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not some mistake


Oh come on. You really think I’m going to take that for a mistake?

You knew all too well what time I was going to be here to pick you up this morning, I told you yesterday before we left. I said it to the minute, there was no lack of understanding. I told you I’d knock on the door at 7:30am, expected you’d be ready to go. Instead you holler for me to “come in.”

Stepping through and clicking the door shut behind me, your apartment presses me towards its belly. You are nowhere to be seen, but I can hear you, you’re off in the bathroom. And, as I walk into the…

Oh… oh no way… nuh-uh… are you being for real right now?

Look, this was no accident, you left this ironing board out for my sake, didn’t you? Laden with your unmentionables… some piled some folded, all drawing my attention like a full solar eclipse at noon. There is no way this was a simple miss on your part, this had to be deliberate.

For God’s sake your underclothes… am I reading too much into this? Maybe you were just in the middle of laundry… nothing so odd about that… maybe you’re one of those chicks who could care less… maybe I’m the prude. But, you’re so chaste, so wholesome… I just can’t wrestle this idea. Eventually, I’ll settle on some hybrid theory that satisfies both my impressions of your promiscuity and my all-Penthouse-Forum-all-the-time thought patterns: You did leave them out knowingly, and for the most part innocently, yet still aware of the typical male reaction.

There, that squares it. Nothing overtly porno, nothing rock-stupid. See, I generally handle these things pretty well, and I’m a lot more comfortable as I ease onto the couch to wait for you. Your echoed shout sounds from the bathroom, “I’ll be right out.” Oh, and here you come now, I’m glad you…

Oh… oh no way… nuh-uh… are you being for real right now?

Leading the way come your long legs, no socks, no shoes, no anything. As my eyes sweep the scene: You, hair wet and curly-tangled down your back, no makeup at all on your face, and a simple mauve towel clutched to you as covering, wrapped tight around you making you the most mouth-watering terrycloth burrito I’ve ever laid eyes on. “I’m running a bit late,” you say, smiling as ordinarily as ever as you glide past me, snatching parts and pieces from the aforementioned folded pile on the aforementioned ironing board.

Oh, you planned this.

Dressed in a towel, the requisite building-blocks of your wardrobe conveniently left in the common room where you know I’ll be waiting. Your fresh-from-the-shower wind as you swish tail back to the bedroom blows at me like a perfumed hurricane, spilling torrents of yours-if-you-want-it promiscuity. This was not an accident, and you’re certainly far from the virginal choirgirl you sell yourself as when we’re in your lair.

I act as normal as possible, I’m a stone, a carved image of a man, unfeeling and unreactive. Just like I expected you to be naked under a towel when I stopped in to pick you up, like it’s normal as Hell. Nothing in the world more mundane than your long legs, like speckled porcelain, bared to high-thigh. Yup, regular everyday stuff that.

But y’know… let not man put asunder… and everything.

Goodnight.

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ch-ch-ch-ch-changes


Hi Tuesday. Back to work today, fresh of my latest trip on ship-sick. Felt OK, the busyness of the day working to keep my mind from dwelling on how I felt, letting me instead be washed away in the stress and decisions of my daily eight-hour farce. I suppose that means I have to go back tomorrow, so I will. Today, I went a little mad near the end there (sorry about breaking the no-cussing streak, blame Art). Let’s do this.

♫ Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes… ♫
♫ Oh, look out you rock ‘n rollers… ♫

Just within the past few days, Keaton has begun stuttering. At first, I thought this was utterly cute. She’s always done some amount of stammering or word-repetition at the beginning of her phrases, and I’d always chalked that up to her knowing she wanted to form a long string of words, but needing some extra time to process what she wanted to say and buying it through repetition. This recent stuff though, this is different. All of the sudden at my folks’ place in Oregon last week, she started getting really hung up on her ‘W’ lead-words. “Where’d the doggy go daddy?” turned into, Wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-where’d the doggy go daddy?” With the ‘W’ sound repeated an almost comical amount of times. Actually, with the ‘W’ sound repeated a downright comical amount of times.

