walkabout

It's funny. I signed up for the "all-in-one" package for this thing, which included the hotel that they had special booking in that is "attached" to the convention center. HA! I think the convention center and the Marriott share a parking garage or maybe one exterior wall. Anyway, the convention center is LOOOONG and all of the events are happening way down at the other end, which means I (and many of my geeky brethren) make the hike between the Marriott and the convention center D section frequently. I was worried that being out here with all my meals expensed would land me on the fat wagon, but with all this walking, and the fact that I have almost no other source of food unless I go out and buy munchies or snacks or something, I don't think I need to worry about that.

Well, I need to decide whether I get breakfast here at the hotel or check out what they are doing at the convention center.

going back to cali

So I'm now in beautiful, overcast, colder than Minneapolis, San Diego, CA. I'm all checked into my room and I've registered at the conbvention center (and received a cheap feeling laptop bag full of "swag"). OK. Now I'm off to an orientation session to try and get the most out of this summit.

Ta.

mr. dad

I think maybe its is a generational thing, or maybe its a cultural thing, or maybe...who knows. But I find it funny that in the 80's a movie like Mr. Mom was, you know, a perfectly valid topic for comedy. And I'm not even talking about the PC movement or anything, I'm just talking about what I feel is a change in the overall assumptions about childrearing and who does what. I would like to think that in this day and age, the way that Andrea and I divide the work is not uncommon. Consider that in large part, girls grow up into women with the expectation that they will be working, having careers. And I don't mean that until now girls didn't have that assumption. So when it comes to kids, both parents are in the same boat. The only real difference is that for the first year the baby has biological needs that only the mother can fill (and of course, the mother is biologically impacted by the 9 months prior to birth and the several months afterwards), but other than that, there's no built-in assumptions that the mother does a,b,c and the father does d. Nope. These days, at least in my house, it goes mom and dad to a,b,c,d. In some cases, mom or dad has do do more b or d because of the current dynamics, economic forces, etc...but if all things are equal, the split is pretty close to 50-50.

These days, Mr. Mom is sort of a myth, and if he exists out there, I feel sorry for his family. Mr. Mom should be Mr. Dad.

mr. dad

I think maybe its is a generational thing, or maybe its a cultural thing, or maybe...who knows. But I find it funny that in the 80's a movie like Mr. Mom was, you know, a perfectly valid topic for comedy. And I'm not even talking about the PC movement or anything, I'm just talking about what I feel is a change in the overall assumptions about childrearing and who does what. I would like to think that in this day and age, the way that Andrea and I divide the work is not uncommon. Consider that in large part, girls grow up into women with the expectation that they will be working, having careers. And I don't mean that until now girls didn't have that assumption. So when it comes to kids, both parents are in the same boat. The only real difference is that for the first year the baby has biological needs that only the mother can fill (and of course, the mother is biologically impacted by the 9 months prior to birth and the several months afterwards), but other than that, there's no built-in assumptions that the mother does a,b,c and the father does d. Nope. These days, at least in my house, it goes mom and dad to a,b,c,d. In some cases, mom or dad has do do more b or d because of the current dynamics, economic forces, etc...but if all things are equal, the split is pretty close to 50-50.

These days, Mr. Mom is sort of a myth, and if he exists out there, I feel sorry for his family. Mr. Mom should be Mr. Dad.

Gaaah!

I never seem to find time to write here, especially be cause there is so much to write about.
The rundown:

Felix now crawls, pulls himself to standing on furniture and pants legs, can do a lap around the first floor in his walker at subsonic speeds, eats solid food, feeds himself "crackers", and maybe this week will start sleeping through the night again. He's gotten over the hump of daylight savings time change, though I don't feel that I have yet. He is a "good eater" on most days and a good pooper on the following days. I can tell that he's excited about the prospect of using the toilet, but it seems like simply a novelty to him right now.

I got promoted to Systems Engineer in January. I must have mentioned that before. Hell, I haven't read my own blog in who knows how long so I don't even know what the last thing I wrote about was.

I'm going to San Diego next week for a Microsoft conference. That's neat.

I can not wait for warm weather because the gas bill is absolutely killing me. Of course, by the time cold weather starts up again I'll probably have just finished paying off this winter's gas bill. Good grief. You'd think that with the raises and promotions I'd be doing OK but the exponential rise in heating between November and March just completely yanked the rug out from under us, financially. I mean, seriously, it would almost make more sense for us to rent a studio apartment that has utilities included for the winter months and just shut off the heat and electricity in the house. Seriously. Anyway...enough about probably the most stressful thing in my life right now. As a rule, "there's always something" to knock the wind out of our sails. Well, I just keep saying to myself, "Just make it through winter, make it through winter...". Provided I am able to use that plan where they average your gas bill out over the year...I don't think we can do another winter like this.

We've been putting a lot of time into A's new portfolio website. I think it's pretty nice and I've gotten to learn a lot of little things that I dodn't know about, like how I can write javascript and use space-age technologies like "ajax". heh.

I think I learned from my dad that the sure way to get to work on your hobbies, or to at least do stuff that you consider to be fun is to make it something that the wife is asking for. You can spend an evening fiddling with websites and learning script languages if she requests your help on making a website. You can buy that new table saw if she asks you to build her a bookshelf...

...
..agg, and here i am coming back to this post like a day and a half later...

I/O

Sometimes it feels like I'm living in binary. At work on any given day I'm either swamped with work or bored. On any given day I'm either happy or crappy.

alive

Yeah, I've been a little lax in the bloggering. I'm alive, Andrea and Felix are mostly recovered from their bouts of cold, and life is sort of back to normal.

I'm busy as all get out at work, Andrea's super busy at home taking care of Felix and working on keeping the vestiges of her career alive until she can revert back to full-time focus on it, and Felix is, of course, super busy learning and developing, and being an all-around genius baby. He cruises around in his walker, fowards and backwards, and he's loving being able to stand by holding on the sides of his crib or pack-n-play. When placed on the floor, he can slither forwards but currently he only has reverse gear when crawling. He's eating solids pretty muchy every day, and a wide range from rice cereal, pureed veggies, and now pureed lamb, which seems boring and gross at first (think of a watery pate) but after the first spoonful he goes absolutely nuts for it. And now I know where the really really bad smelling poop comes from. He now has almost regular mini adult turds. GREAT.

We interviewed babysitters over the past two nights and had some superstar applicants, all of whom we plan to use. Oddly enough, one of them was a girl I went to highschool with (she was one year behind me). In sort of happy/sad news, 3 out of 4 babysitters seem to be very successful and on track to be way more successful than either Andrea or myself feel right now (they were all grad students in medicine or Law, etc...).

But hey, whats important is now we have a stable of stars we can call on to take some of the heat off of us in case we want to go out or Andrea just needs a rest, and luckily none of them are demanding the $$$ that our last round of "Nanny" ads got us. This time we just said "Looking for occasional babysitters, great for college student" and thus got responses from all of these uber-high-quality grad students. sigh.