False Awareness

Day 33

2009-01-08T21:22:00.002-06:00

It's day 33 of the 100 days 100 pushups routine. To recap - I'm working up to the point where I'm doing 100 push ups a day. I started out doing situps as well, but ditched that early on.

And I can already tell the difference. So short summary:

Total Pushups since Day 1: 561
Total Pushups in the last week: 210

Not bad who was at 0 and 0 for the last 20 years.

Day 10

2008-12-16T20:49:00.003-06:00

Day 10.

Pushup status: Check
Sit up status: Check

So far, that makes: 55 pushups in 10 days, which is *by far* more push ups than I have ever done in that time period. No big deal so far. Not really struggling or anything.

But, I after working out the other night, I thought I'd just do some other simple exercises. So I did squats, you know, without weights. Well, without added weight I should say. I was squatting a great deal of weight. I did 25 of them, and holy crap am I out of shape. That's about all I could do. I could feel it a little bit today even.

I also went the full seven days without sweets. Which was a big challenge for me, but got through that without a hitch too. Next thing you know, I'll be healthy. Watch out.

100 in 100

2008-12-11T16:23:00.002-06:00

To paraphrase my friend Gabe, it's not real unless you blog it.

So I started a program. I'm working up to 100 pushups and 100 sit ups in 100 days. This is day 5, so far so good. Some people try to work up to being able to do them all in a row, but I have no such delusions. I'm just hoping to be able to do all of them in a single day. It should be interesting. I have trouble motivating myself to work out, unlike DearWife who is nearly obsessive about it. Doing this provides a specific goal - one that I think is accomplishable.

Image via WikipediaIn a related note, I have sworn off all sweets for a week. Which - at least for me - is fricking hard. On day 4 of that one. Why am I doing these things? To see if I can. Gabe recently quit eating meat altogether. And while I've thought of doing that, I think the concept is nearly insane. Why would you give up tasty meat? Pshaw - health concerns. Bah.

Will keep you all updated.

Children's Book - Owl Moon

2008-12-05T15:33:00.004-06:00

Cover of Owl MoonIn our house, we have hundreds upon hundreds of books for our kids. We've read all of them about 80 times. That's a lot of reading.

So I thought I would pass along reviews once in a while. I'm starting with one of my all time favorites, Caldecott award winner "Owl Moon" by Jane Yolen.

It tells the story of a father and his daughter walking out into the snow covered hills near their home. They're going 'owling,' looking for a Great Horned owl. A simple walk in the woods is transformed into a great adventure in the eyes of the girl. You can tell really feel her excitement to be out after bed time in the cold with her Dad.

The book is also sentimental - and I'm a sap for sentimental books. Reading the book reminds me of time I spent in the winters on my Grandparents' farms. It reminds me of how extraordinary every day things can be to children

My kids love examining the pictures to find all the hidden animals. Even though the father doesn't really *say* anything in the book, I always like books with fathers in them. There are too many books that eliminate the father, often times without explanation. So it's refreshing to see stories with Father\Child bonding.

The story is so calming, that it is the perfect book to read before bed. It's highly recommended.

Buy "Owl Moon: 20th Anniversary Edition" at Amazon

Jane Yolen at Amazon

Cone of Silence

2008-10-22T17:19:00.003-05:00

As happens from time to time, life catches up with me. The schedule between longish days at work, the commute and getting some rough-housing time with the older boys, and face time with the baby, is just hectic.

So I haven't been blogging at all. Which is a little disappointing, because it's sort of a reflection on why I started blogging. That is, I didn't want to miss the little stuff. And I have been. No longer.

Yesterday, LittleBrother spontaneously drew a picture of a heart, a picture of me, and 'mis' because he misses me when I'm at work. Incredibly heart warming. I do spend a lot of time out of the house because of work, but at the same time, it's not like I'm gone for the entire day. I'll get home for a couple hours before they need to be in bed.

At the same time, I do feel like I'm being cheated a little bit. Cheated of time when they're truly innocent. Am I projecting? For those of you who work outside the house, do your kids talk about missing you when you're at work?

