbook and edit things written in English.

P.S. I realize that it's poor form for a part-time editor to start paragraphs with "but" AND "and," but the internet is a place where grammar is but an occasional dinner guest.

Devo 2011

2011-03-18T15:03:00.000-07:00

We Ain't Gettin' Any Younger

I saw Devo two nights ago. It was amazing. The show was too F'ing expensive and it was at the worst venue in Portland, but it was easily one of the best concerts of my life. A few quick observations:

Devo started as more of a performance art group than a "band" in so many words, and that has always given them an incredible sense of theatricality that translates brilliantly to live performance. They had a huge video screen, multiple costume changes, and overall fantastic stagecraft.

I am a lifelong hardcore Devo fan, but I never thought of them as being "rocking," really...it was more like a great intellectual exercise to listen to Devo for me. No longer. Devo rocked harder than Motorhead did last month, really. The energy level was intense.

They are amazing musicians. They didn't miss a fucking note. Mark Mothersbaugh, the lead singer, was particularly incredible.

The thing about Devo is that they are truly inimitable. They have had an incalculable impact on music but no one ever has or ever will sound "like" them.

Rekkids

2011-03-14T09:57:00.000-07:00

Records are more fun to listen to than mp3s are. It's true! Here's why, I think:

A record is a tactile experience that takes a small but meaningful investment of time and care (i.e. so that you don't drop the needle and screw it up or scratch the record.) Listening to records involves listening to the whole album since skipping songs is impractical. The album art is infinitely better. The sound is warmer, and there's something satisfyingly arcane about the little pops and jumps. All in all, listening to records shifts music back to being an activity, not a passive background.

I finally managed to make it in to the local old-school electronics joint two weeks ago and got the stylus replaced and everything adjusted and balanced on the 1970s-era Technics turntable I inherited from my dad. Then, in an incredible stroke of good fortune and generosity, my home girl C gave me her entire record collection, consisting of a crate of 90s / early 2000's Pac Northwest indie rock and punk. She and I are exactly the same age and grew up in the same place, listening to a lot of the same kinds of music, so there I am with a pile of Crackerbash and Pond and Oswald 50s LPS and 7 inches and remembering when I used to see them all play and/or covet their albums at House of Records on 13th. Her thing is just that she doesn't have a turntable and didn't see herself investing the time in either setting up a record-listening situation or selling them, so she gave 'em to me (free to good home.)

My plan is to rip the really good records to mp3 so that she can at least have the music "back" in that sense. There are also at least two 7" that might be worth real money, so if I sell those I'm giving her the proceeds. (But, following B's advice, I will probably just keep 'em and listen to them instead.)

Anyway, the point is that records are great and I am having fun being 32 years old.

A Few Things Worthy of Hatred

2011-03-09T13:40:00.000-08:00

When people fall asleep against you on the bus.
The shoddiness of umbrellas.
Pseudophedrine being unavailable as an over-the-counter medication in Oregon (thanks for screwing that up for the rest of us, tweakers...)
One's nose and upper lip turning red from all the kleenex.
Inconsiderate neighbors.
Cleaning the bathtub.
Grown men and women who either a. do not cover their mouths when coughing/sneezing or b. don't wash their hands after using the bathroom. Or neither.
The human condition.

Unsolicited Kiddo Update

2011-03-06T14:07:00.001-08:00

A recent pic of Plan C, courtesy of B, who actually knows how to take pictures.

In completely non-exercise related news...

Plan C is now just over 10 months old. She's been in the midst of a hellacious growth spurt for the last two weeks or so. She still doesn't have any teeth. She eats lots of organic veggie purees, along with oatmeal, hard-boiled egg yolks, and avocado (and breast milk, of course.) She can crawl backwards but has had zero luck learning how to go forwards. She can stand by herself as long as she has something to hold on to. She signs "milk," "rain," "light," and "fan" (she loves ceiling fans) and understands various little phrases we say to her. She babbles constantly and does a little sing-song thing sometimes, especially when we're in the car. She sleeps through the night most nights now, as long as we have the heat in her room cranked to almost 70. She loves our friends. She thinks we're okay, too.

Futher Observations

2011-03-04T12:48:00.001-08:00

As far as I can tell, none of the buskers (that is a person who plays music on the street for money) near the food carts in downtown Portland ever make any money. Maybe it's because they suck so badly.
If there's something better than Pad Khee Mao from a Thai cart for five bucks, I don't care: I'm still getting Pad Khee Mao from a Thai cart for five bucks.
(Technical note): In software development there's a thing called source control, in which you automatically keep copies of your source code in a central repository, so you can always revert back to a working version if you accidentally break something. There is nothing like that for doing systems stuff (i.e. servers and networking.) When you fuck up, things just stop working.
You know what really sucked? Nu-metal.
Also, back in the early 90s, there were a lot of guys who wore shorts with long-johns underneath tucked into combat boots. Those same guys would smoke some weed and then go see Primus.
My daughter is cuter than a pile of kittens. I'm sorry, but it's true.
I am sporting skinny jeans. I took the plunge. Levi's 511s. They've already revolutionized my lifestyle.
I do so many crunches and push-ups, but I always look the same. Oh well.
My homie Ransom and I are going to start playing music again this Saturday! Our band name: The Nervous.

A Lament for the Blogosphere of Yesteryear

2011-02-23T21:02:00.000-08:00

(Today's title: a contender for worst...title...ever.)

I have little time or energy, as ever, but I wanted to say: I miss blogs. I miss the days, those halcyon days of youth way back in 2006 or so, when a lot of people had personal blogs that they wrote in for no good reason, often several times a week. It was nice because a lot of the blogs I read were written by friends who lived far away...it was an easy way to keep up with the basic happenings, goings-on, and shenanigans of people I didn't get to see in the flesh very often.

Near as I can tell, blogs live on among people who use them for something useful, like social/political/intellectual commentary or serious hobbyism (craft blogs are still huge, apparently, according to B.) The pointless personal blogs I so love, however, have either been replaced by tumblr among people who give a shit about keeping up with the times (the only friend I have in this category is K), or simply abandoned (like most of the ones I have in my Google Reader selection.)

The two jobs, the baby, the sobbing softly curled up in a little ball*, etc., keep my posts down to one every week or two these days, but I have no intention of throwing in the towel. Just as I was still hand-coding HTML in my old blog years after it was hopelessly archaic to do so, I will still be blogging when everyone else is, like, projecting their memories into one another's brains via wireless signals running over IP V6 (or something.) Uh, so there.

* Me, not that baby, usually.

Coast!

2011-02-18T07:10:00.000-08:00

It's time again for the annual coast trip, in which an elite cadre of the good-looking goes to Lincoln City and stays at a Saudi Prince's vacation home. This year promises to involve movies, walks, it's cold outside, aquariums, breweries, drinkin', a puppet show (?!), and the best of all video games: Mario Kart for the Wii.

I just need to get through a few hours of computery stuff at work and then we are off to navigate some snowy roads.

