Squublog

Truly, I am barely here. This place is still here, for some reason, and in the spirit of nothing-much-at-all, I'm posting this very thing in this very place.

On? We need new prepositions.

I'm planning to do NaNoWriMo again this year. (I have a bit of an existentational disenfranchisement going on, focused primarily around my growing disenchantment with my "career". I work 4 days a week from my home, and some days it's all I can do to do any work at all. This ebbs and flows - depends on how much work is being sent my way. I'm bored just writing three sentences about how bored with it all I am.) Writing a draft of another book will probably do nothing for any of this -- could in fact further distract me from what I'm supposed to be doing -- but it could possibly force me to focus myself a little bit more in general, thus sort of letting the rest of the unstructured stuff sort of crystallize around it.

Family life is great, stressful, hectic. My daughter is 3 months shy of being 3, and my son is 9 months old, large, working on crawling, and babbling. They're both incredible.

My addiction to Steelers football, and the NFL in general, has increased again this year. I bought a 46" Sony Bravia sometime during the off-season, having sold my only remaining electric guitar (a PRS of some description) to my boss' son. It's great watching the Steelers on it, except for the fact that they keep losing. This season they're some horrible mirror image of last: in the 2008 season they consistently looked like they were going to lose games but then pulled them out in the last quarter; this year the opener was like that, but then against the Bears and then the Bengals they became the bizarro Steelers, starting off with a bang and then just fizzling into crap.

I've been on a diet for a little while now, maybe a couple of months. I went in for a check up with a new doctor, having not had one since before starting my family, and was told I was in dangerous high blood pressure territory, and that I weighed 245 pounds. I was shocked more by the weight than anything; I've been thinking of myself as weighing about 225 for years now, and even at that I was significantly overweight. So since then I've been trying to eat better; started off counting calories but have slipped a little into just a more ambiguous don't-pig-out-all-the-time thing. And I started running 4 or so times a week. I've lost not quite 20 pounds (by my scale I started at 240 and am down around 221 now), and am trying to keep motivated enough to get down to 200 eventually. 220 is the weight I've always had listed on my driver's license, so that's a first step I'd really like to hit ASAP.

The running has been hard on my shins. At the start it was really tough on everything, but a week or so in I was feeling pretty good and enjoying it. Another couple of weeks later and my shins were starting to sort of chronically hurt. My jogging route is basically a mile up here on our mountain, involving a lot of up-and-down stuff. I do it in about 12 minutes, and I have lately been increasing the distance (which just involves doubling parts of the route). It's not a big run, but the hills add to the workout and the time it takes fits well in a lunch-break sort of scenario. Due to the pain in my shins, this week I decided to get my bike in shape enough to ride around up here on our mountain. My first ride, yesterday, was just about a mile and a half of looping around up here, which is hardly anything on a bike, though it was enough to remind me that the leg muscles involved in biking and running are really not the same. For today's ride I went all the way down the mountain, took some pictures in the industrial park down there, and then came back up. It's a strange situation for riding; pretty much the entire beginning is all downhill, taking a few roads that wind down to the bottom, then there's however much basically flat road I choose to follow, then it's all back up a number of steep roads. Feels backwards, as it's hard to enjoy the downhill knowing the uphill's going to follow.

But even though I hadn't even touched the bike since a few rides a year or more ago, I was able to make the trip back up without any huge destruction of self. So the running has definitely improved my conditioning somewhat. I plan on continuing with biking (though fitting it in is going to be difficult; today's ride was just about exactly 30 minutes.) I assume because of the timing issue I should just keep going down and up the hill, as even though it's not really that pleasurable (currently,) it IS a good way to condition myself in a short time.

If I keep motivated to continue posting here to nobody some photos may follow.

One advantage to this out-of-time posting thing is that I can post things on days that I'm sure to be competely unable to post things this way. Of course my chances of saying things that aren't wrong by nature of being guesses based on what's supposed to happen, as opposed to what really will happen, are maybe not that great.

