Did I mention that Felix has absolutely enormous hands and feet? Ok, not enormous, but definitely they are....markedly larger than we were led to expect. It only conformed my suspicions when at his first check-up the doctor said, "Wow! He's got some big hands!" Now, if he was a scale replica of an adult, I'd say, "Whoa! Here comes Gigantor!" but he's not, he's a baby and so had baby proprtions of a different ratio than an adult. So, while he does have the baby-sized (compared to adult sized) extremities, compared to other babies he seems to have large hands and feet, which are each respectively dominated by very thick thumbs and big-toes.
There is no doubting this is my baby, but he may just be much bigger than I was and am when he grows up. I think he's going to be a very sturdy, if not large, child.
Thursday, August 31, 2006
up the ante
Ok, I have to let you all know that the guy who talks on his cell phone in the bathroom comes in a close second to people talking to me in the bathroom on the pet peeve scale. The only reason why the cellphone guy gets lower score than people directly interacting with me is because, well, he's not talking to me, he's just being a dick (no pun) to everyone who is trying to relieve themselves in peace. What do you think this bathroom is, a bus? well...I suppose it could pass for my bus, or vice versa, but anyway...
What I find amusing is that the cellphone pee-er comes in two distinct flavors: Terrorist and Hostage.
Terrorist cellphone pisser is the guy who enters the bathroom talking on his phone (and always loudly), pees, washes his hands (hopefully!) and then leaves, never breaking stride in his loud, asinine, self-important conversation. This guy is a bathroom terrorist because there's no way to ignore him. His talking loudly, like he's in his own bubble, is a passive aggressive way of trying to dominate everyone around him. He's important, his conversation is important, and he doesn't need to consider anyone on this side of the little speaker in his phone. This guy is only rumped (and actually, the talking-to-me pisser is also trumped) by the elite toilet-talking terrorist, the guy who does all of the above using his bluetooth Uhura-esque earphone. I imagine that this guy also eats dinner while he's sitting on the john at home and probably watches tv during sex, so I'm guessing he's at the top of a lot of people's lists. And of course, he does all of the above while yakking on his bluetooth cellphone.
More amusing is the cellphone-pissing-hostage. This is the guy who enters the bathroom like everyone else and starts doing his business at the urinal of his choosing. Sometime during his micturation he receives a phone call. He, being a cellphone-pisser, is not conscientious enough to mute the ringer and return the call later. He goes ahead and answers the phone. If he's lucky, he can end the call before he runs out of pee. If not, he gets trapped talking on the phone, his jones hanging out and dripping dry while he is locked in his urinal by his phone call. This guy is pitiful and annoying. Annoying because, hey, we all still have to listen to his stupid conversation (though this guy is more likely speak softer or limit his end of the conversation to single syllable answers) and maybe somebody else has to pee. He's pitiful because, well, he's unable to do more than one thing, or even focus on more than one thing at a time. I suspect that is it innate biological reflex that keeps his pee from stopping the second he answers the phone and backing up his kidneys, leaving him with a desperately painful need to finish peeing when the call is over. No, if that happened, he would quickly learn not ot answer the phone. But anyway, while annoying, I find it mildly amusing that this guy is standing there, dick in hand, phone in other hand, standing, not peeing (anymore) and talking...in public. How absurd is that? Of course, this guy is a major annoance because his phone-lock takes hold EVERYWHERE. This is the guy that made cellphones illegal while driving and who holds up the line at the grocery store. While he gets held hostage by his cellphone in whatever embarrassing or irritating situation, the rest of us get included in his conversations as collateral damage.
What I find amusing is that the cellphone pee-er comes in two distinct flavors: Terrorist and Hostage.
Terrorist cellphone pisser is the guy who enters the bathroom talking on his phone (and always loudly), pees, washes his hands (hopefully!) and then leaves, never breaking stride in his loud, asinine, self-important conversation. This guy is a bathroom terrorist because there's no way to ignore him. His talking loudly, like he's in his own bubble, is a passive aggressive way of trying to dominate everyone around him. He's important, his conversation is important, and he doesn't need to consider anyone on this side of the little speaker in his phone. This guy is only rumped (and actually, the talking-to-me pisser is also trumped) by the elite toilet-talking terrorist, the guy who does all of the above using his bluetooth Uhura-esque earphone. I imagine that this guy also eats dinner while he's sitting on the john at home and probably watches tv during sex, so I'm guessing he's at the top of a lot of people's lists. And of course, he does all of the above while yakking on his bluetooth cellphone.