Teaching

2011-02-16T10:23:00.000-08:00

After you finish a PhD, you enter the teaching wilderness. Statistically, you're unlikely to have secured a tenure-track job, either at a four-year university or a community college / junior college. The plan, then, is to try to do all of the following:

Teach classes as an adjunct instructor at any institution that will take you, a class here and a class there.
If necessary, teach those classes at several different places at once. This involves driving back and forth in the city / region you live in, teaching a class in the morning at College A, one in the early afternoon at College B, and a third in the evening at College C.
You have no health insurance, you have no job security, you earn about 600 bucks/class you teach, per month.
Keep up your "real" academic work: write papers and present them at academic conferences. Pay out of pocket to get to and stay at said conferences, somehow.
Each year, spin the wheel again. Apply for as many tenure-track jobs as you can all over the country. Hope and pray that you get an interview for one of them. Pay out of pocket to to go the big national conference at which all of the first-round interviews are held.
Eventually, you either beat the odds and get a "real" job or you give up and do something else (just don't be an idiot and go to law school in your late 30s, okay?)

I was talking to B about it last night after we put Plan C to bed (and before Plan C woke up again and nearly drove B crazy.) All I've felt since I threw in the towel and contented myself with teaching and doing computer stuff, knowing that I'll probably end up being a full-time IT again at some point, is relief. Life is tough, trying to bring up this kid, working two part-time jobs and making ends meet, etc., but it's nowhere near as tough as trying to pull off steps 1 through 6 as defined above. In a phrase: fuck that.

This post brought to you by the use of the second-person voice.

Regarding Rock n Roll and Beer and So On

2011-02-10T20:06:00.000-08:00

Ok then!

Motorhead show: just as good as expected. Let's see here...

Opening band: Valiant Thorr. Honestly, that is the worst band name in the world next to (ahem) "Endangered Feces," which is the band name a certain brilliant young woman I know is peripherally involved in knowing about. They were a lot better than their band name was (is), but they also did a lot of shenanigans involving hopping about.

Clutch: so good, you guys. They didn't need the window dressing. Four guys in t-shirts and sneakers, just rocking the (sorry, mom) fuck out, super-hard. The band didn't even move, expect for the highly-charismatic lead singer*, and their kick-ass bluesy riffs were right on. The contrast with Valiant Thorrrrrrrrrrrrrr was telling.

Motorhead: come on. This is like saying "Jesus was very religious." Motorhead were very rocking. This was the fifth (?) time I saw them live and the only disappointments were that a. you couldn't really hear Lemmy's witticisms because the vocals were a little muddy in the mix, and b., they didn't play Orgasmatron, which is in my top three favorite serious rock** songs.

So, in short, the show was a lot of fun, and I got to go with three of my homies, including Ransom, who had never seen Motorhead live before and was appropriately enthusiastic.

The beer part of the post:

Ok. So, Rogue Ales is among the most renowned microbreweries from Oregon, perhaps best-known for their delicious Dead Guy Ale. I am a big fan of drinking the beers they brew in their brewery. However, I am decidedly OPPOSED to the fact that they charge (sorry, mom) FUCKING ELEVEN FIFTY FOR A SIX PACK. COME ON, you JERKS! Their 22 oz. beers are like six bucks. If they made sandwiches, they would charge ten bucks. ETC.

The thing is, yes, Rogue makes really great beer. The thing is, I am not going to pay almost twice as much for their beer, because SO DO A LOT OF OTHER BREWERIES. HONESTLY.

Sorry to shout about it, I just don't like the precedent they're trying to set here. If I wanted to spend a lot of money on booze, I'd get into fancy wine.

* Brother of Mary Alice from Ace of Cakes. I am not making this up.
** Serious rock is a personal genre.

I'm Happy People Smoke in Portland

2011-02-05T11:02:00.000-08:00

Just a few random notes this morning, pending the return of my wife and child from the wilds of California later this afternoon...

I like that so many people smoke in Portland. I like how smoking is, at this point, a kind of defiant act in the face of death itself. It reminds me of the whole rant from Trainspotting ("choose life, choose a big shiny car, choose an automatic washing machine..." etc. etc.) I smile to myself while I'm walking around downtown when I see all the folks standing outside of their jobs smoking on the sidewalks.
My homie K is doing a music video for KMFDM. I am not making this up. This is probably the single biggest connection / interaction anyone I know has had in the music, er, it's not a "business" anymore, so let's say "music hobbyism."
I had fun going out last night to a "bar" and "drinking beers" with "good-looking people I'm friends with." I sure do love that little baby daughter of mine, but it was nice to sneak out and goof off like old times last night.
Speaking of that, I'm going to see Motorhead tonight at the Roseland, accompanied by two of my software buddies from the software company I do software-related software things at. Oh, and F'ing CLUTCH is opening! Clutch is on the short list of bands who deserve to even be on the same bill as Motorhead.
Devo is coming to Portland. I had to buy a ticket to see them, finally. Before they all die, because let's face it, they're getting pretty old.
My poor wife is so, so tired after a week on nonstop mom duty. She is one tough cookie.

Flying Solo

2011-01-30T08:18:00.001-08:00

B and Plan C are down in Cali, seeing the inlaws for a week. Plan C is now nine (!) months old, which everyone agreed was about the minimum you'd want for plane travel. It sounds like she did really well with the airport and flight yesterday, although I received reports that she was pretty cranky on the drive from SFO to Marin afterward.

As for me? This is weird, you guys. I normally have about 20 minutes to myself per day, from 6:45 to 7:10am, as I'm crunching down my Cheerios and slurping the first cup of coffee. This apartment seems huge with just me (and Pesto) in it. After getting all choked up leaving the airport yesterday, I spent my day rebuilding my computer, then watched an enjoyably crappy action movie with K. Then I spent a couple of hours shooting guys in the head on my computer. Then I went to sleep.

I did introduce one near interior design element: an ugly black network cable connecting my PC to the router in the kitchen. I have a feeling it is not going to stay in place when B returns.

I Was Observed

2011-01-26T16:46:00.001-08:00

I had my observation at school today. If it went well, I might get to teach further classes there. If it didn't, I won't. I was feeling okay leading up to it, but now I feel sort of like I got hit by a bus.

B and Plan C leave for California in three days. It's going to be super, super weird for me being away from them.

Our internet connection sucks, so I'm stealing K's through the wall at the moment. Thanks, K!

My bunny's breath smells like bunny food.

There's No Sleepin' To Be Had

2011-01-16T08:28:00.000-08:00

Here's how I remember it worked:

-Childhood into early adolescence: sleep just wasn't a big deal. It was just part of the biological situation.

-Adolescence: sleep became a bigger deal, especially because it became very painful to wake up early, which is pretty stupid because the whole inherited-farm-schedule-nonsense of American schools means you have a lot of very tired, bleary kids showing up at 8:00am. Most of the time during the day you feel alright, though.

- Late adolescence into early 20s: worst part for sleep in a way, because it becomes agonizing to wake up early. The schedule here would normally be something like midnight or 1am to 10am, if possible. You can still soldier through if you have a job that makes you get up at 5:30am (!), but you get real mean and lift weights all the time and drink a lot of beer (a LOT of beer.)

- Late 20s / early 30s: you start getting old. This seems to consist of the ability to wake up when you have to without too much trouble, but the thing is, you feel tired all the time. Morning, afternoon, evening, night, it doesn't matter. It also doesn't matter if you've been sleeping like a champ for weeks. You. Will. Feel. Tired.

- Throw a baby in the mix: well, I sure hope you waited until you were in your late 20s or early 30s, because I know I would have thrown myself out a window if I was dealing with this at 22.

