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after all, i’m dad

I guess the weekend seemed long.  We got a lot done… both social and around the homestead.  For that I’m thankful.

Saturday Keaton and I put up the Christmas lights outside.  We went all-out this year, using three separate circuits and illuminating the trees and bushes.  Well, I guess by today’s “all-out” standards for Christmas lights we’re still bush league – but it’s considerably more than we typically do.  Keaton, as usual, was a trooper and stayed outside with me the whole time.  I really do love the way she likes to help me “work,” it’s super endearing and makes me feel all big-time.  A week or so ago I overheard her telling a visiting friend, “You know, my dad built this whole house!”  How awesome is her faith in dad?  To her, why couldn’t I have single-handedly built the house?  After all, I’m dad.

It’s one of those night where I’m the king of the castle.  On my own with both kids while Sharaun’s off with girlfriends.  In fact, I had the kids “on my own” quite a bit this weekend, for one reason or another.  It’s nice, sometimes, to get a small taste of what Sharaun’s kid-centric days might be like.  I don’t know if I’m cut out for being Mr. Mom on a full-time basis, but I do like to tip my own hat to my reflection when I have a successful daddy-daycare weekend and am still able to get things done.  Sharaun would laugh, I bet, hearing how much of a triumph her everydays are to  me.

So anyway I’ve got the night to myself.  I’ve been in a strange music mood today, starting with a morning of blues from a Chess Records retrospective and then onto Tim Buckley in the afternoon.  Then, for whatever reason, I felt like some cool jams in the evening so I put on Todd Rundgren’s one-man show of Something/Anything? to give me those early 70s vibes.  What?  You’ve never heard Something/Anything?, oh man… get yourself to school you Philistine!  But I’m not kidding.  In real life you should hear this record before you die, especially if you weren’t around to hear it when it hit the scene in 1972.  Go ahead, Grooveshark has most of the tracks – even if they are out of the right running order.

I guess that’s it for tonight.  Goodnight.

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fraud!

Sometime last week our sole credit card was compromised, and was used to make illicit purchases via the internet.  Despite being what I’d call an extremely “heavy” credit card user, this is the first time this has happened to me.  Luckily the credit card companies seem to be super on top of this type of fraud these days, and they noticed the aberrant charges immediately and notified me.

I got the call, in fact, while my phone was rolling through the x-ray machine at PDX this past Monday.  Post-security, after donning my clothes and wiping away the excess petroleum jelly, I checked my voicemail and called the fraud detection department.  The nice woman who answered the phone noted that they had detected some recent charges on my account which they considered “suspicious,” and asked if she could review them with me to verify we’d made the charges.  Now, I can only assume that the credit card company uses some fancy statistic-crunching learning algorithm to analyze my purchases and come up with what is “normal” spending for us.  When any charges that appear as outliers to these patters appear, they must be flagged as “atypical” and alert the fraud crew.  I find this awesome.

In my case, the crooks had also fit a pattern on their own by first trying to “authorize” a small charge with some online retailer.  Not actually spend anything, but allocate dollars to check if the card was functional.  After they got the thumbs-up from the authorized pre-charge, they spent successively larger amounts at some online health food store – and when totaled had dumped near $1,000 at that same place before the fraud folks preemptively shut down the card and called me.  In fact, earlier that morning I’d tried to use the card to purchase our rail tickets to the airport and received an error message at the automated kiosk.  However, from experience I knew those kiosks are broken about 35% of the time and I’d just used a different card and chalked it up to the crappiness of the card reader or machine.  In reality, our card had already been disabled – and the charge really had been declined.

