Checking In.

The weather finally broke here in Baltimore, and 90° suddenly feels downright balmy to me. Which is a sad state of affairs, considering the load we’ve put on our air conditioners in the month of July.

It’s been exceptionally busy the last couple of weeks, which means Idiotking.org is a quiet place. I’ve been juggling baby duty while Mama is recovering from a monster infection, helping remodel and move my daytime office, and also reorganizing my day to day life in order to be a better husband, father, and employee. No mean feat to be sure, but I think it may be easier to accept sweeping change when everything is in flux.

Mama is recovering from her illness, and I will be giving back the keys to the swanky babyhauler tomorrow (mainly because I have a dentists’ appointment in the morning, not because she’s at 100% yet) but I’ve enjoyed my mornings with the girl. Even when it’s been an hour before my alarm clock rang. She’s getting so big so fast. To see her walk a set of stairs, upright, by herself fills me with an immense surge of pride and a wave of sadness, because there’s no better feeling than to have her reach up for my hand and circle one or two of my fingers with her little palm, and there will soon come a time when she won’t want my help with the stairs anymore.

We’ve just finished remodeling our offices at work after about four weeks of work, and it feels good to be settled again. What was once a large space subdivided into tiny offices has now been expanded into an open-plan area with expansive desks, exposed brickwork (my suggestion), new carpeting, and better lighting.

In order to keep costs down, we all pitched in to help paint, move, assemble furniture, and organize the space, so I spent much of the early part of this month at the office after hours pitching in. The payoff has been immediate, though; I feel much more motivated and focused on my work being out in the open instead of holed up in my office.

On that same note, I’m trying a new method of personal organization, which involves a smaller, lighter notebook and a resolution to keep using it. I’m pairing this with my own basic version of the Getting Things Done Methodology that is in a state of kaizen, and I’m really going to work hard to make this stick. I’ve also started using Mint.com to track my personal finances and start setting some specific long-term goals for the future; I’m hoping to dovetail this in with all the work Jen has done on household budgeting in order to save more money than we currently do.

So, in a nutshell, I feel more optimistic than I have in a while, more motivated, and at peace with a lot of things in my life. The trick will be to maintain that peace and forward momentum.

Tomorrow morning I’ll see the dentist for the first time in ages, which is a good feeling.

Grantham: Everything You Need to Know About Global Warming in 5 Minutes | The Big Picture

An excellent, excellent link provided by my Illustration professor via Facebook: Everything You Need to Know About Global Warming in 5 Minutes. His postscript:

[Jeremy] Grantham is an institutional investor who other institutional investors read. He invests based on data and is one of the few who does not politicize facts.

People who find themselves on the other side of the argument with Grantham reexamine their conclusions because it’s been a bad idea to bet against him in the past.

Running.

This is gonna be one of those weeks where Friday suddenly appears and I don’t know what happened to the previous four days. It’s already the end of Tuesday and I feel like it was the middle of the weekend a few hours ago-and I still haven’t gotten enough sleep.

Rollin’ on my Hoopty.

Our neighbor is a real nice fellow, and his driveway faces our backyard, so we usually see him at least once during the weekend—usually as we’re humping bags of mulch or dragging hose from one end of the yard to the other. Saturday afternoon he flagged me down as I was mowing the lawn and asked me if I was a “fixer”. When I asked him to elaborate, he asked me if I like to fix things. I pointed back at our house and said, “Well, if the house counts, then yes.”

He pulled a huge green bicycle out of his shed and asked me if I could fix it, and if so, would I like to have it. I took one look and fell in love.

It’s a two-seater Columbia tandem that’s at least forty years old, if not more. When I guided it onto our back lawn, it was covered in dust, grease, bird droppings, and a light coating of surface rust that begged for a scrubbing with some brillo. He’d mentioned it had problems shifting, and that the front chain had a tendency to drop off the sprocket, so they’d laid it up in the shed, and there it sat.