So in case things go relatively according to plan: Happy 0th birthday, my new son!

I realized just now that i'm probably wasting some of these useless posts by not skipping at least one day per weekend. With the dates. Posting. Dates.

But I've also just read the post where I thought about trying this thing because it just appeared today and I'm thinking now: man. What a goal! A whole year's worth of this crap. And the more I think about it, the more I want to do it. Maybe it'll be like an enema.

My wife's side of the family is going to be here for Thanksgiving. Today we had a few hours without my daughter so that we could try to clean up for that, and for my daughter's birthday party which will be the Saturday after (all of which will be long gone by the time this posts.) We are nowhere near finished cleaning up. I'm not sure it's even feasible at this point. I'm considering getting out some wood and boarding up the doors Wednesday night. Spray painting a sign on the wood. "Sorry Turkey."

In something like three weeks my family's going to be 33% larger than it is now. Is that right? Let's see.

3 + (3x1/3) = 3 + (3/3) = 3 + 1 = 4

There, see? Nobody calls me stupid without being right. (I nearly said "25%" larger. Boy wouldn't that be something.)

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My fingers smell like bleach. My work isn't getting done. My wife wants us to take my daughter to Lakemont Park today. I can't fathom the time commitment. I can't fathom anything.

I'm unabashed here: there are spaces to fill on my little pink-highlightered paper telling me which dates are unwritten. I'm writing some of the dates now, with no pretense that it's going to be anything but filler. There's at least a hint of a motivation here, to check things off (even if that's like a list, and I hate lists, even if lists would allow me to... better, it's not going to, let.s).

I can't fathom anything. I'm not working because i'm doing this, but it's still a Saturday and I've accomplished some things there. I can't fathom driving the 2 hours (or less?) to Lakemont Park today because I feel like I should be working, even if... if.

It's not.

So this is why people give up on these things?

And later, maybe we'll go, maybe we won't. In truth it's as much about the idea of going there, where there's some waterpark that my wife things our daughter will enjoy, that stifles my energy. Hours of sun and the daughter not wanting to let us put sunscreen on her and the tons of people screaming and the headache that will without doubt accompany those things, the driving and the daughter enjoying it for a while but quickly wanting nothing but to go where she shouldn't, to climb whatever's too high and too dangerous, to jump off of things, the short tempers and the sun that'll keep on burning, and the headache that will keep on burning, and the screaming others and no where to go no way to get out no "let's sit down for a while," just a day of unrelenting.

I love them and I love doing things with them. Sometimes my wife over-estimates the amount of patience our daughter has. We took her to a local, very small zoo a few weeks back and that was perfect. That was not a day long commitment. By the time we were finished seeing the animals she was struggling to run off and obviously done doing the structured thing. That kind of thing works well for me, and I would do something like that in a heartbeat. I am struggling though to decide about this amusement park thing. I hate waterparks, my wife likes them. This could be as much for her as for our daughter.

Decisions shouldn't be so hard to make. Spontaneity doesn't seem to work anymore. Spontaneity with children can quickly crash into a guardrail. And try to climb on it. And jump off. And want a pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. POP!!! POP!!!!! POP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Wouldn't it be cool to start posting things to the future? On Tuesday, March 18, at 3:50pm (though the laptop I'm using doesn't know about the modifications to daylight savings time and so thinks it's still 2:50pm), I'm looking out the window at a pale gray day and a little rain. If this works right, happy b-day, brother o' mine.

Sometimes when I'm swinging back into the post-stuff end of my blogging pendulum, I find that I have lots of stuff I'd like to say at once; during those times I usually experience some sort of fantasy about having a slightly-differently-arranged blog that's maybe part wiki. Yesterday I had quite a few things I thought I was going to rant about, but I ended up inadvertently following a tangent right to the end.

