Monday Morning Wrapup.

I’m exhausted for reasons I won’t get into here, but hopefully it will have been worth the loss of sleep. Between company on Saturday and Sunday, Finn’s nightmare early Saturday morning (“I scared of frogs under the bed, daddy”) and a large, time-critical project, I got a total of about 8 hours’ sleep this weekend. But it was all good; the house is clean, we have a new (used) snowblower sitting in the garage waiting for reassembly, and we hosted my brother in law and his beau for lunch on Saturday and our neighbors and their daughter for dinner on Sunday.

Somebody in Baltimore thought it would be a good idea to host a Grand Prix race downtown in 2011, which means they’ve been blocking off and ripping up giant swaths of concrete and pavement throughout the neighborhood where my office is located. All of this means A. I won’t be in the city on the one day they run the race, and B. my commute has gotten interminable because every available artery coming north from I-95 is down to two usable lanes or clogged with people like me trying to find alternate routes.

Afternoon Swim.

Yesterday afternoon, after a gaggle of older screaming kids had finally vacated the neighbors’ pool, I called over to see if I could bring Finn for a swim. She knows that Aloha means “hello” because we talk about it when I put on her pink swim shirt and she literally vibrates with excitement when we get near the water.

I set her down on the steps and we both got in slowly, basking in the afternoon sun, until she was up to her chest and I was floating in front of her. Instead of free swimming the whole time like we normally do at the Y, she was content to sit on the steps and watch as I crept up to her toes underwater and surfaced with a loud “Boo!’, which sent her into fits of giggles. Then she would stand up, hold her arms open, yell, “Ready!” and jump into my arms for a brief tour of the shallow end before practicing her paddle back to the stairs, and we would do it all over again.

There was a moment when the sun hit her face as I knelt in front of her, and her blue eyes looked deep into mine, right before she stood up to jump into my arms again. In that moment, I saw the trust she had in me, knowing I would be there to catch her as she made her leap, and I made a quiet promise to myself that I would never let her down. And as her arms wrapped around my neck, the sun warmed my back, and her giggles filled my ears, I felt like the luckiest man on earth.

Stop Before Entry.

Yep, I’m still here. I haven’t had a whole lot of time to write lately, and by the time I’m settled down enough to write I’m usually out of things to say. I haven’t been doing much picture-taking either, so I guess I’m just falling down on the job all over the place.

That having been said, life is good. The girl is talking up a storm, work is rolling along smoothly, my efforts to organize and structure my life are slowly bearing fruit, and I feel better about everything in general. Stick with me, guys; I’ll get back to a reasonable writing schedule soon.

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!