Gaining some appreciation

When my wife and I decided that we were going to enroll Oliver in day care, we also decided that we were going to stagger our schedules. I took the early work shift which means that I get in at 6 and out at 3. Lisa gets the later shift which means that she gets Oliver ready for day care and comes home later. We've been doing this since he started going to day care in February. I'm very familiar with the afternoon routine of picking up, topping off, day care chores and parenting until Mommy comes home, but every once in a while we take a single car to work and then I get to see my better half lives.

Take today. We are going up to see my folks so we decided to take one car. I suggested that we set the alarm for 4:45a so that we could get Oliver to day care by 6:30. And it would have been a good plan but we were up until almost midnight packing for the trip. So we got rolling at 5:45. I made breakfast and brought it up to my wife. I ate my breakfast while she bounced between eating her breakfast and giving Oliver his. I took a shower while she changed his diaper. Then I got me dressed and him dressed while my wife took a shower. I got everything packed for day care while she got dressed. I carried everything out to the car while she made her lunch and took care of a few last minute things. We got Oliver to day care by 8:00. And that was with two of us doing the work. Sure there were a few extra steps today, but I can hardly imagine what it's like when he isn't being as cooperative and she's by herself.

My wife is making noises about switching shifts. And after a *typical* day like today, I can't blame her. After all afternoons are more fun.

Happy Baby

Happy baby 

Tuesday night we headed back to Kiddie Kandids for another round of pictures before we head up to Chicago this weekend. This trip was tougher for a couple of reasons. First, we didn't feed Oliver before the photo shoot, so he was not as smiley as he had been the last time and was more prone to jamming his fist in his mouth. Second, since we had already been there once, we had already done their usual infant-who-can't-sit-unsupported poses. So we had to get creative on some of them, but this one we wanted from the get-go.

Two hands to hold you

Two hands to hold you 

This was one of the new poses that the photographer had suggested. There was supposed to be one of our faces in here gazing lovingly down at our child, but instead we opted to just get the hands. So, those are my hands.

The tough thing about this particular pose is that Oliver is not a light child by any stretch of the imagination. I was just holding him in that spot while they moved the camera around. But Oliver was a little more interested in eating his hand, so we had to be quick.

Bath time

Bath time 

We've already sent a naked baby picture to all of our friends and family. He'll hate us when we're older, but we're ready to deal with that. In the mean time, here's another addition to the naked baby picture hall of fame.

A Rocking young man

A rocking young man 

This was one of the poses that we just kind of made up. Oliver can't quite sit supported, but with a little help, we can sit in the chair for a picture.

Hi, My name is mypetrock and I'm a recovering Catholic.

When I was small, I was lots of trouble in church. I had a hard time sitting still and was not a lot of fun to get dressed and to church. I'd play the Mommy-See-If-You-Can-Grab-My-Finger-As-I-Poke-Your-Palm game until Mommy didn't want to play any more and beyond. I'd try and go exploring under the pews - never a successful game and usually got a quick grab.

For a while my parents thought I'd behave better if we sat up closer to the front so that I could see the priest as he did his thing. And that worked for a while until one day after mass the priest pulled my mother aside.
"I hate to ask, but is there any way that your family could not sit in the front?"
"But father, why?"
"Well, when I raise my arms to make the blessing, I see these tiny hands poke out over the top the pew to make the blessing. Everything I'm doing I see these tiny hands doing. It's really hard to keep a straight face."
And so ended my clergical aspirations.

When I was going through the Confirmation process, I had serious doubts about the existence of God. At one point, my Religion teacher (it was a Catholic school) said "If you have these doubts, then maybe you don't want to get confirmed." Well that shut me up. My parents would have killed me if I decided that I didn't want to get confirmed. Besides, who wants to be the only kid in school not to get confirmed?

When I was in high school and my parents decided that we were old enough to drive ourselves to mass, my brother and I would skip. We'd drop in to grab a program, see who the celebrant was, and head to a local fast food joint to do homework and wait out the end of mass. It was a full-proof system, but at some point I decided that it was stupid. Honestly, if we are old enough to take ourselves to mass, aren't we old enough to decide not to go to mass? So I sat down with my parents and said "Look, for the last several weeks, C and I have been skipping mass and going to a local fast food chain. I don't want to lie to you, but I don't believe in God and so I don't get anything out of going to church." My parents thanked me for my honesty and proceeded to force us to go for the next several months.

