Dilettante Delights

10:26 am - First hang all the lawyers...

You know why I hate the "legal system"? It's a big game, and integrity has no place in it.

"The advice I would have given AIG is, 'Don't pay it and if they jump up in arms saying you broke their sacred contract, sue me.' My experience is very few contracts are bulletproof," said Douglas Baird, an expert in contract law and professor at University of Chicago Law School.

This is a lawyer arguing that AIG shouldn't have honored the contract it had made with employees. It leaves me with really mixed feelings -- because contracts SHOULD be honored, but should also NOT be NECESSARY, and in this case those people should have ALLOWED AIG to dissolve the contract. They should have been clamoring to turn down their bonuses so the Gov't would be willing to bail AIG out and they could keep their positions.

The contract *should* be sacred. Loopholes are the nitpicking that makes us waste all our time fiddling around trying to write bulletproof contracts and trying to shoot holes in contracts. How much effort goes into that in the US?

Reason and ethics have no place in the legal world, and that's wrong. Lawsuits should be settled by reason and ethics, not by nitpicking through tomes of laws. Contracts shouldn't need to be bulletproof, they should be reasonable, and the enforcing of them should be left up to reasonable people. Give me a jury full of people who want to see the right thing done any day over an impersonal legal system that encourages those jurors to ignore their reasonableness and instead try to pick through the loopholes and laws.

Jury nullification was intended to be a source of reason in the legal system. The legal system will find you in contempt of court if you try to explain jury nullification to people in the courtroom. Law doesn't want reason.

It sucks. It just sucks.

08:51 am - SEPTA

You may know my occasional impulses toward random violence and chaos. Particularly impulses that I believe would be amusing for me. Fortunately I manage to resist most of them.

I ride the train in Philadelphia. It's run by the SouthEastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority, aka "SEPTA." There's this guy who always walks right up in front of everyone who's been waiting for the train, so he can be the first one on board. This irritates me. This morning when I saw the train coming, and him standing in front of me, I had this urge to step up to him and spit and snarl:

"THIS...IS...SEPTA!!!!!"

And kick him in front of the train.

Man that'd have been good on the evening news...

06:20 am - Do you believe old sayings?

"No, I don't want that help."

I just don't understand that philosophy. Or maybe I do but simply can't agree with it. Even though I hold it too sometimes.

A beggar in the street wants some change. I offer to buy him lunch. "No, I just want money." I shrug and walk away. Whatever happened to "Beggars can't be choosers?"

Opening his eighth beer in the hour I've been there, he says "I could quit if I wanted to. I don't need anyone's help." I shrug and turn away. He doesn't like his life, but he doesn't want to work on changing it.

Making slight gagging noises, the woman holds her stomach as she turns pale and rushes to the bathroom. "I don't want to use that," she says about the Relief Band "shock-watch" that she's used before to good effect. I shrug and go downstairs.

In all these situations, I find myself thinking "I guess it isn't as bad as it's been made out to be. Or even if it is, these people don't really care enough, and don't want me to care enough to offer help." I'm offended, in some cases, that they won't accept my help. I understand they have reasons -- even legitimate reasons; the beggar has sources of food for himself but that won't help him use the payphone or buy a bus ticket, for instance.

So what do I do next? The beggar sits there; the man drinks away his liver and his life; the woman is noisily sick and suffers for hours. Later they may want my sympathy -- it's cold on the streets tonight; it's sad lying in the hospital hoping for a liver transplant; there are so many things she can't do because she's sick. And I'm a jerk now for once again shrugging and walking away.

Whatever happened to "You made your bed, now lie in it?"

Maybe I'm just a jerk.

10:10 am - Eye twitches

Sometimes when I get over-tired, over-stressed, or both -- and last week was a lot of both -- I get these annoying little twitches around my eyes. They usually start off with my left eyelid twitching slightly side-to-side along my eyelashes.

(Side-note, I can actually control that muscle consciously, so I can make my eyelashes jiggle side-to-side at will. I've never met anyone else who could do that. It's like wiggling your ears -- no way to teach someone how to do it, either they can or they can't, I guess.)

From that little twitch, it starts to spread. My eyebrow starts twitching side-to-side too, and finally the cheekbone area around my eye starts going a little.

If you have never had a twitch like that you have no idea how MADDENING it can be! Even just the little bit of eyelid twitch can drive you insane after a while.

