An Update and some X3 Thoughts

I see by strolling by my own damn blog that I never really mentioned that the B and I managed to get back home safe and sound. Flying with the baby on my own was a little challenging, but she made it as easy as possible, and I didn't lose any expensive electronics this time around.

I am really glad to be back, but I miss everyone I visited, too. It's an interesting dichotomy.

We celebrated by going to a couple family dinners, and then to see X3 tonight, leaving the B with her aunt and uncle for a couple of hours. It's always hard to leave her, but I managed to do it, and I liked X3. I like the X-Men in general, although I never actually owned any of the comics myself. I had a friend who liked to read a couple of the titles I bought, like Sandman and Hellblazer, and I got to read a few titles they bought, and the X-Men series was one of them. Boy, that one can bankrupt you with all the spin-offs, I'll tell you.

I have personally always enjoyed all the fun characters of X-Men, but really appreciated it more for the themes of ethics, tolerance, power, and politics that you could always find there. I've always found it easier to confront those issues from a fresh perspective when they are taken out of the context that you usually encounter them in. I used the same analogy to explain to a friend of mine who doesn't enjoy science fiction why they might consider watching something that isn't "realistic"—the story may not be something you could walk out of your front door and see in real life, but the issues, conflicts, and dilemmas encountered within may illustrate things about the very nature of those things that you would be blind to if you encountered them in a more familiar setting.

On that level, the movie didn't disappoint me. I think it struck a very careful balance between blowing things up and making me think about the tougher issues they touched upon.

(very minor spoilers, more for general X-Men storyline tendencies than for the X3 movie itself)

On the surface, you could take in an X-Men comic book or movie that deals with "normal" people freaking out about the more powerful X-Men mutations. "If you could stop someone from having the power to walk through walls, shouldn't you?" you might think. Yes, that would be a lot of power for one person to have, as seen through the eyes of a regular joe schmo human.

But then again, isn't a powerful intelligence just as scary for someone of average or below-average intelligence to behold? I've known some frighteningly brilliant people in my time; people you might sit down and have a conversation with and find yourself feeling relieved that they seemed to be nice people, because if they were evil, they could probably bring the whole world down around their ears.

So what's the difference, really? I know they make the "oppressed peoples" thing really obvious with Magneto and his backstory, but they are important questions. Almost every war is fought over a difference between two groups of people, and it's insanity to kill someone because they do some random thing in a different way than you do. In this way (spoiler, highlight to read) watching Magneto give his speech to the mutants in the forest in X3 and watching him become just like the very man he hated, Hitler, was pretty jarring. (spoiler over)

Or maybe it's just a dumb comic book movie and all the true intelligencia are tittering at me behind their palms. Whatever. (Or as Brad might say, brick wall.)

Weary weary fradafradackin' weary

I have had a great time since the 18th of this month in many respects. You see, it was the 18th when I left home to get on a plane and come to Virginia for our visit. We saw a lovely wedding, introduced the B to the most important and beloved of our friends, and finally got the other half of the B's grandparents in the same room with her.

It's been eventful. Wonderful. Tiring. Challenging. Luggage-testing. Unexpectedly expensive, after I left our old digital camera on the plane on our way out, and we had to buy a new one to replace it.

Through it all, my tiny little B has been a trooper. She suddenly was asked to sleep in her pack 'n' play instead of her crib, and she shrugged it off. She's been all sorts of places, from a pagoda in downtown Norfolk VA to breakfast joints in northern Virginia, and she's grinned her toothless, drooly grin through all of it.

She had one tough hour or two at the reception, but that was our fault for shorting her on her solid food that day. Other than that blip (which taught me to have a spoon and a container each of a fruit and vegetable in my diaper bag for emergencies), she's been a model of a sweet little B.

She's been teething the entire trip, but you wouldn't really be able to tell from her mood. She keens a little (not loud enough to actually call it crying) when she needs to bite on something, then goes back to life as usual when she's done.

She's napped on time nearly every day and has only given me minimal trouble at bedtime, considering how completely off her routine we are. She dropped off at exactly the right time tonight completely on her own, even self-correcting to central time in anticpation of our departure tomorrow.

