Category: lil’ chino

the coming spawn

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is it butt-doctor time?


Traffic is on XM as I sit here and write. Half-past 7pm now and I just wrapped up sending some late e-mails for work, trying desperately to get a handle some things which’ve been consuming me of late. This week has been a good one at work, one of those ones where I get to use my brain to dream up what-if type stuff and go figure it out. I like that kind of stuff. I find, interestingly enough, that I get my best thoughts and ideas after I’ve removed myself from work-proper and have a chance to reassess a situation mentally with the benefit of some brain downtime. For instance, I regularly plan out e-mails or courses of action while showering in the morning or brushing my teeth at night. Tonight, a doozy hit me on the drive home from work. What am I even talking about? Let’s get on with it…

This about-to-be-thirty thing is an odd beast. I’ve never been one to spend a lot of time thinking about age, my brithdays generally pass without much fanfare or rumination on my part. This year, though, I’ve been surprised how much pause I’ve taken to consider my three-decade milestone. Not a lamenting or dreadful kind of pause, just a different line of thought than normally accompanies each passing year. I suppose it’s because, although it’s really quite arbitrary, there is some recognized “milestone” a big birthdays like this. For me, it’s less about “woe is me, I’m going to be old” and more about looking back or taking stock. And, since part of “taking stock” is doing those little “how’m I doing” self-evaluations, my mind also turns to those arbitrary life “checkpoints” that everyone keeps track of in their heads. Married? Job? Kids? Check, check check.

This year, however, also seems to come with some degree of self-judging on standards which are newer to me. Things like how healthy I am, and how well I take care of myself. I haven’t really been more than superficially concerned with things of this nature before, as evidenced, I’m sure, by my portly frame and general yen for excess. Turning thirty, which, if I’m lucky, isn’t even a third of my existence, and having Keaton, I’m starting to think about things like my own longevity and its effect on those around me. I’d hate, for instance, to have to leave this sphere for nothing more than too many Double Whoppers and too few jogs round the track. Now, don’t think I’m going all reality-TV on you here or anything, words are one thing – but changing a lifestyle, that takes work y’all. I will, however, seriously consider shaping up when I hit forty – promise.

C’mon board the animal train, c’mon everyone. Learning about animals, is really lots of fun! Colors, sizes, what they say, if they’re fast or slow. Learning about animals, there’s so much to know! Toot! Toot! -Christmas with a baby.

Goodnight.

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concussed


Man the moon is big and full tonight, like it’s right up there in the sky in our backyard. Sometimes I want to sleep outside, like just on the ground in a sleeping bag or something. Not in my backyard, mind you, no that’d be dumb. I mean camping, or getting outside. Too cold now though, gonna have to wait until it’s a little warmer.

Today at lunch, Sharaun and I got caught up talking about when Keaton grows up. We were watching a TiVo’d episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos, which was showing clips of kids hurting themselves jumping their bikes off homemade ramps and landing on their asses while trying to jump curbs on skateboards. It got me thinking about when I was a kid, and how my brother and I used to pull my mom and dad outside into the front yard to watch us careen our own bikes down the sidewalk and off a ramshackle ramp we’d assembled from bits of plywood and bricks. It’s not like we were jumping over a pit of alligators or anything, just launching no more than a foot into the air for a split second, but we had our share of mishaps: ramps flattening mid-ascent, botched landings, and broken bikes – all which ended up in scrapes and bruises. All this before it was “vogue” to outfit your children in pads like linebackers, too.

As a parent now, I know there’ll be a day when Keaton wants me to watch her do a cherry drop off the high bars on the playground (that’s if schools even accept the liability of high bars anymore). The day will come when she wants me to watch her rollerskate down the driveway, or ride her bike while clapping her hands. And, as a source of validation, I’ll be expected to beam with approval and pride while stifling my fear of broken bones and skinned knees. I bet this is hard, although it must get easier as your child grows older. Sure makes me look a little differently at all the stupid stuff my parents used to watch us do when we were young though…

The bloggers-collective are slowly starting to scribe out their 2006 “best of” lists, and, as it happens, I spent a lot of time working on mine today and tonight. Today, running through the shortlist in my brain and re-listening to the albums on the iPod at work; tonight, writing up my thoughts, adding album artwork images to the post, tracking down and pasting in relevant links. It’s coming together nicely, and I think I may even be ready to post before leaving for Florida (or, if I’m facing a slow week of writer’s block). Look for it… if you’re cool… that is.

Goodnight.

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took a couple days off


Took a couple days off last week, had a couple evenings too packed with post-5pm work residuals and, more importantly, supping with friends. Lately I’ve been valuing our friends a lot, I think it has something to do with the ease at which our whole transition from childless-to-parents went with the clique. I love the little things about having a solid group of friends: hearing the unlocked front door open and wondering who’s coming in, the comfort in being able to speak casually, passing Keaton around the room, and, of course, sharing food and drink. The communal meal seem to me like something that’s been at the heart of human interaction from the beginning of time. Seriously, tho, we’ve got some great friends. Let’s go.

