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and when at last i find you


Thursday night as I write, and in the battle of Dave vs. Dave’s Job, Dave won handily. I took the to-do list by the horns and walked it around the arena in disgrace.

Ever since we got the nursery’s rocker (I still have trouble referring to it as a “glider,” although that’s surely what it is moreso than a rocker) fixed up with the help of Erik & Kristi – I head into that room daily to just sit and think on the thing. Mostly, I try to imagine myself holding a baby whilst “gliding,” or watching a baby sleep through the cribrails. I just sit there in that pink room and pretend. Won’t have to pretend for much longer I suppose, but it’s some sort of experiment or internal bet I’ve got going with myself: that no matter how much I rock there, trying to imagine she’s already here, it’ll be nothing like the days when I’m sitting there and she is actually here. My money’s on me not being able to imagine it accurately, not being able to peg the feelings having never experienced it. If you can’t tell, I’m hotly anticipating this one… and the incessant baby-babble is likely to continue for a while. What a puss.

In other baby news (who’d’ve thunk), I think I chosen the song I’d like to be her 1st song. The ride home from l’hopital song. Beatles? But of course, could it be anything else? The track, coincidentally enough from my favorite Beatles LP, “I Will.” I’ve always thought of the song as romantic, girl-focused, whatever. But, when it came up on shuffle the other day, I realized it’s not necessarily limited to the love where one heterosexual wants to bone another heterosexual, it’s a kind of ambiguous love that could, in fact, be taken as referring to family. Plus, it’s a gorgeous soft song, perfectly short and quiet for a sleeping newborn – and more importantly, a newborn girl. A boy might get something edgier, but this song is just right for someone coming home to a new pink bedroom. Check it out, in all it’s DMCA-violating glory, here.

I just don’t have the will to write more, at least I had a full week. Peace out.

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it’s no good, don’t bother


I debated on using the baby-in-mirror thematic Gimp today, or saving it for a big splash on Friday – since I had two designs to choose from. Ultimately, I think I made the right decision… as it looks pretty awesome to me right now. Anyway, bringing it back… today was one loooong day. Had a manager-moot at the local sushi joint, which went well and was full of HR’s-not-watching dirty-talk. Even though dinner was good, the 15hr day was a bit much. Glad to be home.

Looks like I’m not the only one who’s not been completely taken in by the all-powerful Arctic Monkeys hypemonsters, as Stylus seems less than exuberant (Muzzle of Bees highlighted the relevant portions of the review well in this post). Buzz-mongering aside, I do have to admit that I’m sitting her giving the album another chance (although I delete “I Bet You Look Good On the Dancefloor” from the playlist, as it’s just been beaten too far into my head to hear it again). But seriously, why is this album being compared to the Beatles?

Also in muzak, I think I mentioned that Sharaun had purchased us Coldplay tickets for my birthday a while back – and the day is nearly upon us. I’ve never been Coldplay’s #1 fan, but I’m actually pretty excited about seeing them live. And… I guess, since it’s somewhat related… I swear, I full 50% of the time I plug my iPod into the PC iTunes won’t pick it up. Oh, it shows fine in Windows as an attached drive, I can browse through it without issue. Even the iPod Updater sees it, but iTunes, for whatever reason, refuses to recognize the device. Not only that, but I promise that tags I specifically remember going in and cleaning up (Derek & the Dominos vs. Derek and the Dominos) routinely switch back. Stupid, stupid iTunes… why can’t they make it any better than the crap it is?

At least it’s Thursday… and that’s almost Friday… and that’s almost the weekend. ‘Nite.

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stake your names

Can he keep it going?
Another day down at work, and a long one looming tomorrow. In at 5:30am for a meeting with folks in Germany, out after a dinner with some other managers after 5pm. Not looking forward to waking up at the butt-crack to banter with Hans and Franz – the Germans are notoriously rough on us engineers, they have impeccable standards and know how to ask pointed questions.