Sunday afternoon I gave it a quick scrubbing with some auto detergent and a shoprag after airing up the tires. The dust came off quickly, and most of the rust scrubbed off with a little more work, so steel wool should shine up the chrome almost immediately. I tightened up the chain tensioner at the bottom, returned the front chain to the sprocket, oiled the running gear, adjusted the brakes, and took her out for a quick spin on a flat stretch of road across the street. Like butter! It shifted through the gears effortlessly, and the front brakes gripped almost immediately. The rear brake is a setup I’ve never seen before, and it took a minute to recognize it for what it was: a big CNC’d drum.

Jen came outside after changing into some warmer gear, and the two of us took it for a spin around the block. Riding/driving a tandem takes some getting used to, and we developed an alarming wobble early on until we got our pedal synchronization down. The other major issue is that of mass and speed: the bike itself weighs a ton, and with the two of us onboard it takes a lot of effort to slow down. So some upgraded brakes are in order. As is a basket for the front handlebars, and a child seat off the back fender for Finn. I have a vision of the three of us pedaling down into town to the Farmer’s Market on the weekends for vegetables, bread, and other goodies, and it makes me smile.

Everybody Panic and Freak Out.

We’re not getting our usual milk delivery on Wednesday, what with the Second Horseman of the Apocalypse about to bear down on us (there was no mail service today and I can’t even find the milkbox on the front porch), so we felt it would be prudent to stock up on some before the snow starts flying again. Luckily, there were a few half-gallons of organic left at the bottom of the racks, so all is well. Everybody seemed to be in pretty good spirits while I was there, too.

Snow Emergency #2.

Snow fell last night in a perfect stillness, in contrast to the howling subzero winds we’ve been suffering through since mid-December. In the early morning light, it was all still sitting on the smallest branches and twigs, shining brightly as the sun rose behind the trees. Shoveling off the cars took about three seconds, as the snow was the most fluffy, dry powder I’ve ever encountered on the east coast. It was so light, I could have blown it off the car with my breath, had I been so motivated.
This morning I dropped Finn off at daycare so that Mama could run some errands and take care of a doctor’s appointment. Our route takes us down I-95, where one section crosses over a valley of the Patapsco State Park at high treetop level. Everything in sight was dusted with snow in the perfect natural approximation of a Bob Ross painting, and for about an hour, Maryland was the most beautiful place on earth.

Merry Christmas!

She’s a little blurry, but that’s because she hasn’t stopped moving for three days. Happy holidays, everybody!

Pick and Pull.

I had some time to kill Wednesday afternoon (I was out of the office), so I decided to try to hunt for a Saturn taillight at our not-so-local pick & pull down in Jessup. I find junkyards in Baltimore rather depressing, quite honestly; there’s an air of desperation and mistrust at the local chain I frequent, starting with the uneven, haphazard, crowded parking lot (where squeezing into the wrong spot on the north side will guarantee one’s car joins the others inside the wire to be stripped) to the bunker-like entrance adorned with hand-lettered signs stating “The Customer isn’t right, WE Are” and “It’s OUR way or the HIGHWAY”. Once a dollar is offered, a name is scrawled on the entrance waiver, one is free to roam the wreck-littered field of stock, tools in hand, careful to avoid being run down by the giant wheel loaders roaming the lanes.

I always seem to visit right after a large rainstorm, so the fields are usually muddy and infested with mosquitos, who thrive among gaping, swamplike trunks and moldy upholstery. Wednesday was temperate and cloudy, which meant I wouldn’t be squinting to identify makes and sweating as I tried to remove frozen bolts with vise-grips (Rule #1: the object you need to remove will always be held in by a fastener for which you are left unprepared), but the usual lake-sized puddles surrounded whole rows of cars, making navigation treacherous. Helpfully, my predecessors usually create elaborate bridges out of tires, door panels, tailgates, and sheet metal, so it’s not so bad for the fleet of foot. Just don’t try retracing steps while carrying that engine block.