I knew before this that I believed she was the sweetest little thing. Now that I've seen her roll with everything we've done over the past ten days, she's my hero.

For my part, I'm happy, but weary. It will be good beyond words to be home. I've loved visiting my parents, but it's just not the same as being in my own house with my own stuff and my own routines. It's always weird sleeping in what was my sister's room before it became the guest room, and seeing my baby bottles drying on their counter just looks like a nonsensical juxtaposition.

Tomorrow is a flurry of packing and hoping that I haven't left anything, then a waiting game, and then the agony of an airport with a tiny baby with only me to tote that bale once I hit the security gates. That thought makes me want to cry, until I picture myself trying to board the plane, carrying my ever-more-heavy baby in her car seat along with all the stuff she needs to have with her in the cabin of the plane.

I just keep saying what I said many months ago, just before the big move when I was overwhelmed with stuff to do and no time or energy to accomplish it in. The big and little hands keep moving on the clock face, and it will all be over, for better, for neutral, for worse, when it will be over.

But say a little somethin' for travel-weary me, in hopes of sending me "for better" karma, huh?

The Dream

Did you ever have someone in your life who you love, but who insists on saying something over and over again that makes you uncomfortable, that you completely disagree with, but you know there's no point in starting the argument about it if you say something in opposition to it?

Well, I do.

Don't worry. If you're reading this, it's not you. This person doesn't even know about the blog, and wouldn't know how to find it even if I gave them the URL.

I had the oddest dream about this last night, though. I looked right at that person and said, "It pains me when you say things like that. I really wish you wouldn't. I can't reconcile that with the person I know you are, deep down," and they smiled.

"Okay," they said, and looked serenely at me. "I understand. I didn't really mean it anyway."

Sometimes I wish real life could be like a dream.

This One's for Retwin

So, imagine you leave on an errand with a pal of yours who's from the upper midwest, it's late at night in a tourist area, and you're looking for food. You drive past a diner-type breakfast joint and see that scrapple is being advertised on their sign.

Do you tell the nice midwestern boy what scrapple is just to see his reaction, or do you pretend not to know when he reads the sign aloud in a curious, but confused-sounding voice?

I chose to explain it, perhaps giving a slightly more disgusting definition than was necessary, much the same way that the truth is stretched for kids on Halloween, when they visit a haunted house.

I just read that again, and I can hardly believe it was possible to make scrapple sound more disgusting than it actually is, but I believe I may have given the impression that night, all those years ago, that scrapple is basically what the cook in a diner can scrape up on the grill and mash together into a patty, and that's cooked again in some grease and then served. Yep. If it's possible that there's something more disgusting to imagine eating than scrapple actually is, then what I described is about the only thing. It's also not that terribly far from the truth.

I'm still staying with my parents, showing off my offspring to them, and I saw these containers of (urk) commercially-produced scrapple next to the bacon in the disgusting-meats-you-really-shouldn't-eat case. I just had to snap a picture (hey, I have a baby, I go nowhere without a camera) and post it along with this nostalgiac big D memory.

Flowercide

The setup: we were eating dinner yesterday and the B was sitting with us in her Bumbo seat. She was, we thought, far enough away from anything on the table she could grab.

About halfway through dinner, she reached behind herself, reached much further than I thought she could at a much more severe angle than I would have thought possible, and grabbed a fitsful of pink petals that were on the closest flower to her in the centerpiece. This is my plate, after I grabbed them away from her and started laughing at how pleased she looked with herself.


This is the little larcener, surveying the damage she'd caused. See that poor dark pink flower in the background? It's missing about 75% of its petals.

It took us forever to stop laughing.

Boycott GM

So, did you just buy a uselessly large, rollover-prone, kill-the-other-guy in an accident, gas-guzzling SUV from GM, but you're bummed that you have to pay a lot to fill the tank just to drive the twelve miles to the shooting range or chewing tobacco store?

No problem. GM will sell you discounted gas, but only for those SUVs, Hummers, and a couple of luxury sedans. If you do the responsible thing and buy a car with the highest fuel efficiency possible for the size of the vehicle that you require, you have to pay the regular gas prices.