I talked to my doctor about it. She recommended quinine -- the bittering agent in tonic water. It's known to calm down muscle twitches and cramps. They don't really know why, but it does work. Quinine was also a preventative for Malaria, though in much higher doses than you'd get in tonic water.

Legend has it that the purpose of gin was to make the dose of quinine palatable. I pointed this out to my doctor and asked if I could use gin to make the tonic water taste better. She grinned and said that was up to me. I asked if she'd give me a prescription, but she said no. (Man that would have been sweet. "Are you drinking at your desk?!" "Yup. Doctor's orders!")

So I'm left with this:




And so are you.

06:27 am - Coming to grips...

So here I sit, at 6am, sipping my cup of coffee. Stumbling around the web, I have the thought that I'll have to go to work soon. My left eyelid starts twitching like it did all last week, and with a sigh I admit to myself how un-ready I am to go to work again after such a "short" weekend.

Further down the cup of coffee, I've about come to grips with the fact of another week of work.

Then I hear both kids are awake upstairs. I'm not ready to deal with kids being awake AND having to go to work.

*sigh*

10:23 am - Football snacks

Though I'm not really a football fan (though I appreciate the better plays of a good game), we went to a superbowl party. I think most of the folks there felt about football the same way I did.

Rather than just buy something, I felt like making something. So I did this:



The 3-lb loaf of bread is nicely football-shaped (baked in a casserole dish). I cut off the top half, hollowed it out, tore up the bread and put it back in the inside (for easy dipping use). It's a mild sourdough no-knead bread.

The dip is cream cheese, Knorr vegetable dip mix, chopped spinach, a little milk, and I added some spices -- garlic powder, onion powder, chili powder, paprika, and cinnamon, as I recall. The cinnamon gave it a cool, slightly sweet flavor. It's much more green than it appears here, so it looked a lot better.

The gridiron was made of paprika. I made stencils out of paper, sprayed them with PAM cooking spray, and after the dip had chilled in the 'fridge for a while to solidify I lay the paper on the top, sprinkled the paprika through the stencil, and carefully removed the stencil. Worked pretty well, I think.

Both were, to my surprise, quite a hit. The only real problem was that no one wanted to dip the bread through the lines and spoil the appearance of it -- so they stuck to the two outside edges and never touched the middle!

04:30 pm - Did that happen before or after that did?

Hm.

News story talks about how the brain stores data so you can know whether event A happened before or after or during event B:

"Newly born brain cells, thousands of which are generated each day, help "time stamp" memories, according to a computer simulation by scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, and the University of Queensland in Australia. The research was published in the journal Neuron.

These cells do not record an exact, absolute date -- such as January 28, 2009 -- but instead encode memories that occur around the same time similarly. In this way, the mind knows whether a memory happened before, after or alongside something else. ...

The findings could have promising implications for diseases that involve a neurogenesis deficit -- in other words, a lack of new brain cells being born -- which happens in conditions such as depression, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, the authors said."

I have _never_ _ever_ been good at remembering whether A happened before or after B. My life has always seemed a bunch of disjoint memories. My only hope of determining when a memory occurred is clues in the memory itself. That one happened and I was sitting on Dad's lap at Aunt Marian's house, so I must have been about 6, for instance.

Does that mean my brain doesn't generate new neurons? And never has? Does it mean I've been depressed a _lot_ longer than I thought? Does it mean I'm doomed to endure Alzheimer's or Parkinson's as I get older?

How does one prepare oneself for developing serious memory problems later in life? Are there things I can do that will help me get through those years, and help me not be upsetting to my family? I remember my step-grandfather in his declining years, sitting in his chair, just plain not recognizing me and asking who I was and why I was in his house. He seemed so...alone. Kind of horrifying to think about.

Ugh.

09:48 am - Vrrrrroooomba!

Much better.

My Roomba (or, "Oombah!" as Samuel calls it) hasn't been doing well lately. Like so many of its kind, the battery pack has been giving out. Most likely a single bad cell out of the twelve cells inside the pack, because it seemed to get up to full charge, only it dropped to not having enough power very quickly with use.

Fortunately, I'm a little handy and more than a little crazy.

I bought twelve new higher-capacity sub-c sized NiMH batteries from an ebay store.