“W-w-w-w-w-wan-wan-wan-w-w-w-wan-wanna use the potty” began to replace the previously smooth and fluid “Wanna use the potty.” Again, the amount of repetition on the lead word was so prominent I figured she must be doing it on purpose as a reaction to the giggles we initially reacted with.

Within just the past forty-eight hours, though, she’s branched out from just ‘W’ words and now hangs up on all sorts of words. She draws out initial words too, like, “Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii wanna bite daddy’s cheese,” or “Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmy babydoll is sleeping.” Still, I saw no reason for concern, and figured it was some sort of normal speech pattern per development. Sharaun, however, was a little more prudent, deciding she didn’t like the new Keaton-speech and doing some online research. Here’s what the sage internet has to say about toddler stuttering:

Many children go through a developmental stage of speech disfluency that’s often confused with true stuttering. This normal disfluency does disappear over time without need for treatment.

Children with true stuttering tend to repeat syllables four or more times (a-a-a-a-as opposed to once or twice for normal disfluency). They mmmmmay also occasionally prolong sounds.

Hmmm… sounds like our Keaton…

Children with stuttering show signs of reacting to their stuttering — blinking the eyes, looking to the side, raising the pitch of the voice.

Oh yeah, blinking eyes, screwing up her face, seemingly looking into space for the words: check, check, and check. Hmmm….

True stuttering is frequent — at least 3 percent of the child’s speech. While normal disfluency is especially noticeable when the child is tired, anxious, or excited, true stuttering is noticeable most of the time.

Well, as long as the internet is still an infallible source of information and a viable method of self-diagnosis, I’m convinced: Our baby may have a legitimate stuttering problem. The doctor on the internet said we should alert our pediatrician, so that’s what we’ll do.

Still, I secretly think it’s cute, and am not really too concerned. Call me naive.

♫ Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes… ♫

Tomorrow I’m dropping Sharaun and Keaton off at the airport bright and early so they can catch a flight to Florida to see Keaton’s brand new cousin, baby Hobson (blog-style congratulations to Aunt Breck and Uncle Doug). After that, I’ll be on my own for five whole days. Cast back into the shadowy realm of bachelorhood (well, minus all the wild stripper-pole parties I used to throw in my true bachelor past, ahem). On my own for meals, clean boxers, sexual gratification (nothing much new there), bedtimes and waketimes, and whether or not I have to don knickers on the weekend. My barnburning plans include the cleaning jag I’ve outlined here before, and completely eschewing the television in favor of the iPod. In some ways I’m looking forward to the time, but in reality I think I’ll start to miss my girls right-quick.

♫ Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes… ♫

Has anyone ever heard an old fable, or story, or Mother Goose or… something… about a man, or king, or maybe it was a pauper, who woke up one morning to a solid-gold reflection of himself in the mirror? Yeah, I figured not, because I just made that up. But today was my solid-gold day. I was untouchable. I walked on water. I touched souls. The heart-hardened wept open-mouthed as babes for tit.

Below please find the actual photo that sits unblinkingly on my sawmill’s badge. Note the lethargic smile, crooked nose, and fucking hair. It was taken some eight years ago now, and I’ve worn it around my neck five days a week for those long years like a sinner’s millstone. While this is, in what I hope would be anyone’s opinion and not just my own, a spectacularly awful picture of me, it’s constantly displayed on my chest in miniature contrast to my real face just a foot above it.

I like to think I see something better than that in the mirror each morning, and usually I do (changing that pitiful post-college hairstyle really opened up new avenues for me, how on earth did I ever pull tail with that gel-back?). In actuality it’s likely not that far off the mark. They got the underlying concept right.

I hate that picture. Hate.

So imagine my apoplectic joy when, this morning, smiling back at me in that reflective glass, I saw instead an Adonis of an alpha-male, chiseled face sculpted from shining polished gold. I took avenue-wide strides all the way to work, stepping from cloud to cloud and smiling down on creation from my appointed place in the Heavens. I called lightnings with my fingers, distilled the entirety of human consciousness into my hands and cast it to the wind as worthless. I was amazing.

