Frenzied Daddy

Well, you knew it was going to have to happen; we got a puppy. About three weeks ago, in fact. The Humane Society got several shipments at once of what they thought were Border Collie (mix) puppies, so we went over to take a look. We brought home “Thurston,” who they figured was a border collie mixed with some sort of hound. The vet says more “pointer” than hound, especially since he doesn’t bay like hounds do, and the way he stands. He’s smart like Perrin was, kind of sneaky like Honor was, and a ball of wild energy like a puppy is. He’s a lot of fun, and I’m sure I’ll post pictures. We’ve renamed him to “Akamaru” (Aka for short), who is some mangy manga dog.

Miss B is surprising us all with trying out for her high school’s performance of Pirates of Penzance. Don’t know how she did, but the tryouts were this week. Also this week, she brought home the “Battle of the Books” team permission form. Sounds great! She’ll have to read some non-fantasy stuff too.

Miss K had a special reading at her school yesterday. She read a story she wrote about growing and harvesting tomatoes and how proud she was of herself for tending them. I didn’t make it- I was buried at work. Had a client whose website was going live and it needed too much TLC for me to go running off. But I’m going to try to make it to her Winter performance; the classes are all singing rather than doing a play. Once during the day and then again in the evening.

And we bought a new car. A used car. Ms B’s car died on Thanksgiving, on her way home from work. It just stopped working. We found out later that it was the timing belt, a normal maintenance item that when it breaks, it breaks the whole engine. We bought a 2003 VW Jetta Stationwagon from Wentworth Chevy. I’m pretty happy. I’m very happy with the loan from First Tech CU- it’s 3.74%! (with a 1% discount for paying via automatic withdrawal). I took extra joy from that with the advertisement today of car loans “at less than 13 percent interest). Well, that’s something else.

Anyway, hope all is well in your lives.

Miss B’s first high school quarter is coming to a close, and I can say – EdBox is great, but it’d be greater if the teachers would update it more regularly. It’s a whole lot better than just guessing as to whether her work is done or not, though. Overall, I’m pleased with her grades. She has a couple of weak spots that EdBox is helping us track down, and one of those is the reason I’m sitting in Starbucks far from my normal haunts while she spends her Saturday morning at the school doing biology labs.

I’m trying hard to be the “awesome uncle” but my sister in law upped the ante. I’m sending my nephews and niece holiday cards, and sent out Halloween cards. Imagine my surprise when the girls got cards from their new nephew Dylan. Imagine my further surprise when each girl found a five dollar bill inside their card. I was shocked! And soon, I’ll be broke. Thanksgiving is coming. I bet I could fit a whole turkey into the card this time.

Miss K had a good time at her school’s literacy fair. She went to the book fair, ate Round Table pizza, made some comic strips, met a librarian from Multnomah County Library, and won a (scary) book. She spent her “Halloween money” on a Pokemon black/white catalog book. She was unhappy that I wouldn’t let her pack a lunch on the way out the door to school on Friday. Apparently it’s hard to carry both her book and the lunch tray. But I didn’t want to be late to school; we’ll work that out next week. Miss K also won a “respectful” award at her school’s award ceremony. Sometimes the “word of the week” at her school smells slightly of brainwashing, in an Orwellian sense, but some of those kids could use some washing. Last week’s word was “Volunteer” and this week’s was “Character.” She and I trick-r-treated in our neighborhood. She dressed up as a vampire woman, but because she mislaid her teeth, it was just a pretty red and black dress. She got the traditional bucketful of candy.

Miss K has been remarkably clingy this week. I waver between enjoying it and wanting my own space. Usually when I come home, I need my own space. Miss B, not so clingy.

Ms B had a day of Jury Duty this week and was released about lunchtime. I met her for lunch before she went home. It was very nice to sit and eat with her, even if we ate in the mall’s food court. She is angling for me to clean the house today and move the Xbox and PS3 upstairs so they get played with more. The basement is so dark and cold. This is tempting, but the obvious spot for them (at least until after Christmas) is our bedroom, where everyone congregates. I made the tactical error of offering to move our bedroom stuff to the (smaller) living room and then we could use the bedroom as the living room and just come in / go out through the back door. And hey, why don’t we have the Christmas tree back there too. Unsurprisingly, she thought the first idea was silly. Surprisingly, she could get behind the second idea. Whoops.

I’ve run twice this week and plan to either run tonight or tomorrow morning. I’m running 4 ten minute intervals, and my route takes me around a loop on the sidewalk. I’m not running on the (dark) bike paths or down the middle of the street. But it’s cold and wet. Hopefully I’ll keep my motion going through the winter.

And the best news of the week was that Grampa R is out of the hospital and healing at home. So glad he’s ok. I like him a lot.

It’s no secret that the economy here in the US is pretty damn pathetic. Being out of work for 2 years is “the new normal.” That’s not right. So Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, is working on something intriguing. They call it “community investing in America” – but it’s not investing, really. What the Starbucks Foundation is helping organize is people donating five bucks or so to a general fund that’s used by community lenders to help businesses. It’s not investing, because we (the investors) aren’t paid dividends. However, it’s an intriguing plan, and I expect to donate $5 myself.

Here’s what BlogHer co-founder Lisa Stone says:

In a nutshell, Starbucks is donating five million dollars to seed a fund at the Opportunity Finance Network for capital grants to local lenders who fund small businesses that make a difference. Businesses like Zonia Torres’s overnight day care in San Francisco and like Nicholas Kujawa’s housing units and fresh local market in Butte, Montana — these are my favorite examples as a former single mom who had to figure out how to work nights occasionally, and as a Montanan who watched the towns of Butte and Anaconda suffer when local mines declined.
source

To learn more, you can visit the CreateJobsForUSA website, and particularily today, you can listen to a conversation with Mr Schultz – 11AM Pacific or 2PM Eastern, you can call 877-698-0629 and use conference code 23564006. It’ll be a short conversation, and you’ll only be able to listen, but it should be interesting.

Miss B is up to her eyeballs in Algebra One. She’s having a hard time getting good teaching from her teacher. Our friend Mr I is also having troubles, in Trig. I have to admit, I’ve always enjoyed math, and enjoy being asked to help them. I hated my senior year math teacher, though, Mr Keupker.

Mr Keupker was mean. I don’t mean that in a whiny sense- he would walk around the eight seniors taking Calculus and say things like “Why are you even in this class. You can’t do this.” It really bugged me that he said this to Michelle (last name redacted for her privacy). I had a crush on her and knew that she was smart- she was taking classes that I was taking, and hey, I was smart.

Let’s be honest, I was a high school boy. I was a walking sac of hormones. I had crushes on half the girls in my classes. But two of my special affections were Michelle and Heidi.

To my delight, Michelle asked me to come over to her house and give her a few calculus tips. She was way out of my league, but I was more than happy to swing at any pitches she offered to throw. I biked over to her house one evening when I didn’t have to work, and we went to the kitchen table to talk about Calc. Her parents were out, and it was just us.

She offered me something to drink; she said “A coke, or maybe a beer.” Maybe she was offering to impress me, or test me or something. But my thought was “hey I drink beer after work. I can show how mature I am” and opted for the beer. She talked me down to a coke, which was ok too – I was just happy to be there. I wanted her to show up Mr Keupker, but she was starting to believe the things he said; “I’m not really smart.” I hate hearing that, especially from someone taking Honors Calc, Honors English and Physics.

I should have gone with the coke in the first place. And made myself memorable by saying “No, no beer for me. We’re here for Calculus, and I never drink and derive.” But I wasn’t quite that subtle in High School.

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.

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.