I took my grinding wheel and an old hex-key wrench and made a new triangle-shaped screwdriver to remove the funky screws on the Roomba's battery pack

I took my gas-powered soldering iron and soldered the batteries together, and reinserted them in the old battery case.

MUCH happier Roomba.

Much less happy Samuel. He hates that thing. It scares him and chases him around. He'll learn that for now robots are our friends.

02:01 pm - Yuck.

I'll spare you the gory details, but I'm still trying to get well. Yesterday I took a sharp turn for the worse after mostly getting over this, so I finally saw the doctor and got antibiotics for the bilateral ear infections. :P Samuel is on antibiotics for HIS ear infection. Brook's still sick, and Zoe's almost well again. Rough couple weeks. I've lost about 10 lbs over the last two weeks or a bit longer. :P

So you'll understand that my brain is working less well than usual lately. As an example of this, I present the following incident from yesterday.

Normally I drive my kids to a daycare in Ardmore, PA. I leave my car there and take the train to work, then take the train back to Ardmore and drive my car back home. But on Thursdays, Zoe goes to a different preschool closer to home. So Thursdays I leave my car in Lansdowne and take the train from there, which makes for a much shorter commute.

Wherever I park, I usually remember something about where the car was. I don't even have to try anymore, it's just a natural thing. Opposite that door on that building, or a couple spaces down from the pole, usually nothing terribly distinctive but it pops into my head when I get to the station and walk to the car.

After my doctor's appt yesterday, it was late enough to just go home rather than to the office. Brook and I actually got a babysitter and planned to go out to dinner, just have a relaxing evening. (It was supposed to be a dinner for her office's christmas party, but that had gotten cancelled due to illnesses.) So after walking through the mall to get to the train, I hopped on and called Brook to tell her I was on the way. I ordered pizza for the babysitters, to be delivered to home since Brook would get there first. Got the order placed, and got off the train at Ardmore Station.

I stood there, thinking "Man, I must be more sick than I thought. I can't remember where I parked this morning. I *always* remember where I parked. I parked there yesterday, and there the day before that, but..." Then I realized what I'd done. It was Thursday, and my car was near home in Lansdowne, not in Ardmore. I *was* more sick than I'd thought. :P

So after consulting schedules and seeing it'd take me about an hour to get back home now, I had a bright idea. I called my wife and said "Hey! I know! Let's have dinner in Ardmore tonight!" She paused and said "Ooookay. Whyyyyy?" and I said "Because I'm in Ardmore right now! And, my car is in Lansdowne." A pause, then "You took the wrong train," followed by laughter. I didn't think it was THAT funny.

So while she got the kids and babysitter settled, I wandered around and found places to eat. We actually came across this Indian restaurant. Haven't had Indian in forever. So we went in last night, and were absolutely amazed -- this small, strip-mall Indian restaurant, though nicely decorated and moderately empty, turned out to have THE BEST Indian food we've ever had. Outstanding.

So if you ever take the train to Ardmore by mistake and want a bite to eat, ask around, or give me a call.

Serendipity. Almost made yesterday worthwhile.

08:46 pm - sickly

Ugh. Started off mildly achey, sore throat. Then, BANG -- REALLY sore throat, glands in my neck swollen to the point of difficulty swallowing (not discomfort, downright difficulty) and to the point that my EARS hurt, ugh ugh ugh.

Apparently a lot of folks have this. Great. We can all die together maybe.

11:05 am - All the details

Thanksgiving was great, with much of my extended family at my parents' for dinner on Thanksgiving and dinner the day after as well. (We often cook extra turkeys for the extra days that Thanksgiving runs in our family. We have a lot to be thankful for.)

Friday and Saturday my dad, brother and I started figuring out where we were going to go in the woods to hunt. They picked a couple spots in a valley that's typically done well for the family, about a mile back into the woods. I had to pick a spot nearby, and after some consideration I decided to go to the top of the mountain on one side of their valley. The rest of the family was a bit further away.

I found out why no one typically hunts up on that hill, too. I made the 200-foot climb about, oh, six times over five days I suppose. On half of those I was carrying my rather heavy rifle, and on several I carried various other equipment like extra clothing, lunch, thermos full of coffee, water bottle, etc. So six times 200 feet means I walked up that hill the equivalent of walking up a 120-story building. Try THAT wearing heavy winter boots! :P On top of that (so to speak), up there one gets the brunt of the weather. If there's a cold wind blowing, it's worse up there. There are a few benefits, too -- the sun comes out earlier and stays out later than in the shade of the valleys.