When I got home at 6pm, the chump from the badge was back, only he was eight years older and balder. I berated him, tore him down layer by putrid layer and tried to rebuild him again in all the gilt perfection of twelve hours prior. Resisting my efforts, he slithered back into decline, rusting in real-time, biodegrading on a hook in the backyard.

It’s not over.

♫ Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes… ♫
♫ Pretty soon you’re gonna get a little older… ♫

To those of you who were lucky today and didn’t even know it – Goodnight and sweet dreams.

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topic-jumping


Hi internet friends (and real life friends interacting with me through the internet at the moment). Feeling a bit on the mend today, I managed to bang out a few hundred words on the computer in between sleeping and going through the sweating/freezing cycles. Kind of a patchy entry today, with an iPod-only bit that I wrote split out and posted randomly yesterday between then and now (scroll down if you think you might be interested). Splitting that out is part of my new plan to optimize some parts of content for search results, I’ll talk more about that sometime later if I remember. Let’s do this.

I’ve told you guys here before about Sharaun’s recent involvement in this “teen moms” program. She volunteers one night a week to get a bunch of women together to cook dinner for young teen mothers. During the dinner, the moms get to drop their kids off with provided childcare, and then get a chance to visit with the older women – where they presumably teach them basic life-management skills like balancing a checkbook or getting whites their whitest (or, for you feminists, snaking a drain, changing the oil, or negotiating a hostile takeover). As I commented last time around, I see this as quite an admirable donation of time and effort, and I’m glad she’s the kind of person who wants to help like that (Lord knows it’s not my bag, at least not as a full-time thing).

Anyway, she told me a “funny” story about her last session. Apparently, two new teen moms showed up for the evening, and she was directing them to where they drop off the babies prior to dinner. I guess some of the young mothers sometimes bring nothing but their kids, meaning no bottles, no diapers, no nothing. Just a baby and themselves. These girls, however, had both brought diaper bags and left them with the nursery workers, mentioning that there were snacks inside for the two and three year-old kids should they get hungry. When Sharaun heard that, she said she gave some silent applause in her head for a couple younger moms who were thinking ahead and prepared, unlike some of the others. Turns out though, that she later learned that the “snacks” the moms brought were a bag of Cheetos and a baby bottle full of soda. Yeah, that’s right. Cheetos and soda. Oh dear lord, it almost made me wanna cry. Hopefully this support group reviews the FDA pyramid at some point…

Gonna be a topic-jumper tonight, here we go.

I hate the unpredictability of male urination. What happens 95% of the time when I pee isn’t necessarily what will happen the other 5% at all. Most of the time everything goes OK. But, there’s the element of the unknown that you’re always up against. Will something, seen or unseen, somehow deflect your flow? If so, will your compensation fail when that same something, seen or unseen, disappears mid-act, returning your flow to it’s normal trajectory? God forbid that some something, again seen or again unseen, actually bifurcates your flow into multiple sub-flows, each one as unmanageable as the other and no one safe place to aim the distribution. Women seem to have this a lot easier, sitting down, apparatus entirely contained… Maybe it’s the Lord’s way of making up for the whole childbearing thing. Wouldn’t want to have to do that…

And now I’m done. But…

Before I go, I wanted to pass along a couple links I stumbled on while infirmed on the sickbed in our living room. First, remember my old fascination with the “pizza bomber” case? Well, I’d heard there was some break and that the whole thing would be tied up nice and tight soon, but this MSNBC article whet my appetite for those closing details. I’m sure someone like 48 Hours or Dateline has their episode dedicated to this bizarre crime all written and shot but for the ending. C’mon March. Next, and last, this list of humorous children’s science fair projects had Sharaun and I laughing today. Funny stuff.

Well, I’m spent. Time to hit the hay and hope for better feelings in the morning, because I’ve got to go to work one way or another. Goodnight.

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limiting tracks-per-artist in playlists


A middle-blog before my typical midnight post, dedicated to some tech content. Move along if that’s not your thing.

