Short Hair

Finally got my hair cut. The Mrs. has always been, at best, tolerant of my really nerdy impression of Conan.But a few weeks ago she said, quite seriously, that more or less I'm losing hair from traction baldness. Either she honed her delivery to really put the fear of god into me, or she really believed it. 

Turning 45, I had to decided which would win, the vanity from having long hair or the vanity from losing all my hair. Well, ever since I learned what a skullet is, obviously I'm going to try and save what I got.

She finally cut it all off on my birthday. Donated the ponytail to wigs for kids. I don't know what kid with cancer needs black, grey, and some white hair with and uneven amount of waviness in it, but there it is.

Now I just look like any other asian-ish man with short hair. I could be an accountant, or, a ... dentist? Certainly not the rebel programmer ideal I have in my mind. I look like someone you could easily copy and paste into a news segment where they ask the respectable public what THEY think of the latest bypass, or tax increase.  The kind of person who has strong feelings about marginal tax rates and current water tables and not, say, the fact we never get to see Wolverine in his super rad brown and orange suit. 

Honestly the one thing I worried about the most is how my kids would react. They've grown up with a dad with long hair. Owlet, in particular, is pretty conservative about change. She once got upset when we gave away a ghetto blaster we had in her room, that we NEVER used, but that she always saw. Owl Jr.was worried more about my general state of aging and decay. Why would I be balding?

They both adjusted well to the change, or have hidden their horror well. Either way, a win in my book! Not getting a skullet, maybe a bigger win. Now if I could just bend your ear a bit about this gondola line  they are proposing to put in....

PS I've told the kids finally about this blog, this might be the first post they've ever read from me,if so, HI OWLET! HI OWL JR.!

A Very Professional Mouse

About 4 years ago I started at this new company. I soon decided, like any self respecting programmer, that I didn't quite like the mouse. I mean, obviously its low DPI rating and the fact it was wireless was digging atrocious inroads into my productivity. 

Asking for a replacement for the tools you work with every day is a perfectly normal thing for an IT worker to do, within some boundaries. But maintaining professional stoicism is, if not essential, at least highly recommended. That goes doubly for programmers a little older, triply so for programmers at a new job. Quadruply so for programmers who've only ever worked at one other company before and isn't entirely sure what the ramifications of making the wrong choice would be. Public humiliation? Being called out at a meeting? The pillory?

The very slight lag in the wireless mouse supplied was irksome, however, as was the fact that every day at around 4pm many of the wireless mice went a bit glitchy in the office. That last bit was less irksome and more 'fills me with unnameable dread', but you get the picture.

So I started to dive in the world of mice. At some point between looking at mice with adjustable weights to those with enough buttons to reasonable simulate and operate a fully loaded 747 passenger jet I got information overload and decided to just ask for the mouse I have at home. A fairly professional all black wired laser mouse. 

I mean, it's made by Razer, and the model name is DeathAdder but the office would hardly see that. Or the fact that this was the sort of mouse made for unbelievable K:D ratios and no miss noscopes. If you didnt' get the last bit, hey you're not an irredeemable nerd. The packaging is the sort you'd expect for a laser blaster in an 80's sci fi pop-synth TV show starring some once massive genre star of a 60's sci fi hit that might have an entire booth dedicated to it at a Tulsa Comic convention.

But the mouse itself could easily be the sort dedicated to negotiation contracts and pivot tables. 

At some point it arrived and I plugged it in, all proud to have made  the correct, professional, adult decision. 

They had changed the design somewhat. Apparently they decided the mouse had to match the packaging and changed it to glow all the colours of the rainbow in sequence. If this was a movie I could EASILY hack into the NSA or enhance that image. This was the sort of mouse who, if it had a wardrobe, would consist entirely of black, and neon. This was the Fast And the Furious version of a mouse. Professionalism be damned. This mouse flew the nerd flag high, attached to a squadron of X-wings, escorted by a Battlestar, and piloted by Riker. 

Luckily we don't have meetings, or so rarely that it counts as never. And, going on 5 years, I've seen no sign of a pillory.

Microwave Burns Out

(draft written 2015_12)
I don't think there is an appliance in my kitchen that terrify me more than the microwave. Oh, no big deal, just a personalized family RADIATION MACHINE to shoot ENERGY BEAMS at food.