The first section visible after entering is all GM product, so I threaded my way through the rows to find a suitable Saturn donor. There were plenty of correct-vintage sedans and even a couple of recent models, but no coupes. I did find a mid 60′s Corvair 4-door in reasonably good shape for Maryland (no visible rust and a mostly intact engine), a cast-off Cadillac stretch limo of 90′s vintage (no bar set, no TV’s) and several late-model minivans that had suffered horrific accidents among the hundreds of carcasses. But there were no Saturns of the proper model to be found. (Rule #2: there’s a 25% chance the model you need will actually be present.)

Switching to plan B, I crossed the footbridge to the second field where SUVs are collected, and found a Cherokee with gas tailgate struts that matched our model; installing these ($6.60/ea) ensures the tailgate won’t land on Jen’s head again as she unloads the stroller from the Jeep. Strangely, it’s been hard to find a Cherokee of our vintage, while there’s at least one Grand Cherokee of every model year in each row awaiting the crusher. I passed delivery trucks, a mid-80′s customized van with its fiberglas shell top peeled off carefully like a sardine can, several Land Rovers brought low from their days as Starbucks delivery vehicles, and battered pickups of every shape and size.

Having fulfilled one of my two missions, I figured I’d spend some time browsing the rows for other interesting finds, and came upon an interesting survivor in the Chrysler rows: a 1955 Nash in reasonably good shape for its age. It took some sleuthing to figure out what it was at first; the instrument pod form the dash was already gone (drat!) while the combination badge/trunk release proclaimed “Rambler” in script. On the dashboard, in helpful black lettering, were the words “FASTEN SEAT BELTS PLEASE” centered over the ignition key; I think the promise of danger may have been wishful thinking, given the tire-screaming fury of an 82hp straight-six under the hood. It was the kind of car I wish I had a garage for, honestly—it’s odd enough that almost nobody has one, and it was in good enough shape that it might have been worth buying and dragging home to slowly clean up, given that most of the hard-to-find items were still intact. As it was, I took one shiny hubcap, emblazoned with a script “R” and left the rest behind to the vultures.

Beyond the SUVs was an entire wing of import vehicles, Japanese sedans mingled with German sport coupes and the odd Korean compact. Here and there, the empty carcass of a Civic peeked from behind models with no hope of street racing, including an inexplicably bright pink coupe that had been gutted to the floorboards. Off on the edges, diesel-belching Mercedes sedans pointed their hoods at the sky. Not currently owning any imports, I breezed through this section before crossing back over the bridge and checking out the Ford section to see if I could pull a pillar spotlight from an ex-police cruiser. It seems that the second thing enterprising salvagers yank from retired cop cars is the pillar light, right after they peel the “Police Interceptor” badge from the left side of the trunklid. I did find some interesting old Fords back in the weeds, including a mid 60′s Thunderbird dwarfed by a yacht-sized 70′s example; another stretch limo, an ex-taxicab with the plastic billboard cap intact on the roof, a cream-colored Pinto with the engine pulled (??!??!), entire fleets of ex police cruiser/taxicab/security vehicles, each wearing at least three coats of paint and the scars of multiple careers, discarded Lincoln limousines next to tiny stripped Focuses, and the odd clapped-out Probe, all glass smashed out, balanced delicately upon a pillar of tires for access to the transmission.

Exiting the yard is always a great time. After placing parts on a metal tray, a surly fellow leans out a small window and consults an inscrutable pricing sheet, then comes up with a random number for whatever it is you’ve dragged out of the mud. My struts and hubcap cost a total of $24 ($6 each, go figure), while the five ignition wires the guys ahead of me took were in the mid-40′s. Meanwhile, two or three other surly dudes are eyeballing everyone to make sure we haven’t stuffed an air cleaner down our pants or a bench seat into our toolbox. I’m sure this type of place sees its fair share of shoplifting, but I think the guy who threatened to smash my camera last year took his job a little too seriously; it wasn’t until that moment that I noticed the “NO CAMERAS ALLOWED” signage posted among the eighty other signs inside the office. So now I smuggle a point and shoot in my pants so that I can quickly snap stuff; next time I’ll have to remember to reset the ISO down from 1600, which is why everything above is so grainy. As much as the junkyard is depressing, I like to visit, only if to find something out of the ordinary.