The Door fell off

2008-09-26T12:09:00.002-05:00

I was at work on Tuesday. I called home to hear about the kids day in school, how the baby was doing, and all that. DearWife "Um, did you see my Facebook status?" I don't know what it says about us that we communicate in Facebook statuses sometimes.

So as it happens, her status was "The refrigerator door just fell off."

But let's back up a few days. I was out of town at a conference in New York last week. On a sidenote, I stayed in a hotel that didn't have it's name on the outside because putting your name on the outside isn't cool.

So, DearWife was crazy busy with the kids. Then we were at my parents over the weekend. So, there has been little time to get anything done around the house or whatnot. So on Monday morning, DearWife realizes it's playgroup on Wednesday, and ZOMG there is a lot of cleaning to do. So, short story, she decides to paint the mud room - because, you know she's full of free time.

Before the paint dries, the door on the refrigerator falls off. The bottom hinge rusted through apparently. Now DearWife scambles to save the frozen pizza and ice cream (there may have been healthy food in there, I'm not sure, I just don't really pay attention to it) and everything else.

Now in my world, that's a lesson. When you are a SAHM with 3 kids 5 and under, it's always going to be something that pops up. In DearWife's world, it's just that the damn door fell off the fridge. It reminds me of the former Bears head coach Dave Wannstedt, who, after each loss would say "if we could have just made more plays." Well, that's the thing, you have to earn those big plays. And with kids at home, it's always going to be something unexpected popping up sucking your time.

But, to her credit, the house was ready for playgroup the next morning. And everyone survived. What the hell do I know.

It's not if you fall, it's how you get up

2008-08-24T21:19:00.002-05:00

So for the past couple weeks, I've been taking the older boys out to ride bikes. LittleBrother rides around on his just a little too small pee-wee bike, and I've been trailing around BigBrother as he learns to ride on two wheels.

At first, BigBrother was really scared, but eager. You could see he really wanted to do it, and he was ready. But he was still anxious. The first time we did it, we went on a baseball diamond. At the end of the first session, he was going on two wheels by himself for 15 seconds. He was immnsely proud, and I was immensely proud of him. The second time, we went to the parking lot, becuase it had more open space, and he could keep going longer. He would self-correct when he started leaning too much.

Then, a couple days ago, in just the third time we went, he really took off. He could slow down, stop, fall well, and turn. He was going in each and every direction, and I literally couldn't keep up with him. I cannot tell you how proud I was of him. So this morning we decided that we would all go to the parking lot and have Mommy see how great he was doing.

DearWife brought the camera and the video camera. BigBrother started going, and voila, he was doing just awesome. You could just see the concentration in his eyes. His self confidence was just growing by leaps and bounds.

Then he took a turn that was a little too sharp. He tried to break his fall with his hands, but missed, and broke his fall with his chin instead. Then he slid a little and scraped up his cheek too. I ran over to him to hold him and calm him down. He was upset. And there was blood all over his chin and face. I held him, but he saw blood on my shirt when I pulled back. And that set him off. He was completely inconsolable. He wouldn't let me see how bad it was, and just wanted to GO HOME RIGHT NOW. He kept looking over at the family that was on the playset.

He was sobbing nearly uncontrollably, until we got him cleaned off a little and in the car. The whole time, DearWife was telling him how brave he was. Which, you know, he's 5 - I don't blame the kid for being as upset as he was. But....

So anyway, we got home, he calmed down eventually, and we had a decent evening. At the end of the night, I had a talk with him about getting back on the bike. I told him everyone falls, and that everyone has to get back on the bike after they fall.

He insisted that it was his decision, and in his words "frankly, I don't think I want to right now."

I just have to get him back on the bike in the next day or two. Poor kid.

A Quick Horror Story

2008-08-12T21:59:00.003-05:00

I came home from a longish day at work, and asked DearWife how her day went. She told me all the different stuff she did with the kids (they are in love with the 4 week old kittens a couple doors down).

After a busy morning and a quick lunch, they went to the store (of course referring to Target). She was looking for a specific DVD, and the clerk walked her from the counter to the shelves. Tiny (the baby) and LittleBrother were in the cart, and BigBrother was hanging on to it.