Instead of right now following the tangent of trying to suddenly turn Squublog into Squubwiki (which doesn't work as a name at all anyway,) I'm just going to... do something different that I haven't thought out at all. (Didn't I talk about this whole blog/wiki thing before?)

Passwords and "Security" Questions

I can't get into ebay to buy something I need to buy. Why? My account's been locked out, it seems. I've got the username/password saved on my desktop PC, but when I get in there and try logging in with that it doesn't work. The other day I decided to do the "forgot your password?" thing (even though I know my password's one of maybe 3 things there,) and was presented with the security question. What's the name of the first school you attended?

I rarely answer those things correctly. Why? Because that's idiotic. Passwords are supposed to be hard to guess, and hard to brute-force, so my passwords are usually (when it matters, as in this case,) somewhat complicated. If some random person can bypass the password by entering an answer to a security question that wouldn't be difficult to figure out, what's the point? And since I don't lose/forget the passwords, I don't enter anything there that's even remotely rememberable. So my answers to those security questions might just be something like 30948uofajafdljvao, or whatever else comes out when I hit the keys on the keyboard with all my fingers a few times.

In cases where my password gets screwed up for some reason, I can usually just say, "Send the password to the email address on file for this account," or whatever. I've never had to actually answer a security question for this task: why should I? As the account holder, I don't care if some hacker tries to get in and asks that the password be sent to my account. He can't get into my account.

So, anyway -- I'm basically locked out of ebay and am not sure how to get around it except to start a new account, thus losing my seller rating and such.

Monitor

My nice, nearly 3 year old 17" flat-panel ViewSonic monitor is fritzed. I found out recently that it's still under warranty, so I decided to go through the process and have it fixed or replaced. At this point I've got the thing packed in a box (the box that came with my other flat-panel, an older 15" NEC, which I kept while for some reason not keeping the ViewSonic box,) but it's sitting on a chair in my basement waiting for me to get around to labeling it and taking it somewhere to have it shipped.

Losing My Place

I'm always disappointed when Squublog falls off of blogroll/sidebar things on other peoples' blogs. It's not that I don't understand and sympathize with the decision -- I'm very aware of my inability to be consistent, unless you consider going long stretches without posting only to be ended by a couple of disappointingly vapid posts about something that isn't-quite-what-I-thought-I-was-going-to-post to be some kind of consistency. In fact the dropping-from-a-list thing probably encourages me to try a little harder, at least for a day or two. However...

Time to Blog?

Right now I'm supposed to be working. I cut my lunch short to try to get something down here, but at this point I'm overstepping the bounds by being verbose. Even so, I don't have time to think anything through (as you'll see under one of the headers below.) My ideal time to write things like this is exactly during work-hours, and I just don't currently have a work schedule that gives me time to prognosticate.

Additionally, if I do really get into something I want to write about, I often end up being unable to complete the thing and it ends up sort of just hanging in my not-yet-done pile. I started one of those late last week and I'm sort of thinking it's never going to get finished (though it may end up being posted as-is sometime.)

Discussions

Used to be I'd be following, and participating in, a few spirited comment-fests on some more-likely-to-attract spirited comments blogs at any given time. Recently I'm more likely to just follow the conversations without participating, and if I DO participate it's just to offhandedly drop a (usually troll-like) comment somewhere that really I shouldn't have bothered posting.

I've never been able to get into the post-a-bunch-of-links style of blog entry, at least not more than once or twice a year or whatever, even though some of those types of entries are the ones that end up with the bunches of comments. But here are a couple of things I've been paying attention to:
Cynical-C's discussion about Guns. I'm pretty muddled about my thoughts on this subject, although as with a lot of things I find myself getting incredibly irritated with the fringe opinions from either side more than anything else. Collecting and shooting guns as a hobby doesn't make somebody an inbred; but laws outlawing assault weapons aren't violating a right.