It was a slow deer season -- remarkably slow. Usually we have everyone at least seeing some deer. On Monday, the only deer seen was so far away my cousin wasn't sure it was a legally-shootable deer until it was just out of sight.

My Monday was a bit more exciting, though. I had gotten up to work out some kinks in my legs and warm up a bit, so I was walking around the top of the mountain in a big circle to see what could be seen down the sides and such. Rather suddenly I heard something crashing through the brush, but it didn't sound like deer. They're usually much quieter, and there were some pretty heavy thumping footfalls. I looked over my shoulder, and immediately turned around and raised my gun -- and watched a black bear, perhaps 200 lbs, running straight at me. It skidded to a stop less than ten feet from me, and then I saw it had two smaller bears -- her cubs, most likely -- running behind her.

Now, I know there's never been an unprovoked black bear attack in Pennsylvania. The question is, what do the bears consider provocation? So I was fairly sure it hadn't been charging me to attack me, or I'd have shot it right away. The bear seemed a bit out of breath, and had a bit of a "Well dang, NOW what do I do?" expression. Bet you didn't know bears had such expressive faces. Well, she turned at an angle and ran off away from me, but not back where she'd come from. At about fifty yards from me, she stopped and grunted to tell the cubs to follow, which they did. Something had probably scared them away from wherever they were, and they ran through the brush, and I just happened to be on the other side.

I called my dad's cell phone and told him rather vehemently how much I *hate* bears. He seemed amused. I went back to hunting.

Tuesday, a little after noon *none* of the family had seen a deer. (I hadn't seen any more bears either. I did have a nice visit from a red squirrel, and the ever-present chickadees and blue jays and woodpeckers (one of these last dropped bits of wood on my head for quite a while), but nothing exciting. I can live without more excitement like that, though. Anyway, a bit after noon we decided to see if we could chase some deer out of the nearby swamps and such. Spent maybe two hours doing that, and STILL hadn't seen any deer. Around 3:30pm my dad, brother and I were talking about whether we should go sit out the rest of the day or if we should just go home. I looked at the trail going back up my mountain (*sigh*) and said that since it was likely to be my last chance hunting for the year I'd like to sit until dark, and they decided the same way.

At 4:14pm, my cell phone rang in my pocket. It was my wife. I answered with a hushed hello, and she said in a bright cheery voice, "Hi! What's the matter?" I said "I'm out in the middle of the woods hunting!" still in a hushed voice, and she had apparently forgotten I'd still be out hunting. So after a quick conversation in which I said I'd planned to drive home that evening, I put the phone back in my pocket and settled back against my tree.

And then I heard something. Looking to my left, there was a deer, maybe thirty or forty yards away in the thick brush, moving toward the openings I'd cleared out. Even through the brush I could see large antlers. I raised my gun and waited for him to step into the opening, and at 4:16pm I pulled the trigger, having aimed carefully to shoot right through both front shoulders and his heart. Wastes a little meat, but there isn't much on the front shoulders anyway, and I didn't want to have to chase him after dark.

Sadly, there was a tree the size of my little finger in the way, so small I couldn't even see it through my rifle scope. My bullet hit that, started to spread open and deflected slightly. Instead of the heart shot through both shoulders, I hit him toward the front of his right shoulder, and the bullet never made it out the other side. At the time I was simply shocked that though he fell down, he got back up and *ran*. Buh. I called my dad and brother and told them, and they came up.

The snow had been melting and refreezing, so there wasn't much in terms of tracks. The bullet stayed inside the deer, so there wasn't much in terms of blood trail to follow. In fact, for a long while I wondered if I'd somehow missed, but that didn't seem likely. We fanned out and tried to find fresh tracks or blood or any other sign.

After it had gotten significantly darker, I found one mark in the snow where the edge of the snow had been crushed and hadn't had a chance to melt and refreeze. There were no boot prints around it, so I figured it must have been from my deer. I called the others around, and we started looking and Dad (the only non-red/green-colorblind one of us) spotted single drops of blood.