If you’ve read some of my banal iPod-related ramblings here before, you’ll know that I’m a big fan of using iTunes/iPod Smart Playlists to configure interesting musical selections. One of my favorite Smart Playlists I have on the ‘Pod is the “Unheard” list. A simple playlist that grabs all items where the “playcount” equals zero, and theoretically eases the task of making sure I’ve heard all those gems lurking in the back corners of my disk. The only problem with the playlist, and, in fact, with any shuffle-based playlist, is that it gets skewed heavy towards artists that are better represented on the iPod. Now look, I don’t need a lesson in statistics here, OK? I realize that, if out of 500 tracks on my iPod, 250 are the Grateful Dead, I’m going to see the Dead pop up pretty often in a true shuffle (as would be the case with my randomly-picked “unheard” list).

Problem is, I actually want to have every single Dead Dick’s Picks album on my iPod, just on the off chance that I can impress some Deadhead by saying “You bet I do” when they ask, passing the bong, “Hey man, do you have that ’75 Berkely gig, you know, the one where Donna Jean couldn’t hit the high notes in ‘Rain and Snow?'” And, I want each of the twenty-nine takes it took The Beatles to get “Hold Me Tight” right, not to mention all fifteen live versions of “Over the Hills and Far Away” Zeppelin performed on their ’73 US tour. I really do want to have all that on my iPod, all the time. I don’t want, however, the thousands and thousands of songs that pepper my iPod as a result of that fanaticism to “overpower” all the other stuff when shuffling. Here’s where you say, “Too bad Dave, you can’t have it both ways.”

Oh but I can! Here’s how I managed to limit the number of tracks per artist in a shuffled playlist.

First, make a smart playlist of all your music minus the overpopulated artists. I did this based on the catch-all criteria of track-time being greater than zero, and then filtered out the Grateful Dead, Beatles, and Led Zeppelin (my three most heavily populated artists). You could just as easily do it basing it off the iPod’s default “Music” playlist (which contains your entire library). However you do it, what you should end up with is a playlist containing your entire collection minus your most heavily represented artists.

Next, make a separate playlist for each of your overpopulated artists, limiting the number of songs to a reasonable number (I chose one hundred) chosen at random. Do this by using the “artist is” criteria along with the “limit to” filter. In my case, this means I have three playlists: Beatles, Zeppelin, and the Dead, each limited to one-hundred songs chosen at random from the thousands available for each artist.

Finally, create a new playlist that pulls music from the playlists you just made in the previous steps (you can use “in playlist” as a criteria for a playlist). You’ll need to make sure that you set the match criteria to “any” instead of “all” on that last one, or you’ll get a playlist with zero items. This newest playlist is essentially your entire collection, including your overpopulated artists, but limiting them to one-hundred (or a number of your choosing) tracks each. And, from now forward, instead of basing all your shuffle-themed playlists around the iPod’s default “Music” playlist, you can base them off of your new limited-representation list. Voila!

Postscript: If you do create sub-lists such as my one-hundred item random ones described above, you may notice that, over time, these playlists are not magically “refreshed” with new random tunes via iTunes. Despite the more-than-somewhat misleading name, “live updating” does not mean the playlist will choose a new batch of random songs, it means only that, when you add more songs to the iPod/iTunes that fit the smart playlist criteria, they’ll be accounted for and captured. If you’re looking to get some form of “auto refreshing” for your random tune selection (as I was, makes things more interesting), you’ll need to add some further elimination criteria to the playlist. I chose to add a criteria that “last played” is “not within the last” one week. This way, once a song is filtered into the playlist and you’ve heard it recently, it’s eliminated from the playlist and replaced with another (per the “limit to XX tracks” tickbox). Anyway, hope that helps.

You can likely think of all sorts of other limited-shuffle tricks you can do with playlist-combining, which makes using Smart Playlists a fun way to experience your music in different ways. Too bad Apple hasn’t added a way to “hide” certain Smart Playlists from showing on the iPod. It would be neat to be able to mask out the ones that are only “supporting” lists as building blocks to a final one (like the hundred-track ones required as interim input to create the final list above). Maybe with a new firmware, eh?