The agent walked me through the charges: A $12 authorization only from Online Florist X?  I wasn’t familiar with the charge, but Sharaun had left for the restroom and I supposed there was an outside chance she’d ordered flowers for someone.  I asked to take a “maybe” on that one and hear what was next.  $240 at healthfood.net?  Followed by another $475 and then an immediate $390, both also at healthfood.net?  Now, I know me, and I know I’m not going to ever spend close to a grand at healthfood.net.  Chilidogs.net, maybe; pizzarolls.com, perhaps; healthfood.net – that junk is clear fraud.  I told the fraud lady as much and she’d heard all she needed.  She then pleasantly surprised me by telling me they’d killed the cards and that we should have brand new ones overnighted to us that day.

In the end it was a really painless happening.  I know it’s nothing like the frustration one might experience with a true or more widespread identity theft, but considering how “violating” it could be it really was a non-event.  Good on the card companies for being on top of it, I suppose.  I wonder what their annualized fraud “expected losses” are?

Goodnight.

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as into it as i am cynical about it

Happy Wednesday internet.

I’m sitting here in the living room with this laptop on my lap.  Sharaun’s watching Glee but I’m not.  See, I’ve actually got a pair of headphones on and I’m listening to music.  Yes, this my be the definition of dysfunctional – but Picthfork’s review of Kanye’s new record came out this week and they gave it a perfect 10.0.  I saw it tonight and simply had to listen to the album again to see if, perhaps, I’ve been missing something.  Liking rap is such an uncharacteristic thing for me, I’m almost conflicted when I realize something is good (this is one of my musical weaknesses, like my knowledge of the 1950s or jazz).  I’ll figure it out; dig deep and decide if this is good, bad, or just OK.  A perfect ten?

Today at work I sat through the first day of a three-day intensive training.  We’re sequestered, no contact with work proper.  No e-mail, no cellphone, incommunicado.  This class is supposed to “strengthen” me.  For the first two hours I hated it.  Bloated Utopian concepts delivered in clichéd buzzwords; idealistic tripe requiring a suspension of reality to even discuss; supposed “shifts in thinking” which everyone knows would be buried under waves of reality when they meet the true corporate culture.  I was turned off and pessimistic after the first five minutes of this pep-talk crap.  After lunch I gave things another chance, figuring I had two and a half days left.  Maybe it’s because the afternoon was more rubber meeting road, or maybe it was all about my preconceptions – but I enjoyed things a lot more.  I don’t feel any stronger, though.

We took one of those pseudo-psychology self-defining tests, ala Myers-Briggs.  I tend to love those things, even if they reek of the kind of “they nailed me!” one-size-fits-all “revelations” common to horoscopes and other “well duh” self-help materials.  In the end it spit out five “top themes” for my strengths.  They use made-up corporate words like “ideation” and “empathy.”  It’s such a narcissistic exercise.  Me and all the other managers, reveling in our own strengths, basking in the glow of our own skills, patting ourselves on the back and giving each other under-the-table handjobs in kind.  I can’t believe how good I am!  How well I do these five things!  I’m the maestro of communication; I’m the the high-poobah of woo; I’m a triple black belt in “intellection.”

I’m almost as into it as I am cynical about it.

Goodnight.

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moving

It’s 8 o’clock and Keaton and I are watching an episode of Chip & Dale’s Rescue Rangers.  Yes, that show from when we were kids.  I torrented the whole thing.  Been doing a lot of that, mainly nostalgia but also in response to how incredibly terrible most of the cartoons are today (yes, this coming from an adult – and one who won’t watch anything from Japan or with roots in a trading card game on principle).  She likes cartoons, so it’s an easy way to please us both.

At work I exist in a cubicle.  All day long I work in this little space about twice as big as the water closet in our master bathroom.  I never minded all that much, it’s been that way for ten years now.  Last week, however, while we were in Oregon, our site “decompressed.”  This means that our tiny cubes were expanded into bigger cubes.  I got to see my new decompressed cube for the first time today, and I was impressed.  No longer is my monitor facing directly out into the aisle, no longer does my chair risk hitting the back wall when I push-off from the keyboard, no more do I have to look into the rearview mirror on my monitor to see if someone’s lurking (yes, I really have a rearview mirror on my monitor for this purpose).