Barrack Obama's Preacher - this is the stickiest of discussions for me right now, and this is where it becomes obvious that I just don't have time to do this the way I used to. Any brief remarks on the subject are bound to present my viewpoint in the wrong way. This post (and the ensuing "discussion" (can you say "echo chamber?")) at Primordial Slack actually made me a little sick this morning. For a minute or two I considered gathering up some of the comments there and posting them as an entry here; I'm curious about what some of my few readers would think were I suddenly to say stuff like this. Here are some samples:

"If I ever met him, my question to him would be, “If you and your God Damn America douchebag preacher hate America so God Damn Much, why would you want to become president of it?

It’s as retarded as me wanting to become president of the Gaza freaking Strip.

But, as I noted to Guyk a day or so ago, him having a preacher does sort of eliminate the whole him being a muzzie issue, right?"

"It doesn't automatically discount the Muslim connection."

"Now I am not sayin' that Obama is a radical raghead..but among the radical ragheads posturing as whatever to complete their goals is considered to be just fine.."

"I *am* saying that I think he's a radical raghead.

The change he wants is to pave the way for his buddies."

"As I drive arround town, I notice there are several banners put up by the Church of Christ supporting gay marriage and other items that The author of the Bible condemns. This is in Bible belt Kansas.
When I consider how lax Worthless Willie was on the Bible and claiming to be a Christian, It makes me worry all the more about Obama."

There's another brief discussion in this 2Blowhards post. Here though I am left feeling much less queezy, as there are many viewpoints being expressed there.

Again, if I had any time, I'd be responding to this, somehow. Not sure that it's worth it. Briefly, though, why the bad feeling in the guts at some of this response? For a start: an eight year old nephew of mine recently told his mother that if Obama gets elected to office all of the black people are going to attack all of the white people. When his mother asked where he'd gotten that idea, he told her that one of his aunts (another sister-in-law of mine) had told him such. I am so horribly disconcerted by everything about that that I can't really speak to the root of it. I was able to sort of blow that off, though, as the woman at the source of it really spews garbage on a regular basis. I hadn't really considered how much that sentiment is apparently wide-spread.

Listening To: My wife's shuffling mp3s. Currently some Van Halen song (Sammy Hagar era) that I really like more than I ever think I like Van Halen called, I think, "Shine On."

I remember when I used to have a blog here, right here, in this space, on this page. I would... post things in it, I think. It's something I did, posting things, in the blog, on my site. I sometimes wonder, "what were those things I posted? What did I do after I stopped thinking all I had to write about was how I didn't know what I could write about?"

It used to be that if I started a post and was interrupted in the middle I could inform the interrupter creating the interruption that I'd be done in a few minutes. Recently the interrupter is frequently the child of my self, who finishes with her babysitter and thus needs my attentions. She has yet to develop the requisite skills to do something quietly by herself when I tell her I'm in the middle of something and she needs to wait. No matter how patiently I might tell her, her response is usually something along the lines of, "waaaraaaar EHN! EHN! EHN!!" More recently she's developed some (slightly) more decipherable objections, such as, "Me! Me! Me," "Mine! Mine! Mine!" (being generous a tad there, as phonetically typed that's more of a "My! My! My!", which just a hint of "m" or "n" thrown there on the end,) and the currently laugh-inducing "NoNoNoNoNoNo!"

Having not previously had any children confronting me with such arguments, I'm never sure if the things she's doing are as astoundingly advanced as they might strike me initially. Although my first reaction to some of her shenanigans is very often to think (or say,) "Holy hell, she's smarter than a fourth grader!" when she does something like take a CD out of a CD player or put things away when I say, "Could you put those things away?" I don't really have anything to compare it to. She's 15 months old, plus some weeks, and that seems too young to be climbing all the way to the top of a jungle-gym spiral-sliding board thing to me, but what do I know?

