However, if you’re in the market for dramatic stories about babies under threat in a dystopian future, I suggest you scrub the Palin part of your brain and turn it over to George Saunders’ excellent short story “Jon”. It’s about a pair of teenaged paramours who have good reason to distrust the adults around them.

It’s a great story about a boy living in a product dominated existence, struggling with the upheaval in his life brought on by the impending birth of his child.  Can he give up the plush (but unsettling for the reader) life for his wife and child?

Plus furthermore (and I said this to Carolyn) what will it be like for us when all has been taken from us? Of what will we speak of? I do not want to only speak of my love in grunts! If I wish to compare my love to a love I have previous knowledge of, I do not want to stand there in the wind casting about for my metaphor! If I want to say like, Carolyn, remember that RE/MAX one where as the redhead kid falls asleep holding that Teddy bear rescued from the trash, the bear comes alive and winks, and the announcer goes, Home is the place where you find yourself suddenly no longer longing for home (LI 34451)—if I want to say to Carolyn, Carolyn, LI 34451, check it out, that is how I feel about you—well, then, I want to say it! I want to possess all the articulate I can, because otherwise there we will be, in non-designer clothes, no longer even on TrendSetters & TasteMakers gum cards with our photos on them, and I will turn to her and say, Honey, uh, honey, there is a certain feeling but I cannot name it and cannot cite a precedent-type feeling, but trust me, dearest, wow, do I ever feel it for you, right now. And what will that be like, that stupid standing there, just a man and a woman and the wind, and nobody knowing what nobody is meaning?

Just then the baby kicked my hand, which at that time was on Carolyn’s stomach.

And Carolyn was like, You are either with me or agin me.

Which was so funny, because she was proving my point! Because you are either with me or agin me is what the Lysol bottle at LI 12009 says to the scrubbing sponge as they approach the grease stain together, which is making at them a threatening fist while wearing a sort of Mexican bandolera!

When I pointed this out, she removed my hand from her belly.

I love you, I said.

Prove it, she said.

Anyway, I found it a moving story, and it triggered memories of another item I’d read years ago about a corporation-ruled world: “Jennifer Government” by Max Barry.  It’s a fun, entertaining read, with an interesting premise.  It doesn’t rank up there with my favorite books of all time, but it certainly had me turning the pages.  I leave it to Wikipedia to summarize the plot:

Hack, a low level employee at Nike, is contracted by one of his higher ups for an ambitious marketing campaign. The company is planning to release the new Nike Mercurys — which sell for thousands of dollars but cost pennies to manufacture — and in order to drum up interest in the items, Hack Nike and his partner John Nike plan to increase street cred in the worst way possible: by actually killing people who try to buy them. Hack, bound by his contract but unable to contemplate murder on his own, subcontracts to the Police, now a mercenary organization, beginning a chain of business transactions which could land Nike in hot water should word of the plot leak.

After several children are murdered at various Nike chains on opening day, agent Jennifer Government takes it upon herself to track down the perpetrators, even if she can’t get the funding for it. Along the way, readers are also introduced to Texas 20-something Billy NRA, an athletic man who gets in over his head, and Buy Mitsui, a formerly French stockbroker. Also involved is Hack’s unemployed girlfriend, Violet, who engineers a dangerous computer virus to sell to the highest bidder.

From: Jennifer Government (this version)

The latest evidence of my condition: for the second time in the last month, I made the coffee at work, only to discover that I had left out the grounds. There was a nicely used filter and carafe of hot water, with no coffee to pour in my cup. This foul-up comes on the heels of forgetting to grab keys for the right car this morning and forgetting my watch for the third day in a row.

It’s a damn good thing mortgages can be auto-withdrawn so I don’t have to worry about losing the house.

So now I’m stuck with a shaggy head of hair that hasn’t been cut in six weeks.

For the record, I know the title is over-provocative, but it wouldn’t really be blogging if it wasn’t…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF6yfxwgRiM

• pneumonia
• croup
• reflux
• emergency rooms
• doctors
• viruses
• sleepless nights
• zombie days
• work
• family activities
• TV
• a healthy portion of “I don’t know”

A lot of those things were unforeseen and disproportionately affecting our 6 month old son. Many had a major impact on our daily schedules, mental capacity, and overall productivity. I certainly got
into a state where I was just exhausted and unproductive. Things just weren’t getting finished around the house and I wasn’t happy about it. I just couldn’t get up the energy to change it,either.