The clerk tried to explain why they didn't have "Chicken Little" (my guess is that it sucked and didn't sell, although the clerk didn't use that explanation). DearWife looked down, and BigBrother was nowhere to be found. She walked to the counter...nothing. Down the aisles, nothing. Just.about.to.panic.

Then over the intercom "Would BigBrother's mommy please come to the customer service desk?" I think it goes without saying that this could happen to anyone - I know it's been close to happening to me in the past.

BigBrother had a long, scared face, but he was very brave. "I knew just what to do. I found a lady that worked there, and told her I had lost my Mommy."

Honestly, I couldn't be more proud of him, and of the job DearWife has done in making sure he knows what to do in that situation.

On "Jon & Kate plus 8"

2008-08-05T09:04:00.002-05:00

or..."reason 12,345 my family will never be on reality TV (reasons 1-12,344 being we're too boring)"

"Jon & Kate plus 8" is a TV show on some cable channel (TLC? Having DVR means never having to know). Soon after they got married, they had fertility treatment, and had twin girls. A couple years later they wanted to have 'just one more.' They had sextuplets. Now they have a TV show.

It's pretty popular. And when that happens, you get haters. There are websites out there dedicated to ripping into the family (the parents really), based on (among other things, like Kate's hair cut, her tummy tuck, or Jon's hair plugs) the theory that the parents are exploiting the kids.

I honestly haven't read these sites, but DearWife goes to them from tiem to time and tells me what people are saying. So this isn't a diatribe against the sites perse, it's more of a general commentatry on the Streisand effect. But there are two things I don't really get.

First, if the point is that you want to save the kids from exploitation, contributing to a site that promotes the show is bad. Every comment on these sites, positive or negative, raises the profile of the show. People happen on the site, get worked up, and watch the show more often because they're so worked up about it. Which means higher ratings, which means a longer run. Which means if you blog about how a show is exploiting the kids, you're contributing to the exploitation.

Second, what is going on in your life that it is so damn important to be so negative publicly. Is Kate bitchy? Sure. Hell, she has 8 kids- how could she not be bitchy from time to time. Are you so perfect that you can afford to be the first to throw stones?

If you were to tape any house in America for two weeks, you could edit it to show the family to be great or horrible. Lighten up people.

Damn that Frankie Valli

2008-07-24T15:36:00.003-05:00

Whilst in Vegas (or the land of 3" heels and cleavage as I like to call it), we went to see Jersey Boys. For the record, I hate musicals as a rule. "Cats," "Les Mis" I just don't get it. I want some sort of, oh, I don't know PLOT. Most musicals are an excuse to string together broadway tunes with a barebones, yet highly melodramatic outline.

But I had hope for Jersey Boys. It was about a real group, real people. And it had non-broadway music. Let me just tell you, I fucking loved Jersey Boys. Fantastic. The only problem is that I can't stop singing "Rag Doll" or "Dawn" or "Bye bye baby baby goodbye" or half a dozen other songs in my head.

If you get the chance go see it.

Note: As we were leaving, an older gentleman was talking to his wife about the show. He LOVED it. The music was great, the story, etc. Then she said "Oh Stan would love this music." He said "DO NOT let him buy it. I'll just burn the CD."

Nothing like showing your appreciation of an artist by stealing their music. I'm off to listen to my Four Seasons station on Pandora.

4rth of July Parade

2008-07-10T19:32:00.006-05:00

In what has become a tradition, we went to our local 4rth of July parade. We live in an area that is rapidly turning into a megasuburb, but still has it's country roots.

This is the country part.

Is there really a need for a company doing Pet Transportation?

Cool TriPod dog, who was recently rescued.

HUGE Mastiff being friendly with some kids.

Wouldn't the Saints have been a better choice for a nickname?

These are the belly dancers. Emphasis on BELLY. Looks like the old lady on the left is considering joining the class.

I was seriously concerned that he'd have a heart attack, it was like 85 degrees.

My favorite ad in the whole damn thing.

Death defying acrobatics!

Hot Rods!

No better way to show your patriotism than by sitting your fat ass on the Amercian Flag, is there?

