Frenzied Daddy

I was introduced to gaming a very long time ago. My friend Bill, a couple of years older than me, invited me to his place to try out a new game. I wanted to be liked by an older person, so I agreed (hey, what do you want, this was long ago in the days of Norman Rockwell) … the conversation went something like this:

Him: You’re walking through a forest, and a storm has ripped up an old tree. Underneath, there’s a tunnel leading down.
Me: Oh, ok, I go down the tunnel.
Him: You enter the cool tunnel, and go down the path a little ways. On the side of the tunnel is some green slime
Me: Eew. I run my fingers through it and smell it- does it smell like chemicals?
Him: You do what? (flips through book) Oh, you die.

Woo, wasn’t that exciting? I went home with a burning urge to play this weird game; and it fired up my imagination and played right into my love of reading. So, maybe you’ll understand if I go a little batshit over this announcement that Wizards of the Coast (who now own the DnD rights) are giving kits away to librarians … to run after-school games!

Nobody knows.

Our eldest feline, Malkin, is just like this. We generally think that she gets over stimulated and so goes bonkers and tries to claw your arm off. But sometimes, sadly, it doesn’t take very long until you’re bleeding from four long gouges in your forearm. It’s neat to know that 20 percent of all cats are psycho. Sometimes, though, I think the percentage is much higher. About five times higher.

I was badgered into buying water balloons. Normally I wouldn’t, but y’know, they were on sale, they promised to pick up all the pieces, and they (ok, Miss B) swore that the balloons weren’t for throwing but for cuddling. Uh, yeah, ok, honey.

They’ve been playing with their little balloon pets for an hour or an hour and a half, shrieking and carrying on. Now Miss B comes to the door and asks if I’d like my car washed.

What the hell, it can’t look any worse.

So now I have six of the neighborhood kids, none of them tall enough to wash the roof, all of them under nine years old, scrubbing my car. My car washing minions.

Wanna bring yours over? Not the car, the kid- I’ve got a lawn to mow, and since they can’t see over the handle, I was going to let them use scissors. I mean, what the hell, it can’t look any worse.

Am I a failure, if I need someone to watch my kids 2-3 days a week, so I can get “work” done? These last two days have really encouraged me to accept this “failure” and get done what needs to be done.

Last night, before dinner, Baby K was playing in the upstairs, and I was working on the laptop. With my acknowledged hearing loss and the lack of a baby monitor, I’ve found it more comfortable to work on the laptop upstairs while she sleeps in her crib. But yesterday she was playing in the upstairs. I was happily working away when I heard a huge thump and crash from the kitchen. Believe it or not, she had climbed ontop of the kitchen table and came crashing down. On her forehead. Which answers the question- which is harder, oak or bone- but also which is harder- oak or flesh; she has a huge purple black bump on her noggin.

Today, I can’t get the dogs to quiet down. They spend too much time in their kennels anyway, and they’re “just being dogs” wrestling over a ball. I think the ball was just an excuse to rough house. Baby K thought this was entertaining, except that they were wrestling over her ball. So I had screaming kid, growling play-angry dogs. Finally, I gave up and took Baby K downstairs to play “quietly” while I work on the big computer.

Remember that we moved the scrapbooking area downstairs?

I heard a thump, and some crying, and then some more crying, and then she started to get angry. I came out to find her, with her arm stuck in a drawer of the plastic craft carts, clutching a ball, with the cart pulled over on top of her.

I gave up; she’s in the crib, actually sleeping now, and I’m on the laptop. How do other daddies handle this? I’m going to need professional help.

I don’t compare myself to Superman, or even Spiderman, but I do have a comic world role model. And by his standards, I think I’m failing. How does Adam@Home do it? I’ve got a terrificly home-oriented job, two awesome kids, a delightful wife, and I still feel like I’m not getting anywhere.

Mrs B tells me that I need to set a schedule in steel. That is, get to where I know that at any certain time in the day, what the kids are supposed to be doing. That works really well until (like today) Baby K crawls up on top of the kitchen table and falls off onto the hard floor. That was kind of distracting, and then Baby K wouldn’t sit down anywhere for hours. Sigh. Gotta keep working on it.

RSS man, RSS man,
RSS man hates Atom man,
They have a fight, RSS wins.
RSS man.

for the record, nobody’s really dead yet. I just thought the TMBG reference was funny

Thanks, Slashdot.

I crawled under the desk, my trusty craftsman cordless drill/screwdriver in my hand. In the other hand I held a small brass l-brace, and in my mouth, two small screws. Carefully, I placed the brace in what appeared to be the right position, held a screw to drill into the board, and started driving the screw in. Naturally, I screwed it in crooked, the screw slipped to the side and fell to the floor. I looked down, then removed the second screw from my mouth, placing it in the gouge left by the first one. I drilled it in, and learned that because of awkward placement (the brace was too high up on the board for the bottom of the desk surface ), I’d have to redo the whole process. I sighed, and backed out of the desk.

Don’t tell anyone, but then I reached over for my wife’s scrapbooking materials. I took a glue dot™ and stuck it to the back of the L-brace, then slid it into position. I drilled a couple of pilot holes, and then put the screws to it. Worked like a charm. I suppose I could have taken out the gluedots after the holes were drilled, but what purpose would that serve?

I tell ya, scrapbooking tools just aren’t manly enough. Hard to imagine a carpenter walking around with a bundle of glue dots ™ on his belt. But maybe a real craftsman wouldn’t need glue dots.

Amazing

I was stumbling the internet, bleary eyed and work-avoiding when I happened across a “ray tracing contest” site. Ray tracing is the computer graphics where usually you see a steel ball bearing suspended above a checkerboard, with the checkerboard reflected in the ball bearing. It’s tracing the rays of light, or something.

There were some gorgeous examples of it in this competition/exposition, but the most jaw dropping was this gentleman’s. I find it particularily amazing because he will explain in math terms what the shape is that his pov-ray picture is of, and he has an artist’s sense of color and composition. Real left-brain and right-brain unity.

My lovely wife (Happy Anniversary, honey) turned to me last night and said, and this is a direct quote; “Honey, we don’t have anything planned this weekend, right? So you can finish ripping out those bushes and mow the lawn and clean the house ?” I have to admit, my response was a not very helpful grunt. My weekend went from a fairly quiet S.E.R.E.N.E. weekend to a H.A.V.O.C weekend in less than a paragraph.

Honestly, I don’t need help coming up with a honeydo list; there’s always one in my head. That’s one of the reasons I’m frequently tired; I spend a lot of mental energy chasing one end of the list around, making sure I’m not forgetting something, and then starting over again at the top. Frustratingly, it’s hard for me to decide not to listen; if Miss B asks for a glass of water, it sort of sits in the back of my head that “hey pal, someone needs water.” Or if Mrs B suggests that she’d like to see the HUGE hedges gone from in front of the house sometime this summer, well, it sits in the back of my head for literally months.

Or even if Toddler K wakes up from her nap, plays quietly for a little bit and then cries for a while … sooner or later I have to change her.