It took us quite a while to go the 150 yards that deer made it before going down. From the time I shot until the time we got out of the woods, it took us a total of four hours. That deer is big, bigger than any taken by the family before, and man was he heavy. After much work and serious dehydration, we got him out of the woods and into the trunk.

I turned out to be the only one who spotted a deer that day. I'm still tired from the ordeal, but he's awfully nice of a deer. I'm pretty happy overall, though.

Now it's back to work. Hm.

03:44 pm - Happy hunter!

09:56 am - Yeah yeah, been a while.

Life's been busy. Deal with it. :)

Let's see. Dad's business just landed a great big contract. I might actually wind up the son of a millionaire. That'd be neat. I'm happy that Dad appears to have finally beaten the naysayers.

My church is 100 years old now. That's kinda neat. We're still growing in an area where other churches are closing their doors forever.

I'm a full-time employee at Comcast now. I'd be happier about that if it weren't Autumn.

Zoe had a bad cold, Brook had four seriously impacted and growing wisdom teeth removed, our babysitter quit and Brook found a daycare that came highly recommended and she's comfortable with; but it's a minimum of 20-minutes drive out of my way to drop them off, there's no parking anywhere near the train stations around there, and I've wound up driving back home to take my local train home. On a BAD day, when I leave a bit late, it's taken me an hour and forty-five minutes to make it to work. Best case it's added 45 minutes to my total commute. I'm grumpy about that.

Sam has a cold, Brook's working, so I couldn't bear trying to drop Sam off at the nursery for church -- he was wailing horribly for me, so that just wouldn't have been nice to do to the poor nursery staff today. :/

Is anything else going on? Not much, I guess. We've had some snow (nothing serious except to these stupid flatlanders who wound up in all sorts of accidents because it was snowing even though the snow was instantly MELTING and the roads were merely WET and even less wet than they have been during recent rains. An electrical outlet I thought safely disconnected turned out to be shockingly live, quite the surprise. Thanksgiving is coming, and I'm going to hopefully go hunting a few days. I've caught Sam's cold. Work gave me a Macbook that I barely know how to use. Free cable, internet, and half-price digital voice phone is nice but I mostly use the internet and neither of the other two. I got yelled at for buying a book for $20 because it wasn't in the budget, but an entertainment center has also been ordered by the person who did the yelling and somehow that was okay (I'll never understand women).

Lots of little random stuff. See why I haven't bothered updating here? :)

09:06 am - Overtrained? No, WELL-trained.

I'll calm down later. Right now I still feel a snarl on my face and I have that odd sensation that my teeth are sharp pointy fangs.

I got off the train this morning in the underground concourse, and started walking toward my building. As I passed a square pillar about 2.5ft on a side on my right, this fist came at my head, holding something metal!

Next thing I knew, I had grabbed the wrist with my right hand, stepped out past the fist and a half-step away from the pillar. Twisting to my right, I yanked the wrist forward in the direction it had been going and a little bit down.

Pivoting further to the right on my right foot and putting all my weight and force from my left foot, my left hand was swinging palm-first toward the head of my assailant. I was going to jam the side of his head against the corner of the pillar. I think I fully intended to kill him.

Somewhere in the middle of the reactions (there was no thought involved in this process, it was just automatic), my mind started to realize that the arm was wearing a suit jacket (I saw the sleeve as the fist came toward me), and realized the metal was keys being held loosely in the fist, and I managed to stop my left hand and pull back up on the arm to keep from pulling the guy over.

It was just some guy in a suit gesturing to the person behind him to show them what direction to go, not looking where he was going, holding his id badge and keys in his hand.

A very nice policeman came rushing over to us to find out what exactly happened. I don't think I managed to hide how angry I was, but at least I wasn't still snarling like I was going to sink teeth into the guy. After a brief explanation I went on my way, leaving the policeman to calm the other guy down (he seemed rather in shock).

Undertrained would have been at least a collision as the guy walked into me. Overtrained would have been slamming his head into the wall and him going to the hospital while I went to the police station. I must conclude that I have been well-trained, and I am extremely grateful to my sensei for all the beatings.

Now if I could just stop feeling like I'm still going to sink my fangs into someone, I could get some work done. :P

05:49 am - Yup, those bones are Fossett's...

According to CNN, the bones found near the wreckage of a plane are indeed Fossett's. He was scouting for locations to try to break the land-speed record in a rocket car when he disappeared a year ago.

