Wha???

Hey, I still have a blog! WTF? Wonder if it still works... heh heh heh.

Crime stories

Yeah, so I got mugged. Robbed at gun "point". I put scare quotes around "point" because, luckily, the gun was not pointed at me, just shown to me. But it was scary. Apparently, despite any macho fantasies one may have had previously, my brain was ready very quick to react as soon as it recognized the weapon. Wallet dropped, and feet engaged. Unfortunately, my eyes were not quite as with the program. I think I shut my eyes but my body went into action to escape. So I ran head first, or tripped into, or maybe I got hit, I don't know. I like to believe the "tripped while running" story, but anyway, I hit a short sign and gashed my head open during my escape.

blogless

between facebook and twitter, I'm finding no room to really blog. Or maybe its because those avenues are so much better at being instantly accessible...

I have the intent of using el blog for longer, more thought out things, but as you can see...I don't think so much these days!

so it would seem.
or maybe I just think too fast.

Rain

It actually didn't rain yesterday. This situation has been rectified but the steady "light" downpour today, and if the rumors are true, tomorrow also.

Picked up dad at the airport. I spent as much time on various subways and trains as dad spent in the air. So now he's here, we've eaten some lunch, and he's going to finally try and get some sleep while I do our last load of laundry, finish packing, make other preparations.

I hear the snoring (no cpap) so I guess that means he's sleeping already.

Comeback kiddo

They arrived healthy and happy (and 20 minutes early!). Felix was once again the model airplane passenger for his age group and below. They should give some sort of frequently flier bonus points for that or something. Anyway, they got there safe and sound, went grocery shopping, and went to Gramoms and Poppas house. Felix gets on fabulously with his cousin Colin who is one or two years older than him. Its good to have cousins close to your age. Makes family gatherings more fun, I think.

I am in the midst of chaos. I have unpacked everything from its rightful place so that it can be put back away but into boxes instead of into closets and drawers. Andrea did lots before she left, but there's still lots of nitty and gritty to go. Tids and bits, as they say. Come up to the point where I have to guage, "Is it too early to pack this away yet? Mightn't I need some of that in the next few days?" But then its hard to not pack absolutely everything and live like squatters amid the boxes when you consider the type of schedule we have set up.

Ah...the chaos. Well planned chaos. Wish I was on the relaxing end like Andrea and Felix. Sure enough, I'll get there, sure enough. So it goes.

d-week

So here it is. A and Felix fly off tomorrow. In a week or two we will be back in the lower-upper-mid-center of the country. Seems fairly spatially accurate. Anyway, we won't be east coasters anymore, though it's hard to really feel like you are on the coast when you are constantly surrounded by buildings and people. No nice sandy shore lines (yes, we made it out to Jones Beach once and Coney Island, but living in Brooklyn does NOT come with that "island" feel).

Anyway, days are strictly numbered. Midwest, here we come...back. In a way is with the taste of defeat, but in others it is with the taste of victory. So it goes. So it goes.

blogette

just a quick post: it seems incredible that the move is coming up so quickly. It went from months to weeks in what seems like no time at all. I guess this is the way of things. Sort of the same for any big event like a wedding, home purchase, or birth. You get ready for a long time and then suddenly, bam, the moment is upon you. That's sort of how it feels right now.

Modern convenience

I cannot WAIT to have a dishwasher, clothes washer, and dryer...not to mention a laundry room, real kitchen, and non-wood paneled bathroom (or other rooms, either).

mouthes of babes

During dinner Felix climbed into my lap. Andrea and I had finished and Felix was still toying with his dinner. He pulled his plate over in front of us and was fiddling with his fork. Suddenly, he looks back and up at me and lifts his plastic utensil and says, "I'm going to fork you up!"

Andrea and I could not hold back the laughter. If he was from New York it would have been something else perfectly.

Moved to Seattle?

So, since April 1 we have had 1 whole day of sunshine. Every other single day has been either partly cloudy, overcast, or rainy, with the majority of the days being rainy. I recall last year there being some rain in the spring, but nothing like this. It's starting to feel an awful lot like we've been transported to Seattle, minus all the greenery, and plus (I expect) about 9000 times the amount of dogshit on the sidewalks. I am only speculating on this last point because I imagine Seattlites to be wholly more conscientious about picking up after their dogs. No basis for that. I've only been there once, the weather was great, and I did not encounter any dog doo (and I walked everywhere on that trip, except for one brief and harrowing car ride from the airport).