Call him TINY

2008-07-10T19:18:00.005-05:00

And don't worry, he has his whole head and everything. I just snipped it because teh internets can be creepy at times. Anyway, 2 chins, manboobs, a roll on his chest, bigolefat arms and legs. Yep, he's fat! Obviously this is a good thing. He's very healthy. Very very healthy. Except that about 1/2 of what he takes in comes back out through his mouth. The only person who hasn't gotten spitup on is BigBrother, who has some type of anti-spitup magic.

Feel the Burn

2008-06-30T20:33:00.002-05:00

My brother in law is building a new house on his property. Before he could start, he had to get rid of the old house. The choice was a $500 donation to the local fire department or $5000 to a demolition company. I think he made the right choice.

In addition to allowing the firemen and women a chance to practice under controlled conditions, it allowed the local police a chance to burn up all the porn and drugs they've been waiting to dispose of...no joke.

So we headed out and honestly had a grand old time watching their house burn down. The only bad part of that the mosquitoes love them some Khyle. They're female after all. Bad jokes aside, it was a little weird watching the house burn down that we had Christmas and other holiday's in. Had to have been a lot weirder for their family, watching the first house their kids lived in be destroyed.

At least Brother in law has the comfort of knowing that he will be living in a crowded house with his in laws for 9 months or so. Great people honestly, but it can't be easy moving back in with mom and dad and toting your two kids and husband in tow. Good luck to all involved with that.

Pictures:

This is after just a few minutes after they lit the final fire.

You can see the flames visible now in the kitchen through the door.

Now picture you waking up in that smoke. Not fun. Check your smoke detectors!

The smoke is blocking out much of the sunlight at this point.

The addition on the right is the first room to really light up.

This is a view of the same door as in the first picture. But here you can now see the front room on the left completely ablaze.

No trees were actually harmed in this. Not even the ones 5 feet away.

The addition (partially behind the tree) is almost completely gone.

Just the shell left on this one.

Quickly

2008-06-24T11:48:00.003-05:00

I downloaded Spore Creature Creator when it came out. This video below is of a creature LittleBrother (3.5) created. Pretty cool for a 3 year old. When i can get around to uploading the one that BigBrother did, I'll do that too.

A Quick Note about the baby

2008-06-13T13:19:00.003-05:00

Or Tiny, as I call him. He's just over 3 months old now. And he's stretching out of his 6-9 month clothes. Seriously. He's just that fat. DearWife will argue with me on that "babies can't be fat" - but she's wrong. If you put him on his back, he looks eerily similar to a komodo dragon.

It's a good thing too. We moved him into the nursery, and he's been very cool with it. On Wednesday, DearWife went to BodyPump. I (somewhat miraculously) got the big boys to bed early. Tiny screamed through the book reading portion of our routine, and wasn't too happy when I tried to sing to his brothers.

But then I turned on baseball. And he calmed down. And went to sleep. And stayed asleep...for 10 more hours! Amazing little kid. I attribute it all to his eating.

A pool of Blue & The Sound and Fury

2008-06-10T10:40:00.002-05:00

Just a note: So BigBrother is fine. After the bloodletting the other night, he's been 100% ok. So that's good.

We just got through with a long weekend. Not long as in a took a day off of work. Long as in full of stuff. We spent most of Saturday at the local pool. It was awesome. DearWife and I alternated between playing with the big boys and holding the baby. LittleBrother voluntarily put his head under water for the first time. You know, that doesn't sound like a big deal. But one of my favorite things as a Dad is watching the little achievements like that. He was so proud.

Then they both got these floaty-life-vesty things (DearWife help me out what are they called?). And they swam for hours all by themselves. It was just fantastic. And a welcome diversion from every day and work stresses.

We left 15 miutes before a deluge. So that was nice. Then we spent a long time in the basement as there was a tornado warning. The kids were fine, playing with their toys and whatnot. The biggest argument was that I told DearWife she couldn't go get the kids' babybooks because, you know there was a TORNADO in the area. So she went and got them anyway.

Sunday brought more storms, except this time they came after the kids were completely asleep.
LittleBrother slept his way through the whole thing. BigBrother was only partially awake. DearWife and I spent our time watching videos on Funny or Die.