Wasted some time Sunday morning trying to help figure out the latest in internet mystery vogue. I first saw it over at reddit, but apparently it made it’s debut on some Russian website – where a psychiatry professor posted it as a problem for his students to solve. What is it? It’s a painting, one which the professor says contains “sure signs” that the painter has a mental illness. The challenge to the students, and, by proxy, the the internet at-large once the word got out, was to identify the signs and illness. Here’s the original version of the painting, from a Russian webboard – where the comments number into the multiple thousands. Leading theories suggest obsessive-compulsive disorder, agoraphobia, paranoia and depression. Problem is, the professor who posted it said he’d come back with the answers in a few days and has since dropped out of cyberspace. Take a look, thoughts? Anyway, I bet the thing will have been “solved” in the reddit comments by the time this post goes live anyway.

Sunday evening I made the near-final step in my CD-ripping project – tossing all the Beatles CDs I’ve verified as MP3s. It was a very hard thing for me to fill the recycling bin to the top with the fruits of my college obsession with Beatles bootleg collecting. Oh, I saved all my factory-pressed discs, as I have some very rare ones, but I pitched all the CD-R copies of albums (hundreds and hundreds) that I traded for over the course of six or so years. As I dumped the piles of discs into the bin, I saw certain ones go by that I could recall spending hours and hours on: crafting homemade artwork in Photoshop and paying money to print it on the laser color machine at Kinkos, printing and affixing cd label stickers, etc. Hard to throw it all away, but liberating in a sense too…

Updated Keaton’s pictures today, like a good dad. Check ’em out.

Goodnight folks.

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northwise by autocoach


Finally home, post 12hr drive where it was either raining or snowing the entire way. All twelve hours of driving in some kind of precipitation, our little greenhouse killer doing its part in joining the other bits of vehicular plaque clogging the holiday-weekend highway arteries of our nation… each of us fatter and slower for the turkey feast afforded us by virtue of our number one spot (as countries go) on this orb. Yeah yeah, it was a good weekend. I’m not entirely sure, though, that the drive is worth it anymore… certainly not with a little baby… it’s a long dang way – and although Keaton handles it like a pro traveler, it just takes too long. But hey, we’re home now. Let’s move on.

Despite the fact, however, that it was a great weekend – it was, as far as electronics are concerned, a complete bust. My laptop harddrive checked out, I’ve only got it running now because I smacked it just the right way and got it to work. It’ll have to be replaced tho, which will be a timesink. Then, my cellphone decided it was also tired of working, and gave up to meet the harddrive at some pub in tech-heaven. Not to mention that, ever since Sharaun dropped it into the cat’s water dish at the Halloween party, the digital camera eats through a battery in about 10min, making it nearly unusable. Finally, when I got home, my trusty had-since-college CRT monitor crapped out and I have to stretch the image so much to fill the screen that it’s hardly usable. Yes, my friends, it was a maelstrom of electronic failures… thank God the iPod’s still working.

Although I don’t have much more than the preceding readied for today, regulars may be happy to know that I did post Keaton’s Monday pictures this week – sorry for missing last week, but the digital camera issues and a general lack of pictures taken just didn’t produce a crop worthy enough to cull from. Going in weeks, the albums are now up to week thirty-seven – which makes no sense to me since Keaton won’t be nine months old until tomorrow (which is today, as you read this)… the whole weeks = months thing always messes me up. But, enough of that – here are the pictures, enjoy.

Goodnight folks – look for a more cohesive entry tomorrow, when I’m not so dead-tired and road-spent.

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football and leftovers


Despite unfavorable weather and seemingly interminable traffic, our family arrived in Oregon safe and sound after a 9hr drive that ended up being a 13hr drive. Yes, it was long, and frustrating to no end, but, in the end, it was worth it. A long weekend spent relaxing, reading, doting on the baby, drinking wine and eating. There’s small better pleasure than sitting inside a comfortably warm room while the cold and rain press outside, reading a book and nurturing a nice merlot buzz. It’s hard to believe, although glorious to be sure, that it’s only Friday, as I’ve got a lot of atrophy yet ahead of me before having to pack up the truck and head south through the snowy passes back to northern CA. Today it’s football and leftovers, tomorrow: leftovers and football – just to switch it up a bit.

Keaton has been an absolute angel since we’ve been here, having soldiered through the much-longer-than-intended drive like a champ – sleeping for about 95% of it (although I must admit I felt a bit like a bad parent forcing some sort of car-induced narcolepsy upon her). She’s been the picture of a cute granddaughter for mom and dad, keeping them entertained with giggles and smiles. Since we’re heading to Florida for Christmas, my folks did their gifting last night – heaping box after carefully-wrapped box on the table near Keaton as Sharaun and I tried to entice her into tearing them open. She tore, a little, but she mostly needed assistance to get to the chewy centers. When all the paper was ripped and piled around her, and we’d taken a few obligatory bow-on-head pictures, she ended up a nice cache of spoils. There was an awesome circus train toy which moves and sings, and several baby outfits which are the kind of cute that only miniature-people clothes can manage.