Last night I was in bed by about 11, then up before midnight to convince Plan C to go back to sleep. Then I was up at about 5:50am because she was up and ready to baby party (baby partying is a lot of rolling around the floor with toys making noises.) It's the weekend, so B gets to stay in bed. Then after two hours, Plan C was tired and cranky again, so I put her back to sleep.

Now it's 8:30 in the morning and I have been awake for 2.5 hours and no one else is up. It's weird.

Update All Over the Place

2011-01-10T19:31:00.000-08:00

It turns out that Full Sail makes a tasty lager (called LTD), which doesn't really taste like a lager to me, but is still good! So, thanks for trying, Full Sail!
I really enjoyed the movie and associated soundtrack Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. As things like that do, it vaguely made me miss playing in bands. In particular, it made me mourn the nonexistence of some kind of generic middle-of-the-road catchy indie garage pop/rock.
You know what's pretty sweet? Getting Cisco networking equipment to authenticate against a Linux-based radius server. That's what.
I am in love with the PCC shuttle. It's free and it picks me up and drops me off (along with a couple of dozen other people) 10 minutes from my apartment. There's even a downtown line that plops me down close to the software company when I do my schizo teaching / IT guy days.
The baby sleeps in her crib now. The transition was tough but nowhere near as tough as we (or any of the don't-sleep-with-your-baby naysayers)* thought it would be.
The baby has been antisocial lately. She is no longer instantly charmed by loud groups of people. This makes it harder to take her to Motley Crue concerts.

* I do not know who exactly I mean by this.

Civilization

2011-01-03T06:58:00.001-08:00

It's still very dark (and cold!) out right now - 6:58am, exactly 30 minutes after I got up. My first class starts in a few hours. About 60% of my lectures are written(-ish) but I still have a lot to do. I'm especially concerned about running out of material for my ancient world class. There is only so much I have to say about the Egyptians at the moment.

At the risk of repeating myself, I'm pretty annoyed at having dug myself back into the position I was in the whole time I was a graduate student: perpetual guilt tied to perpetual work. As a graduate student, by definition, if you aren't working, you're slacking. Every minute of every day should, in some sick sense, be devoted to working on articles or languages or review. For most people, this results in a nauseating cycle of procrastination and desperation that only lets up when they've finally reached their mental limit and declare to everyone within earshot that they just don't give a shit anymore and they stomp off to cry themselves to sleep. I was happy to leave that behind.

Yet, somehow, here I am again: desperately battling the clock to get enough prepped while still working part-time in IT. Twice a week this term I will be jetting downtown after I teach in the morning to put in a long afternoon at the software company, along with all day on Fridays. B now has to do all of the heavy lifting with Plan C while she (Plan C) is teething, transitioning to the crib, and otherwise going through growing pains.

Lest you think this is all idle complaint, let me restate my intentions for the edification of the interwebs: never again will I do this kind of crap. I will turn things down rather than oversubscribe. We moved here, I abandoned all hope of a professorship at a four-year, because we wanted to live and be happy (-er) in Portland, not so that I could become a new version of Captain McGrumpyPants. ForSOOTH!

Yours,
-Captain McGrumpyPants

The Trick With Presents

2010-12-26T11:30:00.001-08:00

B pointed out several years ago that the trick with presents is to get people things that they actually want, not things you want them to want. It's the kind of idea that seems pretty intuitive but is deceptively difficult to stick to. Example:

Things B actually wants: nice, classic clothes.
Things I want her to want: cute indie girl clothes.

We've now been married for...let's see...one billion years, so we've got it about sorted finally. For xmas, she got me gin, a record (we are totally setting up a stereo in the new place with a functioning turntable again), and a rad vintage cowboy shirt. I got her a necklace and a badass restaurant-quality mandolin.* Other family gifts were equally successful - lots of weapons and liquor, mostly.** My eight year-old niece even busted out a bunch of crafty hand-sewing and gave everyone cute stuff; I got a brown fleece cap that makes me look kind of like I'm going to go pillaging across the open steppes.

Only a week or so until I start teaching. I have vowed never to be in this particular position again, come hell or high water; once I start teaching, I'm going to push hard to get the lid back on the sanity kettle.***

* A mandolin is a kitchen appliance used to produce uniformly-sized slices, not a renaissance-fair instrument for playing ballads.
** Seriously. Gin and sharp things for kitchens were well-represented under the tree.
*** As in, I will not be doing class prep on top of super-hard IT crap at the same time ever again, for fear of heart attacks, homicide, and insufferable complaining.

Make Some Lager, Bitches

2010-12-19T16:53:00.000-08:00

...more on the stress, overworked, kind of terrified front going on in the background here, but let's go ahead and bracket all of that and talk about something else instead:

LAGER.

Lager is a nice kind of beer. A good lager is very smooth and easy to drink and gives you a wonderful feeling of beer-satisfied. Unlike stouts and porters and IPAs and ales (all of which I like), the taste of a good lager doesn't kind of add up until it's unpleasant, nor are lagers likely to make you more tired than their sheer alcohol content would suggest (I find that other beers do that sometimes.)

Two example really good lagers: Kingfisher (Indian) and Carlsberg (Danish...I think.)

Now, the thing is, almost no microbreweries make good lagers, if they bother and make 'em at all. Lager is too declasse, too quotidian, too obvious and boring and vulgar and mundane, so they concentrate on crazy hoppy stuff and beers that sometimes take as much work to drink as, say, a sandwich would. To drink.

I don't blame them for this; the glory of microbrews is that people who really love good beer tend to run them, and there is no question that the microbrewery phenomenon of the last twenty years has dramatically altered the face of American beer selection for the better. I just think it's time that they realize that crafting a smooth, delicious lager is a worthy goal, one they could certainly address with their extensive command of beer mastery.

Thus: I call on the microbrewers of the western US to rally and offer delicious golden lagers to accompany their already-excellent selections of other kinds of beer. By the power vested in me by absolutely nothing, make it so.

What Can I Say?

2010-12-15T16:54:00.000-08:00

Besides talking about being tired, there's nothing quite as tedious as using a blog to talk about how one blogs infrequently...so I won't.

I will say, though, that the KFR show has been pretty schizophrenic, or at least bifurcated. Observe:

Every single time we hang out with friends, which is generally 3 - 4 times a week, we have a lot of fun. Last night, for example, we had our compadres B + C over for a massive Indian feast from Bombay Cricket Club, our favorite restaurant in Portland.
I am really stressed out, you guys.

Also:

The stuff I do at work is easily the hardest, most complex IT stuff I've ever done. I'm setting up a whole security infrastructure right now to link our Cisco networking gear and our Linux servers to the same kerberos environment. It is not that easy to figure it all out.
My classes start in, like, two weeks. I have some lectures ready(-ish) but I have the sinking feeling that I'm going to be standing up there and run out of material, like always happens to me.

And then there's:

Plan C has been changing up sleeping patterns and getting all erratic on us.
Oh, and apparently, it's Christmas now? What?

DANG.

Right On, Sister

2010-12-12T09:10:00.000-08:00

Sometimes her own vast privilege makes her hard to read, but in general I totally agree with Tenured Radical. I ESPECIALLY agree with:

THIS POST.

Cheers,
-KFR

I Represent

2010-12-04T10:08:00.000-08:00

I got my Oregon license, plates, and insurance all sorted out yesterday. I missed one question out of thirty on the knowledge test: what causes the most accidents involving motorcycles? I bet you did not know, but it is the scourge of abrupt left turns.