Baby Poop

This link to a visual guide to baby poop is making the rounds this week, which strikes me as funny for some reason. Jen and I get BabyCenter bulletins, and yes, we saw this, and yes, we looked at the poop. It’s surprising how analytical one gets about poop after having a baby.

Whoa, It’s Been Awhile

I’ve been writing and rewriting a post to Finn about her birthday, but I’m not a good enough writer to say what I mean. Meanwhile, the last two weeks (well, the last month) have been ridiculously busy, to the point where I’m not getting a lot of spare time to organize my thoughts. I’ll keep trying.

Happiness Is.

A sunny morning walk with my bride and my baby, with plenty of dogs to meet along the way.
A 1-mile commute to work on an 80° day in a noisy, clanky convertible.

Reunion Manifesto

Wow, this is pretty amazing: Why I won’t be at my high school reunion. My high school experience wasn’t nearly as bad as this one, but I echo the sentiment at the end: Our kids will have some kind of kung-fu lessons and be able to finish physical conflicts on their own terms. I think that kind of self-confidence is essential in this day and age.

Ebb and Flow.

Monday night we spent a little time with some friends in the industry, trading gossip, war stories, and news, and it left me feeling a little sick to my stomach. I know that times are tough out there, but the more bad news I hear, the more discouraged I get. This business is cyclical in nature, and having lasted through three recessions since joining the full-time workforce (exiting college right in the middle of one, no less) I know that this will be the way of things until I retire or give up and go sell insurance.
This one has me more worried than the last two, and that’s probably because I’m wired into the scene a lot better than I was in ’93 or ’01, and a lot more knowledgeable about the economy, our country, and my insignificant place on the edge of the whole mess. Work is scarce, jobs are even harder to find, and the money that people are spending is net 120 at best, so I’m holding on to what I’ve got for dear life and hoping we can ride this one out.
Compounding my worry was a rough time I was having with a project at work, which seemed to be dragging onward with no resolution. I’d sketched and sketched and between fifteen or so pages I had three distinct approaches, but I was having a hell of a time getting them to flesh out onscreen. At times like this it’s easy to get into an “I suck” mentality, which becomes self-defeating (and self-prophesying), but I’ve learned the hard way over the years that time and a little perspective can be an ally. I came home, helped give the baby a bath, watered the garden, spent some time with Jen, and then took another look at what I’d done. Within an hour or so I felt the quiet, pleasurable shift of things starting to fall into place, and soon I had had one solution finished, the second on its way, and the elements of the third sorted out for the next morning.
I guess the upshot of all this rambling is that even though my chosen profession doesn’t have the stability of, say, law, banking (ha), or civil service, it’s more rewarding than anything else I can think of. That feeling of the gears meshing and elements clicking together is one of the best things in the world—I’d be hard-pressed to find something else so rewarding that I could get paid to do, even when it seems like the industry is groaning and creaking and imploding around me.

Veteran Loses Donated Home.

Nonprofit reverses plan to give injured veteran a home. Friends of ours spearheaded the effort to build and donate a house to an amputee veteran. But it turns out he and his family own two other houses and had a third built for them by volunteers in Georgia. What a sad, demoralizing story.

I’m Still Here.

There’s been a lot going on around Idiot Central lately; too much to list here. Suffice it to say we’re all fine and running as fast as we can to keep up. More later, promise.

Finley Stardust and the Spiders From Mars.

As noted elsewhere, this weekend was another milestone in Finn’s development: She moved into her own big-girl room on Friday evening, after a whirlwind installation of cardboard blackouts over the windows and frenzied crib relocation. She sat on the floor and played happily with her toys as we hustled around, moving and hauling and organizing, and seemed keenly interested in examining our pizza and beer when we finally stopped for dinner. Her first night was uneventful and quiet, and she slept through until 6:30 without an hour of talking and fussing like she’s been doing for the last several weeks.