Finally...lat night we went and got our passes to Great America. Spent a couple hours there riding the Whizzer and in Wiggles World. Kids were completely worn out and loved it.

Great times.

A Pool of Crimson

2008-06-06T16:26:00.002-05:00

I was holding the baby, watching the White Sox the other night. Both older boys were asleep for the night. BigBrother had just broken his fever the day before. I heard someone messing around in the bathroom. It was too late to be a 'Daddy I need a drink' 'Daddy I have to go potty' or 'Daddy I heard a sound' excuses to come out of their room.

It was BigBrother. He was blowing his nose. "Daddy, I have a bloody nose." So I went up, closely followed by DearWife, who was working in the office.

At first I thought, ok, no big deal:

Get toilet paper\kleenex
Hold his nose together
Wait till it stops
go back to bed

But that's not what happened. He was bleeding all over the place. I mean to the point where I thought this was a scene from a Quentin Tarantino homage to kung fu movies. DearWife kept telling him to blow his nose, which would inevitably end up with blood spattering on the floor, the sink, the bath tub, his face. I thought about saying "maybe it's not a good idea to blow all that blood out of his nose" but thought better of it. I figured my main job in this was to keep the baby quiet.

Once we (and be we I mean DearWife) got the bleeding stopped, we (and by we I mean DearWife) changed his sheets and his pillow cover, which were blood soaked.

BigBrother was calm. He's had bloody noses before, and we didn't make it a big deal. After cleaning up the bathroom (I recall a similar scene playing out in Pulp Fiction) DearWife googled Bloody noses.

And like all things with kids - it's usually not a problem. As DearWife said "it's just that the kids membranes are thinner. Unless it's a sign of LEUKEMIA."

So that's another call to the doctor for next week.

Sickness

2008-06-03T14:38:00.003-05:00

BigBrother (5) has been sick for 6 days now. His only symptoms are a fever of 102-103 and a lack of appetite. Six. Days. We have taken him to the doc twice. Same answer both times. "It's a virus, it'll run its course, and then he'll be fine." And ok, I trust our docs. So I'm confident that it's true.

It goes without saying, I'm sure that it sucks watching your son be sick for 6 days and not being able to help out. Helpless is not something I am generally good at. I do my best to keep his spirits up. I took LittleBrother out and had him choose a little present for his BigBrother. He chose foam swords in a close decision over a sand toy.

And last night, after his brothers were asleep, BigBrother couldn't sleep. So I let him come down. He asked me if we could watch Dirty Jobs. It was a small thing. But it was one of those small things that I could tell took great joy in. Just him and his dad.

BigBrother talked about all the things Mike Rowe was doing (cleaning garbage out of a sinkhole, cleaning a printing press). I even let him watch a little of the next show (Verminators). That show made a big impression on him ("Daddy make sure to watch and tell me how they kill the rats!").

But the shows weren't what made us both happy. It was spending time just relaxing, watching a funny show, just father and son. The two of us don't really get alone time. And although there are far more chaotic families than ours, it was really cool just to be able to take advantage of the time we had.

On DirecTV

2008-05-30T16:32:00.002-05:00

DirecTV:

Are you begging me to cancel? As you know, I was upset with you because your HD TV channels' audio would just lock up for a second randomly. I complained. The issue went away. Then it came back, and you had no idea why. So I blogged and tweeted about it. You called and shipped out a brand new version of the HD Receiver.

At first, I was happy. Then I got random digital-ish quirks in the audio again. It was the audio equivalent of watching scrambled cable. And I hadn't experienced that until last night.

Look, I only give a crap about a single show: LOST. Last night was the two hour finale.
At several points in the show, the audio would scramble, and the screen would go green. Green! During the most important two hours of my TV watching experience.

At this point, it's not about your disappointing Customer Service. It's about the crappy product. My recommendation is to bring back Tivo. Tivo kicks your DVRs ass in so many different ways. As soon as I convince DearWife that we can go without TV or to switch to Cable for several months, you're done.

Unless you buy me back with free shit of course. Payola is welcome.