The agenda has been more nuts than usual of late. B's been minding Plan C and finishing the unpacking / organizing / logistics while I bang my head against code at work and trying to write lectures as fast as humanly possible. We had dinner with friends twice in the last three days, with a massive birthday celebration planned for this evening following a Xmas-tree outing and a visitation with B's brother at the puppet factory.*

Here are some of the things that have been just amazing and help counterbalance the stress and sleep-dep lately:

Pad Khee Mow (mao?)
More coffee than usual, if such a thing is possible
LAND LINE
Friends of taste and learning
Oregon plates
This apartment
I like the bus
Kind of crappy fantasy novels set in D+D worlds
Copying and pasting other people's code and changing it slightly

* Seriously, he works at a puppet factory.

Happy Belated Thanksgiving, You Guys

2010-11-28T17:27:00.000-08:00

Above: a peaceful moment from Thanksgiving at my brother and sister in-laws' place in Oregon City.

Whew but dang...that was quite a week of holiday visitations and merry-making. One thing we didn't realize on moving back to Oregon is that living close to most of both sides of our respective families, while great, also means that holiday visits happen at double the quantity they used to. In this case, it was tricky coordinating everything less than a week after we'd moved into the new pad. That said, it all worked out and we had fun and ate a lot of stuffing, so go team.

We haven't seen our friends very much for a little bit, though, so we plan to change this in a big way soon. Perhaps when the Vonage thing shows up we will start calling people...on the LAND LINE!

Stay tuned for more breaking news of earth-shattering consequence.

Further Observations

2010-11-24T18:03:00.000-08:00

It's quite tough to find the time to do stupid things like register your car and take the written test when you have a "job"!
That said, here's to the personable fellow at the emissions testing joint today. That whole process was painless. One (more) thing I love about Portland is the fact that average joes like him are often witty and urbane (this is to say, wittier and urbane...er than their analogs in California.)
I wrote a successful program the other day in C-sharp. Then I had to do more complicated stuff and I turned into one of the monkeys from the start of 2001, jumping up and down and throwing rocks at an obelisk.
I have a special "programmer's cramp"! When I can't figure something out, my left shoulder bunches into a painful, burning knot. Fun!
DARN but it has been cold in Portland over the last few days! Today we braved it anyway and went to the store with Plan C in her stroller. She was all bundled up and looked adorable, as ever.
Waitin' for the thing to arrive from Vonage in the mail. When it does, we will have a LAND LINE again. We are old school like Vision Street Wear and gettin' film developed!
My homie Ransom is helping us fix our car, because he is a fine human being and a good friend.
Today I wrote a lecture about the late bronze age. I bet you didn't know I knew a lot about that! Neither did I.

Observations For Your Day

2010-11-16T21:29:00.000-08:00

Learning to program is hard, not easy.
Say what you will about Comcast, their repair/support guys are totally nice and helpful.
B and I have abused our recycling privileges at the new place - we had a lot of boxes, and we yet have more to go. DEAL WITH IT.
Dominos pizza really is quite good now; I'm not sure if it actually changed, but the whole crew was super into it the other day.
You know what I still love to do? Play Dungeons and Dragons.
You know how many lectures I've had time to write for next term so far? None.
Pesto is loving the new place. She has a big carpeted room to run around in and things to hide behind. Total bunny heaven.
So...tired...

Swedish Modern

2010-11-12T12:36:00.001-08:00

Yesterday evening, B and I, aided by our invaluable friend, the inimitable K, hit up Ikea. We dropped what the Italians refer to as un sacco di soldi on new furniture: a loveseat, a new bookshelf, a desk setup for me, some other crap.

You see, tomorrow we move again, this time back to our beloved Southeast Portland, some thirty blocks to the east of B's and my first apartment from seven years ago. It's a few blocks from Laurelhurst park, next to all kinds of neat stores, and at the foot of Mt. Tabor, Portland's scenic walking bump (i.e. it's a big bump you can walk on/up.) The apartment itself looks different depending on your background and point of view:

If you are used to nice things, it looks like a slightly worn-out, funky two-bedroom apartment in a red brick building in need of a little sprucing up.
If you are used to living in Santa Cruz, California, it looks like the Taj F'ing Mahal, dude. It's huge. It costs precisely 50% of the equivalent in Santa Cruz. It has storage. It has enough counter space in the kitchen. And, OMFG, it has a dishwasher. I am ALL A-TITTER about this place.

Tomorrow, the gang shows up around 11am, just as I return to the house with the Uhaul. I figure it won't take too long to load up our stuff (which is mostly still in boxes) and drag it on over. Then I call in the pizza, return the truck, and celebrate the arrival of quality living.

So, Do You Have Five Minutes?

2010-11-08T20:34:00.000-08:00

Because...the thing is, the following is probably the funniest thing I've read in six months or so. Maybe longer. Ahem:

The Different Kinds of People That There Are.

It's from Portland's local alterna-rag, The Mercury, which I have always loved.

If you choose to read the article, stick with it. It gets funnier as it goes on, until you are left all happy and hurty by the end.

It's a Happy Panic

2010-11-06T11:35:00.000-07:00

I always knew that things were screwed up in my life in Santa Cruz because of how I felt during the default moments; when I wasn't directly engaged with something interesting (academic, computer-related, friends, whatever), I was pissed. My life was a constant series of distracting activities meant to keep me from remembering where I was.

Things in P-town are better in precisely this capacity - I'm still a seething little ball of anxiety, but I'm happy during the default moments. Right now, for instance, I have a lot on my plate:

Prepare two classes for next term, most of which will involve new lectures from scratch.
While I'm doing that, continue to work semi-full time on the most complicated IT stuff I've ever dealt with while trying to teach myself SQL, Javascript, and C-sharp (p.s., no, I have never coded before, besides bonehead HTML and CSS stuff.)
We're moving into our new place in a week. This part isn't actually a source of stress, it's a source of rad. But it still involves effort, just in terms of finding the time to set things up. Also: there is need for Ikea.
I should add that my car broke last week; 350 dollars later, we have a whole new spark plug setup. The (cool, kind of rockabilly) greaseballs who did the work also identified problems with the gasket head and serpentine belt, which would be another 200+ bucks to fix.*

The difference is, though, every time I look up, I'm in Portland. This really keeps things in a happy place.

* Can you believe there's a part of a car called a "serpentine belt"?! I thought Axl Rose made that F'ing word up for 'Welcome to the Jungle'!

Kicks!

2010-11-02T09:32:00.001-07:00

To celebrate my current state of semi-employment, and because the rest of my shoes are a. trashed and b. made out of canvas, I got a new pair of Adidas. They're made out of leather and they have the rubber clam-shell toes, which I have on good authority make them highly resistant to the wet.

I don't know what you think, but I think they're rad. The best part is, when I wear something like this, you're never quite sure if I'm going to start break dancing.

Job Shit Is Crazy, Dudes

2010-10-28T17:21:00.000-07:00

Look. I just don't have the energy for a big thing on this, but observe:

I have an interview next week for two(!) possible community college teaching jobs in winter term. A combination of connections and extraordinary luck brought this about; let's hope I don't totally screw the pooch on this.
I turned down a possible tech job this morning. Because it pretty much sucked: too much work for not enough money.
I have been having a great time at the software company I'm temping/contracting/consulting/your-mom-ing at. The big guys there would like me to learn how to code in C-sharp, ASAP. I am actually going to try to do that. (Ha, ha...ha. No, Seriously. I really am.)

