Category: lil’ chino

the coming spawn

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the night is still mine


Happy Tuesday night friends. Today at work I took the liberty of blocking off the 10am-12pm slot on my calendar for the remainder of the week. I plan to use the daily two-hour escape to complete all the remaining work I have to do around our annual review processes. As someone who has to be responsible for ranking others, I hate this time of year; but as someone who himself gets ranked against others, I actually look forward to succeeding. But, I don’t want to talk about it now… because I came home from that awful place to get away from it, at least the night is still mine. For now…

About a year ago, I read on a friends’ blog that their daughter was into the show Backyardigans, which is a computer animated kids show on cable that has a bunch of friends use their imagination to have adventures Muppet Babies Rugrats kinda theme. The twist being that all the adventures the crew has are set to original music, each show tending to have a musical theme in addition to a storyline.

I liked it so much I started TiVoing episodes for Keaton, and it’s become on of her favorites. And, actually, I’ve really come to appreciate the music that goes along with each half-hour. The songs are well-written, enjoyable as “real” music, and often infectiously catchy. And, while I don’t think she’s ever actually sat through an entire show (she’s just not much for the television), we enjoy watching snatches of it together.

Well, today when I got home from work and Keaton asked to watch “Yaganins,” I saw the lightbulb flick alight above Sharaun’s head. “Oh,” she said, drawing out the word for emphasis, “I want to show you something that will blow your mind.” Firing up the TiVo and scrolling down to the Backyardigans, she highlighted a new episode called “Tale of the Mighty Knights.” Now, there’s a pretty finite number of these shows, and I’m fairly certain I know them all, so the title was new to me. Turns out it’s an hour-long special episode, done in the style of a 1970s prog-rock-opera. And since knights and dragons are the stereotypical storylines of epic rock music, it’s the perfect genre to accompany the story.

Anyway, I was curious, and with a little research and I’d uncovered the interesting backstory on the guy responsible for the show’s tunes, Evan Lurie. And… that linked article is the whole reason I wrote those previous two paragraphs. Hey, with heavily musical shows like the Backyardigans and Yo Gabba Gabba!, Keaton and I can both have a good time watching Nick Jr.

Goodnight, and act your age.

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the way to a man’s heart is through…


… that little 3ft x 3ft tile-floored, three-walled vestibule area just inside the front door.

Well, at least to this man’s heart, on this night, it is.

Keaton had a friend drop by for a few hours this evening. At one point, he was pulling around Chicken Dance Elmo in the little wagon while Keaton followed close on his heels wheeling her baby doll in the stroller. They’d circle their little procession around the living room room a few times and then head for the front room. On their way Keaton would shout, “Going to our house!,” and her friend would echo, “Our house!”

Their house, such as it was, was that little 3ft x 3ft tile-floored, three-walled vestibule area just inside the front door. They’d both cram in there with the wagon and stroller and baby doll and Chicken Dance Elmo, and be “home.” At first, Sharaun and I thought it was a fluke. But, after they did it several times, we decided they were really playing house. It was the coolest thing to watch. Where the heck do kids get this stuff?

Now I will tell a short story.

In fifth grade, our class went on a field trip to the town’s public pool. Somehow, a friend and I convinced one of the girls in our class to sneak a camera, which we provided, into the girls locker room. Her instructions, once inside, were to snap dirty pictures of a certain other girl in our class. I have no idea why she agreed to this, maybe she didn’t like the other girl. The boys and girls split and went to their respective rooms to change into swimsuits, and we were jumpy with anticipation. When she finally did return the camera, we hung on her every word. “Yeah, I took some,” she said passively, as if this weren’t the successful culmination of every fifth-grade boy’s best-laid plans. I don’t remember how we got the film developed without involving the folks, but we did. In the end, our mole only managed to take a single picture, which was extremely tame and unsatisfying, but which I still have to this day. Sorry Kristina, I was in fifth-grade-love with you, it’s what we did.

Goodnight.

