Frenzied Daddy

I love going to my in-laws. I can almost understand why some people don’t like their mothers- or fathers-in-law, but that’s not the case in my home. So when we left for their house this weekend, I was in high spirits.

Traveling over Willamette Pass, however, took its toll. It was dark, and foggy, and raining. And I’ve slowly been getting worse at driving at night; I have a hard time distinguishing the lane lines in the wet darkness (specifically during a rainy night). The fog lines were all blurred out from the winter wear on the roads (cinder ash and gravel) and there were times I found myself in the chain-up area thinking I was in the lane. There were wisps and banks of fog as well as the rain. It was a terrifying hour or so as we wound up from Oakridge to the pass itself, then the roads dried out and I didn’t have nearly as much fear.

Coming back was better- we came home during the day and I could see what was happening. Basically, humidity was very high, and there was a fog rising from the snow (the cold snow was causing a fog to rise and become a lenticular cloud). On top of that, the clouds were full and raining on us. The drive was surreal; we had ‘steam’ rising on both sides and from the road and at the same time we had snow falling on us from these clouds. And we had cloud banks (fog banks) across the road at intervals. It was a much more entertaining drive home than it was up into the hills. We have some neat pictures that I’ll upload (sometime).

I had a great time (as always) in K Falls. The girls had a lot of fun with their Grandma and Grampa and their cousins. And they got to go swimming at the Running Y ranch, too. The weekend was a success, but I hope that the roads get better before we go back down.

We are a dog free family. For now. Honor, our Aussie, passed away pretty gently yesterday in the sun-lit freshly mowed grass. She’s been resting on the mossy patio lately, when she’s been put outside.

We got Honor from a mall pet store (the one in Lloyd Center, now closed), before Miss B was born. She had been there a while and was marked down half price. She was a sweet, sneaky, little wench of a dog. She had some mild behavior problems and she had some bad hip dysplasia, which led to her FHO surgery. But she was a big part of our family. We’ve been worried about her age, and last week I thought she was going to be staying at the vet’s. She came home with some pain medicine.

It’s been about a year since Perrin died and we’ve been talking about getting a younger dog. There have been a couple of real winners that have gone through the Humane Society, and we’ll probably get one from there in the next few months. I’m sure the girls will like a younger dog to play with. It was hard to rough house with Honor.

I have a business license. Because I have a business. And every year about this time, this discussion comes up.

I have to admit that I only have “a business” because FileFront wouldn’t pay a contractor directly. So even now that I’m no longer at FileFront, I’ve still got arghwebworks running as a business. And every year I consider closing it, specifically because of the Multnomah County Business Tax. I mean, I can either pay the tax, close the business or move the business to Tigard. I’m not actually sure how to move it to Tigard; do I just get a PO Box ?

I recommend a business to lots of people. It makes it a lot easier to, say, discount my income by $500 in a year and buy a new laptop (for the business). Or my cell phone, which is pretty much a requirement. Lots of stuff cause a decrease in my income, which is what I’m taxed on for state and federal income taxes. But the business tax is taxed on the gross income for the business, and if you make over about $50K (gross!), you’ll be paying income tax.

It would be less bad if I could figure out this “saving” concept. But I just had some money saved up for the kids to go to camp, and the engine broke on the car. That sucked up half my savings. I could almost get this done if surprises stopped happening. Financial surprises suck. And I just got another one; since I haven’t been saving (much) money, the almost-three-thousand dollar tax bill kind of hurts. (I’m arranging a payment plan this time). If I had been saving up some money each paycheck, this would have just been a normal payment.

This snowballs too. I could be making estimated payments, or saving money up in a savings account, but I have to pay last year’s bill. So I won’t be saving up that tax money — and then I’ll be in this same situation next year (just like I was last year).

Anyway, thinking again about closing “ArghWebWorks” and just doing 1099 work. I’m not sure I’m finding enough deductions to make it worth my dollars.

I’m not happy with the whitewashing of Huckleberry Finn with the removal of the word “nigger.” It’s one of those topics, though, on which I don’t talk much; I don’t want to give the impression that as a white middle aged guy I know everything about how that word in particular and racism in general. I don’t. However, I think it’s an important word when it’s used in context. The word shows up again in another book often read in High School though, it shows up in To Kill A Mockingbird.

“Do you defend niggers Atticus?” I asked him that evening.
“Of course I do. Don’t say nigger, Scout. That’s common.”
“’s what everybody else at school says.”
“From now on it’ll be everybody less one.”

(shamelessly stolen from Art of Manliniess)

I think that word belongs there too. For two reasons; first, it’s actively discouraging the word. Second, because it actively adds something to the passage.

I think it’s important in Huck Finn too. It’s not satire; that’s completely different. Some people say it’s local patoise, local flavor, it’s a word they would have used. I say, Mark Twain used this word because he knew that couth mouths like ours would find this word distasteful, and he was trying to make a point about Jim and people’s assumptions they make when you describe someone a certain way.

Don’t forget, Mark Twain said that “word choice was the difference between Lightning and Lightning Bug.”