Everything else in the kitchen is understandable, and doesn't toe the line of magic and doom. Spinning things with blades, large things that turn electricity into heat. Other heaty things. Sure, they might burn the house down, sure I might sever a lesser used digit. But I'm not going to end up with a laser hole in my torso or a curiously growing tumour.

So it was with some consternation that our microwave/oven vent blew. Just stopped working. My buddy helped me take it down, then even suggested I open it up and look for a fuse. My comfort with hardware never goes beyond assembling components to make a computer. I don't own a solder, for instance. I know OF fuses. I know they have to be replaced when they blow, and that's it. The idea that they'd be in the Radiation Machine seemed a bit far fetched, but he opened it up and voila, there are fuses.

So, looking like, if not feeling like, the adult I appear to be, I went to the local hardware store and picked up right fuse with the right amperage/voltage/whateverage. Brought it back home and plunked it in and wow it worked.

Next morning, blew again. So, getting a new microwave, but happily have not detected any tumour growth.

Parent-Teacher Interviews

Both my kids are of the age where they are in actual SCHOOL school as opposed to School Kinda But Actually Just Fingerpainting and Light Story Reading. The daunted 1-12 years of, for them, public* school.

I know I'm an adult because I seriously think about metamucil and have a considered opinion about mortgage insurance. But a startling reality hits me when the teacher, with all seriousness, asks me if I have any questions. I would only have questions if either of my kids were having a particular problem. I don't have an opinion about the curriculum, for example, or their didatic style. I do feel guilty for this.

On the other hand, isn't it much worse, I tell myself, to be a helicopter parent? To be micromanaging their education and their interactions? 'Yes', answers what I hope is just not the extremely lazy part of me.

I mean, we are all on this planet chaotically, wandering and blundering about and we try and achieve what we can and what we want but to attemp to optimize along every axis seems an act that'll lead to a padded room and powerlifting psychiatric nurses asking  "How was your pudding, champ?"

Or, says the other part of my brain during a sleepness night, maybe I"m just succumbing to laziness and letting them struggle and fight in the mire of childhood because I did and I didn't turn out to be an outrageous disappointment (so far?).

I realize I'm over thinking the underthinking. How much intervention is too much, not enough? At one horrible moment have I irreparably broken my kid? That last question the most haunting and certainly most universal, I think, of first world parents. Well that and, Why The Hell Aren't They Just Going To Sleep Already For The Love Of All That Is Holy.

It's a spinning tizzy of questions and counter questions, a mental sweater with that one thread askew that if you started to pick at it, in no time you have a  tumble of yarn that used to be a sweater, no questions answered, and an analogy that doesn't really hold up to close inspection.

So I always say what I say every year, I smile apologetically, and murmur, "uh, no, thank you".

*Public in the North American sense not the British sense which actually means private and how does the once greatest Imperialist power confuse public with private when both are explicitly opposite? My guess is that you rise to utter world domination and subjugation  by not worrying about things like that.

Oregon Coast - Part 5 : Ecola Park

Our last day there we went to Ecola State park, which while also sounding vaguely like a non-lethal intestinal bug was apparently the place we went last time to take our family photo. It's high up over the beach and quite pretty. Wheeling gulls and ocean-wind swept vistas and the like.

There's a rather involved drive where you follow a twisted road. I'm sure it was laid down before any sort of laws were passed about turning radius, minimum shoulder width, and all things that make the average North American road not make you want to grip your steering wheel white-knuckled. At all times, anyways.

I was constantly reminded of professional drivers: truck drivers, delivery drivers, and any and all who have to operate multi-ton vehicles in anything more tricky than the Bonneville Salt Flats --who have a sixth sense where their vehicle is, bringing their tire within an eighth of an inch to the curb or building or small child running for her red ball -- apparently without worrying and sweating and accidentally hitting the horn twice and the high beams once in the process.

This was the sort of road made when men like THAT made roads.

You can imagine them, hacking away at the Pacific Northwest forests, making what they perceive to be a perfectly reasonable path and that would not tax at all the abilities of the average office worker whose trickiest spatial reasoning he has to make is how ergonomic, exactly, IS he sitting.  Optimistic, perhaps a little too generous with those who don't have an easy swagger, and skin made from calluses and rugged individualism.