My short happy life as a Swimsuit model

2008-05-29T09:19:00.002-05:00

One of our good friends happens to be the Director of Marketing for Key Lime Cove. It's an indoor water park in Gurnee. And if you know Gurnee, you know there is a dearth of things to do there, so it is much needed. Anyways, they were doing a photo shoot and recruited some local people to participate. So we got the call.

The shoot went off pretty well. Basically the photographer let the kids play with us, and took pictures as they were having fun. There were some amusing moments as the art director kept trying to direct the photog to get what he thought the best light was. Watching the photographer keep his cool was fun in and of itself.

As for the park itself, I thought it was really fun. It has all the things you need in an indoor water park: wave pool, lazy river, toddler areas, huge water slides. We stayed longer than I really anticipated because we were having so much fun.

We didn't eat much while we were there, preferring just to get hot dogs and fries for the kids. But the food we ate was really good. Unfortunately I can't comment on the prices, because, you know we got in free.

They have a couple promenades that have various stores and food places. There was a guy showing off a parrot talking to the kids as they waited to check in.

Overall, I would say that if indoor water parks are your thing, you should check out Key Lime Cove.

There are no comments anymore

2008-05-22T13:37:00.003-05:00

I recently installed Disqus for comments on this blog. I did it because Disqus can help solve a couple problems I've had for a long time. That is, I forget where the hell I commented and I forget to check for responses. I want to go to a single place and track where it is that I've commented, and get an Email when someone responds. And now, I can do that - at least for all blogs that use Disqus. Check out my Disqus profile here.

Some blogs have the Email feature, including Blogger (if you use your Blogger\Google identity). But not all. I'm me, one person, I should control how I recieve comments come in, not the writer or publisher of some blog.

However, even as the evolution towards portable comments is happening, I'm seeing a different trend. Many responses form Blog posts are coming in the form of other blog posts and tweets. So I'm begging Disqus to write a Twitter bot of some kind to allow people to tag tweets (and link to the appropriate conversation, possibly in Quotably) to link back to those in comments.

That is all. Goodbye.

The confused state of Video

2008-05-21T11:41:00.002-05:00

On the day I canceled my Netflix account, they released a set top box that streams videos from their online library through the internet onto your TV. It is getting great reviews.

That doesn't stop it from being stupid. For the life of me, I cannot figure out why companies cannot get this right. If you're going to do a set top box right now, it has to be a killer set top box. It has to be loaded with functionality. The Netflix box does one thing, stream videos (from a libary of 10k movies & TV Episodes). Their entire library is just greater than my que when I canceled.

This is doomed to failure. First, Netflix has to be taking a big loss on this just to stay in the game. That sounds nice, but the only way this pans out is if they get bought out by a complimentary player (like Best Buy). Even then, it is not clear that this would ever turn into a money maker.

The next problem is that this functionality exists already today in nearly every house this will be deployed in. It's called a PC. It makes no sense to me that we can't just get some kind of cheap extender that will extend your PC to the TV. Doing that means you can take advantage of all the media on your PC and the internet. YouTube, DVDs, videos you have legally downloaded, etc. You could watch a slideshow or stream your music library over your stereo system.

Sooner or later TV makers are either going to imbed a simple media OS into TVs or they will come with WiFi that allows you to hook up your PC and stream videos. In the mean time, if we insist that a set top box is required, here is what it has to do to be successful.

Access to a HUGE library: It's ok if I don't see "Night Train to Munich" but it's not ok if I don't see "Raiders of the Lost Ark."
OTA receiver + DVR: If I can hook up some rabbit ears, I should be able to watch free over the air HD content and record it for future use wherever I want.
BluRay DVD: Must be able to replace the DVD player I'm about to buy.
Integrate with PC content
Stream video from multiple sources on the Internet (YouTube, the networks' websites) etc.

Until this happens, all these set top boxes will fail.

Steve Jobs, get working.

Language just gets in the way

2008-05-19T15:19:00.002-05:00

Some family friends from Macedonia were in town recently for a couple weeks. They stayed at my parents place, but we spent a good amount of time with them. Their son, G, is 5 days older than BigBrother. I was curious to see how they would get along, seeing as they couldn't really talk to each other.