More amusing is the cellphone-pissing-hostage. This is the guy who enters the bathroom like everyone else and starts doing his business at the urinal of his choosing. Sometime during his micturation he receives a phone call. He, being a cellphone-pisser, is not conscientious enough to mute the ringer and return the call later. He goes ahead and answers the phone. If he's lucky, he can end the call before he runs out of pee. If not, he gets trapped talking on the phone, his jones hanging out and dripping dry while he is locked in his urinal by his phone call. This guy is pitiful and annoying. Annoying because, hey, we all still have to listen to his stupid conversation (though this guy is more likely speak softer or limit his end of the conversation to single syllable answers) and maybe somebody else has to pee. He's pitiful because, well, he's unable to do more than one thing, or even focus on more than one thing at a time. I suspect that is it innate biological reflex that keeps his pee from stopping the second he answers the phone and backing up his kidneys, leaving him with a desperately painful need to finish peeing when the call is over. No, if that happened, he would quickly learn not ot answer the phone. But anyway, while annoying, I find it mildly amusing that this guy is standing there, dick in hand, phone in other hand, standing, not peeing (anymore) and talking...in public. How absurd is that? Of course, this guy is a major annoance because his phone-lock takes hold EVERYWHERE. This is the guy that made cellphones illegal while driving and who holds up the line at the grocery store. While he gets held hostage by his cellphone in whatever embarrassing or irritating situation, the rest of us get included in his conversations as collateral damage.
Saturday, August 26, 2006
infant troubleshooting flow for men
Baby:
START
|
|
┌--IS CRYING? > ----- NO ---- END
| |
| v
| |
| YES
^ |
| v
| |
| ROCK
└---<---┘
potty talk
You should already know that one of my biggest pet peeves is when people talk to me in the bathroom, especially while someone (myself, the other party, or both of us...or even some third person who isn't even involved in the conversation) is peeing. Who are these people who view this as prospective social time? Not I. There are several sure file ways to invoke my wrath including taking food off of my plate without permission, stepping in front of me in line for ANY reason, and talking to me while piss is in midstream.
With that said, the other day I was at the good old urinal, focusing on my own 4" x 4" section of the tiled wall, when a co-worker stepped up to an open spot, unzipped, then said, "How's it goin'?" I immediately start constructing all kinds of converstaion quelling retorts, but happen to glance over to see who is invading my private-time-in-public-space. It turns out to be a guy who I can't really get mad at. He's your proverbial geek with a heart of gold. So the attach dogs are kennelled and I thought to myself, "How do I not be a jerk in this situation? I mean, he did observer bathroom ettiquette by choosing the open urinal farthest from me instead of the one right next to me..." So I made a slight movement to pretend I was assessing my own peeing progress and said, "No problems so far!" He sort of chuckled nervously and I couldn't help but to chuckle a bit myself (of course, I was thinking I was so clever, ha ha). I thought it was funny and accomplished the feat of drawing attention to the fact that, I'm sorry, but I'm sort of committed to something else right now. And my wrath went unincurred.
With that said, the other day I was at the good old urinal, focusing on my own 4" x 4" section of the tiled wall, when a co-worker stepped up to an open spot, unzipped, then said, "How's it goin'?" I immediately start constructing all kinds of converstaion quelling retorts, but happen to glance over to see who is invading my private-time-in-public-space. It turns out to be a guy who I can't really get mad at. He's your proverbial geek with a heart of gold. So the attach dogs are kennelled and I thought to myself, "How do I not be a jerk in this situation? I mean, he did observer bathroom ettiquette by choosing the open urinal farthest from me instead of the one right next to me..." So I made a slight movement to pretend I was assessing my own peeing progress and said, "No problems so far!" He sort of chuckled nervously and I couldn't help but to chuckle a bit myself (of course, I was thinking I was so clever, ha ha). I thought it was funny and accomplished the feat of drawing attention to the fact that, I'm sorry, but I'm sort of committed to something else right now. And my wrath went unincurred.
m.i.a.
I've been in training all week, which is always a nice departure from work. It is sort of a like an all-expenses paid (except gas) work-hours vacation. So, yeah, you have ot get up early and get somewhere by a specific time, but they have bagels and doughnuts and coffee and soda, all you can eat and drink, for free (well, I'm sure they barely notice the cost of food when the class costs thousands of dollars to my employer). So, you sort of get a vacation from work AND from home, which doesn't happen all to often. Not that I need a vacation from home or work right now, just that it was nice to be able to go and get some technical learnin' that's not completely self directed. So here's the kicker...The class was taugh AT Microsoft. Yeah, I got to go to the local branch office of microsoft to learn some of their stuff. All my feelings about Micro$oft aside, it was a pretty good class that will be very useful for me in my current position, so I think my employer is going to get their money's worth out of me.