The pictures were taken, with more squint than was desired, as these things tend to go. The camera balanced inexpertly on a camera bag, inches from the sort of fine sand you should ABSOLUTELY keep from your camera at all costs.

It turned out. It's funny how pictures like that tend to turn out, even when they turn out poorly (well, back in the days of no-preview film), it's poorly in a nostalgic way. The way your cousin is blinking and how dad's hair is something medusa would feel a little self conscious about, these become features and not defects. Mental watermarks on a day that only seem to get better in hindsight.

After that bit we went back tot he cottage for one last day just hanging out and, for whatever reason, not going to the beach. The kids can get in a rhythm where they actually enjoy playing with each other, and it's kind of the magic you want to keep going, not interrupting to go do this or that activity. It also perfectly suits my loosely realized vision of Hands Off And Lazy Parenting. Also known as 80's Parenting.

The cottage is tiny, even smaller than our townhouse, but because it has a somewhat odd layout and there are bunkbeds this makes for a WONDERLAND of fun, apparently.Sure it's a small boring bedroom, but it was a small boring bedroom with a bunkbed with a window that looks out into the family room, how CRAZY is that? Very, apparently.

So we let them have their fun, running around slightly different layout with odd choices for rooms made by budget rather than aesthetic. I'm sure it'll help them develop that spatial reasoning that will only atrophy in time; a skill they'll wish they had when, 20 years from now, they are driving white knuckled through some federal parks' idea of a reasonable road for drivers in 1932.

Oregon Coast - Part 4 : Rides

On the fourth day we went to the tourist city, Seaside. Where all the distractions that appear cheap and absurd in your adult's eyes will hopefully be magical to the kids. The tourist boardwalk . Replete with what I assume to be reconditioned rides from carnivals that have long since folded, merry-go-round, saltwater taffy shops, t-shirts shops that show their political bent a little too readily, an arcade, of all things.

Oh, and the standard small train ride that raptures every boy and some girls below a certain age. An age that, I think  Owl Jr has sadly passed. Actually, we steered him well clear of it because we only have so much energy to wait in so many lineups. It was all the way across the street, for god's sake, I used up all my overachieving in high-school.

There were bumper cars though. A ride I always preferred in my youth, favouring a ride in which I had some say in the matter notwithstanding the 22 year old 11th grader who seemed expert in all things mildly violent (a detail that was infuriating to kid-me, and not tragically sad to adult-me). Owl Jr was of the same opinion.

Owlet was fine with me driving, and screaming and hollering as we slammed into and were slammed by various other cars. Owl Jr actually drove, with startling malevolence, accuracy, and bloodlust. Where do children learn how to drive? What is this instinct to bash and crash coming from? It was the first, and probably not the last time one of my children drove me somewhere. The abuse of prescription painkillers in the elderly is no longer a mystery to me.

In the other bumper cars were the other dads and the alternately timid and wild teens.  One quickly finds who is perfectly acceptable targets (most), and who aren't (the kid who's just there trying to obey the rules of the road, for some reason).

Then the tilt-a-whirl. This was what Owlet seemed to enjoy the most. This thing went fast, fast as in "Am I in a reboot of The Right Stuff and/or hurtling towards dangerous re-entry and humming "Battle Hymn of the Republic"" fast. Fast as in I start to wonder at what speeds does the brain develop instantly fatal aneurysms. Fast as in the very vivid thought about how Mrs. Owl would make a striking widow. Fast as in my entire faith (never that much) in the FDA or whatever regulatory body that regulates the speed and safety of worn-down carnival rides housed in long-forgotten tourists traps in a desperately eager beach-town crumbled dust.

Of course I had to maintain what little cool I possessed. It's a well known fact that dads must, generally, Maintain Their Cool. Regardless of me clawing over my children to make sure they didn't get flung into the ether. Small whimpers of terror must be overridden by what I think are robust, devil-may-care laughter. Like from a war-bassoon, or, something equally manly and not at all made up.

They put this bar.. thing, which I think is supposed to simulate some sort of control? But I couldn't ascertain -- in the blinding minutes on what I'll generously call a ride and not "A Machine That Makes You Seriously Consider Life Insurance" -- how exactly it worked. Illusion of control, is what I'm guessing, like traffic signs or gun safeties or elections.