The other night I happened across David Blaine’s Street Magic special on TLC. I remember the first time I saw it years ago, and all the love of magic that over-the-top “illusionists” like David Copperfield had sucked from me over the years with their cheesy music and light shows came flooding back to me. Seeing real people react to close-up magic is so much more engaging than seeing Mr. Copperfield walk through the Great Wall of China from 15 different soft-focused camera angles. I swear I chuckle with glee when I see him pull off the more amazing of his non-trick-deck sleights. Anyone can use a stripper, svengali, or rough/smooth deck… but even with the assistance of trick decks he’s got a charisma that makes even the most hackneyed tricks feel fresh. It’s the personal, close-up, stuff that’s the best, even the Balducci levitation played up throughout the entire show pales in comparison to the nickel-filled coffee cup anyway. Altho, when he does it for the cluster of hearing-impaired kids, I swear I tear up at the happiness on their faces.

Remember my beard? I shaved it one night last week. My beard is gone.

My mom and Sharaun’s mom both sent packages in the mail for Lil’ Chino. I thought it was funny that they both used the notes accompanying these pre-birth packages to attempt to establish their “grandmother names.” My mom stuck her claim on “Grammy,” while Sharaun’s mom opted for “Gami.”

Dropped my iPod for the first time today, seems to be OK… but it gave me a scare seeing how utterly dependant I’ve become on its awesomeness.

I always knew I wasn’t attractive enough to pull the kind of game I consistently do.

Tuesday night and that means baby-class at l’hopital. Tonight they gave all the preggers little stress balls to squish in their hands while they worked through the fake contractions and associated breathing. I lost it when the instructor kept gently intoning: “Now… keep squeezing your balls,” and, “Continue to squeeze your balls, in and out.” There’s a lot of unintentional humor in the class.

The other night I spilled super-glue on the cat. I had to cut out a huge chunk of her fur because I was worried she’d lick it, ingest it, and die. Now she has chunky bald-spots on her front shoulder.

Added some new pictures of the nursery progress, almost done now.

OK, seriously… what is up with this ginormous buzz surrounding the Arctic Monkeys’ debut record? I have the album, and I am, thus far, underwhelmed. There are some catchy hooks… but I don’t see what’s supposed to be so amazing about it. However, I have decided to give it a few more open-eared spins just to check my (mostly) infallible instant sense of good vs. bad.

Goodnight my friends.

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shooting sharks

An ongiong parody.
Near 10pm Monday evening, sitting in the “computer room” for a change, since Sharaun’s holed up in here working on progress reports for her class or something. She can’t concentrate with music, so I’ve got the iPod on shuffle in the “blues” genre – really been getting off on listening to blues standards lately, maybe it’s the weather. Still need to do the dishes and put some coffee in the pot for the morning… too late already. I guess today’s thing is a hodgepodge of little one-off paragraphs that didn’t fit anywhere else. Oh, and you may notice the larger-than-average post-accompanying pictures of late, just roll with it, it won’t be forever – I’m having fun.

Even though some may say it’s too early to call, I think we may have a frontrunner for media-overdose of 2006: the trapped miner. 2003 it was shark attacks, 2004 was attractive white girls going missing (extra bonus if they were pregnant), hurricanes ruled 2005, and it’s looking like ’06 may shape up to be a cave-in frenzy. If only we could get some attractive, pregnant white woman trapped in a caved-in mine, with rescuers unable to reach her due to a massive hurricane which has picked up sharks from the ocean and is raining them over the West Virginian countryside… CNN’s head would asplode. Really, I just wrote that whole paragraph because I pictured swirling clouds “shooting out” hungry sharks and cracked up at a vision of them hurtling towards earth, gaping razor-mouth first. Hahaha. Shooting sharks.

Do you know that nowhere on all my DirecTV channels is there any instance of Gilligan’s Island? Are you for real? We have 300 some-odd channels, each with 24hrs of programming, and not a single one can show an hour a week of a classic like Gilligan’s Island? What the heck am I paying for if I can’t even watch Gilligan’s Island?

