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.