See ya!

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margarita fever-dreams


Sorry so long between entries folks, lots has happened. Keaton can do long division, Sharaun now detests untidiness, and I’m now 100% bald. Nah… I’m just screwin’ with ya. Not much happened at all: A trip back from Oregon and a day spend on the couch in misery yesterday. Why? I’m sick.

Being sick, the Monday I had planned was ruined. No waking up early to get Springtime fertilizer and spreading it on the lawn, no pulling weeds, no time in the sun. Instead I spent the whole day laid up on the couch alternating between freezing and boiling with a pounding headache and more snot than brains in my head. I started feeling bad when I woke up Sunday in Oregon, our last day there, it was worse yesterday, and I’m cautiously optimistic I’m on the mend today.

Yesterday, in a brief flicker of feeling-OK, I decided to amass the tax documents and do our 2007 taxes. The past few years, I’ve developed a strategy: Use the online H&R Block tool to rip through the process as quickly as humanly possible, trying hard to not be anal or stressed about it. Then, when I’m done, I close the whole tool and wait one day. Going back that next day, I do a very cursory review… just an eyeball to see if things look semi-right, no number-matching or data-checking or anything wise like that. Then, I press “file.” Simple as that. Taxes are a mystery to me anyway, I always think I understand what’s going to happen each year, and each year I get surprised. I guess I just don’t have a head for numbers when it comes to finance. Hell, I guess I just plain don’t have a head for numbers, period. But, we ended up getting some money back this year – which is a good thing in one way, and a bad thing in another because I’d rather not loan the government my dosh. Either way, we’re done for this year.

Speaking of windfall, we’ve managed to pre-spend some of that tax money already by way of booking tickets for an April vacation in Mexico. It’s the first time I’ve ever had to actually buy airfare for Keaton, and it hurt just as much as I thought it would. We’ll be spending a full week somewhere south of Cancun, splitting the cost of a two-sided “lockout” timeshare thing with a coworker of mine and his family. The price was decent, and the accommodations are brand new and look fantastic. Plus, since we’ll both be bringing our broods along, we plan to work out an alternating babysitting scheme that gives the husband-and-wife duets some time away from kid-duty. I’m just excited about the carnitas, swim-up bar, and sunshine. Bring it on.

And, on a funny logistically-related note, the US government says that Keaton needs to have a passport to travel. I used epassportphoto.com to whip up some pictures of her for the application, and Sharaun and I will have to both tote her down to the post office so she can give the requisite fingerprints, pint of blood, hair sample, and get her “not a terrorist” tattoo. It’s a pain in the butt, is what I’m attempting to sarcastically say, to have to “pose” my two-year-old daughter for a passport photo and whatnot. What’s she gonna do anyway, score a key and smuggle it back in her baby dolls? Doubtful.

Anyway, I just wrote this entry to get something up here for Tuesday, as I couldn’t stand to go nearly a week without a post. I have the best of intentions to also have something ready to auto-post at midnight tonight as Wednesday’s entry, so, we’ll see about that. Until then, see ya.

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a nice way to start the day


As the doors of the elevator slid closed this morning at work, entombing me momentarily with four strangers, I had a head-snapping moment: I got a waft of the large blob of a woman who had taken position next to me.

Globular and short, she appeared to be experiencing much higher G-forces than the other passengers and I, for she seemed to be smooshed down into herself, her neck all but disappeared and her legs compressed to stubs. As I pondered the dimensional aberration she must have unwittingly stepped into, wondering just how much more gravity weighted her down inside that anomalous hole in the astrophysical norms of the universe, her scent brutalized my nose.

Now, here, I’m sure you’re expecting me to make a crack on this poor woman’s odor as somehow related to her size – not so, though, dear readers. The scent that tickled my nose was not objectionable in the least. In fact, she stank ripe and sweet of some familiar perfume – the perfume of a girl I used to think I was in love with. It was such an olfactory revelation to smell that scent again, a tug on the lapels from times past, flooding thoughts of the present with old memories instead. So powerful is that tie in my psyche that I actually had to take another look at the woman beside me. Nope; still large and largely unattractive; bummer. And anyway, the lumbering cables hoisted us to where we were going and we parted ways.