Unsolicited Baby Update

2010-10-24T09:59:00.000-07:00

...in case anyone was wondering.

We just had Plan C's six-month checkup and immunizations. Here's the status:

She's 14 pounds, 10 ounces. That puts her in the 25th percentile for weight.
She's 27 inches long. That puts her in the NINETY-FRICKIN'-FIFTH percentile for height.
She's now immunized against various bad baby diseases. Side note: people who don't get their babies immunized are morons.
She rolls around, grabs toys without having to look directly at them anymore, shakes rattles, and carries on extensive conversations in baby-squawk language.
She sits up as long as someone or something is supporting her back.
She starts on solid foods tomorrow - brown rice baby cereal stuff, later followed by sweet potatoes, pears, and avocados.
She is a gorgeous, sweet, extremely "good" kid in public. She loves people and loves looking at stuff.
She gets extremely bored with us when we're just hanging out at home. B and I have to keep improvising to keep her entertained. We take lots of walks and do a lot of sweet dance moves to disco beats to keep her entertained.
She's still a good, albeit not great, sleeper. Sometimes she likes to wake up for an hour or so in the middle of the night. Sometimes she likes to not nap all day. But, mostly, she's good about it.

In sum, all's well in the tiny weird world of the Baby Croc.

An Eventful Couple of Days

2010-10-21T09:10:00.000-07:00

I was looking for the most prosaic post title, and I think I found it.

Anyway.

First, left-coasters be aware: the rain is coming. Portland in the rain is my favorite thing in the world.

Second, I now (kind of, sort of) have a lucrative IT job. The company my homie T works for hired me to come in and do the kind of mundane stuff they haven't had time for (workstation builds, cabling, setting up VLANs, getting their phones to transfer calls successfully, etc.) It's hugely intimidating, because it's a small software company staffed with ridiculously smart and tech-savvy guys, but I'm going to go in guns blazing and try to figure it all out as fast as I can.

On the same day, which remains yesterday, I received notice that I made it to the last round of interviews for a different tech job, this a real salaried / benefited (is that a word in that context?) one. I'm still skeptical about my prospects of actually getting it, but it's nice feeling like my whole would-be transformation back into a tech is at least plausible to the people doing the hiring.

Third, I forgot to post about this last week, but we gots an apartment. We're moving in sometime around the second or third week in November. It's a two-bedroom on SE Stark, about twenty blocks up (i.e. east) from where B and I lived when we first moved in together one million years ago. I have really enjoyed living in St. Johns, but SE is where the heart is and I'm stoked to be closer to most of my friends (my homie K is our neighbor. In fact, she will be on the other side of the wall from us, which is rad.)

Joe: RIP

2010-10-18T10:55:00.001-07:00

I found out that my old friend Joe, who was the drummer in the Varicoasters for just about the entire time I played with them in the mid-late 90s, died suddenly of a heart attack while on a cross-country race yesterday. He was 47.

The thing I remember best about Joe was how cool he was in putting up with his teenage bandmates; he was in his 30s when the band started and most of us were about 16 or 17 (we also had a couple of guys in their 20s.) For me (and I realize that this sounds cheeseball, but it's true), he was kind of an icon of what it might mean to be a man. He was funny, tough, smart, and he never seemed to get shaken by anything. He was also incredibly nice; he just never acted like it was a big deal that he'd seen it all before and we really hadn't.

The other thing I remember about him was that he and his (later ex-) girlfriend were the first parents I knew as friends; they had a little girl and they stayed the same people they had been, playing music and writing and hanging out with everyone while being great, supportive parents at the same time.

I hadn't seen Joe in years, but I was really saddened to hear about his passing. 47 is way too young to go.

On the Other Side of Academia

2010-10-12T12:14:00.000-07:00

...just be persistent! That's what people have told me, right after they tell me that there are no teaching jobs in the entire greater Portland area, population just under one million (counting the suburbs.) People who work at the community colleges tell me that, sure, they would be willing to say something to the department heads, but it wouldn't really make a difference. Other people hear that I'm looking and just laugh (albeit in a very sympathetic manner.)

Meanwhile, I have an interview on Friday for a tech job and several friends in tech companies all around the city. More to the point, I've noticed this...let's call it an "absence of desperation" in most of my friends here. I always liked the craziness of academia, the gallows humor, the kind of camaraderie you get out of a bunch of people feeling equally screwed, but on the outside, it looks a little nuts, frankly.

We got an apartment yesterday. The lady at the property management company was really cool; she took our sob story at face value ("we are nice people with degrees and savings but no income to speak of") and signed off on the bunny to boot. I can easily imagine myself going to a normal job, grumbling about the early wake-up and the routine stress, but never having to speak mangled French to anyone or give two shits about "the state of the literature" again.

So we'll see (dramatic closing statement!)

Compu-Destruction

2010-10-11T08:35:00.001-07:00

I mentioned a few posts back about semi-destroying my trusty iBook. Two days after that happened, I ordered a new cheapo laptop from Dell to replace it, which showed up the next week.* Since then, it's been a veritable nonstop cavalcade of compu-debacle, ending (perhaps?!) yesterday. Here's how it all went down:

I pour cereal and rice milk on my iBook. It doth protest.
I semi-revive it after tearing it open. The keyboard, touchpad, and half of the RAM are fried.
I bring my PC up from the basement and discover that it's dead, too. I order a new motherboard.
The motherboard shows up. I install it. The thing is still borked.
I order the replacement laptop for less than 500 bucks.
It arrives. I resize the Windows 7 partition and install Debian Linux on half of the hard drive.
I cannot for the life of me get wireless to work in Linux. I futz about with updates, a new kernel compile, and all kinds of nonsense.
It completely dies - neither OS will boot. I start over.
Windows installs but wireless ceases working. I switch to Kubuntu over stock Debian, which works...except for wireless.
I get wireless to work in Kubuntu, because I am an amazing computer hacking stud.
Days pass as I try everything known to man or beast to get wireless to work in Windows. Right before I give in and think about another reinstall, some random combination of steps fixes it.

B has been very patient with this crap. Now I actually have to get some work done instead of wrenching on a laptop all day...

* BTW, Dell is no better or worse than any other big PC manufacturer. Seriously.

Bitch, Please

2010-10-06T13:17:00.001-07:00

The Job Hunt So Far

2010-10-05T10:48:00.000-07:00

I'll keep this brief.

There aren't any teaching jobs. Friends in grad school: beware. It's terrible out there. Position yourselves as best you can, primarily by looking for teaching jobs while you're still in the program, because when you get out, you'll find that even the old lecturer / adjunct gigs that used to be the "fallback" jobs for people who couldn't get tenure-track positions are all but nonexistent.

There are some IT jobs. I had a phone interview this morning (I give myself low chances on this one, just because it was a kind of weird position involving running reports and crunching data, not things I have much of a background in.) In fact, because of my many beautiful friends in Portland, it looks increasingly likely that I will end up being an IT guy again. I mean, the jury's still out and everything, but I can't overemphasize how impossible it looks to just get a job teaching at a community college...

In other ideas, I might be even better at being unemployed if I got a pair of funny Gadhafi-style sunglasses and a scarf. What do you think?

Got 8 Minutes and 43 Seconds?