The weird (or maybe not so weird in the big picture, but weird for me) thing about this class was that Microsoft training is like being sent off ot qa deserted island. We spent all day working on computers that were completely disconnected from the grid. The only network involved was the virtual one existing on the virtual PC software we were operating inside of. Microsoft of course has their own internal network, but theres no way they let anyone from the outside on to that. My experience has always been that training places usually have their classrooms networked, but on a seperate segment that is in the DMZ. At Microsoft we got zip. Not even a guest network for me to log into with my own laptop in case I wanted to check my email. I had to go down to the Caribou Coffee in the other office tower and even there I waso nly able to get online because there was apparently a wide-open wifi networked conference room (Caribou had ATT, which requires subscription to do anything other than look at the caribou homepage).
So while I've been on vacation from work and home during the day, I've also been on vacation from the "outside world" for the most part. No email, not blogging, no browsing. I guess it helpes with attention span in the classroom if you know that your geek students are not going to be surfing ebay for action figures or Googling obscure coding examples in an attempt to trip up the instructor. But it is sort of disorienting to have whatever is on the car radio be my last free-world information stream before entering the Microsoft bubble. I may be more dependent than some folks, but seriously, if you regularly check your email (not even your work email, but your home email) at least twice a day, then you go on a net-free vacation to say, I don't know, a cabin in the woods or an igloo on a glacier or something (can they get internet in igloos yet? probably) you'll know what I'm talking about. Or, if you can't really give it up completely try this little experiment: Stop watching TV, ALL TV, for about a month. TV is such a steady stream of info that is so ingrained into our society that a lot of the time you probably don't even notice how many TVs there are around you all the time, every day. It is almost a part of the backdrop in a lot of places. Anway, if you suddenly cut out that subtle background stream, you find you start to notice it not being there but only in the back of your brain. You'll feel like you are missing something, like you are little disjointed when you try to talk to people who still are connected into the stream and are still receiving all those soundbites and opinion cues.
Ok, I'm rambling a bit. Of course, I've been in class, cut off all week, and at night I don't really have much time to dedicate to my blogging habit, or anything hobby related really. When I come home, i do my best, in whatever way I can, to relieve Andrea from Felix duty. Unfortunately, I cannot replace her, I can only try to take a little bit of the weight off of her shoulders. Well, luckily right now Felix is snoozing and Andrea is off with her brother, so i can try to catch up here. As soon as she gets home I'm going to have to tackle the house chores that have gone undone for the past few days vacuuming mostly...dog hair piles up faster than you can sweep it!). So I'm going to try to squeeze as much into this opportunity ads I can.
The weird (or maybe not so weird in the big picture, but weird for me) thing about this class was that Microsoft training is like being sent off ot qa deserted island. We spent all day working on computers that were completely disconnected from the grid. The only network involved was the virtual one existing on the virtual PC software we were operating inside of. Microsoft of course has their own internal network, but theres no way they let anyone from the outside on to that. My experience has always been that training places usually have their classrooms networked, but on a seperate segment that is in the DMZ. At Microsoft we got zip. Not even a guest network for me to log into with my own laptop in case I wanted to check my email. I had to go down to the Caribou Coffee in the other office tower and even there I waso nly able to get online because there was apparently a wide-open wifi networked conference room (Caribou had ATT, which requires subscription to do anything other than look at the caribou homepage).
So while I've been on vacation from work and home during the day, I've also been on vacation from the "outside world" for the most part. No email, not blogging, no browsing. I guess it helpes with attention span in the classroom if you know that your geek students are not going to be surfing ebay for action figures or Googling obscure coding examples in an attempt to trip up the instructor. But it is sort of disorienting to have whatever is on the car radio be my last free-world information stream before entering the Microsoft bubble. I may be more dependent than some folks, but seriously, if you regularly check your email (not even your work email, but your home email) at least twice a day, then you go on a net-free vacation to say, I don't know, a cabin in the woods or an igloo on a glacier or something (can they get internet in igloos yet? probably) you'll know what I'm talking about. Or, if you can't really give it up completely try this little experiment: Stop watching TV, ALL TV, for about a month. TV is such a steady stream of info that is so ingrained into our society that a lot of the time you probably don't even notice how many TVs there are around you all the time, every day. It is almost a part of the backdrop in a lot of places. Anway, if you suddenly cut out that subtle background stream, you find you start to notice it not being there but only in the back of your brain. You'll feel like you are missing something, like you are little disjointed when you try to talk to people who still are connected into the stream and are still receiving all those soundbites and opinion cues.