So, yeah, been gray and cold and rainy (actually snowed yesterday). And I might add, it really sucks. So, not to be a gloomy gus, but it has been nothing but gloomy here, on top of everything else that goes on in this borough. It is coming up on a very active time of year, however, and it would be nice to be feeling all warm and sunshiny. I mean, seriously, with the amount of things we have up in the air, you'd think we were a family of sky-diving jugglers. Sigh.

Our family fortune cookie would read, "Major change is coming, but not in the weather. Button up!"

Tomorrow is Easter Sunday, or just Easter. My mother asked me if Felix was going to get an "Easter Bunny Basket" which I guess is her way of trying to unreligiousify the idea of Easter in my mind. But the answer is yes, we are going to set him up with a little Easter basket with a couple treats. The odd thing is, since Easter is not nearly as commercial a holiday, it has not had much traction in our secular, non-TV influenced day to day living. You don't even get a day off from work, so there has been almost no reason for us to even think about Easter. But right now it would be nice to have a excuse to have a little change in the weekend, have a little extra treat like an Easter basket. Mom asked if Felix had been talking about Easter, to which I replied, "Uh...no. He doesn't know anything about it. We haven't been talking about it at all...hasn't really been on our radar." So, not only will Easter be a nice treat, it will also be mostly a surprise. And Felix likes surprises if they are good ones that involve little treats. So we'll outfit a little basket with some fake grass and some goodies. I suppose I might tell him some sort of story about the easter bunny or the origins of the holiday. Trying to explain the Jesus stuff would be way too complicated, so I'll probably stick to the historic rites of spring type stuff. We might color Easter eggs, too. Who knows. I'm sure Felix would love that.

One nice thing about celebrating Easter is that even in its fully celebrated form, it is not a majorly commercial holiday (beyond the confectioner market). There's no pressure to drop a lot of money on Easter presents or even, really, to have some fancy meal. A nice meal is good if you are having a big gathering, or if you want to just get out for a treat, but in general...Easter basket with some goodies, a couply little trinketty toys and plastic eggs, an easter egg hunt, and voila! Low impact holiday! Of course, you just have to deal with some places being closed. We don't usually go anywhere on Sundays except for the park and whatever shopping chores are leftover from Saturday.

At least the forecast for tomorrow is sunny, even though it will be cold. So there is that. Weather forecasts here seem to be more accurate than we used to see in the midwest. Not sure why. Maybe being on a island gives us more predictable forces than the anything goes climatology of the middle west. And not sure why it would even be considered the midwest since it is really just the middle. Minnesota should be called the upper middle, not the midwest, since it is, technically, at the topside of the middle, not the middle of the left side. And then the middle east isn't even in this hemisphere...wtf is that about? The middle west is Ohio to Nebraska and the middle east is Libya to Iran. Maybe that makes more sense...does being the midwest really mean that America's heartland is actually the very center of western civilization? Sounds nice, but not likely. Then you have to get into the semantic argument about whether "middle" equals "center" and if "center" refers to geographical, cultural, ideological, etc... Of course, New York and its New Yorkers would immediately take issue with that since everyone here knows that NYC is in fact the center of EVERYTHING. I mean, really, where would our economic crisis be without New York and Wall Street? Flounding, looking for its center...or maybe not even existing. Which is optimistic. i do believe that given the chance, American masters of finance would have come up with the same crap regardless of where they were based.

I guess I should read more history. I know Japan had their big bust and never fully recovered. But did anyone have a "Great Depression" like we did? And did they recover? Or is that what happened to all those hundreds of countries and societies whose names have faded into the dust. They couldn't have all disappeared due to being conquered by their neighbors. I bet thats what happened to the Incas and Mayans. High finance. Sub-prime mortgages and complex securitized financial instruments. Human sacrifice, basically.

Sigh.
Enough for one laundry-day.

Guts

as in, mine have been wiggly jiggly for the past couple days. See, we've been looking at life a lot lately and trying to make some big decisions. When you are/have a family it seems like there are no little decisions, but some decisions are a lot bigger than others.