2010-10-01T14:26:00.000-07:00

David Cross's latest thing that wasn't picked up by Adult Swim slew me:

Rednecks and Their Signs

2010-09-30T13:10:00.000-07:00

It's easy to get disheartened about the state of the American political landscape driving up I-5. Every farmer between San Diego and Seattle seems to have a bunch of bombastic right-wing nonsense up on big signs, taking advantage of the fact that they're the only people with a reason to own property adjoining an interstate. "Get the US out of the UN," "Produce the Birth Certificate" (i.e. the horseshit about Obama not being a citizen), all manner of evangelical Christian crap, etc.

Living in St. Johns, we're right across the St. Johns Bridge from one of Portland's industrial areas off of Highway 30. Portland itself is a very blue-state, center-left city, but its industrial zones are a clear exception. The same kind of demagogic rhetoric is all over the place over there - the one I noticed today was a state congressional candidate whose sign promised "less government" - always a vacuous, disingenuous, and pernicious claim catering to the room-temperature IQ crowd.

But then, it occurred to me: the thing about the right is that being angry, confrontational, hyperbolic, and mendacious is a central aspect of its political identity. The point of left politics (dumbass anarchists with spraypaint cans aside) is REASON, thinking about things carefully and considering how one's own outlook is conditioned by perspective. It's predicated on a fundamental sense of fairness, of justice, of how the world could be if people renounced their own selfishness in the name of a higher ethical calling. Thus, for the most part, we don't put up big angry billboards; that's not who we are.

The trick is knowing that we're out there, that just because the right has the sound and the fury, we're the quiet, smart, thoughtful people who occasionally carry elections.

Cutesplosion

2010-09-27T15:21:00.001-07:00

I know every parent thinks that their kid is the cutest, but check this OUT:

Unreal, right?

I've told a couple of people this already, but it's a damned good thing Plan C is so adorable. B and I are the kind of honest that would have totally admitted it if she was ugly. Dodged a bullet on that one!

Note: picture taken by my darling wife, who is a much, much better photographer than I am. She has recently promised to start blogging again. Also, if you are on her list of flickr buddies, you can see tons of her awesome pics here.

Compu-Update and Damn! It's Hot!

2010-09-27T13:47:00.000-07:00

Compu-update: my iBook miraculously booted this morning, on the last, spur-of-the-moment check before I reached for a big flat-head screwdriver to finish prying it open and extracting the hard drive. The keyboard is dead, so I've got it hooked up to my PC peripherals. I'm still going to have to get a replacement, since the whole thing could easily go tits-up at any moment, but it was a relief to be able to get everything off of it first.

Damn! It's hot! We just went for a walk down to our favorite neighborhood spot: Cathedral Park. But it's F'ing 80 degrees out! And it feels a lot warmer in direct sunlight, BELIEVE YOU ME!

Utter, Total, Computional Disaster

2010-09-26T21:16:00.000-07:00

When I woke up this morning, I thought I had two functioning computers: my trusty iBook G4, trucking along after over four years of loyal service, and the PC I built about three years back, living happily in a box waiting for us to get our own place.

Then I spilled cereal and milk on the laptop. It didn't work anymore.

Then I unpacked the PC because I need a computer to work on stuff and apply for jobs. It didn't work anymore.

So now I'm typing away on B's laptop, sans computer of my own. I ordered a replacement motherboard for the PC off of ebay, which (hopefully!) will fix the it. The iBook is dead as fried chicken, so we're trying to figure out what to do about it (a new 1000 dollar Apple laptop or a 450 dollar PC laptop with linux are the front-runners.) I have never done anything quite as straight-up idiotic as destroy a cherished computer out of pure clumsiness. The PC thing is just insult to injury. This is payback for all the times I have gotten a lucky break in the last year or so; the law of averages is a cold, harsh mistress.

P.S. Apple made it ridiculously difficult to get the hard drive out of its laptops. I plan to get it tomorrow, whether or not I have to use a blowtorch, and then use a USB adapter to be able to get at its contents. What a pain in the ass...

Notes from the Leisure Class

2010-09-21T20:50:00.000-07:00

A former housemate from years ago always referred to his unemployed male friends as "gentlemen of leisure." My homie Ransom and I got laid off from the same stupid dot-bomb at the same time, so for a while 2/4 of the people who lived in that house were gentlemen of leisure.*

I'm now in a very peculiar kind of leisurely situation.

B and I don't have fantastic savings, but they are a heck of a lot more viable in PDX than they ever could have been in (stupid, ridiculously expensive) California. We're living with B's brother, who has been kind enough to welcome us in to his awesome little pad in St. Johns. We're buying health insurance from Kaiser for about 340 bucks a month, which isn't cheap, but is a lot better than it could be. Long story short, while I know they're out there somewhere, the wolves aren't really at the door. I'm an unemployed academic / former IT guy, and while some part of me knows I ought to be worried, I just can't get the worry train moving (for once.)

In the meantime, along with the daily job hunt and my ongoing random textbook gig (which is another reason I'm not that worried...supposedly I'm going to get paid New York money for working from home), B and I weed-whack the lawn, we go grocery shopping, we see old friends, we go on walks with Plan C. We discovered that St. Johns definitely has its sketchy side on a walk this evening, but as is usual with Portland sketchiness, a block from the sketchy is perfectly nice.

So, um, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

* Of course, the same guy who liked that phrase was probably the most leisurely of gentlemen I have ever known. His mom owned the house, so he didn't have to worry about rent, and he would make enough from one carpentry gig to live without working for months at a go and spend his time playing his vintage synthesizers in the basement. When I got a replacement 9-5, I was very, very jealous of him.

In Greater Detail

2010-09-18T14:10:00.000-07:00

So here's how it went and how it's been:

I rented a 22' Penske truck to do the move, which would have been more than large enough for our crap and the crap of my brother in-law / new landlord, but the peoples at the rental joint only had a 26' one available for me.
A gang of the strappingest of tough kids in Santa Cruz showed up and helped us move everything into the truck. There was Tecate and Dominos - the leftover pizza was donated by our friends E+N+N to the skate punks in the park.
I only hit one curb driving that monster.
I screwed up at the first truck stop and tried to buy gas in the commercial truck section. My friend K, serving as driving buddy, bailed me out with the nice redneck lady inside and we got our diesel. We had Popeye's for lunch en route.
It was a 12 hour drive to Portland. We arrived punch-drunk tired but intact.
We unloaded the next day with a mix of family and friends and friends of friends helping out.
We've had five days since, unpacking, settling, seeing people, and starting to check out our new home turf, the St. Johns neighborhood of Portland. It's amazing here. We have a clear view of the bridge from the house, we're a five-minute walk from the local farmers market, maybe a 15 minute drive from downtown PDX, etc. And it's been raining. I don't really want an academic job anymore; I just want a teaching job here.

Portlandia!!!

2010-09-15T16:15:00.000-07:00

PDX backyard BBQ weather! As in, it's RAININ'!

I have way too much to post about (for once), and I think I'll devote a subsequent post to describing what it's like driving a 26 foot diesel truck 750 miles, and interstate moving with a tiny baby, and the sudden shock of waking up in a beautiful, welcoming, affordable city after living in one lacking those qualities for four years.

I'll keep it to this, then: we are in Portland, we are almost done unpacking and organizing, and I feel like I can breathe here, breathe like I haven't been able to in a long, long time. It's nice to be home.