Ok, I'm rambling a bit. Of course, I've been in class, cut off all week, and at night I don't really have much time to dedicate to my blogging habit, or anything hobby related really. When I come home, i do my best, in whatever way I can, to relieve Andrea from Felix duty. Unfortunately, I cannot replace her, I can only try to take a little bit of the weight off of her shoulders. Well, luckily right now Felix is snoozing and Andrea is off with her brother, so i can try to catch up here. As soon as she gets home I'm going to have to tackle the house chores that have gone undone for the past few days vacuuming mostly...dog hair piles up faster than you can sweep it!). So I'm going to try to squeeze as much into this opportunity ads I can.
Thursday, August 17, 2006
Thursday, August 10, 2006
goodnight
Last night we had a good night. Felix continues to feed voraciously, but last night he slept well and both of us were able to get quite a bit of sleep. Andrea is experimenting with various nursing positions. Maybe after this is all over she can provide a course on "free-style breastfeeding."
A co-worker of mine gave me a book on baby sign-language as a . It sounds sorta hokey, but after reading it and talking to another co-worker who is actually using baby sign language with his 13-month-old, it seems like a really good tool to have in the baby-tool-box.
This morning at my team meeting one of the agenda items was "Surprise for Will." Unfortunately it was not a surprise promotion and pay increase :( but, as I could easily guess, was a bunch of baby gifts from my team. If any of you somehow have discovered my blog, thanks a bunch! They gave Felix some onsies (tagless, even!) and some socks, and some toys (which make sounds, but quiet sounds, yay!), some bibs, crib sheets, and some outfits of various sizes. Go team! Thanks a lot.
That makes me wonder...now that my life has real crib sheets, where did the term "crib sheet" come from? Cribbage?
A co-worker of mine gave me a book on baby sign-language as a . It sounds sorta hokey, but after reading it and talking to another co-worker who is actually using baby sign language with his 13-month-old, it seems like a really good tool to have in the baby-tool-box.
This morning at my team meeting one of the agenda items was "Surprise for Will." Unfortunately it was not a surprise promotion and pay increase :( but, as I could easily guess, was a bunch of baby gifts from my team. If any of you somehow have discovered my blog, thanks a bunch! They gave Felix some onsies (tagless, even!) and some socks, and some toys (which make sounds, but quiet sounds, yay!), some bibs, crib sheets, and some outfits of various sizes. Go team! Thanks a lot.
That makes me wonder...now that my life has real crib sheets, where did the term "crib sheet" come from? Cribbage?
Wednesday, August 09, 2006
its been three weeks since i looked at you
Felix passed the 3-week-old mark this morning. He rung in the new week with an all-nighter, too. He's been feeding like mad, running Andrea ragged, and he has the gas like nobody's business. All night he slept in 15-30 minute spurts punctuated with 30-40 minute episodes of crying, groaning, and straining. It looks like he's shitting a metric ton but each time i changed his diaper (I think about six times?) all he had done was pee, and a little yellow/green skidmark here or there. Not the diaper filling loads I was expecting based on the noises coming out of both ends of him all night. Luckily, at some point around 3 he decided he didn't want to feed any more and would focus completely on gas, so Andrea was able to get some sleep while I took care of him, trying to sleep during the 15 minute checks when he slept, though he makes a lot of noise when he sleep too, so frequently I would wake up just to check and make sure he was not waking up. I think he spent about 45 minutes sleeping in my armpit, head on my shoulder. He likes to sleep at an angle rather than flat on his back like he is in the crib. If he's not really really tired, he won't sleep in the crib.
Also, last night Andrea swears she killed a cockroach in our bathroom. She left the remains for me to investigate and it did look roachesque, but I know I have killed several critters that were definitely NOT roaches. It's an old house and we have our share of spiders and centipedes, but not so many as to consider it an infestation. So, from the remains that she left on the wall I couldn't be 100% on the identification, but she swears it was a roach. Anyway, that amount of doubt was enough to keep me awake for a couple hours alone...unfortunately while Felix actually was sleeping. I'm thinnking the roach was just a single visitor from across the alley (possibly from the apartment building or the apartment building dumpster) but you know, there is always the fear that when there is one, there are many. Something primal and instinctual about such critters comes into play. I don't think we have roaches or else we would have seen them where there was food, hopefully. I'm thinking this was just a lost little roach that Andrea mercifully killed before it could betray us to its brethren.