Before I leave, I wanted to share a little thing that happened to me a few weeks ago. I wrote about it then (post 611, this is 621), but binned it for the next God entry instead of pushing it through. Anyway, I basically cut and pasted it out of that work-in-progress God entry here: Friday night I had some beer. I was driving home afterward (buzzed driving is drunk driving), listening to Sufjan’s Seven Swans. The song “The Transfiguration” has always been a favorite or mine, and this particular night I was extra struck by its religious imagery. At this point in the old entry, I quoted the lyrics in full. Rather than do that here, I just wanted to link to it so you can hear for yourself. It’s a great tune (if you like the trademark super-super-super gay Sufjan sound), so don’t let the God-talk scare you off.

OK whatever goodnight.

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t-minus one month and counting

FetusWatch 2006, Day 1
Some may think a month out is perhaps too soon to start my regular baby coverage, not me – I’m gonna do this in true media-blitz fashion. And, keeping with that blitziness, coverage will approach a fever pitch as the denouement approaches. Plus, I figured, I made the fancy news-style banner (thanks Inkscape!), I might as well kick off the feature. I’m not saying we’ll be all single-topic now, but you can expect the baby-talk to increase.

At the request of the to-be-hitched Ben and Suzy, Sharaun and I rambled up to some sawdust-burg set deep in the old-gold Northern Californian foothills Saturday evening. The place they’ve chosen to nup’ at has some “promotional” deal where the couple-to-be can come up and stay and drink for free, and, what’s more, they’re encouraged to bring friends. Not being ones to pass up an offer of such caliber, we gladly accepted and hit the road. It was a nice night, filled, for me at least, with wine and beer and some bad-judgement cigarettes I bought from the center console of some girl’s Ford… really, she had two-inch white heels on and sold me a pack of cigarettes out of her truck. Had I not switched to water around 1am, things could’ve been much worse – it was a swirly, headachey sleep as it was. It was a great night though, haven’t done that much unbridled imbibing in a while.

And, in iPod news, I spent some time this weekend importing album artwork into my library using the iTunes Art Importer, which works really well, if slow. Every time that little picture of the album comes up with a song, I feel a smile spread across my face. This thing, this “iPod,” was invented solely for me; I’ve been waiting for it since I was 12 and didn’t even know it – how I lived this long without it, I have no idea. I’ve also been slowly wading through the library and making sure the genre tags for all the tracks are correct. I never cared about tags that much before, but with the ability to shuffle within or listen to a particular genre – it’s become more important. Want a grunge mix? Blues, maybe soul? Fire it up.

No more writing. Goodnight.

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back to work

Mountains of junk filling my house.
Wednesday night; working… at home… on work stuff. Management is hard. Although, I can totally see how, from the outside looking in, it would appear cushy and lazy. There’s not a lot of concrete results to be had by a manager, rather the sum of the concrete results of those they manage. So, management is hard. I’m really trying to get back into the caring-about-work phase, despite Lil’ Chino’s looming arrival. I did, however, finally communicate that I’m not bending to the tremendous pressure, being placed on me by my management, to do some traveling in mid-March. Only two weeks from the projected due-date, and I’d be gone for a week. Sharaun, predictably, puked all over the idea – and my initial attempts to back out were met with more pressure. However, today I just laid it bare and said “no.” Really, it doesn’t make sense: My first baby, two weeks old, and I leave my just-gave-birth wife alone to care for her? No, sorry, not gonna do it – the world of work won’t stop turning if I’m not up in front of the customer.

You may have noticed the apparent lack of focus last week that caused me to slip and miss two consecutive week-ending days. Oh, and yesterday too. It’s true, I’ve been cheating on the evening blogging routine with a number of things: running, iPod fiddling, and, God forbid, work. Yeah, I’ve picked up that old torch of working during the evenings again – things are really getting hot and heavy, and my “duck it all until the baby comes” strategy is clearly flawed. So, I chose to react, to step up and try and kick ass in the little time I have left. It may sound lame to refer to what I do as “kicking ass,” as there’s not much that sitting getting fatter in front of a monitor and winning a fight have in common – but in my cubicle-dominant world, that’s how we do it. Y’know, like tax bitches do six 1040s in one day – that’s kicking some tax-ass. Me, answering 100 e-mails and attending five meetings – that’s kicking some what-I-do-ass.