Since I left for college I've been back to church a few times - mostly for Christmas, baptisms, weddings, or funerals. I don't have anything against the church. I think they do some great things (and some not so great things). I just don't believe. And sometimes it's awkward not to believe when all of the songs that I know are church songs and I need to come up with something to sing to my child.

The only thing that I do miss is the sense of community that you get at church.

Working for the weekend

For the first time in a long time, we are going up to Chicago this weekend and I'm looking forward to the trip. One of my friends from high school is having a wedding reception where a number of other friends from high school will be attending. So my wife and I get to introduce Oliver to more people. My parents have been looking forward to seeing Oliver for a while now so they'll get a chance to. And L and I are planning on getting some Oliver pictures taken, so we'll have presents for friends and family. Good things all around.

We are driving up to Chicago this weekend to see how the other half lives. This might be the last trip to Chicago by car for a while, depending on how Oliver copes with being cooped up for so long. Wish us luck.

Lawn update

If you recall from "Ow My Aching Everything", my wife and I spent a couple of days this month tilling and fertilizing and seeding our back yard in the fervent hope to counter the "landscape of the moon" effect that we had going on before. Well, Houston, we have grasslings. They're short, but they've definitely cleared the plane of the dirt.

Now if we can just keep the rabbit and birds from eating it all.

J update

An update for the few who are interested in what's going on with my getting-divorced co-worker: Present and on-time on Monday. Absent Tuesday for a sick child. Very late Wednesday. Very late Thursday but might make it in. It is to the point where the business that she supports is starting to get annoyed. And today I fixed an error that would have been caught with ANY level of testing. And then caught logic errors when going to fix the error.

I might have been willing to be helpful once, but that time has long since passed.

Hard to leave

Monday I was getting ready to go play. Lisa and Oliver were sitting in the rocker near the front door. As I was getting my stuff ready, I looked up and Oliver was just sitting there smiling at me. I almost didn't make it out the door. It would have been fun to just stay there with them and play.

But I have a responsibility to the other people in the group to go. And so I went, but I'm beginning to understand why people with children disappear from the collective social life once they have children. Sometimes it is just so tough to leave.

River to River

This past weekend was the River to River Relay, an eight-person eighty mile relay that runs from the Mississippi River to the Ohio River across southern Illinois. 240 teams are started off with a half-hour stagger in between. Good teams race for prizes and the bad teams race daylight. If you cross the finish line before they close it down, you get a t-shirt.

This was my second year and I was one of the veterans on my team. The team consisted primarily of a group of hashers - Duzzy Cum, Dead Squirrel, Necrofeelyass, Haley's Comet, Mother Mary Nipple, Just Nicole, Fuzzy, Blows Like a Freight Train, and me, Waldo's Pimp. I felt like it would be a strong team that had a good chance of finishing before subset. I didn't know Halley, Necro, Fuzzy, or Nicole, but the others seemed capable of putting up solid 10:00 miles.

The day got off to an inauspicious start when our first runner, Dead Squirrel, had to stop and throw up on her way down to the rest of the team. We were literally the last team out of the start by a healthy margin. We made up some ground over the next few runners and finally caught up to other groups in our starting time. Halley and Nicole proved to be strong runners and averaged 8:00 miles. By the time Just Nicole handed off to me, we were more or less with the groups that would have started with us.

During the first set of legs, the team drove to the exchange point and then everyone got out. Inevitably I would hit the bathroom and then head back down the final stretch of the leg. While waiting, I'd stretch out my legs and warm up a bit. When our runner came around the bend, I'd give a signal to the next runner that they were coming. When the other runner caught up with me, I'd jog in the last piece of the run with them.

My first leg started off with a flat stretch before I hit the hills of increasing slope - up and down, Up and Down, UP and DOWN. I'd like to say that the hills didn't stop me, but I stopped a bit near the trop of the Up hill. One guy passed me as I started to give out again on the UP hill and said that the finish line was at the bottom of the hill. That got me back going and I powered down the hill into an uphill finish.

By the time I got in the van the team was already discussing skipping legs. It seemed really early in the race to be considering that. At the time all we need to do was average 10:00 miles. Our next couple of runners increased the time gap that we'd need to make up. We deployed our alternate runner Fuzzy on leg 9. By leg 12 we were "helping" our runner over the difficult hills and in leg 13, we did a mid-leg exchange between Duzzy and Halley.

Leg 16 was probably my favorite of the day. The first mile and a half is a slow uphill followed by a steep mile and a half descent finished with a mile and change climb to the finish. Despite being the longest run of the day, I felt strong and smooth throughout the leg. Probably powered by the long downhill I finished it averaging 8:00 miles.