Sometimes the way I'm learning to adjust to that sense of incredulity is a little dangerous. While accompanying her on said fifteen foot high sliding board metal plastic contraption the other day at the park, I quickly adjusted to her prowess. While at first I thought, "Wait, holy hell, she can't possibly climb this ladder thing... there's only one rung on the way up the thing, and the destination is as high as her head," after seeing her do it a couple of times I simply thought, "Ah, well, I guess she can climb shit well." I was right behind her, thinking that very thing, wondering to myself about whether other 15 month olds climbed ladders like that, when I sort of muted an alarm buzzing in my brain saying, "'Hey, dumb-ass, she's got her leg on the top rung and her other leg still down there on that one and that's a helluva reach she might not be able to," and was then only partially shocked when she toppled backward and hit her head on the metal railing of the thing. "Nice catch," I thought, standing there with my hands very near my pockets.

But (and this, I'm told, is pretty much universal,) toddlers have incredibly hard and resilient heads. She didn't even get herself a bump. Hopefully this is a good thing; she might try just a little bit harder to hold on to the ladder next time. Or maybe I'll pay attention better.

(NOTE: What I just wrote is absolutely not what I thought I was going to write. But I think the babysitter's back, and my little girl probably hasn't learned yet today to understand what I mean when I say, "Let me get to the point real quick...")

What if I lose my connection? What if my webhost goes down just for a few hours? What if the snow causes the whole house to cave in? What if a tree falls on my head and nobody's there to hear it? What if the clock continues to move ahead and never stops and it's suddenly after midnight before I even knew what hit me? What hit me?

Those are just some of the questions I'm not expecting you to answer. They are, however, things that I'm using to open this, yet another rambling, incoherent entry in a seemingly endless stream of rambling, incoherent (inchoate?) entries in this Squublog I keep kicking around. They are also my brain's little niggles that just started happening as I thought about how I've been meaning to write something here all day, but have yet to actually spontaneously just have written something. There's only one of these every 4 years, is what my point is. I looked back to my old archives, and in 2004 I didn't write anything on this day, and that's just a hideous waste. In 2000 I started writing dated entries on March 7. There is something horribly amiss about this day in the history of this, and I intend to stop it dead in its 2008. Right here and now.

But there's still the itchy twitch there saying, "ah, but what if your timestamper on this configuration turns out to be screwy? What if it's set to Greenwich (pronounced very much like sandwich) mean (angry) time (tempus)? (question mark (that's just one of many punctuation marks I know about.)) What will you do then? Once again, the 29th of February will have had its way with you."

There's only so much a man can do, after all.

Diet coke in a plastic, 20 ounce bottle tastes horribly far from Diet Coke in a 12 ounce can. Seriously. They aren't even the same species. Diet Coke in a 20 ounce plastic bottle is the Triumph to the 12 ounce can's Rush. The 20 ounce plastic bottle is like they shook up the Diet Coke can, sprayed it onto the wall, soaked it back up with a sponge, squeezed that into the bottle, and then filled the bottle the rest of the way up with water. Not even bottled water, but bad tasting tap water. Is that red cap supposed to confound and bedazzle? I only buy you, you disgusting plastic gunky stuff, when they don't have a can at the store. Why don't they have a can at the store? I am clearly not voting with my dollars. If I were voting with my dollars I would've bought a... a... how does one vote with... oh, I guess I'd have gone to a different store, in the slippery snowy crap, where they'd have a can, and bought that there.

My wife and I went to see a comedy murder mystery tonight, where the players ran around in the audience sometimes shouting themselves horse and other times speaking in normal voices (that we couldn't hear.) We were eating horrible, fatty steaks at the time. And stale cake. The one lady who was all the way at the front most of the time (my wife, my wife's sister, my wife's sister's husband, and myself were at a table in the back with four old people with whom I refused to make eye contact except the one time when I was looking to see what was going on in the bar area in the back of the room since these people had taken the good seats actually facing the action and I inadvertently locked eyes with one of them and a shiver went up my spine during that moment of soul-to-soul contact between myself and this normal dude with a mustache that was so violent that my left elbow probably did a Costanza,) had a microphone that didn't do anything except make everything she said too quietly have a slight echo, like maybe it was a toy microphone with a speaker in the butt, so we couldn't hear her at all. Some of the other actors were loud enough, and sometimes close enough to us, that we could understand many of their outdated, cheesy, non-funny in the first place jokes. One guy asked how many of him it would take to screw in a lightbulb, and he said just one, because he'd hold it in place and the whole world would revolve around him. Gold. GOLD!