On Saturday, Mama and I began the long and arduous task of planting asparagus in our garden. Planting asparagus sounded, at first blush, like it would be cool. It’s a native plant in Maryland, we like it grilled, and it’s good for us. This was all before we realized what a pain in the ass it is to plant asparagus. The best way I can describe this to you is that it was like burying giant prehistoric spiders in a drainage ditch.

Most of the soil beneath our ratty lawn is pure Maryland clay, so I had to dig a 12″ trench and throw the dirt/clay onto a tarp spread on the lawn. After installing the asparagus, we covered them over and watered everything heavily while Finn kept an eye on us from the comfort of her blanket.

Sunday morning we took advantage of Finn’s early breakfast schedule and hustled out to a restaurant for Bloody Marys and an anniversary breakfast before the church crowd set in; she was in a wonderful mood for our whole visit and crashed out on the car ride home.

Most of the the weekend was consumed with yardwork, from mowing the lawn for the first time in two weeks, cutting saplings down on the property line, fixing gutters, and repotting a ton of seedlings in the greenhouse. Two of my tomatoes and two of my eggplant have aphids already, so they got moved outside and away from the other plants. Four cucumber seedlings got their own tub of dirt, pepper seedlings got moved to their own pots, and the radishes (which are remarkably leggy) got placed outside so that they’ll acclimate quickly. As the sunlight dimmed and turned to stormclouds, we moved inside and began cleaning out the front porch, which was relegated to a dumping ground last year during the remodel and hasn’t been touched in months. There are about three Scoutloads of debris to be hauled to the dump next weekend, which will free up a ton of space around here.

Finn was patient and understanding throughout the entire three-day weekend, spending time on her blanket, in the backpack carrier, in her car seat, in the bouncy chair, and on the floor while we planted and weeded and mowed and cleaned and vacuumed and moved. While we were outside hauling dirt from one side of the yard to the other, she watched as I piloted the wheelbarrow back and forth, and each time I passed she smiled and held her arms out: TAKE ME FOR A RIDE. So I scooped her up off the blanket, placed her on an empty bag (and my folded up T-shirt) and she got a wheelbarrow ride around the back lawn while Mama held her hand.

Salon: Stop worrying about your children!

Stop worrying about your children! My sister and I walked to school by ourselves when I was in the first grade, and often left the house for the entire day without having a cellphone, GPS tracking device, or RFID implant. Don’t believe the nobody-is-safe hysteria.

View From The Ark.

We’re in week 2 of the Great Deluge, and while my nose has stopped dripping, our gutters are still clogged. All this rain means I haven’t gotten a damn thing done outside on the house, or with the Scout, or in the garden, which is driving me batshit crazy. However, while feeding Her Highness the other morning, I noticed that our neighborhood currently resembles Ireland in its lush, green, foggy beauty, and that’s not a bad thing. When we are slogging through another oppressive brown August, I’ll look back and remember how vibrant all the plants looked this spring before they had the life cooked out of them, and that will make me happy until I can crawl back into the air conditioning.

We enjoyed a wonderful meal Saturday evening with Mr. and Mrs. Scout, who are possibly the only people in Maryland to have actually managed to sell their house this year, within weeks of putting it on the market, and who will be leaving the ‘Ville to move across the Bay where the traffic is slower and the sky is sunnier. Mr. Scout promises me he will be back in the area regularly, but I suspect this means we will now have to settle for long-distance bromance.

I took the time last night, in front of a roaring fire, to finally wipe my MacBook clean and install a fresh new copy of Leopard, a full year after buying the install disc. I’ve noticed a huge speed gain already, as well as access to modern conveniences I should have been enjoying months ago. The last 12 hours have been a whirlwind of new installations and digging through discs to find long-forgotten files, but overall it’s great to have a clean system for the first time since 2004 (I’ve done user migrations since 10.2, and it was getting very, very crufty under the hood).