So Long, Santa Cruz

2010-09-09T12:35:00.001-07:00

I'm 32 today. We've been packing for four days solid now; B did the entire kitchen over the course of about 11 hours yesterday. I have a few minutes right now before I run downstairs to the one shared washer/dryer for the 23 apartments in this building to swap loads. Tonight I scoop up B's brother A and my old friend K from SJC, they help us clean tomorrow, then a pack of rabid rabbits comes over Saturday AM to help us pack the huge 22' Penske truck. Sometime around 1pm Saturday, I head north, and that's the end of the KFR Santa Cruz experience.

My contempt for this town has colored this move in a weird way; I've been so excited to leave and to return to Portland after six years in the academic wilderness that I've only realized in the last few days how much I'm going to miss my friends here. Let it be repeated: Santa Cruz is a dump, but a dump that has a lot of really wonderful, smart people (most of whom are affiliated with the university.) The crazy hobos and ridiculous cost of living do not cancel out the redwoods or the walk along West Cliff or the brilliant people at UCSC.

Likewise, B and I have done very, very well living here. Her job was amazing, as is her resume now, we had a kid in a wonderful, supportive medical system, I completed a PhD and emerged owing zero dollars to anyone or anything. So we don't have jobs to move to; neither do we have any debt or (much) regret about anything. The only thing I would have changed is that I would have worked harder here and there, to not only finish the degree as quickly as I did, but to flesh it out more so that I felt more proud of my final results. That said, I didn't do bad work and I think I have a reasonable shot at being a teacher. So that's fine.

Anyway, thanks to all of my friends here. You guys are amazing and I will miss you.

People of PDX: see you soon.

Back-Breaking Bullshit

2010-09-06T15:49:00.000-07:00

Criminy, I mean, yes, I already knew that moving sucks, but moving sucks, man! Our apartment is now officially in mid-packing bomb-went-off mode, and we haven't even gotten to the "kitchen" yet.*

Anyway. I don't have the mental horsepower to post about this topic, and I'm on beer number two for the PM, but neither do I have anything else to post about, so here goes a short summary: apparently, the only way capitalist economics works is by inflating bubbles, riding them on the way up, then rich people jumping ship as they burst and everyone else getting screwed. You can't read the whole thing unless you're on a college campus, but this New Left Review article does a brilliant job of summing up the current situation with global economics. It scared the crap out of me (again, more) because the point is basically that there's been nothing but bubbles, no "real economy" to speak of, for thirty years now. Should we all be hoping that another bubble comes along that temporarily lifts the situation?

To sum up: there still is neither hope nor justice in the universe. But we knew that.

* Our "kitchen": a teeny hallway with a miniature Italian fridge. I am not making this up.

Looking Back

2010-09-03T14:39:00.000-07:00

It's a pretty standard caveat to start a blog post with "sorry I haven't been posting to my blog very much," especially lately. My once mighty cadre of fellow bloggers has shrunk to an elite task force of semi-regular updaters (ongoing big ups to my homie K for his always-enlightening posts.)

The thing is, for me, it's like: baby. I have this baby, and that's about it. I could complain about the lack of jobs, the worries about the future, etc., or I could talk about how elated I am at the prospect of returning to Portland. But most of the time, I'm just making ridiculous noises at Plan C to get her to giggle and/or bouncing her around to get her to go to sleep.

BUT: what I did want to post about was something B and I were talking about the other day, namely, the fact that we can't remember the first two months of Plan C's life in anything except hazy nightmarish images and dreamscapes of insanity. That's the thing about really serious sleep dep, of course: your memory gets shot to shit. It's also a kind of very softcore version of post-traumatic stress; it's just so bloody hard to deal with a newborn, the constant screaming, the fact that they have absolutely no sense of their surroundings, the simple fact that to be awake is to be unhappy for them, etc.

Happily, that changes. Having heard the horror stories from friends with kids, I think we're pretty bloody lucky. The little croc has her self-soothing techniques (she sticks her whole fist in her mouth, mostly), she giggles when we dance around, she plays with stuff, she naps, she sleeps at night (mostly), she does all kinds of rad shit like that and is generally hilarious. As far as I can tell, she's only four months old and she's already a lot easier than most of her baby peers.

Once the move is over, I hope to have new and interesting things to post about (no promises, though. I am pretty boring.) In the meantime, I'm just happy to have this funny little kid and to be moving back to my favorite city on earth.

Chunklet: Indie Cred Test

2010-08-30T12:14:00.001-07:00

I contributed some stuff to a new book managed by indie / punk / garage uber-savant Henry of Chunklet fame a while back. The book is being self-published, so check out the fundraising video (which is F'ing hilarious, BTW.) 15 bucks = a copy of said book. Either way, watch it.

That Too Did Pass

2010-08-26T14:17:00.001-07:00

...and so ends the weirdest class I've ever taught.

Normally, when you teach college kids, the whole trick is to get them engaged. You're usually staring out at a room full of glazed eyes, with the students texting or updating stuff on Facebook while you're talking, the one kid in the back taking a nap, and your three good students sitting up front nodding diligently, reminding you that they should really get A's.

This session, however, was the weirdest pedagogical clusterfuck I've ever had to deal with. I had one complete big-mouth dickweed who interrupted my lectures every sentence or so with either an irrelevant tangential comment (a.) or an obscure question (b.) I didn't have the impression that he was being a jerk deliberately; it was more like he was compulsively driven to be a jerk because of deep-seated mental problems. Besides him, I had about ten other students who interrupted and made tangential comments as well, albeit at a whole level of magnitude lower in intensity and frequency that Captain Blowhard. Collectively, the class was way too engaged, making it almost impossible to keep the narrative thread of my lectures together. I felt really bad for the dumb kids, who invariably lost track of what I was talking about as I had to fend off question after question and try to keep the anachronistic comparisons to a minimum.

I told B the other night that each lecture was like trying to land a plane with all of the engines out, desperately trying to keep the lecture on course as you plummet.

Anyway, I finished grading the finals and essays I had to do this morning and handed off the rest of the stack to my homie M (who is my TA), so that's done and done.

And the worst of it? Captain Blowhard totally got an A. As much as I wanted to report him to Homeland Security with some made-up threat and get him waterboarded, the fact is he wrote a really good essay and did a fine job on the exam. Crap.

Hating the Heat

2010-08-24T10:17:00.000-07:00

The elements of enjoying hot weather might include the following:

A/C.
A porch with chairs or a couch.
Cold beers.
Screen doors.
Water? For people who like that kind of thing?

We have none of these things.

The elements of why I hate hot weather do include the following:

Third-floor apartment (note: heat rises.)
Tattoos make being in sun inconvenient.
I am always about five degrees warmer than everyone else.
I can barely swim.
I try not to leave the apartment in Santa Cruz.

That all said, I guess I can't complain too much - it's been about 67 degrees here all summer. The good times couldn't go on forever.

Untapped Ironic Affectation

2010-08-20T09:36:00.001-07:00

In the spirit of our imminent move to Portland, I wanted to offer a sartorial suggestion to that oft-maligned class of citizen, the "hipster."* One of Portland's defining quirks is the massive population of hipsters, which frankly I always kind of liked because it meant a great music scene and lots of people who were fun to look at. In turn, one of the defining characteristics of hipsters is the ironic fashion; consider the following trends from just the last ten years or so:

Big nerdy glasses (like Elvis Costello.)
White belts.
Mesh trucker hats.
Mustaches.
Huge mountain-man style beards.

