One Monkey, Six Years

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Random updates
We went to see Bowling for Soup at the county fair on Friday. The lead singer reminds me more and more of my youngest brother Tim. And apparently Bowling for Soup is also from Denton. They're much more of a punk band in person, and play really fast. I have further confirmed that I like the kind of silly that their music is. I suppose I'll need to decide whether I prefer BfS's "Hooray for Beer" or Tim's "Malt Liquid" :-)

Shanna continues to sprout up like a weed, and is capable of following basic verbal instructions, when she feels like it. Yay!

We went to a nice barbeque yesterday. I knew nobody. Shanna had lots of fun, as did Krissy and I. Also yay! We've also determined that some people have vastly, unbridgeably different taste in tequila than Krissy and I. Fair enough.

We've eaten way more crap lately than usual between the barbeque, the county fair, and generally just slipping a bit. On the plus side, funnel cakes are really good, and basically too big for only two of us to eat.

We now have a couple of big scheduling whiteboards in our bedroom, all marked up and everything. If we suddenly become far more organized after, like, yesterday, then you'll all know why. If we don't, that's okay too.

Random: Lars and the Real Girl
Awhile back, some folks recommended the movie Lars and the Real Girl to the girl and me. Last night, we finally watched it.

Note: very minor spoilers follow.

It's a neat, weird, amazing, twisted movie. I mean that in a good way. The title character is an absolute cypher, and has to be in order to make the movie work. The role really called for a guy like the young Dan Aykroyd - stiff, hard to read, but basically really likeable. This guy wasn't quite like Dan Aykroyd, but the way he played the role wasn't all that different.

This movie is chock-full of likeable weird people with lousy social skills. The only person that's particularly conventionally attractive is Gus, Lars's brother, and Gus is kind of an asshole for a lot of the movie. There's either a moral there, or the screenwriter is awkwardly likeable and wants revenge on the conventionally attractive people in his/her past.

The movie starts out as a mini-biography of Lars' awkwardness among people who like him but don't quite know what to make of him. It then moves on to him receiving the RealDoll he ordered. This would be kind of a surprise if you hadn't already read a brief synopsis of the movie somewhere. As is, it just seems -- well, sudden and random, since RealDolls had been mentioned only by the sleazy cube-mate at the office that spends his time surfing for porn.

Lars introduces "Bianca", the new RealDoll, as a woman of Brazilian/Danish ancestry who uses a wheelchair and whom he met on the internet. He moves her into the guest room in the house (remember, he lives in the garage), brings her to dinner, and generally treats her like, y'know, a person. That's the actual plot of this movie, in case you hadn't read the summary before. It's a small town humoring Lars to various degrees as he brings his RealDoll to go socialize, often among people and in places where he'd been too awkward to even show up before.

The RealDoll in the wheelchair is exactly the right kind of creepy for the role. Good purchasing on somebody's part.

For reasons I won't get into here, the movie slowly turns from gentle, bizarre comedy to weird, twisted psychodrama, with Lars and Bianca as twin centerpieces. The acting is fantastic, far better than I had given it credit for early on, especially on Lars' part.

This movie walks the line of certain art flicks that try hard to keep a central character weird, mysterious and hard to understand but allow us to really like him anyway. This movie manages not only that, but puts him through a variety of hard situations where he's under a lot of strain and we still pretty much come through liking him.

That's a hard line to walk, and they do a fine job of it.

Overall, I'd definitely recommend the movie to anybody who reads the two-line description and still thinks, "yeah, I think I'd like to see that."

A random aside: they don't mention the RealDoll parody site which has been around almost as long as RealDoll in the movie, but they should. Or at least, somebody really should.

Random
Cheddar-flavored yogurt is weird. It seems like it wants to be, I dunno, swirled with beef-flavored yogurt or something.

One of the things that makes me happy about more cooking at home is that we do more random cooking and trying weird variations on stuff. Like, say, when we're out of milk at an inopportune time :-)

Shanna likes cheddar-flavored yogurt. Now we know. And Annie's natural mac'n'cheese recommends it for a reason, though I don't think it'll be our new standard when we do have milk in the house.

Hiring and FaceBook
I have just read that companies routinely review facebook and myspace activity when screening prospective candidates. One allegation is that if your profile is blocked to non-friends, they may ask you to log in in front of them to let them have a look. This is roughly equivalent to showing up at my home and demanding an opportunity to sift through my trash and check for signs of moral turpitude like blended Scotch or subversive literature like Fahrenheit 451...

From Reg Braithwaite's description of why checking the web to discover people's personal activities and politics is an ineffective hiring practice, and why any company that would do that should really not hire him.

I agree, which is no big surprise.

Busy few days
Back from Yosemite, done some cleaning and getting the house back in order from a week away.