As Andrea defiantly proclaimed last night, I will not have roaches in my house! That is one thing I will not put up with. Of course, my immediate thoughts are to the cost of exterminators or somehow roach-proofing the house while she's talking about firebombing the aparment building. I suppose those are both means to the same end...
Also, last night Andrea swears she killed a cockroach in our bathroom. She left the remains for me to investigate and it did look roachesque, but I know I have killed several critters that were definitely NOT roaches. It's an old house and we have our share of spiders and centipedes, but not so many as to consider it an infestation. So, from the remains that she left on the wall I couldn't be 100% on the identification, but she swears it was a roach. Anyway, that amount of doubt was enough to keep me awake for a couple hours alone...unfortunately while Felix actually was sleeping. I'm thinnking the roach was just a single visitor from across the alley (possibly from the apartment building or the apartment building dumpster) but you know, there is always the fear that when there is one, there are many. Something primal and instinctual about such critters comes into play. I don't think we have roaches or else we would have seen them where there was food, hopefully. I'm thinking this was just a lost little roach that Andrea mercifully killed before it could betray us to its brethren.
As Andrea defiantly proclaimed last night, I will not have roaches in my house! That is one thing I will not put up with. Of course, my immediate thoughts are to the cost of exterminators or somehow roach-proofing the house while she's talking about firebombing the aparment building. I suppose those are both means to the same end...
Monday, August 07, 2006
back to work
I worked from home last Thursday and, well, working from home sucks. I mean, it is nice to be able to when necessary, but I really feel like I'm operating in a very diminished capacity when working from home. The reason being that I need a certain amount of isolation to be effective. And I don't mean that I would work at home better if i was just locked in a quiet closet and left alone. For the most part Andrea and Felix tried to pretend that I wasn't home, but every time I heard him start crying I wanted to go help. No, what I really mean by isolation is that I need to be surrounded by my work environment to be able to be effective. I need to be able to do several things at once, and at home I just cannot do that. Instead of focusing on deployments, and documentation, and development, and dealiing with clients, etc, like i do when I'm at work, at home I focus on deployments, and the dog, and the baby, and lunch, and dishes, and laundry...
I need the firewall of email and telephone to limit my ability to focus on home when I'm at work. So I went to work on Friday and was able to do more than just the bare minimum.
Today Felix has his 2 week checkup, though he was 2 weeks old last wednesday. He is almost 3 weeks old now, and in a little more than a week he will be 1 month old! It does seem to fly by. Though I'm sure I will miss his current state (I dunno, maybe not) I also can't wait to see him develop. He's already pretty far ahead of the game physically, but I want to see him as he becomes more aware mentally/intellectually.
The novelty of the new family member has worn off for Ash and he has gone back to his regular routine of "Take me out, take me out, take me out!" every 30 minutes. Perhaps he is now switched from being more considerate (he routinely waited until late afternoon before doing the pee-pee dance in the past two weeks) to more competetive (he now does the pee-pee dance about every 30 to 60 minutes, which is bogus because I know he can go for HOURS without having to pee).
Sigh. It aggrivates Andrea to no end to have to deal with a super hungry baby (seriously, he does a minimum of 2 cluster feedings a day) AND now a super needy dog. I hope it is just a phase for Ash. I guess Ash won't feel like there is balance until Felix becomes a possible source of butt-scratches.
I need the firewall of email and telephone to limit my ability to focus on home when I'm at work. So I went to work on Friday and was able to do more than just the bare minimum.
Today Felix has his 2 week checkup, though he was 2 weeks old last wednesday. He is almost 3 weeks old now, and in a little more than a week he will be 1 month old! It does seem to fly by. Though I'm sure I will miss his current state (I dunno, maybe not) I also can't wait to see him develop. He's already pretty far ahead of the game physically, but I want to see him as he becomes more aware mentally/intellectually.
The novelty of the new family member has worn off for Ash and he has gone back to his regular routine of "Take me out, take me out, take me out!" every 30 minutes. Perhaps he is now switched from being more considerate (he routinely waited until late afternoon before doing the pee-pee dance in the past two weeks) to more competetive (he now does the pee-pee dance about every 30 to 60 minutes, which is bogus because I know he can go for HOURS without having to pee).
Sigh. It aggrivates Andrea to no end to have to deal with a super hungry baby (seriously, he does a minimum of 2 cluster feedings a day) AND now a super needy dog. I hope it is just a phase for Ash. I guess Ash won't feel like there is balance until Felix becomes a possible source of butt-scratches.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)