Anyway, life is full of dependencies. You cannot do A until you have done B, cannot do B until you have done C and/or D. Etc. Or you don't know if A is an option until you know the state/status of B, C, and D situations/conditions. You get the picture. And of course, every item has its own dependencies and due dates and everything. Trying to keep them all straight, or just trying to get them to line up in the right order (or be able to stand waiting on one thing so you can tackle the next) can be a gut wrenching experience. Hence, my guts. And their wrenchiness.

It is no easier because of my seemingly innate desire to buffer the spaces between these things with some sort of comfort. Try to celebrate A before having to deal with B. My other half is the other way around, preferring to charge on to B at the very moment A is resolved and maybe grabbing a moment's respite somewhere along the way? Or perhaps at the end? Where/Whenever that might be?

As you can tell, I'm not going to go into great detail here, but just state that its really kinda crappy to have your isides so mixed up. On the one had, hooray! on the other hand, I wish I didn't have to think/deal with things.

in other super sappy parental emotional news, Spike Jonez is making a movie of Where the Wild Things Are and for some reason the trailer makes me feel like bursting into tears. Not becaus I'm sad but because watching it makes me feel like I'm getting a look into Felix's future, a look at a possible future Felix. I can totally see him as that little boy. Even today he was being a little wildthing. He so totally IS the boy from Where The Wild Things Are. It's bizarre. Watched the trailer twice, at different times, just to make sure I wasn't getting swept up in some sort of strange empathy/nostalgia wave or something. Nope. Same effect at different times, in different settings.

When does kid-stuff stop tugging at your heart strings? Ever?

Laundry Post

I'm doing laundry right now. Everything seems to be ok with the house and boiler. My father in law and brother in law (not related) went to the house last night and we verified that nothing horrendous is/was about to happen, so they went home. Today FIL went back to get the boiler started. He tapped some relays and maybe unplugged and re-plugged the master relay and foosh, everything jumped back to life. He'll check back in a couple days to make sure the house is still standing. So, that's a load off our minds, but also gives us more reason to think and consider and plan for some other things in the near future, maybe. Thinking back on this, two years ago (our first spring in our new house) this same type of thing happened to us. There's even a post in the archives about it. I think it was in April of 2007 when one spring morning the furnace mysteriously was not on. I ended up calling the boiler guy at 6am and he walked me through getting it restarted (it was the flue damper switch that time...apparently we don't have one of those anymore???). About the same time of year, about the same type of situation. Maybe this sort of thing is common amongst 1 year old boilers. Maybe they build in a little 1 year timed defect to make sure you get your boiler checked out a year after it is installed? Naw. If they were going to do that they'd have it break something major so that you had to pay something... But still. Hmmm.

Weather here is nice, if a bit cool. Felix is amazing as ever. Still refuses to do #2 in anything except a diaper but we rarely have accidents with #1 or #2. work is going very well for me and Andrea is making adjustments and trying to figure out ways to keep her career from dying on the vine. Some weird things have happened there which I won't get into, but suffice it to say that clients are clients are clients, and as soon as you feel like you're committed to one course of action, something ALWAYS crops up to complicate things.

In general, there is not too much love lost between us and NYC anymore. When we came out here, I thought it was great to be here. All the options and all the convenience and everything. But for all of that, you eventually start to feel the hidden and not so hidden costs of such things. There are definite things I like about NYC and will probably miss regardless of where we end up in the future. But there are also a lot of not so nice things that come along with living here too. Someday I may catalog all of those things for your perusal. Not today. Right now I'm too busy trying to make lemonade.

Deja Vu

First day of spring. What a day.

As it happens, we found out, again by accident, that something had gone kaflooey with our boiler in our house in Minneapolis. In this case we did NOT also find a house full of frozen pipes and radiators. No, we know quite certainly that the heat has been working up until at least last week some time. And the temps in minneapolis are predicted to be above freezing for the next week at least.

But again, it starts with someone reporting that something seems not right, then the prop. mgmt company sends someone over who comes back and says "Yeah, seems cold over there even though the thermostat is set at 60." Well, last time, over a year ago, they found everythign frozen solid and it took until I think just about this time last year for all the repairs to be completed. This time I sent my local representatives over and it seems like perhaps the damper safety relay got thrown or something. This happened on our last brand new boiler one night that it got particularly windy. So, hopefully my FIL can get it sorted out and make sure everything is in proper working order. Of course, we were alerted to all of this because the tenants were complaining of unexpectedly high heating bill. So, we were all set to hear "It's 900 degrees in the house!" but turns out no, its more like 50, which is OK for right now, but not OK in case it gets colder (which it is supposed to do by the end of next week). In anycase...had a good half day of deja vu of the worst kind.