Jackasses. Because what we need are more Hummers on the road.

The Saddest Lines

A baby, staring at the door to the bedroom because she's waiting for daddy, is sad.

It is sadder when you know he and the baby are temporarily 1000 miles apart and she'll have to find a way to fall asleep without him. I've told her the butterfly story three times, but it's no good.

Our Trip So Far

So, the Virginia Beach portion of our trip is nearly done. We'll be leaving here by 11:00 am today to get Tom up to Dulles airport in time for his flight back home. We've had a great time on this leg of the trip, and I'm using the heck out of the new digital camera.

We got in at the home of the best hosts ever, CK and LWC, and put together the B's east coast exersaucer, which has greatly enhanced her experience of the trip.

Not that she hasn't spent a lot of time in people's laps or taxing their arm strength, grinning at them and drooling...

She's even had some time to chill out.

And really chill out.

I think a good time has been had by all. Now, as I look forward to a week with my parents so they can get to know their only grandchild (but sadly, may go a week with little to no internet access) I can only hope I will get even more snapshots to put in my obsessive little family albums.

Sony: You're Nuts

I'm with Tycho, I'm not buying a PS3 for what they're asking for it.

Yes, Sony. I know that the official line is that five million people would buy your PS3 even if it didn't have games. Right. Whatever. "Gee, it's a real bargain if you are in the market for a Blu-Ray DVD player." Well, there's the issue. You've somehow convinced yourselves that there are five million people who give a rat's patoot about owning a Blu-Ray DVD player. It isn't even a standard format yet. It has to compete, Beta vs. VHS-like, with the HD DVD format. And for this, they want us to pay five or six hundred dollars for a gaming console?

It doesn't shock me that Sony included some crappy "features" to make the PS3 more business-model friendly. And by features, I mean crippleware. We'll get to why it doesn't surprise me in a minute, but here is a blurb from the current Wikipedia article on the PS3:

"Sony has defended its pricing model, noting the PS3's higher performance and inclusion of the Blu-ray drive.[24] However, it is not clear how useful the Blu-ray drive will be on the less expensive model; film studios may choose to turn on Blu-ray's ICT (Image Constraint Token) flag at any point, degrading the non-HDMI output to slightly higher than DVD resolution. A Sony executive responded that it is "too early to speculate at this point" whether movie producers will activate the ICT feature."

Gee, Sony. Now I dunno why you lost the Beta vs. VHS fight. With sterling judgement like you're showing now, you really should have won that one too. (sarcasm off)

Yes, that's right. You're expected to pay through the nose to get a Blu-Ray player because it supposedly blows regular DVDs out of the water from a quality standpoint, but companies who produce Blu-Ray format discs can activate a flag to make the difference nearly negligible, for no reason that I can think of off the top of my head.

"They won't activate the flag," you say. "Why would they make your experience more crappy than it needs to be?"

Yes, they will. Why would Sony press CDs that break your damn computer, install a root kit so anyone can break into your shit, and, in many cases, disable your CD-ROM drive? But they did that too, because they're afraid someone, somewhere, might listen to some music over your shoulder and they wouldn't profit from that. Soon, it will be illegal to open your car windows while you are playing a legally-purchased CD in your car, because people who haven't paid their tithe might hear a few seconds of music.

But I digress. When Sony got caught on this whole copy protection hoo-hah, I should note that their "rootkit removal kit" opened more security holes on your computer, didn't remove the rootkit entirely, and generally screwed you over more than you already are. Not that I know this pain from experience, but it still sucketh mightily that anyone had to do it.

Furthermore, I'd always been brainwashed to think that Sony electronics were superior. I just don't think that's the case anymore. I've compared price/performance ratio for many electronics purchases recently, and Sony really isn't near the top anymore. Their video cameras I tried were fuzzy and had bad UI. We bought a JVC and we love it. My laptop is, sadly, a Vaio, and I've never been less impressed with hardware than I am with this. When we replace it, it will be with something else. Even the original PS2 had that shitty Disk Read Error that plagued nearly every PS2 eventually, including both of the ones I've ever owned.