About a week and a half ago, I ran across an article on Hacker News about using org-mode in Emacs to implement GTD*. Well, I know Emacs as my standard editor and IDE in Linux, but the rest of that title was foreign to me. I read the article anyway and started to see a path forward for geting back on top of everything.

org-mode is simply a set of features that have been added to the base Emacs functionality which allow you to easily capture all your tasks, events, notes, and much more in a single place. GTD is the abbreviation (I almost said acronym) for Getting Things Done by David Allen, a well-known and popular book on organization of your daily life.

Well, in the last week, I’ve started to try and capture all the tasks I need to accomplish using Emacs. I keep a copy on my work computer and pull a copy every night onto my netbook. Every morning, I re-sync the updates I made overnight and I’m off and running again.

Since moving my tasks and calendar into this system I’ve been more productive and let far fewer tasks slip endlessly, both at home and at work. I’m still reading through the book, trying to understand more of the system, but it’s been a pretty good change for me.

[*] I think this is the article: How I use Emacs and Org-mode to implement GTD, but I don’t remember the exact one and I’ve lost the link.  Either way, I found that page to be extremely helpful.

We were all set to have the TV delivered between 3:00 and 7:00 pm two nights ago. My wife made sure she was home and we waited. At about 8:15 pm, I called the shipping company to see what was going on, as we had neither seen nor heard anything from them. After waiting on hold while they reached the driver, I was told it would be another 30 minutes before he could be there. “Is that going to be okay?” the lady asked me. “Well, no. But I want my shipment, so I guess it’s going to have to do.” I replied. After 45 minutes of additional waiting, the TV was finally delivered at 9:00 pm. Only two hours after our four hour window expired.

Well, the new TV is only so impressive if you don’t have a high definition television signal to display, so we had already called Verizon to change our FIOS service over to include the HD channels, etc. This brings us back to last night, where we had a block of time from 1:00 to 5:00 pm for a technician to come out and change out our SD DVR for an HD DVR (for some reason, they HAD to have a tech do it rather than their usual method of shipping us the new box and including a label for us to return the old). So my wife again makes sure that she’s home and available for when this guy arrives, forcing her to postpone a number of errands she needed to get done.

You can probably guess that the guy wasn’t timely, based on the first little annecdote. It gets better than just being late though, as a 4:58 pm phone call from Verizon informed my wife that the guy wouldn’t be coming at all. He was so far behind on his schedule that he just couldn’t make it to our house last night. What went unexplained was how they only figured out 2 minutes before the end of our window that he was that far behind. All for what should be a five minute service call to switch out a single set top box.

So I was disappointed right there, as I had been planning to watch game 7 of the Caps-Penguins playoff game in high def. Slightly sulky because of the lack of HD, I set the DVR to record the game so I could watch after putting the kids to bed. Now, my wife watches American Idol religiously, so that was also recording and she wanted to watch it while I caught up with the game. Not a problem, as we have the home media option from Verizon, allowing her to play back DVR recordings on any of our other TVs. When we tried to do this to allow our daughter to watch an episode of the Backyardigans before bed, we found that the multi-room DVR functionality was broken. Wouldn’t work at all… It appears to me that Verizon missed our appointment, but still made the changes to our service like they had been there, breaking our current setup.

This unexpected “feature” pushed back the time I could start watching the game by quite a bit of time, adding to my disappointment. The final straw was watching the game itself. I guess it might be a blessing that I didn’t have to watch the Caps crap the bed in high definition, but it was no less disappointing to see a highly competitive series end with a complete blowout that was never close, in score or effort on the ice. And to the Penguins, probably their biggest rival of recent memory. It’s almost as bad for me as seeing Duke get worked over by UNC for an extended series of games. Not quite that bad, but close.

Verizon gets a chance to fix our setup with another service call this morning (my wife loves that she’s trapped in the house for the third time this week). The Caps have to wait another year to see if they can make it right.

Is this really effective?  Who has been coming into the restroom and not washing their hands and is now thinking they should start?  Were the traces of urine and fecal matter not enough of a reason to wash before?  If not, does H1N1 really elevate the need for this type of person?

At least they’re trying to help.  I guess.

• Swine flu prevention at my office
• Neighborhood watch, complete with pitchforks and torches
• Killing a bus route
• Capitals hockey and my daughter

On top of those items, I really need to work on the design of my blog.  I wanted something that would display photos nicely and look kind of cool and I’ve ended up with a crowded, hot mess.  I might return to a more basic theme as I work on something more permanent…

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