(Side note: One good way to keep track of the east-coast version of hipster fashion is to watch Ace of Cakes on Food Network. That one cake decorator started dressing all 80s as a kind of fashion thing, but now she has an actual perm and wears actual mom dresses, apparently having forgotten that it was supposed to be ironic.)

Anyway, may I humbly proffer an item of enormous ironic potential, as yet untapped: THE COMBOVER.

Niiiiiiice.

The way I see it, hipster dudes who are actually bald / balding (like, uh, me) could sport the real deal. Hipster dudes who aren't could have their heads shaved and configured to achieve artificially-induced combovers! All the hip, swingin' guys in town would look like my AP Biology teacher from high school! Triumph!

Think about it, hipsters of Portland (and other cities.) We can make this happen if we try.

* There is an enormous internet literature on the "hipster." It's one of those appellations that almost no one admits to being, but clearly exists in huge quantities. Personally, I think hipster is fine as long as the hipster isn't a dickhead.

The Worst-Case Scenarios

2010-08-18T10:04:00.000-07:00

Editor's Note: This blog post will use the F-word a lot. On behalf of all of us at kungfuramone.blogspot.com, I would like to apologize about this fact to my mom, who doesn't like it when I swear too much in my blog.

The apartment building next to ours is just awful. It's run-down, ugly, and inhabited, mostly, by very sketchy people. We actually looked at an apartment there on the first day of our hellish hunt for housing in SC four years ago, but B wisely called bullshit on the ambience. Through weird coincidence, we ended up in the adjacent building instead.

At some point in the last six months, a gang of idiots I like to call the "Word-Case Scenarios" moved in to one of the upstairs apartments there. These guys play really, really loud hip-hop and stand out on their porch shouting about getting in fights and "the primest jack I ever saw."* They invite over every hostile idiot in town and have parties about four days a week. I cannot imagine what it must be like living in one of the adjoining apartments. Thankfully, our apartment doesn't face theirs, so even when they're blasting their music at 110 decibels and doing their best to emulate the Insane Clown Posse in both appearance and behavior, we don't really have to deal with it.

That said, there was a brilliant moment two days ago when I went to take out the recycling. The recycling bins for my building are under the WCS' apartment. Here are the lyrics to the song they were playing this time, as best as I could make out:

"Fucka-fucka fuck fuck fuck FUCKA! Fuck fuck FUCKA fuck fuck! FUCK FUCK fuck fuck FUCK!"

It was like...their theme song.

Here's hoping wherever we end up in Portland has a much lower per-capita moron count. Portland as a city has about 15% of the morons of SC, so I'd say the odds are on our side.

* As in, "the most entertaining robbery I have ever witnessed."

Don't Bother With the Psychologist

2010-08-15T11:52:00.001-07:00

"Yeah, uh, go ahead and don't call again."

Editor's note: We all know that talking about your dreams is stupid and tedious. To help deal with the phenomenon, I established a rule many years ago for talking about dreams: you get two sentences to describe a dream in all of its intricacies.

In my dream last night, I was confronted by a faculty member at UC to the SC, who informed me that I had not, in fact, finished my PhD. I broke down in a kind of whiny semi-freak-out, telling her that I...I...I just had to get out of SC.

You could assign this dream to high school students studying Freud and get pretty accurate readings, I think.

P.S. B, completely earnest, just now: "We need more disco beats!"

(this after a successful Goodwill-gathering mission in the kitchen set to the Scissor Sisters.)

Rocking My 30s

2010-08-10T14:36:00.000-07:00

Rantity-rantity-rant-rant-rant...

Not really. I don't have the energy for it. The baby croc's latest trick is to vacillate between getting the 5am shift person up before 5am (a.) and being totally dead asleep at 5am, thereby necessitating this whole song-and-dance to get her awake and eating (b.) Also, a few hours ago, she screamed at me like I was plotting her murder (not true!), then a minute later was openly baby-laughing with delight as I danced around the room with her going "doo-pa-doo-pa-doo!" (true!)

Anyway. I do have a few things I've been thinking about.

First, I realized that real estate developers are Satan incarnate. The reason California is broken, permanently, terribly broken, is that real estate speculation over the last twenty-something years pushed home prices completely beyond the level that anyone earning actual wages or a salary could afford them. Home prices rose so much faster than did wages that there is now an insuperable divide between means and ends in housing. That same pattern happened and continues to happen all over America, of course, but it's so bad here. The only people who benefited from this bullshit were the real estate developers themselves. IMHO, they should be hung on hooks like pigs in a slaughterhouse (feeling feisty today!)

Second, Santa Cruz, California. I'm always interested to hear from other people about their opinions and observations about this little dump. Two people I know (one a friend, one a neighbor) noted recently that they've watched things go to shit in this town. My homie H told us about her eight years here, watching the town getting dirtier and more dangerous and generally sketchier in every way, and neighbor A just said it's gotten so expensive she's thinking about moving up north just like we are. It's nice to know I'm not alone in noticing these things.

Money. Money money money. I just want an income, one that I can feel reasonably certain will keep our very, very modest standard of living going indefinitely. This summer is the perfect hodge-podge of random jobs bringing in scraps and I have no idea if/how things will change when we get to Portland.

Getting older...I really noticed that in pictures lately. Looking at pictures from years past is always shocking, that amazed "I look like a fucking KID in that picture!" reaction. Unfortunately, I'm now at the point of looking at recent pictures of myself thinking "I look like a SKINNY OLD GUY in that picture!" Part of that is probably the stress and sleep dep, but part of it is just that I am, in fact, older than I used to be.

Probably the Greatest Picture Ever Taken

2010-08-08T14:54:00.000-07:00

Our homie C got us this Motorhead onesie when she was in England recently. B took this picture of Plan C in it a few days ago...I'm pretty certain this makes Ansel Adams look like a rank amateur.

P.S. I should add that the awesome blanket was created by our homie K.

Ride a Cock Horse

2010-08-06T14:21:00.000-07:00

"Ride the Horse:

If you're like most parents, you'll soon become your baby's "horsie" and will be for quite a long time. These games help your baby bond with you and improve his ability to create and maintain social relationships. It also helps develop his muscle coordination and balance.

While singing the song "Ride a Cock Horse," cross one knee over the other and place baby on your free foot. Holding his hands firmly, gently swing your foot up and down, bouncing him while singing:

Ride a cock horse to Millbury Cross
To see a fine lady upon her white horse.
With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes
She shall hear music wherever she goes.

When baby laughs, laugh back at him! He'll love the interaction."

-Glade B. Curtis, M.D., M.P.H. and Judith Schuler, M.S., Your Baby's First Year, Week by Week (Da Capo Lifelong, 2005), page 200.

I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP.

Road Warriors

2010-08-03T11:23:00.001-07:00

And, 1500 miles later, we are back in SC...

This is the view from the front porch of my brother in-law's new house in St. Johns. We're going to stay there for a while when we arrive in PDX next month. STOKED.

This is the friendly fellow who just got married!

And lo, the happy couple! They are brilliant and beautiful and fun.

Our baby is amazing. She put up with two 11 - 12 hour drives and bitched about it less than we did. She's also getting huge; she's over 25 inches long / tall and weighs about 12 1/2 pounds.

We've got a lot to do in the next month. SC friends: get in touch. We're almost out of here.