Later we made a trip to the toystore. 'Mass-produced junk mostly made for nostalgia and largely forgotten 15 seconds after purchase store' being too wordy, if accurate. Many items in the store were obviously put there to hook the nostalgia in the parents. Silly Putty, Slinkies, Simon Says. You can just feel the embittered pleas as Gen-X parents try and get their kids play with an archaic toy (only really fun in the 80's because of the inexplicable cartoon tie-ins). And the trains, and puzzles, and the sorts of toys you would've swore were banned in the 70's because of eyes being poked out or lead based paint or a bit of both but some factory in the hinterlands of China never got the memo and is still pumping out GoBot knock-offs with military grade spring-loaded missile-launchers.

Owlet took a sizable portion of a geologic epoch to decide, having been given a budget, and what seems like one quintillion combination and possibilities. Owl Jr lasered in on Lego Star Wars. Not the last time I've been grateful for otherwise heinous media empire cross-overs.

We finished it off with ice-cream, because, you have to finish off a tour of the tourist trap town with some ice cream (ardently-assured to be Real with just sugar/milk/cream and NO ADDITIVES like you have in the city what with your Sushi and hybrid cars).

It's a day I hope my kids will remember with nostalgic fondness and not a wry cynicism. Wonder, exhilaration, joy. And if they have even a smudge of that in their memory, then it was well worth it; Fond memories that will stay with them through whatever they decide to become, anytime anyone mentions the beach or Seaside.

At least until the FDA shuts it down.

Oregon Coast - Part 3 : Less Windy

Pacific Northwest Beaches aren't usually the type where all the men are in euro-speedos and all the women in two-pieces that fit with varying degrees of accuracy. It's more like a warmer version of what I think everyone thinks of New England. With better sand and more neutral accents.

We went to another beach at Ecola Park. Which was supposedly 'less windy'.  'Less windy' than the opening scenes to 1996 disaster movie "Twister", the last time Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton were remotely relevant, is not 'not windy'. Also, by meterogical fate, the wind WAS blowing directly onto the beach. Nobody was digging out their loved ones from suddenly appearing sand dunes, but nobody was peaceably perusing a newspaper, either.

Everyone mills about in Gore-Tex or capris and strolls up and down taking a sudden interest in tidal wild-life and various sub-species of gulls.

There are also surfers. Pacific North West Coast surfers, to be exact, in their Subarus and faux-hippie attire and rigourously distressed boards. I often wonder if these surfers get defensive when confronted with a Hawaiian surfer  or anywhere in which the size of waves can be measured in 'number of galleons that it can capsize'.

There are those who obviously insist on experiencing the beach as they imagine it, if we were 10 degrees lower in latitude. Shorts and frolicking in the sort of water they use to prep for cryogenics, I assume.

Invariably these off-seasonals are kids. My kids.

They spend some time making the sort of lumpy no-form sand castles that can only be made with perfectly dry sand, and then decide they want to play in the waves. Sensible parent that I am, I steer them to a calmer area, where the waves won't immediately claim them in a deceptive undertow. Owl Jr. becomes grumpy, because, of course he wants the life-threatening ones, populated entirely with wet-suit wearing Pac NW surfers.

And here, amongst water that makes my toes candidates for hypothermia-relatd amputation from an enthusiastic 1800's naval surgeon, they are most happy. Running to and from the waves. Surfers doing their surfer thing. Me, squinting, the wind and the sun being a bit much for my introvert ways. Mrs. Owl is far back where the dry sand is, being one of those regular people who seem to enjoy sunshine and just, 'relaxing'.

(It's impossible to 'relax' while being assaulted by a bracing wind and a sun that insists it's the middle of summer, is my general take on things. On a couch with the gentle impulse engines of the NCC-1701-D, maybe. )

But boy, do the kids scream alot. It takes a practiced ear and a tense-nonchalance to determine if this is 'screaming because we're having so much fun' or 'screaming because a severed head has just washed ashore'. Context and probability help me out, usually. And this is their game, running to the waves. running away from the waves. Owlet, being a girl who could get dirty taking a bath, would switch up the running and screaming and make extremely muddy lumps of sand and build a sad moat around them, and become pseudo-distraught when the waves washed over it. The things that kids find fun.


And the wind, not noticeably less, didn't seem to bother them at all.