Frenzied Daddy

Sometimes when I walk from the car to the office, I go past a huge child care place, down on first and oak (and second and oak, it takes up most of the first floor of this particular building). I like to watch the kids playing in there. One day, as I marched past, head down so I didn’t get rain in my eyes, I noticed something strange. There was one boy and two girls away from the rest of the kids, kind of tucked around behind a wooden play set. The girls were facing the boy and he was facing them. Behind them was the window past which I was walking purposefully, behind him was the wooden play thing. Kitchen? Yeah maybe a play kitchen. The teachers were on the other side of the room doing something with the rest of the kids and hadn’t noticed anything amiss.

The look on the boy’s face sent me back; way back to when I was cross country skiing* in Anchorage…

I went past a friend’s house. Her name was Katrina. We were freshmen in High School together. She was cute and I liked to pass notes back and forth with her in Social Studies. And, uh, math. Maybe some in english too. Bah, I liked flirting with her, and she never said “get lost.” The main problem was that I had a girlfriend at the time, Stacy. Stacy was pretty much my first “real girlfriend.” The first girl I kissed, and meant it. She went to a different school though, and Katrina was closer to home. As I passed her house, Katrina came out and waved me to a stop. She invited me into her garage where we could “talk” without her parents butting into our conversation. I took off the skiis, put them and the poles up against the wall (leaving would be more of a production now than just running off). And I went into the dark garage with Katrina, not knowing what to expect, but thinking it couldn’t be too bad.

This is where I learned that Katrina and Stacy knew each other. A sinking feeling, then some fifteen or thirty minutes of “discussion,” after which I was supposed to “choose.” And then, of course, both of them telling me to go away and not talk to either of them any more. I knew it was a foregone conclusion when I found Stacy at Katrinas. The Jig, as they say, was up.

The look on this poor kid’s face looked just like I imagine mine did when I was cornered like a dirty, lying, dog-faced, two-timing rat.

So, some advice for you, kid. Hang tough. Apologize to the women and hold your head high. Don’t make unnecessary choices. It’s not really “either x or y” — it’s more likely “neither” than “both.”

* Don’t mistake me. We didn’t get to ski a lot in Anchorage. I just happened to be tooling around on my skis.

I hate stuff in the road.

I don’t know where it comes from, probably my socialist side, but I hate that when there’s a big thing in the road (bag of trash, et cetera), people just swerve into the other lanes and cause traffic problems rather than just move it. I don’t think you should put it in your car, or whatever, just get it out of the way. And I remember seeing things along the freeways as a kid, wondering where they came from and what their stories were.

Maybe it was the crowbar that came flying at me and stuck in my car so long ago. I don’t really know.

Last year it was a big five gallon tank that looked like it fell off a jeep or something. I was surprised how heavy it was as I dragged it off the highway. Last week, I pulled a big bag of trash out of one lane on Columbia. And today, there was a road sign (“steel plate in roadway”) that had fallen over and the sticklike supports were in the road just ready to be jammed into someone’s wheels or under their suspension. So when I pulled around at 42nd at the construction, I went up the hill a little way (it doubles back) and pulled over.

I thought I successfully navigated down the hill and to the sign but, alas, a sneaky (and thick!) blackberry runner caught me around the ankle and I fell down the rest of the hill, landing on my knees and hands in the muddy gravel. Not an image I like to present. But I dragged it out of the road and stuck it in the construction area anyway. Bah. Maybe I saved someone’s wheel. Maybe not. Just wonder where this hatred comes from.

I read an interesting article in Wired… ok, it’s true- I wouldn’t be telling you about a boring article I read in Wired, now would I? Anyway, it purported to be about “Google versus Facebook,” and how Google approaches the web from one direction (data) and Facebook from another (connections). But the more interesting part was a characterization of how people use “the internet” and “facebook” differently.

Most obviously, people use their real names on Facebook, and not “on the internet.” When someone suggests something to another person on Facebook, it’s one human to another – there’s less anonymousness. This makes the trust level of suggestions a lot higher there. As opposed to here, where I’m (mostly) “just a guy” and I refer to my wife as Ms B, and my kids as Miss B and Miss K (or the DQ and TT).

Part of this is the ability to ignore and block people on Facebook.

It’s a really interesting difference, and I plan to keep watching it.

I’ve landed a temporary gig at a place in Beaverton, remaking their website. I’ll be working there at least 30 hours a week. It’ll be interesting; I haven’t had a daily “go to work” job in over two years; the last one was Interlink. Since then, it’s been a combination office/work from home or just plain work from home. I’m excited and nervous, wondering about the culture there; do people eat at their desks? Will they understand peanut butter and jelly, an apple and a juice box?

Thirty hours a week won’t keep me from my other engagements. It’s temporary, so I’ll be looking for more gigs. But the stress will be off for a little while.

On the other hand, Miss B will be out from school soon (about this time next month) and we’ll have to discuss if we send her to a sitter or trust her alone. Alone in quotes; the neighbors are awesome. What’s the age you at which you were left alone? I was alone in the house … uhm third grade?

The unemployment line has gotten a little larger; FileFront.com is shutting down, and shuttering their business. That means that I’m unemployed, again. This is not a time for going off my meds and watching a lot of television, though. And this time I’m not playing Everquest 2, so won’t be grinding my conjurer. Nope, I have a bunch of irons in the fire and, while I need to get a full time job for the security of paying the monthly mortgages and other bills, I’m reasonably optimistic. A bunch of my other friends are unemployed too; (hi, Rachel!) – we could practically have a support group.