In preparing the baby’s room, it struck me last night how “modernized” the process is these days: We got our rocker off Craigslist, our custom-painted letters spelling K-E-A-T-O-N off Ebay, ordered the bedding on the internet, and manage our gift registry in cyberspace also. I swear, Lil’ Chino’s gonna come out watching the latest episode of Diggnation on her PSP (OK, that sounds super-relevant now, but won’t make a damn but of sense in a year). Speaking of “preparing” for the baby… getting a baby means an absolute explosion of “stuff.” We’ve got all kinds of stuff, piled all over the house. I swear, we have enough to fill, like… a whole other room, a baby’s room… even.

Downloaded an album by an outfit called I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness the other night, on name alone. Turns out, they are pretty dang good. Kinda melancholy and a little bit same-sounding throughout, but I like the plodding feel of the songs a lot. Also in music, I found this recent post over at stereogum hilarious – I don’t know quite why, but it really epitomizes a common feeling amongst the greedy hipsters who covet “good” bands. Oh, and, even if this Coachella 2006 poster was a fake – it seems the rumors about the Pumpkins getting together to gig this summer may indeed be true. Being that I was completely infatuated with the Pumpkins once upon a time, I’d love to go seem ’em again for old times sake.

Goodnight.

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that’s a big little hole

C'mon band, you can do it...
Wanna bet me that I’m not sitting at the computer at Midnight on Monday listening to Depeche Mode’s classic, Black Celebration? Go ahead, bet me, you’ll surely lose. Wait… midnight Monday is 12am Tuesday, not 12am Sunday, right? Sometimes I think I should know more things. But, now it’s Tuesday night, and Tuesday night is baby class. Tonight we watched the live birth video. I think it scared the shit out of Sharaun. The woman on the tape was doing it without drugs, and was pretty vocal about the pain. There were plenty of “I can’t do this”-es and wailing moans. It’s pretty real when you actually see a woman laboring through it – I think I’d be scared too… when they zoomed in on that little head crowning… man that little hole gets big…

Honestly, people… effing work is getting on my nerves. I could seriously, seriously, care less about it right now. Sure, flip back to yesterday to read more of the same, and the week before that, and likely again before this week’s out. I think I just want this baby to be here. I can’t even explain how often I wonder what she’s going to look like, what kind of Sharaun/Me combination she’ll be. Will she have Sharaun’s flat nose, or my big bubly one? My lack of chin, or Sharaun’s little round one? Will she be tall, short, chubby, have blue eyes, blond hair? Will she beat the doctors’ predictions and come out with a wiener and scrot? I just want to see her, hold her. It’s actually frustrating as hell… having to wait this last month, it’s like one long Christmas Eve when you’re seven years old and have petitioned Santa for months for the Ewok Village. You can almost feel yourself playing with the Ewoks, moving them around the deck strung up under the canopy of trees; almost see the Speeder Bikes whiz by. That’s what it’s like waiting for you, Keaton. This last month is my Christmas Eve and you’re my Ewok Village.

I love this contest over at Gorilla vs. Bear, where the author asks readers to name their top three “most anticipated” albums of 2006. What a great idea, and it got me thinking. Apparently, I’m not unlike most GvB readers, since my list lines up pretty well with what others are saying: 1) The Arcade Fire, 2) Radiohead, 3) Built to Spill. Yeah, #3 is less anticipated than the 1st two, which actually I’m salivating over already – but it’s still plenty anticipated. The Arcade Fire have so much to live up to, I honestly wonder if they can pull it off. Sophomore albums always end up under a microscope… and the one pointed at the Fire’s effort is gonna be Hubble caliber. Good luck my Canuck heartthrobs, good luck.

A short entry, but an entry nonetheless. Goodnight folks.