Some of his remains were found over half a mile from the wreck. Their theory is that animals may have dragged the remains there.

Either way, I think he may have broken the land-speed record for dead bones. Can we get back to some real news now?

(Yes, harsh, but I hate news stories that are only "newsworthy" because they're about rich people. Like the whole political scene.)

05:41 am - Stupid HP laptop

When I packed up and left work yesterday, I hit the power button on my HP laptop (dv6000 series, dv6700 sub-series(?), dv6985se model) and saw it start to shut down, folded it closed and stuffed it in my bag.

Bad move.

Apparently it didn't shut down. This morning the battery was drained completely, and when I hooked it up to wall power and turned it on, it lit up a bunch of normal blue lights around the keyboard and sat there. The fan started, the CD drive clicked a few times, and then nothing.

On another computer, I looked into this sort of thing for this sort of laptop, and found it distressingly common. But, well. HP's support page suggested I remove the memory and put it back in. Uh, okay. I guess I could see the memory popping out a little bit if it overheated perhaps. Maybe some weird electrical issue where the memory has to be removed to discharge another circuit or something. Uh. Seems like a stretch, but I did it anyway.

I took all the memory out, and powered it back on. Sure enough it beeped repeatedly to tell me it had no memory -- signs of life, good!

Put one stick back in, it started up. Put both sticks back in, powered it up all the way. Seems to be working.

Concerning, though.

ObPoliticalAnnoyance: When I got home last night, there were eight calls on the answering machine. One was a friend offering to drive Zoe to preschool this week. The other seven were political calls. Four didn't identify themselves and hung up, one was an Obama call, one was a McCain robot call, the other two were separate McCain supporting groups. Note to political parties: Encourage someone to be the point person so you don't annoy folks with repeated calls. :P

06:30 am - I finally won a round!

I finally won a round in my neverending fight against the avalanche of toys in this house.

For a long while I've argued that we have far too many toys around here, and that is why the house is a disastrous mess. It'll take hours to clean up, but minutes to dump all the toys back out and spread 'em around a bit.

Brook's sick, and really feeling lousy. Little sleep, no energy, feels awful. But she was getting all upset about the state of the house, which led me to bring up this argument again. We've gone around this one before. In the past I've watched her clean up one room and said "That took an hour. Want to know how to save yourself an hour of work? Take those three bins of toys and toss them in the dumpster outside." Now mind you, that's three small bins of toys set next to a pile of stuff roughly four times their size. She responded that she wasn't willing to consider my suggestion.

I understand that she wants our kids to have everything they could possibly want to play with. There's even a certain reasonableness to that -- she wants them to have whatever they want to play with, so they can play and be happy. I, on the other hand, think they have MORE than enough to play with and still be happy, so why suffer through the messy house for little additional benefit? If you have ten dolls, how much of a difference does an eleventh make to you? Particularly when you only play with two of them? Keep the two, maybe a third, and remove the rest. The kid'll be just as happy, and the house will be much less cluttered.

Brook even informed me that she has one coworker whose husband feels the same way I do; that coworker keeps piles of toys in her van, so she can rotate them in and out of the house without the husband getting too annoyed.

What finally won me the round was this: She wants the kids to be happy, and so do I. But is more toys to play with what will make them happy? We're teaching them that more stuff will make them happy, and that they need more and newer stuff all the time to play with. Isn't it better to teach them to make do with what they have already, to teach them to use their imagination? To teach them outright that they don't need more stuff to be happy and satisfied, thus preparing them for the rest of their lives? Isn't now the time to teach them these habits that will serve them for life, rather than bad habits and concepts that will ruin them?

I could see Brook considering our lives, and how we've acted, and how we've piled up some significant debt. And suddenly she agreed with me.

Which is better to play with, a toy castle or a castle made out of stacked wooden blocks with imagination?

I'll take the blocks every time.

05:44 am - Fall(ing)

Yesterday I worked from home during the afternoon due to having a nasty cold that leaves me feeling miserable and drugs that leave me feeling tired and woozy.

Then I spent some time building a double biquad antenna for my wireless network, and testing out said antenna. (Works alright -- while indoors pointing it away from my wireless router drops my signal something like 25dB or more, and each 3dB means the signal is cut in half, so it's clearly doing SOMEthing...)