When I got to the finish, I was suprised to see Fuzzy in the exchange area since he had just run a couple of legs ago. The team informed me that we were skipping the next THREE legs in order to give ourselves a shot at finishing before sunset. Especially at that point, I didn't much care. I just needed water and rest. Fuzzy, Blows and Necro were done for the day. Dead Squirrel and Mother Mary Nipple were going to split a leg. During the Dead Squirrel/MMN leg, Blows and Necro started talking about needing to skip another leg because the runners (Duzzy, Halley, Nicole, and I) would need to average better than 10:00/mile in order to finish on time. I protested that all of the runners this group should be able to do it. Halley volunteered to skip leg 22. I said that if he didn't want to do it I would. It seemed silly to run River to River and skip the race's signature leg. Eventually we decided that we didn't need to skip any more legs.

I started on leg 24 with an hour and a half less rest than I was anticipating. Leg 24 has three sharp hills over the first two miles and then it is downhill to the finish. The hardest part about the leg is that you are running all by yourself and running up hills that curve around bends. Mentally you see the bend and think that the hill ends just beyond it. Then you get to the bend and it keeps going. When I started down the long downhill, I heard cheering from the base. Huh, I thought, I thought it was farther to the end than that. So I picked it up. And when I got to the source of the cheering, it turned out to be several members of another team cheering on the runners as they went through. That was almost enough to stop me, but then I saw Blows at the top of the straightaway and started picking it up. As I turned down the straightaway and saw the other members of my team and the finish line, I started sprinting for the end. I'm sure the other members on my team would have preferred a much more leisurely pace, but it was finally over.

After the finish we went on top of the dam and took several pictures and sang several hash songs. I'm sure the other runners didn't appreciate us (some old man sang a retort "So long farewell, I'm sure you're headed right to hell."), but we enjoyed ourselves. We got our t-shirts and headed for home.

This year's River to River wasn't quite as good an experience as the previous year's was, but it was nice to be one of the stronger runners for a change. And you can bet that if I can get on to a team next year, I will.

Interview with Daughter of Opinion

1. Why did you do that?
Everyone asks what I saw in Karen. The best answer that I have is I don't know. We were definitely opposites. She is delicate. I'm not. She is a nervous talker. I'm more reserved. She had her nose fixed. I turned down my mother's request to get mine done. She's a Fuzzy Navel and mixed drinks person. Chalk me up to beer and shots. Everyone else saw the writing on the wall long before I did. But I saw it. Just eventually.

2. If you could change one thing about the world, what would it be?
I'd clean up all of the hurts that we are doing to the environment. I'm leaving the world to Oliver and his children and I want to make sure that they are able to enjoy it.

3. What is your favorite thing about being a father?
It's really hard to say. In some ways it still hasn't sunk in that I'm not on one of the world's longest babysitting assignments. Like tomorrow, Oliver's real parents will come to the house, pick him up, and give us $20 for helping out.
That said, I think my favorite thing about being a father is my pinky. When Oliver needs to be calmed down so that he'll either eat or sleep I'll stick my pinky in his mouth. When it works he slowly stops crying and begins to suck on my pinky. The tension in his little body releases and he'll snuggle in and drift off to sleep. And I get to stand watch over my son, protecting him and giving him comfort. People ask why we don't use a pacifier, but it is too precious to think about giving up.

4. How would you define your general outlook on life?
In the long view, life has treated me too well to get down on it. Tomorrow's troubles will take care of themselves.

5. When it comes to food - sweet or spicey?
Definitely spicy. Perhaps not at hot as when I was a youngin', but throw some curry, cayenne, or habanero on something and I'll pull up to the plate. Besides spicy doesn't sit on the hips as long.

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The Official Interview Game Rules

1. If you want to participate, leave a comment below saying "interview me."

2. I will respond by asking you five questions - each person's will be different.

3. You will update your journal/blog with the answers to the questions.

4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview others in the same post.

5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

The Changing Nature of Sex

I've been thinking alot about sex recently. Yes, I am a male. And no to your next question. More specifically, I've been thinking about how sex has changed for me over the years. It's been many things: a joke, a curiousity, a mystery, a goal, a game, a toy, a chore, a carrot, a stick, recreation, procreation, something wished for, something regretted.

