Frenzied Daddy

It’s me, I’m cheater pants today.

Run For the Arts is a jogathon designed to raise money for the arts in our schools. Our schools here in Portland have been hit fast, hard and long by the Bill Sizemores of the world, and funding for the “good stuff” is way down. When funding is down, “nonessential” things are taken out; teachers are laid off, school days are subtracted, and programs like TAG and ESL are axed.

Most schools’ music and art departments have been stripped as bare as an unlucky monkey shredded by piranhas.

Miss B’s school has a weekly visit from a music teacher. He’s a great teacher- and writer of such songs as “We are Sanguaro Cacti” (think … a spooky music number). And this past year they had “artists in residence,” which has taught each classroom a great deal about their art form. Both of these programs are paid for by this Run for the Arts.

So, I’ve stuck up a “Donate” button and you can sponsor Miss B and her school through Paypal. You can either do a “set amount” (their suggested minimum is $1.00) or a “lap amount” (their suggested minumum is $0.25.) Run day is April 5, and the sheet has to be turned in by April 4 (That’s Monday). If you want to do a lap amount, leave a comment and I’ll update the sheet. If you want to do a set amount, just do the donation thing. I’ll collate the information and put it on her sheet. After the run day, I’ll let people know how much they need to fork over .

One more thing; the form has slots for name, address and telephone. Feel free to make stuff up; I’ll use an email address for the address, and I’m fine with ‘unlisted’ for telephone. But a name would be nice (internet pseudonym would be ok with me), and an email address if you want to know how much your laps * lap amount comes to.

Thanks

But I hope I do it again.

Miss B, who crawls into our bed about five nights a week, slept the entire night in her own bed. And Baby K slept in her crib- the entire night. I had an entire night of sleeping in my proper place, next to Ms B, and was sweetly and gently woken at the crack of morning by the birds chirping outside the window.

A guy could get used to this.

I even managed to wake up the girls without hollering this morning— no arguments about who is getting of bed when, who is taking a shower — none of it.

Ok, so if my daughters have been replaced by pod people … do I complain?

Miss B’s Aunt M had her baby- another Baby K. She’s a delightful mewling little tyrant. You can tell she’s a girl because of the little green bow in her “hair.” They weighed her at her dad’s store, and she’s just about eight pounds. She makes our baby K look like Baby Kong- at eight months, walking and chatting about quantum physics and string theory. Or she might as well be- I can’t understand a word she’s saying. Ms B swears she says Daddy and Doggie and even the raucous “who put rice cereal in my chicken noodle dinner? gosh darn it! I hate rice cereal!”

Aunt M’s Baby K (Talk about her much more and I’ll need a different name, eh?) really is a little sweetie who does all the appropriate 2 week old things- eats, sleeps, poops, eats, sleeps. She cries a little, and she is happily carried around by everyone in the family. I can’t wait to see her again. I’ve found out how much I really like babies

… and a happy easter was had by all. Miss B and her Aunt T decorated about five dozen eggs, and we ate a whole bunch for dinner that night (Deviled Eggs are a traditional Easter Dinner item in Ms B’s family, her total disavowal of their deliciousness not withstanding. We spent some great time eating with, and visiting with, her family, and then on Sunday bright and early (well, ok, it was 11) got back on the road headed north.

Ms B’s parents lent us a pair of walkie-talkies to help with coordination between the car of kids and the car of dogs. Mine crackled to life about every two and a half minutes “Dad, are you in? Dad? Are you in?” To which I usually responded with “Who is this? What’s your call sign? Perrin! We got company!”

I drove to Klamath Falls with the two most annoying dogs ever, listening to The Devil’s Code. The narrator, Frank Muller, has a distinct gravelly voice that one reviewer refers to as “Audio Noir.” It’s a great voice for the gravelly character of Kidd.

Kidd comes across as a dry gumshoe, like that in Casablanca and the Maltese Falcon; characters made famous by Dashiell Hammet. However, he’s basically a criminal; he’s a computer / industrial spy who pays for his trips to Italy to study painting by pulling off corporate espionage. He’s likeable, he has a strong moral code, and he’s pretty smart (though also humble enough to let on when he’s been stupid). I also like that the NSA people and the FBI people are not described as idiots- nor is the “hacker community” described as angels.

Some of the reviews on Amazon have been less-than-favorable, but I’m thinking this was a good time-passer to pick up.

Pretty much aimed at those of you who do different ‘projects’ at work. Most of my jobs have entailed the assignment of different projects- not like “take orders in section A” or “stock shelves in entertainment,” but more like “build website for foo.com.” When I get a project like this, I visualize two things; on the one hand, the relationships of the database tables to each other (books to authors, books to inventory), and on the other, the way the user will experience the interrelationships of this data (the website flow) – index page has a navigation bar, click on authors, or click on books, or click on inventory . In fact, part B really defines part A; generally speaking, someone has specific demands laid out for how a site works, as opposed to specific demands as to how a database is organized.

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Delicious. I don’t know what “crhme fraiche” is- I’m supposed to add 1 T to the sauce, but I threw in a healthy dollop of sour cream I found in the fridge (Don’t want to even think about how long it’s been there- but hey, how do you know when sour cream is bad anyway)

It’s late, so I sort of threw it together, but it cooked for less than half an hour, cost me about four bucks and will be a great breakfast as well.

Look at this! Just look at it. Type in a domain name and hit the ‘search’ button. It uses the same fricking techniques that maps.google.com and the google suggest beta use; this javascript thingie that looks up data after the page is loaded, and replaces part of the web page. Type in your domain name, and go to the next page- down the column it says “checking..” and then switches to “available” or “not available” as the case may be. Slick, very slick.

I hate you.

Work is a competitor to dotster.com; and I just had this discussion with my boss about this exact technique and how to add it to our services. The time just passed too quickly. Damn you, dotster, damn you.

Our finances are, so to speak, “teh suck”. And so, I’ve stopped buying yum french roast or sumatran, and have committed to buying not yum the big cans of coffee grounds for $4.00. I also tried those little NOT yum coffee bag things,folger singles, which were, as you might imagine, completely disgusting. Not bad for a quarter a cup, mind you, but… what am I saying?! They’re disgusting pathetic little things only good for rat poison! And the coffee from a can’s no better — it’s like battery acid that’s been left out in the rain! More scoops of grounds doesn’t help the situation, either- that just makes it like battery acid someone left in the rain and the dog peed in. ARGH!

It’s a good thing, that commas, are cheap.