Face it, guys at Sony. You've convinced yourselves that we are drooling over this thing, and we're not. Some people will buy it for the exclusive titles, like Final Fantasy, but a lot of us just don't have time for your crap anymore.

Me? I might just be buying a Wii and then be done with it. Traditional Nintendo games are cute and the B will probably love them as soon as she gets some motor control. I hardly have time to breathe anymore, let alone play games, so I'm good. The mister will be playing WoW until the cows come home, so we're covered there. And the Wii has wifi built in, which every console should have had five years ago.

All right, rant over. I could have bored you all about how stressful it was to fly on a plane with the B (she did great, though, two little cries before I got the bottle in her mouth for the descent), how much it sucks that I left our digital camera on the plane, and how much I hate Enterprise for screwing us on the car rental. I have chosen to keep that rant to myself, and just be glad that I can see a few people for awhile before I visit my parents for a week and let them meet their grandchild.

New Hoopty

So as long as I am posting various bits of personal news, here is our new car. It is a cool metallic dark blue, and it is pretty sweet inside and out.

I could gush about the way the remote can open the side doors without the touch of a human hand, or about the storage compartments and the many ways the seats fold hither and yon for maximum flexibility. In fact, I think I might just have done so.

As you can see from my fancy dancy inset and as I believe we've mentioned before, this beast is a Honda Odyssey. I think my favorite feature is that it turns off three cylinders in the engine when they're not needed to save on fuel. I am all about fuel economy, so this is the most fuel efficient minivan we could find.

If you asked the mister what his favorite feature is, he'd probably tell you it's the moon roof. I mainly like that you can pull a little door over it and pretend it isn't there. I dunno why I don't like them, but something about being able to see the clouds over my head when I'm supposed to be safely esconsed within a vehicle is disconcerting.

Farewell Horrible Wallpaper

Before:

After:


I know, in this picture my after might not look as polished as the before. Let me defend my simpler choice here for a moment. First, that flowery wallpaper was especially horrible up close. It is indefenseable in a bathroom that a man will be using every day.

Second, why would you put wallpaper in a master bathroom? It was a nightmare to remove because the previous owners had repasted it at the seams over and over again and it tore the wall up when it was removed. Any wallpaper in a bathroom where the shower gets used multiple times a day will not stay up on the wall without peeling at the edges. Dumb.

Third, it had a white background and the vanity/sinks and tiles are a sandy yellowy off-white. Yuck. They put in a flooring (you can see it in the before) with white and blue in it to try to tie it in, but it just looked like a big arm wrestling match between the two schemes.

It's not perfect--the floor still doesn't quite tie in, but now that the ceiling color ties in the tiles and the vanity and the walls pick up the blue in the flooring, the floor almost recedes away and isn't quite as objectionable. Also, the blue towel in the after is going, to be replaced with a sand-colored one that matches the ceiling almost exactly. Those towels are in my dryer at the moment, and I couldn't stand to wait for them to finish before I took my after picture. Just imagine a perfect sand-colored towel there, because that's what'll be there in about an hour.

It was a nightmare project that took me a month in real time to complete, mostly because I could never work on it for very long with a baby to take care of. It may not be perfect. There may be some places where the paint got on the trim a little or the line at the ceiling isn't perfectly straight. But of all the things it is and isn't, the most important thing is that it is...done!

Mother's Day Wrap-Up

So, I just completed my first mother's day as a mother to an actual child living outside my womb. I got a card from the mister last year because we already knew I was pregnant on mother's day, but I have to say it's a bit different now that I've actually gotten a little mothering experience under my belt.

I liked my day. It was pretty sweet. I got to talk to CK and LWC, which is a further loveliness, and I got a hand-drawn card from my youngest niece. I got cards from the mister and one from the B, who scribbled in what I'm sure is her desperate attempt to tell me that she appreciates me cleaning up after that little poo incident she and her onesie had a few days ago.