I've been sucked into Twitter which is partly why there is so little happening here. Sorry. The problem is, Twitter is inane, yes, but its also incredibly easy. I can send txt messages from my blackberry while i ride the subway (though they get a jumbled and out of sequence). I can do it from my desk as I get ready to eat lunch. I can do it without turning on a PC, browsing to a web page, or logging on to anything. It's like the Flip video camera of blogging, but its more like micro blogging. The cross-platform nature of it is what so easily draws people in, even those of us who are not iPodites.

Day On

Or weekend on. Since A has started doing full days with Felix I've been trying to do more full-time weekends with him, though that's of course nearly impossible. Unless you can physically separate a toddler from the other parent, you will always get him demanding something from the other parent while you are trying to do 100% for him. Anyway, since this is a 3day weekend for me and many people, I'm getting an extra day. We all started it off by sleeping way in (9am!!!) which has NEVER happened. Pretty crazy.

Of course, that tends to throw a monkey in the works because with toddlers you also have to be careful of upsetting the delicately balanced schedule of daily events like nap times, etc. We are not Sears method people (let the kid set his own schedule! He knows when he's tired... HAHAHAHahahahahahahahha almost makes me cry how funny THAT is).

But in other news...how about that economy? Sheesh. I could use some stimulus right about now, not sure about all you folks. Alls I can say is we still have all our balls in the air, but taking time to stop and talk about them isn't really in the cards. I have just met my mixed metaphor quota.

Hope February finds everyone in good shape. If you haven't lost your job or your home, then good on ya! Looks like Minnesota is still in competition for the best worst place to live right now. Let me know if you can figure that one out.

Here we go.

Ok, silent long enough. Obama is in da house and he seems to mean business. Good. Go for it. I hope it works out ok for him and all of us. He's off to a good start.

I don't know what it is that is in Felix's food but the kid's hair grows so fast that we have to cut his bangs almost every week (it seems). He really does have a moppy head. His hair is thick, but straight, which is odd since neither one of us has straight hair.

short story

just had to share this:

This morning Felix wanted to play at taking a nap (its his new favorite game in the morning...wake up and take a nap). He pointed and said he wanted me to lay down too. SO I did, and as soon as my head hit the pillow he said, "Daddy, story!" Ah ha! It was a trap.

I turned it around on him and said, "I want a nap. You tell me a story." So he thought for a second and then said:

Little boy

jump over

rainbow.

Little doggy

jump higher

 over rainbow.

Fountain

jump that.

Felix jump that.

The end. (I added that part)

empathy

In some ways, I feel like I've become rather cold or unempathic. When it comes to death, I'm very divided. When it comes to older people, understand and feel some remorse, or at least imagine what I think that someone who is close to that person might be feeling, and feel sympathetic. But it generally doesn't affect me directly, emotionally. When my uncle died this summer, I felt bad and sad, and really I felt bad for his daughters and wife who were part of his every day life and I felt bad for my parents and their siblings who were also very close to him. But I also felt detatched from it. I didn't burst into tears because I was overcome with grief. I wrote at length about my mixed feelings regarding his death and death in general.

However, when I hear about a relative stranger, or even a fictitious instance, of a child dying, I am tremendously emotionally affected. When Andrea and I watched Benjamin Button, at the end he dies, having finished his aging process and becoming a newborn baby. Even though we followed the story and understood that it was an old man drying, the imagery was that of a baby closing its eyes and stopping breathing (I'm starting to get a little choked just writing this sentance), and both Andrea and I were just sobbing and sobbing. Today I read about the death of John Travolta and Kelly Preston's son, Jett, and again just reading about it I had a very hard time keeping from bawling outloud. It makes SENSE to me, since one of the foremost events in my life right now is raising Felix. It just brings home the notion (not sure if I heard this somewhere and I'm paraphrasing or if I'm making this up, but I think it holds true, SHOULD hold true) that once you become a parent, every child becomes your child.

And perhaps its an evolutionary mechanism, even if it clearly does not work for everyone. After all, if evryone felt this way, things would be a lot different in a lot of ways.