My lovely wife has now successfully coordinated the receipt and division of one and a half butchered cows, of the grass-fed variety. This sounds like an exaggeration, but isn't. The meat has been about half given out and about half paid for, but is fully sorted by who gets what. Later, there will be pictures of her sitting at her laptop in front of a "who wants how much beef" spreadsheet, surrounded by a sort of miniature snowball fort of frozen packaged steaks and roasts. She had it all sorted out by two hours after getting fourteen boxes of butchered cow into our Prius to get it home. Then, we went out to dinner (despite cow -- people from out of town were here).

She's awesome.

Unrelatedly, there will be much barbequeing this summer.

Home again, home again...
We're back from Yosemite. If anything huge has happened in the past week, I probably won't read LJ back far enough to see it. Please feel free to point it out.

Geeky randomness
Those of you with long memories may recall me posting about a geeky blog I was keeping elsewhere. I posted to it regularly for awhile, and then pretty much stopped completely.

I stopped partly from lack of motivation, but partly because I was getting to the point where I felt like I should be writing the code to make all this happen. WordPress is big and unwieldy, and using it doesn't get me experience building my own sites. So I built my own blog and imported the old entries with a script I wrote (but not the old comments, what few there were).

And in late april, not long after starting it, I decided I'd do something geeky at least six times a week that I could write about. And oddly enough, it's worked quite well. I have very little time for it these days, and yet somehow, knowing I should do something for the blog, and even something tiny would count has kept me putting up interesting little bits, day after day.

This week I won't be making my six since I'm leaving early for a camping trip. And next week I probably won't have 'net access at all. But I'm proud of even a month of doing this. It's really, really good practice.

I should try more of these exercises people tell you you're supposed to do to get better at things. Apparently, sometimes people are right :-)

Now I just need to put it up somewhere stable, instead of running off a simulated VMWare box running on my home machine, with my home DSL connection...

Gone next week, general goodness
Things have been great lately. I've been on several good dates with my wife, with more soon. Just generally, a lot of good stuff has been scheduled. The kid is still healthy and happy, with what looks like a probable growth spurt coming on.

I'll be going on a week-long camping trip with friends next week, so expect only intermittent replies for a bit as we pack and go. Probably no internet access while we're there.

Brezsny
To Gemini, my sun sign and Shanna's, Brezsny says:

Seventeen-year-old Jay Greenberg is a music prodigy who has written numerous sonatas and symphonies. His first CD, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra and Julliard String Quartet, came out in 2006. It's not exactly a struggle for him to create his compositions. He often completes them in less than a day. "The music comes fully written," he says, "playing like an orchestra in my head." I believe you now have something in common with him, Gemini. According to my reading of the omens, there will soon be ripe visions of future accomplishments floating around in your imagination. You should write them down or describe them in detail to an ally or do whatever else it takes to launch the process of getting them born.

To Leo, my moon sign, he says:

"I can't exactly walk on the water," says Russ Crim, "but it looks like I can because I know where the rocks are hiding just beneath the water." This would be a good trick for you to emulate during the coming weeks, Leo. By doing your homework and some advance scouting, you could put yourself in a position to accomplish a splashy bit of hocus-pocus that will ultimately be legendary. To help ensure that you don't generate a karmic backlash as you glorify your ego, I suggest you find a way to make your magic serve some worthy cause. For instance, maybe you could walk on water in order to raise money for charity.

Taken together, these are quite suggestive. Most of my future visions lately are of programming stuff. I'm not sure who to describe such things to, you know?

33
I seem to have gotten older.

I continue to be incontrovertibly an adult. Got a wife, a one-year-old daughter, a house with a mortgage, and a job that wants me to lie about my hours on their little forms. To be any more definitely an adult, I'll need to start wearing adult diapers.

I can't remember. Is there anything that requires being older than me, other than running for president? I don't think I'm going to run for president.

Wonderful birthday
Shanna, Jennifer, Laura and I had a really wonderful little birthday celebration, and Krissy did an absolutely fantastic job of pulling it all together. Like, she did basically all the organizing and the significant majority of the cleanup cooking, food-prep and generally putting the party together.

That's significant labor, and she was mostly very remarkably cheerful about the whole thing. She also made absolutely fabulous cakes for the event as well.

Yay!

Congratulations to MisterNihil!
I've been plague-ridden. That's my excuse for not posting yet, though I passed along congratulations over the phone already.

A few days ago, my younger brother Ben (

misternihil) and his lovely wife Natosha had a new baby boy named James. All involved are healthy and happy.

Congratulations to Ben, Tosha and James!

Still sick, getting better
My wife rocks. Not only did I skip tango class, I pretty much came home, got out of my riding gear and collapsed in bed under a lot of covers. She brought soda, watered juice, soup, and took care of a grumpy Shanna by herself for hours so that I could get some sleep.

Technically, I didn't get any sleep. Whatever weird bug I have is keeping me from sleeping, which is one reason I'm up right now. But I spent a lot of time collapsed and basically hallucinating lightly (I get the best thoughts while sick and miserable and unable to sleep - weird). And now not only do I not feel so awful, I've no longer got ungodly high fever and chills, just a fairly reasonable fever.

