miscellany

A couple of weeks ago, our son turned one year old. My parents came into town for this auspicious occasion, and my in-laws, my sister, and a couple of our good friends were also in attendance. Max ate cake, played with cake, smashed cake, and smeared his face with cake. At one point I laughed so hard I started crying and having a gut ache. That, my friends, is a good thing.

Two strong chins, there...

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I read this in today's New York Times:

"[snip] The Post/ABC survey found for the first time that a slight majority of Americans - 52 percent - believed that the administration had deliberately misled the country before the war. That figure has climbed sharply, up 9 points in three months. [snip]"

52 percent... I guess that makes it a fucking mandate, now, doesn't it?

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More house renovations lately. The electrician never showed last week (ugh), so I'm trying to get that under control. But we're slowly patching and waterproofing the cement walls and floor in the basement, and a couple of carpenters are rebuilding one of the basement starcases (we have two).

Here's a neat shot of the new slider door in the bomb shelter we call a kitchen:


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I scared some people when I walked into my office building the other day. I've been listening to some 80's British cheese metal lately (specifically Iron Maiden), and as I entered the lobby, I sang along with the verse then playing on my iPod: "Satan's wooooorrrrrk is done!!!" It turned a few heads. Heh.

boston uncommon

I saw something that made me do a double-take while walking through Boston Common early this afternoon en route to work: a Christian revival tent. Not 'revival tent' as in the one full of paramedics at the end of the Boston Marathon, but 'revival tent' as in folding chairs and a cheesy P.A. system and fire and brinstone and Jesus died for your sins, Hallelujah Amen.

A Christian revival tent. On public property.

Now, I'm no lawyer (I have a modicum of self-respect, thank you very much ;-) . So I'm unclear as to the legality or illegality of a religious entity getting approval from City Hall (I'm assuming) to stage an event like this. I don't know where the 'separation of church and state' notion comes into play here. The whole thing just sort of struck me as odd. Something that wouldn't, I think, seem too out of place in, say, Orange County or Atlanta or Wichita (are these things legal there, too?).

But Boston? True blue Beantown?

Sure, Pope John Paul II held a mass at Yankee Stadium, but I think that's a privately-owned venue.

Now, maybe the notion of 'public property' (somewhat of an oxymoron, eh?) or 'public land' means 'open to all peoples and groups so long as they don't instigate a riot or pee on the rhododendrons.' I'm not qualified to make such a judgment. But it does give one pause. One being me.

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We're celebrating our son's first birthday this weekend. My parents are driving to Boston to join us, and my in-laws will be here as well. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone. I know Max won't quite understand all the hubbub, but it should be fun watching him play with his presents and attempt to eat cake. :-)

I can't believe the li'l bugger's almost a year old. Time flies... and yet it really drags too, sometimes.

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It's not nearly as fucking muggy and hot as it's been for the past several days. It was hazy and sticky and in the 90s for what seemed like a week, only about two months too early for the 'dog days' of summer (picture Matthew Broderick in "Brighton Beach Memoirs," in his full army uniform, saying "This is Africa hot!"). Today's rain seems to have broken the cycle -- the temperature dropped about 20 degrees (Farenheit) and the humidity dropped as well. Which is a good thing. Max was having a hell of a time sleeping (just watching him sit there, sweating and bawling, broke my heart), as were his mommy and I. The window fans we bought helped, but we may have to go the closed windows and blankies route tonight!

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The house deconstruction continues. I'll post pictures at some point.

the only point i have is at the top of my head.

Work has been rather dull of late. Not the usual mind-numbingly, push-fork-tines-in-the-cornea-because-it's-better-than-this dull, but stultifying nonetheless. Mostly software upgrades and little busy-work wank projects my boss gives me (the latest being troubleshooting why a redundant power supply on a non-production test switch won't work -- I mean, please.). What's the point of all this, bill-paying notwithstanding?

I get to feeling this way every few months, when life gets boring/stressful, and I have trouble motivating myself. I also find myself not living so much in the present but rather in a future that could have been, i.e. what if I were still single, or at least not a parent. Thinking that way makes me kind of sad, because it implies -- screams? -- that I'm dissatisfied with my present existence. It convinces me that there's something deeply wrong. With me. With life.

Sometimes, when I get this what-is-my-life's-true-purpose? feeling, I peruse grad school websites all over the country, for various and sundry programs. Documentary film at Berkeley's journalism school. Law at Northwestern. Public Policy at Columbia. Computer Science at Stanford or Cornell. Not that I could ever dream of getting into any of these programs (OK, maybe doc at Cal), but just something different. Something that makes me wake each morning with a wow. (Note: when I was in college, I greeted many mornings with the thought of "oh shit, I didn't get any work done" or "fuck, I have a final in two hours and I don't know where it is" or "why am I sleeping with this person? I can't fucking stand her," ad infinitum. Why ten-plus years and several Major Life Events would really make a difference in the Academic Me is truly a question for the ages. I grow older, but I don't necessarily grow up. And so it goes.)

At any rate, work is boring, but at least it's steady. I vest in roughly a year and a half, and hopefully by then I'll have my CCIE and I'll be more marketable (read: I'll get a more difficult job, hopefully at a higher salary, where I'll be even more prone to negative karmic feelings. Oh boy oh fucking boy.).

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The house deconstruction continues apace. (Note to self: post some of the pix you took of the demo work thus far.) The contractors showed up today, 3 hours late, but supposedly (according to Nadine -- I had to leave for work shortly after they started working) replaced all the basement windows and one of the kitchen windows. Tomorrow (and sporadically, it seems, over the next few days) they're slated to do a bunch more demolition work in and around the kitchen: removing a not-up-to-code chimney; knocking a hole in the dining room wall for a 2nd window (wheeeeeee!); hauling away that ghastly Sherman tank of an oven that's never worked since we moved in... a whole host of things. The plumber (a swell guy, actually), is then going to do a bunch of... well, plumbing. He'll run pipes up through an interior kitchen wall, part of which Nadine and I have to tear down this weekend. He'll spend a couple of days running pipes and installing a temporary sink in the kitchen, and then we 86 the old sink, and the contractor returns to knock out the kitchen wall where the old sick was, and put in its place a large sliding glass door (which will open out onto an as-yet-unbuilt deck). The scope of all this work scares the shit out of me. But I want it done, so I have to face these demons and just get crackin'.

And, of course, there's other work to be done in the house. It will never fucking end.

Life in the 'urbs. Yes... I... am... one... with... the... Home... De(s)pot...

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We registered for the Macworld Conference exhibit halls today. Nadine's office sent her (and ostensibly me) to Macworld in San Francisco in January 2004, but they've put the kibosh on trips for a while, so we'll check out the east coast version (i.e. sans Steve Jobs, that punk-ass beeyotch) for a couple of mornings before I have to schlep the three blocks from Macworld to the office. It should prove somewhat fun in a geeky way. And an outing for Max and Nadine and me. For all the years that Macworld has been in Boston (most of them, except for a couple of years in New York), I haven't been to one here. Strange.

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For anyone in the Northeast (or at least New England), it hasn't rained in something like two whole fucking days. If Boston has nice mountains and a real working ferry system and a huge fascist software company, this could have been fucking Seattle, what with all the fucking rain we've had lately.

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Now to spend the next hour or so in our loud-ass data center, troubleshooting this un-fucking-important power supply issue. Fuck.