That should be enough for today I think. I wasn’t even intending to write. Hope you all had a good Thanksgiving and as nice a weekend as ours is shaping up to be.

Good afternoon.

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three days off


It’s Monday night of an abbreviated work-week. Sharaun and I are intending to hit the road early Wednesday morning (which I tend to think of as Tuesday night, since it’s the same dark that came at 7pm the previous day), sometime around 3am. The thought being that, while it’s still dark outside, Keaton might get some sleep in her carseat. I’m hoping she can sleep until 6-7am, which would at least kill a third of the long trip for her. I hate the thought of her having to be stuck in a carseat that long – but you gotta do what you gotta do I suppose. Forecast through the mountain pass on the way up is rain, and on the way back is snow. It likely goes without saying, but getting stuck in the snow again, this time with Keaton, would particularly suck. I’m hoping for the best, at least. And, being that we’ll be on vacation Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, I’m not sure how much, if any, I’ll be writing those days. Two days might be I’ll this week’ll get out of me.

Today work seemed interminable. With a good bit of the troops out for the holiday week the place felt like a ghost town. The volume of e-mails and calls and meetings was also down, making for less of the “filler” I rely on each day to get me from task to task. For me, switching focus every so often is essential to doing a thorough job on a single task. Rarely do I ever do my best work in one sitting, my real genius only comes with revision and revisiting. So, it’s good for me to take an hour meeting and break up my flow of work on a presentation – it makes me go back and start from zero, re-read and re-think and, most of the time, make things better. But, today was without those interruptions… and it was boring. When the office is abandoned like this, motivation is hard to come by.

This weekend, I spent Saturday my morning downloading and organizing music. A while back, I scored a membership to a private tracker site known for lossless live music (no, not that other private tracker I’ve mentioned before), and last night I decided to take some time and really browse the repository of FLAC-encoded shows that were available. I ended up downloading some vintage performances by Mike Bloomfield and Delaney & Bonnie (with Duane and Gregg), both of which are outstanding shows that have never seen commercial release. I’ve mentioned before how my musical leanings seem to go in phases, alternating between nouveau indie rock and good ol’ classic rock ‘n’ roll. I guess, lately, I’ve been getting back into the classic mindset. I attribute this to the recent release of a 1970 Neil Young & Crazy Horse show at the Fillmore East – which, by the way, is outstanding.

Goodnight, until whenever…

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when i was bulletproof


Work today was another one of those sprints to five o’clock. Meeting after meeting, rushing to get one thing done before it was too late to do the next one. I don’t mind so much, but I hate the fact that, when I get home, I’m often so beat down that I’d just rather collapse than do something ultimately more enjoyable like feed my daughter dinner. Tonight, though, I powered through it – and went immediately from dropping my keys to spooning pureed chicken and apples into her perfect little mouth as she bopped around and babbled. At the time, I may have wished I was splayed out on the couch instead – but I think I made the right call.

Little by little these past few weeks, I’ve been working on my “best of” list for the music of 2006. I guess I’ll let it fly sometime in December, I’m imagining posting it while in Florida for the holidays. As part of the process, I go back and listen to each album I shortlisted throughout the year, and try to write something about it while it’s on the cans. Today I wrote a little bit for one album that I liked so much, I’m going to put it here – but without listing what album it was for. I justify this because a) I’m running low on material and I liked it, and b) I figure people don’t really read all the “best of” text anyway (who wants to read some dude’s gushing over rock ‘n’ roll, anyway?):

One night back in highschool, I found myself at one of many parties in the woods. Sharaun could never accompany me to these things, so I was flying solo. At some point, an upperclassmen girl I knew fairly well sauntered over and, her face lit furtively by the flickering bonfire, whispered close that she wanted to try some of what I was smoking, but that she was with her “straight” friends and needed to be discreet.

So that’s how this girl and I, our relationship already clearly established to me, her, and apparently others as being flirty enough to raise eyebrows, found ourselves quietly slipping off into the trees to get high together. I’m convinced I could’ve made anything happen under the shelter of those trees that night, but I didn’t. We smoked, laughed, enjoying our teenage moment, and walked out together into the crowd some five minutes later.

I guess our disappearance into, and subsequent reappearance from, darkness got folks talking though – and by Monday morning at school it was said that we’d bedded in the pine needles. I had a time explaining to Sharaun, but everything worked out in the end.

Ahhh yes, those sacred years… nothing like highschool when I was bulletproof.

Oh my, the “new” Beatles record has leaked and I’m 24hrs late to the party… gotta catch up… goodnight.