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snack-a-cheerios


Mondays mean I have to go back to work, so normally Mondays blow. This Monday, however, was quite pleasant. I got a ton of work done, hung out with friends at lunch, and came home to a big “Hi Daddy!” and hug from Keaton. I got home a little late (meeting ran long and I hung around talking to Ben a little bit), and we had leftovers for dinner (which I like, honestly, since I do dishes and leftovers mean less cleanup).

Tonight Keaton and I called Grammy and Grandpa together, we do that sometimes. Keaton likes to use the phone, and can actually hold something of a conversation (well, a two-year-old talks to an adult kinda conversation). Tonight, it went a little like this:

Grandpa: Hello?

Keaton (at Dad’s prompting whispers): Hi Grandpa! I love you Grandpa!

Grandpa: Why, hi Keaton! I love you too! Want to talk to your Grammy? (Ahh… the classic dad-answered-the-phone handoff, “Hey there!… let me get your mom.”)

Grammy: Hello?

Keaton (more whispers from dad): Hi Grammy! I love you Grammy!

Grammy: Hi Keaton! I love you too! What are you doing?

Keaton: Snack-a-Cheerios!

Grammy: Oh, you had some Cheerios?

Keaton: Yeah.

Grammy: We’re they good?

Keaton: OK.

Keaton: Me hold-a baby Colton!

Grammy: Yeah! Did you see baby Colton?

Keaton. OK.

Awkward silence….

Dad: Keaton, can you tell Grammy what you did today?

Keaton: Today.

Dad: What did you do today?

Keaton: Slide-a-Krittal.

Dad: Oh, that means “Slide with Crystal,” mom. That’s the person at the gym’s childcare.

Grammy: Oh, you went to the gym?

Keaton: OK.

Grammy: Did you have fun?

Keaton: Had-a-Cheerios!

…

And on and on and on it went like that. But, Grammy never seemed to tire of the conversation.

Well then, I am going to paste in something I wrote a while ago… maybe it’s interesting, let’s see:

Did you guys know that, no matter how you cut it, there is a certain element of the earnable respect a person can have which is entirely age-based? Well, I’m telling you that there is, whether you knew it or not. Now, people may tell you that this is false, but they are either misinformed or lying. If you’re a young whippersnapper, no matter how much of a superstar you are at what you do, and regardless of the number of millions you make, you’ll be still deprived at least some percentage of the respect you could garner (from those older than you) because of your age.

Furthermore, I bet I can roughly quantify that percent-deprived by looking at the median age of your peers (those who do the same tasks as you in your chosen profession) and subtracting your age from that. For instance, if you’re a thirty-two year old middle manager at your dead-end warehouse job, and the average middle-manager at the warehouse company is actually thirty-nine years old, you’ll be deprived of about 20% of the respect you could earn were you seven years older.

Now I know there’ll be a lot of fast-trackers and young up-and-comers out there who’d completely disagree, and maybe even argue that they are, in fact, more respected than some of their elders. And I’m not saying that can’t be possible or doesn’t happen (because, in point-cases, I’m certain it does), I’m just saying that, in a general sense, they’d be wrong. Sure, if there’s a deadweight fifty year old who’s coasting along as your peer, you may indeed be more respected in comparison. But, in general, those who are older than you will still have it in the back of their heads that they’ve “been around” and you’re “fresh off the tit.”

Seriously, you’re gonna have to work around this. It’s just a simple fact that you trust people who are your age or older because your brain tells you they’ve had at least as much, or more, experience than you yourself have. Think about it, we inherently think of those younger than us as less-experienced than we are (and, because physics says that time flows forward, we’re probably right in doing so). Young people are expected to “earn and learn” their way to the top. Just look to the longstanding, pre-medieval, concept of apprenticeship, or the way lawyers and accounts log hours to win partner.

Anyway, I’m actually not criticizing the concept – it’s common sense. I’m just saying, if you’re planning on being number-one top-cheese in your chosen field by thirty-one, you may be surprised. You might even make it to CEO by that age, but you’d better bet some of the musty members of the board are looking down their noses at your unwrinkled brow and perky breasts. Hey, I’m OK with it… just gotta do the time (or get insanely rich, cash out young, and run for the hills).