We ran into a couple of friends of ours a few weeks ago, and met their kids. That is, Miss B and Miss K met the kids, Ms B and I spent most of the time talking to the grownup parents. And as we were driving back, Miss B said something like “I like them, they’re really nice kids.” I happen to really like these friends and I could see kind of lines in my head between the parents and their kids. So I said something like “Oftentimes, great kids are the results of great parents.”

Sent a shiver down my back.

Our kids are, well, fantastic. Lots of people tell us that our kids are fantastic. It is extremely difficult to do my normal meek and mild thing after blindsiding myself like that.

It’s only been raining for three days, I said day before yesterday, and I’m already depressed. I can feel the long cold claws of that forty pound monkey* sinking into my back. What is it with the winter and me lately? I’m cold and wet almost all the time. I just want to huddle under a blanket with a book and a cat and wait for a sunny day. But I can’t do that — I have things to do, websites to finish, projects to wrap up, dinners to fix, dogs (well, a dog) to walk, kids to play with. All these things need to get done even if I’m cold and wet.

On the plus side, I finally bought new shoes. I’m pretty hard on them but my hiking shoes had a big hole, and in the rain, well let’s just say there’s a reason I was cold and wet. And even thought Ms B’s HR department fouled up some paperwork, I actually had enough cushion in the accounts that the automatic withdrawals went through just fine. This made me feel like a grown up.

Maybe I’ll bring my work computer out of the basement and put it in the living room next to the window. How do other people handle this without wellbutrin or Prozac ?

*I don’t even know if monkeys have claws.

Wrapped up New Years tonight by playing Rock Band with the family.

We have one guitar that’s not working so well (the strummer thing isn’t working so I’m using the d-pad which makes it hard to do the whammy bar and overall it’s not as responsive as the strummer thing), and Miss K has a hard time on drums (but she does a great Animal impression). Band Hero works better for Miss K because of the “beginner’ mode but our stuff seems to work better with Rock Band. So we had an argument over which to play- frustrate Miss K or frustrate everyone. She chose to be our backup dancer though, which worked out ok with us playing Rock Band.

Miss B killed on vocals. Ms B and I were pretty ok on bass and guitar (but Duran Duran can suck it, thanks guys for your great Bass line). We had a lot of fun overall. Miss K can really dance up a storm.

We kept talking about RockBand 3 for Christmas, and it looks like we’re still talking about it. It has a “no failure” mode which would work great for Miss K (and me, honestly). And I see some guitars for the xbox are coming down in price. I like playing the four of us together a lot, so I’ll make that a priority. I think it’ll be worth it to keep that fun going.

Coming down to the last week before Christmas. It’s a secular holiday in this household – more fun because of the music (I happen to really love Christmas Carols) and more fun to have an excuse to give presents to people. Of course it’d be more fun if they weren’t expecting these gifts, but a guy’s gotta go with his strengths.

Christmas puzzles me. For eleven months of the year we tell our kids not to be greedy and that we don’t have the money to spend on this trinket or that video game. But then, the last month of the year, we tell them to tell the world what great things they want. I’m sure it confuses them too. I wonder, though, what would happen if we established about a seventy dollar budget per month to buy trinkets and games throughout the year, and then downplayed the presents in December.

It also puzzles me because of the threats- “I’ll take back all your presents!” or “I’ll tell Santa you’ve been a bad kid!” (Never mind that he’s watching, and he knows if you’ve been bad or good.) Obviously the kids believe this, more or less, but why? I mean, we wouldn’t really take their presents back, would we?

I find myself, though excited, somewhat ambivalent about Christmas. I’m human, I’m allowed to have complex emotions. We have a gorgeous tree from Skyline Tree farm, some lovely presents under it. Some more presents in the mail.

I’m glad the kids will be having a great Christmas.

And I hope you have one too.

Miss B came home with a worksheet for a trebuchet. Totally excellent. We’re going to build it in the backyard and lob things at our neighbor.

Uh, I mean, no we’re not.

It’s due 11/15. I told her that we needed some diagrams of what it was supposed to look like so we knew how much wood or rope to build. It’s only supposed to throw a small hackey-sack item about ten feet, so it’s not getting strapped to the roof of the car. Yet. I may build a scale replica in 3:1 scale.

So she drew this out, but it didn’t have what I wanted, and here’s where it gets sticky. If it lobs a hackey sack ten feet, what angle does it lob it at, and how hard does it lob it at? And how much of this is math/engineering she should know at eighth grade? I figured this; she should be able to take the mass of the counterweight and the different lengths of the lever in order to figure out if it’ll lift the sack. And how hard it will lift it. Then she’ll need the arm (lever) to swing in a circle then stop, and she should be able to figure out the angle of release. She might be able to (assuming a frictionless world) figure the velocity of the sack at release, but it’ll take calculus, won’t it, to determine the change in the velocity relative to the ground, so she knows how far it was thrown?

I think we’ll wind up doing a bunch of trial and error launches, but it’d be neat to figure out how the math works.