I had been imparted with the standard sex education curriculum. I knew what all of the parts were called. I had a vague understanding of the mechanics of the activity. I knew about contraception and abstinence. And I had watched some R-rated movies and read dirty joke books. So I had all of the basic knowledge that would enable me to become sexually active, but sex itself remained a mystery. To give you an glimpse of how far off I was in my understanding, I didn't know that the female urethra and vagina weren't the same thing (after all a penis is a penis is a penis). Somehow, I thought that the vagina was located on the front of the pelvis rather than between the legs. Yup, I was the youngest of three brothers.

So up until I got to high school, my social skills and my appearance left something to be desired. But a combination of puberty, participation in sports, and some level of maturity turned me from an ugly duckling into a mildly repellant duckling. Then I met A and we started dating. A and I were the first boyfriend/girlfriend the other had had. At that point sex became less of a mystery and more of an achievable goal. Over a course of months, we progressed from first date to first kiss to ... first intercourse. The sort of steady progression of our physical relationship made sex seem like a goal - something we were working towards if you will. The emotional side of our relationship deepened as the physical side progressed, but I'd be hard pressed to call one chicken and the other egg.

But something odd happened once we got there. There wasn't anything to work toward really. There were other activities and other positions, but not really a sort of defining goal. At that point sex turned into a kind of game (See previous statement on gender). We enjoyed it. It was something that we did together. But the only real urgency came from mutual teenage lust. Eventually we broke up and then the game began anew. For the rest of high school and my college years, sex was more recreation than anything else. I had solid relationships, but none of them turned into a love connection.

I met my wife at work. She and I were assigned on a project together. I would go over to talk to her about various facets of the project and inevitably I would lose my train of thought while looking into her beautiful blue eyes. I'm sure (because she's since told me) that she thought I was sort of an idiot (now confirmed). But I was in deep smit. Eventually I asked her out on a real date instead of a group thing or a pseudo-date and we hit it off. Goal, game, recreation, check check check. But then we got married and suddenly it turned into procreation. I have to tell you that the first time we had sex when it might actually be productive was the oddest, coolest, most indescribably special sexual experience I can remember. The closest thing that I use to describe it would be the first time you sailed down the street on our bike without training wheels.

But as readers of this site would be aware, we looked behind us, realized that we were doing it on our own, and crashed. Infertility was not a fun experience. Sex on a schedule sounds great, but like the Baskin-robbins employees find out all the free ice cream you can eat loses its appeal after a while. I can only imagine what it was like for her. Sex was a chore that we needed to do together every night for a week once a month like clockwork. Then there came the hoping followed by the monthly flow. Rinse. Repeat.

Sex as a carrot and a stick is something that I'm becoming more familiar with now that I'm in a committed relationship. It's the carrot of romance. The carrot of flowers. The carrot of a loving relationship. It's the stick of "Don't pour water on me if you ever want to have sex again" comments. The stick of curbing your irritating habits.

Sex has been the source of some of my biggest regrets. Some of it has been buyer's remorse (for lack of a better term) over relationships and hook-ups that were at best ill-advised. Some of it has been for the emotional turmoil that has surrounded it. But in the end sex is the source of two of my greatest joys - one recently almost forgotten when it turned three years old, the other turned four months old yesterday. Both make me very happy.

Ow! My aching everything

This weekend we decided that we were going to work on our backyard. We hadn't had to do anything in a year or so because when we had our previous concrete deck removed, the contractors were kind enough to destroy anything that resembled a lawn (although to be honest it probably resembled a close-cropped collection if weeds). So between then and this weekend all of our topsoil washed away leaving us with a pleasant view of hard clay and the pieces of the former deck that didn't get removed. And it was exceptionally fun to walk through when it rained.

The day began way too early as I had been up working until 2:00am. My wife rolled me grumbling and cursing out of bed at 7:30 to go to Home Depot and rent a tiller. I was quite certain that she could have gone and gotten while I got more sleep, but my largely incoherent arguments were overriden. The people at Home Depot were very nice and helpful and busy, so an hour and a half later I'm home with some new tools and a tiller. The tiller was loaded on to the truck, so my wife and I wrestled it down successfully, but not gently.

Truck returned and I'm back to the house behind a tiller. Thanks to Salamasond for regaling me with tilling stories from his well-spent youth I have the foggiest clue as to how to work said tiller. For the next four hours I attempt to churn our rocky, root-infested, clay while not running into my wife, the fence, the garage, or the tree. It was much like riding a bucking bronco. Every time it hit a rock I was thankful that I didn't dislocate a shoulder. Finally, barely successful on all counts I got to do it again, this time with peat moss.