My wife apparently enjoyed herself. The only thing I enjoyed, really, was marveling at the two Harley guys who looked so much exactly like Harley guys that I couldn't believe they weren't somehow leftover characters from some other show, but were in fact just guys there to see the thing. They stood in line in front of us while we waited 10 minutes to check in and get shown our table, both very much taller than I, very much shiny-head-shaven-bald, and both with extremely agile mustaches wrapped around their upper lips. Afterwards, when my wife finished talking about doing this again sometime and I finished trying to understand what manner of obscene joke she was making by intimating such a thing, I decided to talk to her about the two big Harley guys who'd been standing in front of us (in case this part wasn't clear a second ago,) for 10 minutes, with their shiny heads and their embroidered Harley Davidson shirts that said, surprisingly enough, Harley Davidson. She said, "What Harley guys?"

"You know, the hugely tall bald guys in front of us. Shirts said Harley... crazy ass mustaches... probably own the Harley store or something..."

"I didn't see them."

"They were, right, they were the only thing we could possibly look at for the ten minutes we were waiting in that line not talking because we don't like... well, I wasn't talking because I didn't want to talk about those guys while those guys were there, and there'd be no way for me to talk about anything else because that's what was going on, was that there were these two giant Harley guys who both looked kind of exactly like G. Gordon Liddy..."

Most of that last bit was probably not actually said as much as imagined while my wife was saying, "I wasn't paying attention."

There was snow all over the roads as we drove home; a friend of mine was busy in the passenger seat of his wife's SUV while it was used as a pinball, bouncing between a guardrail and a snowplow. Apparently they're both okay. My wife and I got home safe OH MY GOD WHERE'S THE BABY oh sorry she's at my parents' house for the night.

Is this the end of this yet?

(more after the thing)

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Yesterday, inadvertently logging in as Kingo who sneaks in here to use my computer sometimes when I'm not here and in this case left shit the way he shat it without unshitting it the way it needed to be unshitted so I'd login as me instead of him, I mentioned "logistical concerns" related to the snow, among them, "Will my wife make it home safe? "

Fortunately, she did. But not before a rather sizable portion of logistical problems caused by the snow. It's a long story, and I don't really feel like re-hashing the entire thing. Had I taken some pictures, maybe... at any rate, her car didn't make it up the hill, and slid backward onto the side of the road where it straddled a curb. The curb is right at the bottom of the hill, and separates the road from a drainage ditch on the corner. Car was stuck, wouldn't go forward (there had been no plowing or salting by that time in the evening, which is unusual and annoying.) Going backward would mean the curb would guide the back wheel of the car toward the drainage ditch, where the wheel would then stop having ground beneath it. I tried reversing, hoping it'd hop the curb back onto the street, but indeed it followed the curb, and I stopped before the wheel was off the ground entirely, but with the spring mechanism still scraping the blacktop curb.

(Side arrayment: I'm very bad at this sort of technically descriptive writing. Always think I need pictures, though there's got to be a way to use language to do the situation justice.)

Many nice people in the neighborhood came to stare, offer advice, although most of it was, "dude, you're really stuck." My dad ended up coming and saving the day with a jack and some wood. This is the part that I really don't have the energy to try and fail to describe. In the process we also witnessed a snowplow go up the hill and then come barreling back down, narrowly missing the front of our stuck car, then slide across the intersection and collide with a concrete curb on the other side. It hopped up onto the sidewalk and didn't quite plow into the house there.

More snow and ice called for from tonight into tomorrow. Still out of salt.