And finally, after a month of fruitless listings, untold numbers of flaky, half-legible emails, and three no-shows, I sold my sidelined G5 iMac this evening—for exactly what I paid for it a year and a half ago.

Working From Home.

“…one of downtown Baltimore’s main thoroughfares is filled with water after a water main burst just before 6:30 a.m. Tuesday. The break closed Lombard Streets from President to Gay streets, crippling rush-hour traffic, closing buildings, parking garages and the National Aquarium in Baltimore.”

Weekend Recap.

70° days are rare in Maryland this early in March, so this weekend we tried to balance spending as much time as possible with Finn and as much time as we could outside in the fresh air. Saturday was dedicated to long-overdue yardwork, which consumed a good portion of our afternoon, but, what a beautiful afternoon to do it!

I made the mistake of wearing work jeans, and after a half an hour raking leaves off the foundation, I had to switch to shorts because I was too hot. We had five inches of snow last Monday. I am surprised I did not blind the pilots of overflying passenger jets with the sunlight bouncing off my pale knobby knees.

Anyway, while Finn slept off her second breakfast, Jen and I filled twenty bags of leaves from the back of the house, the driveway bed, and the odd area under our back porch, which seems to attract all of the loose leaves in this zipcode like a great sucking vortex.

Once that was accomplished, we three got a bite to eat, changed our diaper, brought the swing outside, and commenced to cleaning out the sad, dilapidated tangle of weeds that was our garden while Finn supervised. I cannot describe to you the sense of satisfaction it gives me to look out on that bare patch of earth and know the neighbors aren’t cursing us under their breath anymore.

While raking up the leaves, I reflected on the sad harvest we reaped last year (mainly due to the toll taken by varmints), and decided that this would be the year I modify our greenhouse to grow vegetables properly. Doing some research, I found online suppliers who sell polycarbonate glazing and ventilation systems, which will be an up-front investment and take some engineering to install, but should turn our useless sealed hothouse into a productive greenhouse.

Meanwhile, I straightened up the pots and barrels and soil and made way for seedlings.

Then, I moved out to the garage and straightened up as much as I could around the Scout without actually diving into doing something on it. I did break down and disassemble some of my new parts–but I’ll go into that elsewhere.

Sunday we got the girl up early—or is that the other way around?—and made preparations to take a long walk around a lake in Columbia before doing our grocery shopping. After her first bottle of the day, this child, who almost never stops moving, did something she’s never done with me before—she leaned her head down onto my chest, under my chin, and quietly nestled up against me for three of the longest and best moments of my life.

Once we got out onto the trail, she was fine for the first fifteen minutes or so, but soon decided she wanted to be facing forward, which meant we wound up carrying her like a football for two and a half miles. Once out of the stroller, she was her usual observant self, appraising each new passerby with a taciturn stare, careful to warn away strange ladies who, no doubt, were plotting to rush over and pinch her chubby pink cheeks. Touch my face and I will projectile vomit all over your track suit, that glare said. And it worked.

Jen and I are afraid nobody will ever see the inside Finn, the girl we get to see who is giggles and smiles and gets so happy her entire body spasms repeatedly like she’s hooked up to a car battery. When she’s around us, she’s Miss Congeniality, and when she’s out in public, she’s Steve McQueen, staring down a hostile world with those steel-blue eyes and a .44 magnum. I will show you proof that she can smile:

After our return to the car, we hightailed it over to the grocery store, where Mama stayed with her in the parking lot while I hustled around and got our shopping done. A quick trip to the health-food store, and we headed home for a three-hour nap and some more yardwork: the front hedge got cleaned out, the greenhouse got a final sweep, and the toolbench in the garage got cleaned off.

About the time I was finishing up for the day, Finn woke up for dinner: avocado and pears. MMMMMMMMM, avocado. And then it was bathtime, and as soon as she was diapered and dressed, it was time for sleep. I’m exhausted just writing about it all.