Frenzied Daddy

Have I ever told you how much I hate spaghetti?

I’ve done it again.

By which, I mean, I’ve walked away from an accident bad enough for the insurance company to throw up its hands and shout “Don’t bother fixing it! We surrender!” Yes, the kids are alright. Yes, so am I. But the Kia is cooked. For those of you on I-5 southbound on Black Friday (Friday after Thanksgiving), under the Morrison bridge, about noon, I apologize.

What happened? Well, I went from highway 30 to I5 and then foolishly tried to change lanes. There’s always a traffic knot at the exit to I84, so I went into the left lane to go ’round, then back into the center because eventually I needed to turn right. On the second lane change, I hit a puddle or something on the road, began to fishtail, spun perpendicular to the traffic flow, and eventually into the concrete divider under the Morrison bridge.

You see that first point on the map? That’s where I pulled over and made Miss B sit on her butt. We were listening to rocking Christmas tunes and singing, and she was dancing- but I made her sit down (she had been sitting on her feet in her chair in order to get more bounce).

And the kia? I’ll upload some pictures. The scary thing is that I hit the concrete barrier at something close to freeway speeds and the air bags didn’t explode. I probably hit it kind of sideways (You can see sideways scratches on the front of the car) but the impact was hard enough to jar me, give Ms B a minor strap burn on her shoulder, and Toddler K bit her tongue hard enough to bleed. That’s not a little love tap. So if you read these statistics, take them with a little bit of salt, because my stupid air bags didn’t do anything. Of course, I did walk away from the accident (and promptly jumped back out of traffic).

Furthermore, I was really sucked in by Les Schwab. The weekend before Thanksgiving, I spent 2.5 hours and $350 at Les Schwab (and the kids were awesome), and bought completely new tires and had them siped because I was (and still am) paranoid, and their demos made a lot of sense. Well, the siping didn’t stop the hydroplaning, and I don’t think they helped when I was sliding perpendicular, either. Maybe I was expecting too much?

Well, we’re ok. And I’m out one newish car (2003), which has a positive side. But now, I’m looking for a car with decent mileage, good reliability, seats four (with 4 doors preferable), and I would really like to seat more (some sort of mini-van or something) in order to transport wood / building supplies / the neighbor kids. And my budget is kind of small. I was going to bid on one on ebay, but I can’t find the listing now (it already ended).

I’m getting fed up. I should take it as a compliment, I suppose, but I’m deleting over 20 comment spams per day. Also, there’s an exploitable part of the code I’m using for this site; so soon, very soon, I’ll be upgrading to WP 1.5. It’s excellent; I’ll be ok. But the site look might change for a while. I’m sure you’re used to it by now.

I don’t do it often, but now that Mr R showed me how, I get a real man-charge out of taking apart the toilet to fix the darn thing. It’s one of the few things I do that I feel manly for being able to do. I did it a few months ago to rescue a bottle of aspirin that had gone for a swim. The medicine chest is in an unhappy place. This week, I had to do it again. I should have been more careful; I was in the study, and Toddler K was toddling about. Then I heard a maniacal cackle out of the bathroom, so I rushed in and saved her from playing in the toy-let again.

I should have known something was up when it wasn’t flushing right. So I plunged the sh— err, snot out of it. That didn’t help matters. I jammed a coat hanger down it, hoping to dislodge whatever was in there; no such luck. So, finally, I resigned myself to pull it apart and find out what was down the tube.

Perhaps this sign I made will … illustrate the … issue.

While I had it all apart, I noticed that a bunch of the rubber washers that held the system were swollen, cracked, and basically worthless; that probably didn’t help the leakage issue we’ve been having. So, for want of a $5 toilet repair kit, we’ll need to replace the floor (we needed it anyway, the bathroom floor was a goner from the get-go).

Still working; distracted mostly by more immediate concerns. But when I get it running again, my wishease wishlist will have books by Robin Williams (no, not that one) like this book . Robin Williams has been around for a while, and this topic has really been in my mind a lot. Specifically, type, but also how to design websites. Unfortunately, I’m in kind of a rut; header graphic, left navigation, right news, middle content. Bo-o-oring.

Pat Morita, of Happy Days fame, has become the late Pat Morita.

No, he wasn’t in my car. Thanks for asking though.

Story

Heh.

Found this on fark.. Target is offering free wakeup calls for their sales this weekend. It’s all computerized n stuff, surely. You just register and select a caller (everything from Kermit the Frog to some sluttysultry swimsuit model, to a mariachi band. I bet it’s pretty easy to register your email address and some poor schmuck’s telephone number. But since it is all computerized-n-stuff, maybe you should annoy your brother in law (not me, not me!) and not someone who is getting entirely too much sleep, mmkay?

We found a fascinatin’ show on the HGTV channel last night; Holmes on Homes. They were doing “Thanksgiving with all the fixins’ .” Basically, they find people who have had shoddy, totally craptacular work done on their house and redo it. My favorite episode was this one:

Jacking the Box
Sian hired a contractor to pour a new foundation around the perimeter of her house but the wall was too small for the size of the house. So, the upper part of the house now overhangs over the foundation. Mike Holmes arrives to shore up Sian’s house and give her a safe, warm basement.

The original contracter lifted her house up in the air (with a crane, it was several feet up!), poured a new foundation, and then demanded his money before he put the house back down. When he put the house back down, the foundation wasn’t the right size, and there was even big gaps between the foundation and the wall. Then he basically stapled the house to the foundation and called the job done.

One of the kids slept in the basement, and wild animals (racoons and oppossoms, I imagine) crawled over him every night.

Aside from the obvious homeowner – contractor – project connection, this show was inspiring in a “web contractor” sense. It’s always impressed me that when I build a website for someone, there’s no building permit, there’s no “up to code” to follow, there’s no publically employed web inspector to go check a site. And Mike Holmes was adamant about “you hire contractors for a reason” – we know the questions to ask. You pay them huge amounts of money, and you don’t know if they’ll deliver your goods or not. You shouldn’t have to check up on the contractor.

Sure, if your website is built shoddily, you won’t be sleeping in a draft with a racoon on your face, but you might be exposing credit card numbers, email addresses, you might have broken scripts, easily findable (and stealable) images, your php might be flawed and allowed a bad guy to use the script to send spam from your computer. Are there actually web inspectors who look for these insecurities, or is it just a realm of the script kiddie?

Cept for all the piratin and whinin.

Working from home has its advantages, to be sure; I get to spend a lot more time with my kids, and I get to be pretty loose with my “schedule.” But the downsides are there too- I’m at home a lot more, I have to be firm on myself, and if I don’t meet my goals, I’m still working; I can’t just say “oh well” and go home at the end.

Well, I can, I suppose, but it sort of looks bad if I’m not getting my work done.

The biggest problem is the lack of transition. When I go to work in the office, and then come home, there’s a definate feeling of “I’m home now, I can work on my home stuff” whether it’s (ahem) cleaning the house, or (cough) feeding the family, or even (sheepish grin) playing Sid Meier’s Civilization IV. But when I’m home all day, it’s harder to mentally “clock out” and go on with my day. It’d be a lot easier if I could rule out more distractions; if I’m home with the kids, I’m likely to be disturbed, then I’ll feel less like I’ve accomplished stuff, and more like I should keep plugging away.

Well, I’ve found a new positive feature of working from home. I really screwed something up last week, to the tune of my boss asking to chat with me about it. It wasn’t pretty, and totally contrary to the way I feel I should work. I swore I’d never do it again, and … it happened again. So, I can kind of hide at home (helps that the kids are out of school this entire week) and hope I can make it up in the time before I go back into the office next week.