I was hoping for a more positive post for my 1000th post, but it’s an important change in my life, and should be marked by a post.

It’s funny, though. Some of my other jobs that I’ve lost when the business closed down, I have always worried that I caused it. Maybe if I worked a little harder. Maybe if I didn’t make so many mistakes. What if it’s all my fault. But this time, I know it wasn’t my fault. (Thanks Chris for making this clear).

Speaking of Chris; Chris O’Brien was a terrific boss.

I’m just getting used to the changes in the whitehouse website, when recovery.gov has been sprung on me. So far, I’m really happy with what I’m hearing from and seeing in the Obama administration.

But enough about those heavy politics Let’s talk about my kids.

The DQ had “a date” last weekend. Sunday, she went to the movies with her friend. A guy friend. Both Gramma P and I refuse to call it “a real date” for similar but different reasons. Her stance is that “sixth graders do not date,” while mine is “my sixth grader doesn’t date until she’s thirty.” At any rate, the mothers (Ms B and the young man’s mother) dropped them off at the theater in the mall, he bought her a soda-pop and they enjoyed Bedtime Stories. She came back all flushed and happy for the rest of the day.

Of course, that was wrecked when we learned how behind she was in school. But she has been summarily chastized and we are in direct contact with her teacher as she picks herself back up. I hope she manages to keep her solid 4.0, but I’m not seeing any band practice forms. She’s smart enough that the added homework is just an extra speedbump, though.

This weekend, I lifted the grounding because she sprained her ankle. I admit that I was a little skeptical when she called me from school at about 4 and claimed to have “kinda sprained my ankle,” but I went and collected her anyway. Yup, it’s sprained. She missed some classes on Friday and she’s been on the couch all weekend with an ice pack and the television controller. She’s nursing it for all she can get; limping around the house and whining for someone to get her some milk.

Too bad for her the cable’s off But Netflix to the rescue, I guess. I made her sit through Underdog.

The TT’s got some great updates too, but I have to go catch her and make her watch The Muppets Take Manhattan. Talk atcha later!

Frenzied Daddy, you’ve mauled the grass, butchered the roses, defoliated an entire microecosystem… What are you doing now?

Drinking my coffee and going back to work! I’m listening to small is the new bigby Seth Godin and plugging away on some audio stuff for CelleCast. I’m also trying to figure out how to make another site not have to be read from a subdir ( like www.example.com/blog ). Once those few tasks are complete, I can focus on some other ideas for making a buck online

This FreeLance Switch article on why one should work with smaller jobs ( and getting paid more frequently than monthly ) rung a bell for me. I love working with FileFront but with the size of some of our bills, I’ve got to keep working these side jobs. One of them does pay monthly, but also quickly; I send out invoices and they write a check usually that same day and mail it out. That’s ok, most of my bills come in at regular intervals.

I prefer the checks because Paypal takes a small but noticable cut out of the amount, and it would take the same amount of time to transfer my money from paypal as it would to have the check mailed.

Hope your weekend is fun, relaxing and productive!

You’ve probably noticed the advertising over on the left; a few months ago I swapped out the google adsense for the BlogHer ads. No, I’m still a “blogHim” but they’re taking new members, including … ( wait for it ) … guys!

Anyway, they’re taking a survey to find out what makes my ( our ) readers tick; so please go over here and take the survey. Apparently you can win a free pass to a BlogHer event, and everybody likes those.

I hear BlogHer events are great places to pick up chicks.

OW OW OW OW

One of the things I’m happy about from my childhood is the math. Yeah, this is where I remind dad that he wouldn’t let me have a calculator until I didn’t need one. Math and I get along pretty well. It’s kind of odd that reluctance to do math contributed to my dropping out of the Chemistry path in college, though. I enjoyed science too- especially Chem but I got tired of doing the “where could the electron be” equations and finally gave up.

Anyway, the DQ was doing her homework last night and asked me if some large ungainly number like 23001 could be divisible by three. I told her that 2+3+1 was 6 and 6 was a multiple of three, so yes. I think I picked that rule up in Junior High. We were doing some sort of factoring exercise and the teacher showed us that rule. So we could do any number was divisible by 2, 5, 10, and now 3, 6, 9 too ( if it’s divisible by 2 and also 3 then it’s divisible by 6, if the numbers add up to a multiple of 9 then it’s also divisible by nine ). I could never remember the fairly complicated rule for sevens, though. “Sevens are hard” I told DQ last night.

Ms B was surprised to learn that rule of threes. She caught on quick though because she’s a smart cookie. She agreed that sevens are hard.

So in my daily news reading, I was surprised to come across this article: “Is 91 Prime?” . One of those strange coincidences of the world.

Here’s their answer to the sevens conundrum:

Is 8638 divisible by 7?
863 - 2*8 = 847 (subtract twice the last digit)
84 - 2*7 = 70 (subtract twice the last digit)
70 = 7 * 10, which is divisible by 7 -- therefore 8638 is divisible by 7

That seems like too much work to me. It’s actually faster in this case for me to look at “7 goes into 8638… goes into 8 remainder 1, goes into 16 remainder 2, goes into 23 remainder 2, goes into 28 even, so yes. Sort of a division only worrying about the remainder.

Anyway, that article actually explains why the threes rule above works. It has to do with the decimal system. I almost understand it. One of the comments was also very interesting about square roots: the difference of two square roots is not prime. So 91 is not prime ( sorry to spoil the ending ) because 1) seven goes into 9 remainder 2 then seven goes into 21 remainder 0 and 2) (10×10)-(3×3)=91.

Easy, huh? What about 133? Are there two squares that differ by 133?