Last Saturday, they came up for the day, and watched BigBrother's piano recital (wow, my 5 year old had a piano recital). And after he was done, BigBrother sat patiently for a while, and then got bored. He then started looking back and smiling at G.

Afterward, we hung out and BigBrother and LittleBrother introduced him to the land of 1,000,000 dinosaurs also known as the play area in our house. for the entire two weeks, they hung out together. G's mom did translate a little, but not much. G got the humor of 101 Dalmations. He knew how to play monster with my Dad.

It was just kinda cool to see the boys really hanging out together and enjoying each other's company.

Talking to G's mom is really good if you want a dose of perspective. Here, there is an impending(?) recession, $4 gas, and the abomination that is the Democratic Primary race (but i digress). Over there, the big concern is that the government might not be stable. As in, it might just collapse under the weight of immigrants from a neighboring country that wants more space. I can't imaging how it would feel to live in a country where I didn't think the leadership had control of it's own destiny.

And yet, in many places, that's exactly the case.

A funny thing happened

2008-05-16T10:08:00.002-05:00

Generally speaking, I'm not particularly a social animal. I suck at, and generally don't enjoy small talk. If I'm at a social activity, it's hard for me to walk up to someone I don't know and start a conversation. And for the most part, I'm ok with that.

So when my boss told me I had to go to a trade show and sit in a booth, I was not excited. I know our product very well. I know how to talk to prospects, find out what they do, what they're interested in, and what other applications we provide that might apply to them. Once I'm talking to someone, I'm pretty good conversationally.

But I had never been in a booth before. So I was nervous. I volunteered to stay back and man the phones. The boss said no chance. So I went.

I showed up about an hour before I had to. Registration didn't show up until 10 minutes before I was supposed to be in the booth. So I had a lot of time to get more nervous. Eventually, I got in the booth with my coworkers and put in a 3 hour shift.

Thing is, I liked it. I am passionate about the technology we provide and it's utility. So getting to talk about it is sorta cool. Other than the setup and tear down of the booth, I'm looking forward to doing another one.

Year 40 - or a long rambling incoherent post

2008-05-13T16:45:00.003-05:00

I turned 39 last week. I don't make new years resolutions. But I'm going to make a couple resolutions for my 40th year on earth.

Really really really focus on not saying no to my kids. I have a horrible habit of saying no when I really mean "I don't want to have to clean that up."
Stop clenching my jawthe.
Cut down the time I spend in the car getting to and from work.
Play outside with the kids more.
For chrissake work out more.

It's funny, someone asked DearWife last week if it was more or less difficult having the third than it was the second child. She said, "oh, it's much easier with the third."

I almost choked to death on my pizza when she said that. She gave me what I consider a pre-dirty look. The look meant, you better have a good explanation for your near death pizza moment there pal, because if you are going to make fun of me I'll finish the job.

She explained herself. I explained myself. SO it boiled down to this. She is worried primarily about giving the kids enough attention. Making sure they are being stimulated. Making sure they are not bored. Making sure that they can explore and create.

My primary concern is order. How chaotic is the household? Can I keep them all in my line of sight to make sure they don't run off and get into some kind of trouble? What is the likelihood that I can keep all of them in the perfect state of 'not crying.'

So we're both right.

Back to my 40th year...I work a decent amount. I enjoy it. But, part of who I am is being stressed out about it. I'm never happy with work-based accomplishments except in a very temporary way. My commute takes a long time, and working at a startup takes a lot of time, and not just 9-5.

I will be listening to the radio and completely lose track of what they are saying because I'm thinking about work. I start to think of all the things I need to accomplish and find I've been clenching my teeth so hard my jaw hurts for hours. I dream about work.

So what I'm saying is that I have a hard time turning off work. I will be thinking about clients when I'm reading books to the kids. And I'm not happy I do it. But I can't stop it.

What I need to do is be more involved when I'm at home. Hell, I chose to make my own life this complicated. And frankly, it's a great life. Beautiful loving wife. 3 great kids. Interesting challenging work for which I am paid fairly.

But none of that stops me from stressing out about it. So I'm going to make a concerted effort to be at home when I'm at home. And to be at work when I'm at work. But it's hard.