Before the decompression, I took an opportunity to “downsize” while packing up my stuff.  Got rid of a ton of crap I’ve collected over the years and ended up with three little boxes of stuff I took to the new cube.  I unpacked those today during a conference call and tried to make the place a little more hospitable.  But with all the new wall space it still looked sparse. That’s when I remembered a cardboard tube in our garage.  In that tube are all my old posters from highschool.  Beatles, Tolkien, Zeppelin, etc.  Now, I’m a little too grown up to pull out most of these… (and in fact don’t really know why I’ve saved them) but I did dig through to find the Beatles’ White Album portraits poster… because I have no shame hanging that.

So I’m the old dude with a Beatles poster in his cube.

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whatever it is we do on a regular basis

A nice long week in Oregon, away from the hustle and bustle of whatever it is we do on a “regular basis.”

We had a great Thanksgiving.  Spent some much-needed time with family.  Grammy and Grandpa watched Cohen one afternoon while Sharaun and I took Keaton to see the new Disney movie Tangled (which, by the way, I truly enjoyed), and then watched both kids another evening so Sharaun and I could have a nice dinner together.  We needed some time off as a couple I think, I it just reminded me that we have to make time for that more often.  We grabbed some Thai food and bummed around the mall for an hour or so… the kind of “old people” date we’ve come to accept as what we now enjoy more than $12 cocktails, barstools, and thumping bass.  As we trod the aisles of the Hot Topic, lamenting the capitalistic misappropriation of our youth, we happily agreed that we are now “parents” and are fine with it.  Old-people dates: best enjoyed tepid.

I thought today about how the year is already almost over.  Over!  I sometimes don’t understand how time moves so quickly.  Next week I have a mandatory all-day training that lasts three days.  That’ll kill the week.  Two weeks after that and we’re off to Florida to ring in the new year for another couple weeks.  I’ll be a blur, like it always is, and then it’ll be next year and we’ll be racing to Keaton’s birthday and all the other markers that we measure.  I sometimes think I “conceptualize” the passing of time in the wrong ways.  It almost feels like I think about time “in between” these milestones, and sometimes miss what’s happening day-to-day in between.  I’m always thinking about what happened “between” this thing and that thing… I want to start thinking about how long each day itself is – what we can do with the time that’s right on top of us.

Goodnight.

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cold turkey

It’s 18° in Oregon and I’ve been cozied-up on the couch at my folks’ place since Monday night.

I had to work yesterday and today, and since a good portion of folks are already on vacation I found myself busier than I expected for what was supposed to be a couple of “slow” holiday workdays.  I found myself feeling guilty, which is wrong, but I had this notion that these would be “easy” working-from-home days and I’d be spending time with family moreso than turning the millstone.  My fault really, if I’d really wanted a vacation I could’ve burned the days instead of trying to cheat them out.  Maybe today will be better.  Maybe it’ll teach me the rest of my lesson.

We got in Monday night around 7pm after a little more than an hour of flight delay.  None of us were groped, scanned, or otherwise molested by the TSA – security was as it’s always been and altogether uneventful.  My mom had a late dinner prepared and waiting for us, which was much appreciated.  Keaton, being excited to finally be at Grammy & Grandpa’s place, was granted a “stay up late” night and got to play until around 10pm.  At about 9:30pm she peeked out the front door and announced that it was “snowing hard.”  Already in her pajamas, she ran to get her shoes and jacket and we both went out into the driveway (me in shorts, an undershirt, and slippers) to make prints in the newly fallen snow.  She really likes that less-than-an-inch of snow.

I’ve got my sights set on Thursday for some turkey, beer, and football.  Brother’s coming over with his wife and the new niece we’ve yet to meet and I’m anticipating an incredibly lazy day spent reading, continually nibbling, and hanging out.

Goodnight.