Was a nice way to start the day.

Transition.

Today we traveled.

After two hours of delay in California, including a repaired hydraulic line, boarding and a taxi out, finding out the repair introduced air in the line and trashed the pump, and a taxi back in to move everyone to a new plane, we’re finally in the air and on our way to Oregon. Keaton held up well considering the long wait and lack of nap, her spirits buoyed by an ad-hoc dinner of chicken nuggets and a lot of walking around in the terminal. She’s restless now in the empty seat between Sharaun and I, but at least she’s behaving. At this point, I just want to be there (Keaton and Sharaun too, I’m sure.)

Back in California, the warm sunny weather is making me shamefully aware of the sad state of my yard. Winter weeds, fed by constant rains, have completely overrun my planter strips and any other patch of bare ground capable of sprouting seed. My grass is coming out of its cold weather hibernation and brownly awaits some Spring fertilizer, and my downed fence is still ghetto-propped with 2x4s. Plus, that the 10′ x 10′ patch in my front yard that’s gone unplanted since I had to drive machinery over it while building our retaining wall is really starting to get to me. I’ve decided, then, that I’m going to spend some money and fix it all. Gotta get things in shape for summer… Beer. Beef. Summer.

Goodnight from the North friends, think of me tomorrow in your sunshine as I’ll be mired in the rainy gray of Oregon.

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my geriatric symphony


(I think I’ve stolen that image to accompany a blog before… right?)

Monday night and it’s a bit of a jostled beehive here as we’re realizing that we have to leave for Oregon tomorrow and have little time to get ready. With morning obligations, packing has to happen tonight. But… we’re not packing, neither of us. Sharaun’s working on the computer in the kitchen and I’m sitting here on the laptop. By my estimates then, we’ll be up late scrambling to get things in order. It’s a longer visit this time, five days in all staying at my folks’ place. Work at the local sawmill promises to be busy, with two meetings of import Wednesday and Thursday. I know things will go OK, because I plan to a fault… but I still obsess… I still obsess.

I have only one topic for the night, and barely got that one down to boot. Feel lucky you’re reading anything at all, OK? OK.

Tonight, unfolding myself from my nightly position on the couch (leaning sideways into the upholstered arm that holds the laptop from which I suckle my nightly diet of bits and bytes, legs tucked up into myself and knees pulled close to my chest), I arose from my gargoyled perch to a loud crack! from beneath the flesh, blood, and atrophied muscle of my shoulder. My bones. The snap, crackle, and pop of old age set into my joints. While I’m ignorant of the physiology of the phenomenon, I do know that it’s as good as a warning shot fired off my bow by USS Death. Sometimes at work, I’ll turn my head sharply and hear the same auditory harbinger of my pending demise. And I’ve even noticed that, as my foot makes its small pushes on the gas pedal, my knee will often pop in protest of the minuscule motion. It’s like God is communicating to me in some secret language of clicks and pops, telling me I’m neglecting myself… urging me with with creaking bones to get out and run a mile or jump rope.

I’m listening, Lord. I’ve tried Morse Code, I’ve tried that clicky language they speak in the Gods Must Be Crazy movies, I’ve even tried dolphin – but I can’t seem to decipher the message. Maybe I should play the lottery? Eat more greens? File for medical leave and drop off the grid as an experiment to see how long a company will pay an employee who’s MIA? Perhaps I only have a piece of the decoder, and I’ll need to augment my popping joints with the growls and grumbles of my aging gut or the scraping sound my hairbrush makes on my bare scalp in the mornings to reveal the true message. A full sonic testament to old age, my geriatric symphony played right through the instrument of my corpus.

I offer you a wet old-man kiss through well-used lips as a heartfelt “goodnight.” Wish us luck in our travels, and I’ll type to you next from Oregon.