Hmmm… I dunno if that was an entertaining read or not…

Hey, Keaton made Megan’s photoblog: check it out.

Love you guys and your unwrinkled brows and perky breasts. Goodnight.

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youthwise


Sunday, Sharaun’s out shopping and Keaton’s asleep. So far, naptime sans pacifier has proven more difficult than bedtime – Keaton not seeming to mind its absence at all at night, yet having a hard time missing it during her afternoon naps. Yesterday I couldn’t get her to go down at all, and eventually brought her back out into the living room having caught nary a wink. Today, however, I decided to get serious, and, when she was once again playing and talking to herself instead of napping, went in and rocked her for about fifteen minutes in the glider. Once her deep, ragged breathing convinced me she’d fallen asleep on my shoulder, I transferred her to the crib, where I’m happy to say she’s still slumbering peacefully. On the whole, I’d say operation pacifiers-be-gone is moving along quite well.

This weekend, I decided it was high time I worked a bit on all the more obscure BitTorrent downloads that’ve been piling up in my downloads directory, un-listened to and unloved. In line with my laziness, I often leave the “hardest” downloads for last. For my downloading habits, the “hardest” albums are the rare live stuff I love to collect, but hate to sit down and figure out the details on so I can properly organize it, tag it, and merge it into my general collection. It may sound easy, but tracking down the details of that live Jefferson Starship jam I grabbed one day because it looked interesting when the only thing I have to go on is a folder in my “unprocessed” directory called “starship73_SBD_matrix1” is sometimes hard to do. But, I persevered, and Saturday I used Keaton’s naptime to process I whopping ~15GB of rare live FLAC audio. In fact, I’ve snipped in the resulting anally-organized list is below for your perusal, because I know you value this stuff as much as I do, right?

I’m gonna do a general interest bit for nerds now, you can turn your head if you’d like to remain cool.

When I was a kid, I read with gusto a book called Big Secrets by William Poundstone. I’ve written about the book before here on sounds familiar, in the context of my youthwise obsession with backwards audio. The book, was filled with all sorts of cool stuff. One of the coolest, in fact, was the section on mysterious shortwave radio “number stations.” I think (dad, correct me if I’m wrong) that my pop used to mess around with shortwave, and I kind of remember this being partly why I was interested in that particular chapter.

Anyway, numbers stations are an “unexplained” global radio phenomenon, in which a string of random numbers and/or letters is broadcast on a given radio frequency with no explanation, the general consensus being that they are coded communiques intended for participants international espionage community. Some stations have been broadcasting these cryptic strings of numbers since back around the time of World War I. Enticed by the mystery, amateur hammers have, on occasion, turned armchair secret-agents and attempted to triangulate signals and hunt down the broadcast locations. Reading it all back then, I was fascinated. It was like some real-life Hardy Boys thing to me… and I dreamed about getting a radio, studying the signals, and breaking the code…

Anyway, if you’re interested in this type of “cloak and dagger” type stuff, Wikipedia has a great article on numbers stations here, and you can read about the “outing” of one of my favorites from Poundstone’s book, the “Russian Woodpecker,” right here (also via the great Wikipedia). For further reading, this page keeps a list of actively transmitting numbers stations (with sound samples), and even has some cool video of radio-nuts tracking down the transmitting antennas.

I’m sorry if that was boring, but I enjoyed writing it, so you, dear reader, can suck it.

Before I go, a tip of my babymakin’ hat to friends Erik and Kristi for the birth of their strapping young buck, Colton. Way to go guys, he and Keaton can be best friends until they’re around fourteen, then they’re forbidden from seeing each other until they’re twenty-three.

Goodnight.

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struggles


Hi internet.