While sick, I found myself thinking that smart people get an easy pass in this world, and it keeps them from learning a lot of useful ways to think. And that it makes sense that we try to teach them things with no simple answer like art projects because that forces them to do something that you can't just easily think your way through and give a pat answer. Also details for a spam-resistant game co-referral system -- I'm not sure it'll work now that I'm thinking more clearly. And a correct answer to a programming problem I had earlier today. Plus a series of hard-to-describe parallels between being feverish and under a bunch of blankets with drug trips and sweat lodges, and parallels between all of that and having a baby.

I'm so not making it to work tomorrow.

Today, I'm feverish, headachey and slightly grumpy. Had I felt this way when I left home, I probably wouldn't have, and I certainly would have returned home after my 8am dentist appointment rather than going to work.

Oddly, I'm 90% sure this makes me a bit more pleasant around the office, and especially by email.

My internal tact-meter doesn't so much check "is this a good idea to say?" Rather, it checks, "am I in a good enough mood to deal with the fallout of saying this right now?"

Today, the answer is generally, "could this wait until tomorrow?"

And on the first day of the awful new time-tracking system, too. Guess I'll have to save up snark for later.

Brezsny, for the first time in awhile
Gemini, which is my sun sign and Shanna's:

A couple I know planned to have their second baby delivered at home with a midwife's help. The father is a physician who assisted with childbirths during his residency, so he and his partner felt confident about conducting their rite of passage outside of the hospital. But once the mom's water broke and labor began, everything happened faster than expected. The dad gave the midwife an urgent phone call, but the kid was already crowning. "Don't cut the umbilical cord right away," the midwife advised. "It will minimize the shock of transition if the baby can get the hang of breathing while still being nurtured as she has for the last nine months." That's exactly what they did. And I hope you will do the metaphorical equivalent, Gemini. Keep getting fed the old way for a while as you learn how to be fed in the new way.

Hrm. Okay.

And Leo, my moon sign:

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world," wrote anthropologist Margaret Meade. "Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." An excellent example of that occurred during America's Revolutionary War against England from 1775 to 1783. Of all the men in the 13 colonies who could have fought for freedom, only 16 percent did. I hope that gives you encouragement as you seek to fix a glitch in the status quo. You and your band of allies have more power than you know.

Fair enough. Wonder how I want to change the world lately...

The Seven Citadels
When I was in middle school, I read (some of?) The Seven Citadels, by Geraldine Harris. It's a fairly generic fantasy quartet (what's the word for a series with four books?). I've just finished reading the first two books again, and discovered that I remembered almost none of it, and that it's more interesting than I remembered.

Oddly, it's almost a What These People Need Is A Honky situation -- blessed and God-dispatched protagonist brothers for whom everything goes right, weird foreign servant whose respect they earn and who constantly sacrifices his comfort for their benefit, coming from a blessed land falling into disrepair and bringing the gifts of Golden Galkis (their home city) through all the lands they touch. They also do things like bring bows and arrows to the tribesmen they meet, because the tribesmen hunt entirely with thick spears from cowback, and apparently nobody ever, y'know, brought bows over during the regular commerce between advanced countries on both sides of them. Or horses, but there aren't as many horses in the books so far.

Only one major difference springs to mind -- they're brown-skinned and brown-haired, mostly with vaguely Asian-sounding names (what nationality would "Kerish Lo-Taan" be?), and most of the people they're dealing with are white folks. The servant is pale white, if toad-shaped, and most of the primitive natives are either green-haired and -skinned or golden-skinned and white-haired like the bowless cow-riders above.

So then, do I call it What These People Need Is A Chink?

Random weekend update
We had a busy weekend. Among other things, there was gym rock-climbing with two other families with kids (it works better than you'd think). So I got some exercise, and I have nicely sore forearms today.

There was Peter Beagle's birthday party in Golden Gate park. This is the second time I've met him -- he's a sweet old guy, and has really lovely stories to tell. I feel awkward and like I have very little in common with him, given where we are in life (he's 70, and spends most of his time as an author and musician). He seemed to handle that with very good grace :-) Got some books signed, got a picture of him with Shanna, had some fun conversations with various people.

I've been reading a bit lately. So far "Johnathan Strange and Mister Norrell" is a lovely book, and I suspect most of you wouldn't like it nearly as much as I do :-) It introduces a cranky, crotchety, idiosyncratic character with a cranky, crotchety, idiosyncratic writing style, and it's pretty verbose. The individual chapters go quickly, but it's a thick book and it's hard to tell what the plot is going to be yet... Still, I'm enjoying it quite a bit.

[In case you don't recognize the name above -- Peter Beagle is the author of The Last Unicorn. He's written other stuff, but that's the famous one]

Signal boost: Article on Dubai
I didn't know a lot about Dubai. I still don't, really. But whether you're shocked by the bankruptcy laws (hint: medieval, with debtors going to prison), the slave labor or the carbon footprint, there's something interesting for everybody.

The article. Worth reading.