I also got to drive our new minivan for the first time, going out to Circuit City to pick up a new DVD player (ours was skipping like mad) and to the grocery store. I am embarassed to say that I could not have left the driveway without the mister's help in moving the steering wheel. I was very confused because most of the controls are exactly like my Civic hybrid because they are both Hondas, so I just couldn't wrap my brain around the fact that the steering wheel lever appeared to be MIA. It's there, it's just not the way I thought it would be.

I also owe a random lady a huge favor for her help in the parking lot of the grocery store. Now that I have a baby to get settled in a car seat, I always seem to park right next to someone who comes out of the store at exactly one minute after I leave, so I'm faffing about with the baby when they want to get in their car and go. I always apologize and offer to put the car seat shenanigans on pause, and every single person so far has insisted that I get the baby settled, with several of them saying, "That baby's more important than anything," which is very nice. In this particular case at the grocery store today, I got the baby settled and then put the whole affair in a holding pattern so the nice lady to my right could pull out. I tucked my diaper bag right behind the back passenger side wheel so it wouldn't get run over, and then proceeded to put the stroller away in our kick-ass back storage section, followed by the groceries, and then got in the car. You'll notice I didn't say anything about the diaper bag. The nice lady stopped behind me and got out of her car, then ran up and got my diaper bag and ran it up to the driver's side. I plead mommy brain. I hope somebody does that lady a really nice favor soon, because I'll never see her again to pay her back.

So, happy mother's day to everyone out there who fits the bill. All you dads, I'll see you in June when you get your day, and we can spread the love to both halves of genetic material.

A Fool for the Dragon

So I was at the mall with the B a couple of weeks ago, just looking to get out of the house and do a little walking with the B on a rainy day, and we chanced upon this stuffed dragon. It's a baby toy, safe for kids under 3, and he even has a mirror on his tummy to further entrance her.

I saw it in the store and shook it in front of her to see what she'd think. Before then, she hadn't really been interested in bigger stuff like that, other than the elephant that plays music that she stares at while she does tummy time. Her little eyes lit up and she giggled at it a little bit.

Well, she might be a fool for a stuffed dragon, but I'm a fool for her and I'd been looking for an alternate toy that had the power to distract her. What we have now is the first object she really seems to have become attached to. In a couple of months he will probably be mostly drool and about five pounds heavier than he currently is because of it, but you should see her little eyes light up when she sees him.

Did I mention he has a little rattle in his back too? What a quality dragon.

The End of an Odyssey

If you've been reading my mister's blog then you know we've been considering the purchase of a minivan, which would make our transition to midwestern parents complete.

We pick up the above automobile (picture of our actual car, not of some minivan like it on the web somewhere) tomorrow at 4:00 after faffing around for a bit wondering which model we should decide on. It looks black in that picture but it is actually really really dark metallicy blue. (Deep Midnight Blue I believe is the name of the paint.)

In the end, we are paying just a tiny bit more in order to get the higher resale value and better reliability of the Honda Odyssey. That's not just the schtick their salespeople tell you, it's borne out in Car and Driver and Consumer Reports surveys. It's a really neat car and will be really good for the long car trips we tend to take.

Anyway, we're very excited. And if you all are very, very good, I'll tell you tomorrow about stripping wallpaper and painting our bathroom over the past month.

(Don't we lead fascinating lives here?)

Can You Believe This?

What do you get for the man who's spent the last decade or so ruining the coolest thing he ever created? Why, an image of himself, of course.


I wonder if his ego comes along as an accessory, like those little plastic guns I always used to lose back in 1977.

G4TV - Least Viewed Basic Cable Network in America

Ratings numbers give G4TV the richly-deserved distinction of being the least viewed basic cable network in America - less than evangelistic channels, less than third-rate shopping channels. (Read last paragraph of TFL.)

That's what you get for killing the Screen Savers.

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Go Irish!

Go Irish!
Originally uploaded by lostonpurpose.

What do you wear to go and cheer your daddy on when he's playing softball?

Why, your officially-licensed Notre Dame cheerleader's outfit, complete with logo spanky pants, of course.

She'll kill me for this picture when she's 16. But look at how well she's holding herself up on her arms these days! She'll be driving before you know it.