Can I get a collective sigh for the long-awaited arrival of Friday? Good; good job internet. Without jinxing it, I wanted to mention that tonight is the fourth night Keaton’s gone to bed “big girl style.” For you barren folks, that means she goes to sleep without the aide of a pacifier. This is an awesome milestone for us. At this point, she’s going down for both naps and bedtime without much protest. In fact, Sharaun actually packed up and mailed her pacifiers to her sister (who’s about to pop herself), and let Keaton help pack them. When I put her down the other night, she said, “Paci mail to baby Hobson.” Yup, the pacifiers were mailed to baby Hobson. Goodbye pacifiers.

All day yesterday guys, I was struggling with myself to make a choice. I’ve written before about how I tend to worry most over the little things (I know I have, but it’s getting harder and harder to find entries in this mass of writing), and this is a good example. And, since it’s foremost on my mind, I’m going to gestate and give birth to this decision right here, laid bare, in front of the blog. Here we go.

The setup: I’ve been invited to a “pub crawl” with a group of upstanding fellows. These fellows, while not the normal crew I run with, are all birds of a feather and of like age with me. For those unaware with today’s modern street-vernacular, a “pub crawl” is a walking outing centered around moving from bar to bar whilst having one drink or so at each. The idea being that you get to check out a bunch of new bars, hang out with friends, and drink alcohol.

The problem: I can’t tell if I want to go or not. Deep inside me, I bet it would be an awesome time and I think I’d have a blast with the guys. In some other way, though, I feel like this is not my bag. There are a couple factors at play here, but I can summarize it plainly by saying that 1) I’m typically not the guy at the bar, and 2) I’m not sure, but I think I kinda feel “too old” to be crawling pubs. Now, I know both of these things are rubbish, but they are indeed the psychological blocks I’m dealing with. Let’s take them one by one.

First, it’d be fairly accurate to call me a “homebody,” at least as a generalization. If it comes down to the choice between “going out” and getting some drinks or staying home and drinking some beer with friends – I’ll usually choose the latter (by the way, neither my homebodiness, nor my propensity to go out, is tied to alcohol consumption, I’m just framing this in the context of a “pub crawl.”) Some part of this is built into my Scrooge-logic, where I realize that socializing at home with friends is cheaper than socializing at the local overpriced watering hole. Some of it is just my nature.

Second, a “pub crawl” makes me feel old. In fact, most bars make me feel old these days. Unless they’re the dank, cavernous, dreary kind, they’re usually glitzy-trendy hotspots filled to the brim with fancy-smelling youngsters all looking to shack up for the night. Me and glitzy-trendy just don’t work, I just feel awkward and out of place. In fact, the whole concept of a “pub crawl” seems to shout “wasted college kid” to my subconscious. And, while that may have been OK when I was actually in college, thinking about it now makes me feel a bit like the fat, old, balding guy who’s just posturing.

Anyway… there it is. Still not sure what I’m going to do.

Goodnight.

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chicken soup for me


A Monday evening greeting to you, blog readers. Hope things are well on the other end of the internet. Me, I’m sitting on the couch after watching the BCS championship with friends. Sharaun and I have assumed our standard post-repast evening roles: her watching TV, me half-watching TV with the laptop in my lap. We should really shake it up a bit, maybe play Twister or something… y’know… go wild. Today, I’ll regale you with some cutesy tales of Keaton and I. In fact, let’s go ahead and do that right now…

This past Saturday, I decided to clean out our much-neglected garage. I do this on something of a “cycle.” Knowingly letting things pile up on the workbench and around the cars, stacking boxes on the ground haphazardly, and ignoring the tufts of mown and dried grass that start to amass in the corners. Then, every few months going in and doing one big “sort, purge, store” operation. I’m actually OK with letting the garage go like this, it is the garage, after all, so I don’t mind if I can’t eat off the floor.

Anyway, I was in there Saturday rocking out to the iPod plugged the 1970s receiver, courtesy Goodwill, working away while it rained outside. At some point, I had to go back inside. Upon returning to the garage, Keaton ended up following me out. Since I had pulled both cars into the driveway so I could maneuver the ladder around and stuff things up in the rafters, she had the whole room to run around in. She brought her little stroller out, and began walking in circles in the middle of the garage while I worked. Soon, she began dancing to the music, and I just couldn’t help myself: I abandoned my garage work and joined the rainy-day garage dance-party with my daughter. We danced circles around that garage for a good fifteen minutes, and it was positively one of the best times I’ve had in my entire life – hands down.