After I was done I enlisted a neighbor (Hi Bruce! Nice to meet you. Can I borrow you for a second) to help me wrestle the tiller into my mother-in-law's minivan. It fits if just barely. Just a little running room between the grill of the tiller and the back door. And sure enough, the first stop sign we take off from *CRASH* as the tiller runs the three inches of room into the back door with enough force to shatter the glass. Maybe this is karma catching up with me. We returned the tiller and owned up to my mother-in-law. She was just thankful that it wasn't either of us. But I'm sure that she was at least midly peeved that it happened to begin with.

Sunday rolls around and we are back at it. This time the order of the day is to dig a trench out to the garage to lay a power cable. Despite all of my tilling the soil is still somewhat hard and it becomes a full day job. Once the trench is dug, we have to feed the power cable through a conduit long enough to get from the junction box to the soil. As you might expect the first couple of feet are easy and the last couple of feet are a struggle for every inch. After the epic struggle with the conduit we need to fertilize and seed the lawn. Despite setting all of the controls of the spreader as specified, the fertilizer and seeds that should have covered our backyard five times over barely made it around once.

The upshot of all of this is that everything hurts and I'm sporting a nice sunburn. But we might have grass growing in the backyard this year. Just maybe.

Insensitive

I haven't written in a while. I usually blog ovre my lunch breaks, but those lunch breaks have been much shorter as of late. Last week my boss was away, but, despite this mouse's urge to play, demands from works kept me at work. This week another co-worker is away and so demands from work again kept me from play. I don't begrudge them their time off - they work hard and often come in on weekends and everyone needs some time off. My other co-worker is another story, however.

J is the closest person in the office to my age. She sits right across the aisle from me. She also has a young child. You'd think we'd have a lot to talk about and become good friends. But she comes in late, leaves early, barely present in her cube, and is borderline incompetent at her job. And she is a Parrot Man. Oh, and did I mention frequently absent? My favorite J story comes from the early phases of our project where she asked me to help her debug some code. Paraphrasing:

If (A and
B and
C and
D and
E
) then
{
do something
}
else
{
do something else
}
else
{
do another thing
}
else
{
do yet another thing
}
else
{
do that thing that you do
}

"Why doesn't this work?" (Insert laughter) She's not kidding. (Sober) 30 minute explanation ARGH!

She's been taking a lot of time off recently, so it was no great surprise when she didn't come in to work last Tuesday. We got a phone call from her saying that she was going up to Chicago for the week. She told us that she was going through a divorce and couldn't be in St. Louis this week when her husband came back from a business trip. Ordinarily we'd be okay with this, but it isn't like she doesn't have work to do. And because she wasn't here, her work fell on to us. We had our own work to do, but it shouldn't have been a problem. However, she's not our strongest programmer, so there is a high probabality that there would be mistakes. And she failed to write ANY documentation on what she's been doing for the past few months. After a frantic week trying to cover for her and get our own work done, she rolled in on Friday, was present for half a day, spent most of the time on her cell phone, and left early. Hey, at least she was here.

On Monday, she wasn't in at 10:00 when I went to my boss and asked if I should go through her projects and supply documentation for all of them. My boss didn't want me to do it saying that J had to learn to do it herself. Silently I'm screaming "Perhaps this would have been a good conversation to have had with her a month ago!" But I nod and smile. J comes in at 11:30, has a tearful conversation with my boss, and leaves after 30 minutes. That's telling her. In her defense J was on time for most of the rest of the week. But she had the nerve to complain about how hard it was to go back and create documentation for things she worked on months ago. And when she completed it, it wasn't complete or thorough, but was just a listing of the functions that had changed. Glad we straightened you out.

I don't mean to be insensitive. I realize that J is going through a tough time. That work is probably the last thing on her mind. And if it were anyone else I'd be glad to help carry the load. But J is the little girl who cried wolf. Except she wasn't that good at tending sheep before the wolf came. And I am looking at the next couple of months where she maintains this standard of reliability. I'm happy to help, but I don't want to have to do her job too.

Update: J wasn't here yesterday either. No explanation offered. And I still don't know what she's working on.

Quick update

I've started three posts and realize that they'll be longer than what I wanted to write today. I've been busy at work recently (where I usually blog from on my lunch breaks) with the exception of Tuesday when I was Mr. Momming it. When I'm not working or involved in child care, I've been doing a lot of running in preparation for River to River next weekend. Wednesday was a banner night because I got to go hashing. Today, I get to miss my first doctor's appointment for Oliver because of a meeting. Grrrr.

This weekend looks like a fun one as my wife and I look to take on our backyard as landscape of the moon.