Then I heard my wife herding Samuel upstairs to get ready for bed. She commented (somewhat annoyedly) that she hoped I appreciated the fact that she'd taken the kids and left me to my devices, as it were, all evening. I told her that I really did appreciate that.

Of course, I'd set up at the dining room table because that's where everyone was, and they all moved away to a room where I couldn't solder and such without burning down the house... But I did appreciate that she didn't make me put everything away and come help her with the kids.

Okay, so why was yesterday evening so much better, more enjoyable than normal for me?

I did get to see my family and interact with them. I sat with everyone during dinner, asked Zoe what she'd done at preschool, played with Samuel a little. I even dragged Zoe into a different room than Samuel when the two of them were getting on each other's nerves and entertained her for a while. SOME time with the kids is crucial to a good evening.

I got to make an antenna, something I'd wanted to do but kept getting distracted from for quite a while. I don't know how many half-made antennae I have lying around.

And I got to spend a little time day-dreaming. This seems to be lacking in my life lately, and yet it's been so crucial to who and what I am. It takes a some free time, few distractions or interruptions, no overwhelming external pressures that occupy my thoughts, and some mental and physical relaxation.

Daydreaming is a big part of how I think. Letting my mind chew over thoughts however it would like is how I come up with ideas, solutions to problems, amusements to try. Sitting here between sentences I can "hear" thoughts rushing by on all sorts of different topics. Picking one out of the mix I can kind of direct it. But if there's more noise, distraction, interruption, then I can't hear those thoughts, if they're even there at all.

It's rough. Leaving that behind for the day causes almost physical pain. I hear my wife's alarm clock going off upstairs, and I want to just bow my head and almost weep for the loss of the day. It's time to start doing, and doing interferes with being, because the world doesn't want me to be, it wants me to do.

Wish I could ponder this more, but now it's time to get ready for work so I can get the kids ready for their day so I can go to work so I can afford this house that I'm only in and aware of from 6pm-9pm during the week. Ever consider how much your house costs you per hour? Crank that number out sometime and appreciate the horror. If you have a $1500/mo mortgage and you spend 1/3 of your time asleep, you're paying $500/mo for your bed. Makes me wish I was a bed! How many hours must you suffer at work to make that $500 each month? Is that really worth it? Oh, and don't forget you're paying another $700 or so a month for the privilege of not even being at your home while you're at work. Sweet. Does any of this make sense?

Perhaps I'll work from home today, since I still feel lousy and am having to concentrate on spelling words correctly. :P At least then I'll get more for my money.

12:41 pm - WoodWick candles

I found the WoodWick candles when I happened to be browsing through the local Hallmark store after missing my train. Scented candles in a number of flavors, colors, and a couple sizes, but what caught my eye was their slogan, along the lines of "Fragrance never sounded so good." Looking closer, I found an explanation of that nonsensical statement:

The elegant new WoodWick® candle features a natural wick made from organic wood & combines the soothing sound of a crackling fire with premium fragrances for the ultimate candle-burning experience! Each highly scented WoodWick® candle includes a finely crafted wood lid. (burns up to 100 hours)

Now first off, I have to ask: Why does the finely crafted wood lid burn up to 100 hours? :) That shouldn't be a parenthetical, it should just be a sentence.

Next, the crackle of a wood fire in the fireplace is something I really miss, so I had to buy the candle and try it. It isn't quite the same, of course, but it's actually pretty cool. Small, quiet pops and hisses and sizzles. I got the Evergreen scented one, and I'm also pleased that the smell isn't overwhelming and didn't trigger any allergic reaction like most scented things do for me and my wife. The wick in my 10oz candle is about an inch wide strip of wood.

Pretty neat candles. Apparently a number of places sell them, like Amazon, Bed Bath and Beyond, etc.

08:09 pm - Yargh

Zoe is 4 yrs old now. For her birthday, I got her a Real Trumpet. I'm amazed at how quickly she's managed to actually get notes out of the thing. She's absolutely thrilled with it. I'll never have peace and quiet again.

First Frost! I guess I may as well cut down the vining tomato plants which were threatening to take over the world.

And the babysitter gave her notice today. I have no idea who we'll leave the kids with while we go off to work. Mmm. Troublesome. No one springs to mind.

And I'm coming down with a cold. I fear it may be a bad one. Hope I'm wrong.

Mmph. Now what.