And, if that weren’t enough heart-meltiness… here’s another one for you.

This morning, while leaving for work, Sharaun had Keaton in the bathroom sitting on her little potty. She was stark naked since she had just woken up and Sharaun took off her overnight diaper and pajamas. As I walked down the hall towards the garage, I stopped at the bathroom to tell Sharaun goodbye and give her a kiss. Since Keaton was occupied, I told her I loved her too and would see her later. She said, “Bye-bye Daddy!” and I headed off.

A few more steps down the hall I hear, “Kiss!,” and turn around to see the cutest buck-naked almost-two-year-old girl in the world bounding towards me with her arms out. My cheeks neared a complete loss of structural integrity from the sheer breadth of the smile on my face, and I squatted in a catcher’s position to received first a wide-armed hug, and second a nice juicy kiss smack on the lips. As far as I’m concerned, it was the best start to a day that anyone could ever ask for.

Oh, before I go – I wanted to let you know that my Enzyte arrived in the mail today (for background on the Enzyte thing, read here). That means that tomorrow will be my first day “on the pill.” I’ll try my best to make tomorrow be the day I debut my progress-tracking methodology and baseline status – so we can all get involved in the experiment from day one. Because, I know, you are just as interested in this as I am… right?

OK beautiful people… until the next blog, much love and safe-keeping. Goodnight.

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thar she blows


Happy Monday friends. Me, I had a good weekend. Managed to do a fair amount of cleaning and organizing around the house and get in some good kickin’ it time with friends. Neither Sharaun nor I is feeling top-notch, both fighting something, and Keaton’s got “the croup,” according to the doc. So, we’ve hung a “Quarantined” sign on the door to ward away those of good-health from the little infirmary we have here.

Oh hey, before I forget, I finally got around to posting some pictures from our Christmas in Florida. You can check them out here.

Remember Friday when I wrote about the storms coming to sunny California? Yeah well, the storms came, and they beat upon our street with fists of wind and rain. The news, of course, covered the squall as if Al Queda was behind it, with unrelenting 24hr coverage and plenty of Johnny-on-the-spot reporters to give everything a nice local color. I don’t know when weather became cause for round-the-clock “death watch” reporting, but things have gone a tad far if you ask me. When I start seeing computer simulations of what “could” happen if the wind picked up to 900mph (just hypothetically), I change the channel. Anyway, back to those fists of wind and rain: In this fight the wind was Smokin’ Joe and our backyard fence was Ali. And, for those confused by pugilistic allegory, here’s some visual aides for that last sentence:

Yeah, it totally blew down, about ~30ft of it, posts snapped clean off at the dirt (where I suspect they had already rotted a good deal). I actually tried, during the fiercest winds while the fence was wobbling fiercely but still holding onto the ground, to go tie some guy-lines to the posts in the most trouble. The wind was so strong, however, that I couldn’t even use the nylon strap to right the tilting thing, pulling with all my might and using my weight, I was nearly lifted off the ground trying to wrestle what had essentially then become a huge wooden sail. I mean, look at the toppled BBQ Anthony and I built in the foreground there, that thing ain’t light. After that, I gave up and just let the thing go down. The tall shrubs we have on the other side of the fence were all that kept it from blowing away completely.

Oh, that last pic? That’s what I did to save another wind-wobbly section of fence. See that tie-rope? It’s secured to an old gas grill I happened to have laying around in the backyard, and, while the wind was strong enough to drag the grill across the lawn, it couldn’t quite manage to pull it over the retaining wall. I know it’s ghetto engineering, but it worked. I’m sure the first caveman-graven wheel wasn’t quite a Michelin, either.

I was going to write some more… but I just don’t have it in me. I’m gonna bake some cookies and listen to some new albums instead. Goodnight lovers.