2007

There were 200 posts published in 2007 (this is page 2 of 20).

Too Cold

All the heat in my life is vanishing.

First, the heater in my car gave out on Tuesday morning. I’m sure this is a quick fix, but I don’t have time to take it in. I’m playing Santa for Custom Box, so I’ll need to wait a week or so before I can have the heater repaired.

Then this morning the space heater in my office seems to be operating at half power. It’s blowing air, but it’s tepid air. It doesn’t warm me. It’s bad enough that Nick has begun turning the heater off at night instead of letting it operate at a low level, but now the thing barely works at all. Brrrr cold.

I might be able to tolerate this lack of heat if my clothes kept me warm. But because of my current girth, few things fit. Normally I’d wear my long johns, but they don’t “go” with the sweater I wore today, for example. I need to see customers, so I can’t look like a total hick. (I do have my long underpants on, and that’s some consolation.) Also, for some reason my socks and shoes are providing no protection this morning — my toes are cold.

All of this could be forgiven under normal circumstances. If I could come home in the afternoon to take a hot bath, it wouldn’t matter. A long soak in a hot tub would warm my inner core. It’s not happening. For some reason, we’ve got plenty of scalding water in the morning, but when I try to take a bath at 4pm, all I get is the lukewarm stuff. Ugh.

I draw a lukewarm tub anyhow, and I sit in it, shivering while I watch old Star Trek episodes. Every so often I’ll run the water for a couple minutes in the hope that somehow it will have heated. Occasionally I get lucky. Occasionally there is hot water. But a lot of its effect is negated by the fact that even when the water eventually is hot, it starts out cold. The first water from the faucet is ice cold, and it stays that way for ten or fifteen seconds. Or longer if there isn’t actually any hot water.

I’m cold.

Story Time at Rosings Park

Every day, it’s the same thing.

The alarm goes off at 5:30. Kris hits snooze.

The alarm goes off at 5:39. Kris pulls herself awake and heads downstairs for a shower. I pull of my C-PAP mask, roll over, grab my laptop, and then set it on my belly. While Kris is getting ready, I’m doing my morning stats.

Each day, I log the same numbers from Get Rich Slowly. I have a spreadsheet containing traffic, subscriber, link, and revenue information. It’s a little anal-retentive perhaps, but it’s probably no surprise to most of you. I also process e-mail and then check to be sure there are no fires to be put out. (Believe it or not, sometimes there are.)

At about 6:05, I put away the laptop, grab some clothes, and tromp downstairs. I brush my teeth, etc. as Kris gets out of the shower. At 6:10, I get into the tub and begin to soak. I don’t have as long as I’d like (and in the winter, I never get as warm as I want) — I need to be out of the house at 6:25, which means I need to be out of the tube at 6:20.

Some days — like today — Kris throws a monkey wrench into things. Some days — like today — she begins to talk to me about work. At 6:18.

Kris is a good storyteller, and I like to hear about all her little friends, but her stories are not short. In fact, they’re always quite long. I’d rather she told them to me in the evening, as we’re eating dinner. “I’m tired when I come home,” she said tonight when I mentioned this.

I understand. But when she starts telling me stories about work at 6:18 am, my heart sinks. I want to be a good husband and listen, but I also don’t want to be late for work. If I’m on time every day during a pay period, I get a $50 bonus. If I’m not, I don’t. And when Kris begins to tell a story at 6:18, I know it’s going to be a near thing.

Things get even worse when she slips into lethargy mode. She’ll go through periods where she hits the snooze button twice. Or when she won’t get into the shower until 6:04. When I come down to take my turn, she’ll have only just begun.

When this sort of thing begins to happen on a regular basis, I practice social engineering. Before she gets home from work, I go through the house and set back every clock by three minutes. (I can’t set them back any further or it’s too obvious. Though not as obvious as writing a blog entry about it.) This usually helps mitigate the problem, though it never quite solves it.

Ah, the strange dynamics of the husband-wife relationship.

Cats Like Birds

Cats? We have cats? For those of you who have been craving a cat update, here’s a video I took last month. It features are three boys and their insane desire to be OUTSIDE:

Have I mentioned that I love my digital camera? It’s small, it has wide-angle capability, and it takes video. I actually use it more for videos than for photos. It’s more fun that way…

Go, Speed Racer, Go!

When we were boys, which cartoon did we like better than any other? The one with race cars, of course. As lousy as I thought the last two Matrix movies were, the first one was brilliant. And based on that alone, I’ll go see this:

Coming in May!

Good Day, Bad Day

Wednesday got off to a lousy start. I rolled out of bed groggy and unrested. I was cold. My bath water was tepid.

When I got to work, things got worse. My eyes began to water and my nose began to run. I started sneezing uncontrollably. I was a mess. I wanted to go home sick, but Nick called to say he wouldn’t be in, and Jeff had a dentist appointment midday.

That might have been fine by itself, but then Lifehacker linked to my debt-free post at Get Rich Slowly, and things got even worse. Generally a link from Lifehacker is a good thing. In this case, however, my server came to a grinding halt. This isn’t the first issue I’ve had, which made things even more frustrating. It over three hours for things to get back to normal, and I was a nervous wreck the entire time.

Because I was too busy fretting, I couldn’t get anything written. It wouldn’t have mattered anyhow, because the phones kept ringing. Can you imagine? Actually having to deal with customers at a job?

By midday I realized that I had overbooked my evening. I had promised Mark and Tim that I would meet with them to discuss their new book, and to talk about publishing. But I had also told Paul and Amy Jo that I could help them move their appliances out of storage. Oops. I had to cancel my second engagement.

The day dragged on, and I seemed at my wits’ end.

In the evening, my luck changed.

Because I had to work late (to cover for the sick Nick), I skipped coming home and drove directly to dinner. As I travelled, I listened to Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, our book group choice for January. I love it. I haven’t read a book this good since Proust or Moby Dick. (“Oh great,” Kris muttered when I heaped this praise upon it.)

I ate at Cha Cha Cha, a cheap Mexican place that qualifies as “comfort food” for me. I ordered a lime Jarrito to go with my tacos, but just as my server was about to open it, I noticed they served a few mixed drinks. “I’ll take a mojito instead,” I said. A mojito sounded perfect.

The mojito wasn’t quite perfect, but it was strong! It seemed to be made of only rum and mint. When I stood up after finishing, I could tell I had a slight buzz. From one drink! I was plenty safe to drive, though, so I headed off to my meeting.

What a meeting! I don’t know what I had been expecting, but I came away inspired. I know Mark from the Writers Guild, but I had never met Tim before. He’s a confident, energetic entrepreneur. He came prepared with all sorts of notes, and he had articles and clippings to give to me. It was awesome. I left feeling excited about the directions Get Rich Slowly could take. (“Get Rich Slowly action figures!” Kris said when I told her about my evening.)

At home, I did a before-bedtime check of my site stats. It had been a good day. In fact, it had been a great day, especially from a financial perspective. My sites made $422.12 yesterday, surpassing an 8-month old mark. (On April 10th, my sites generated $384.88 in revenue. If only they would do this every day…)

Though I had started the day cranky, I went to bed happy.

The Wire: Prequels

Kris and I have been re-watching The Wire. I believe it’s the best television show ever produced. It’s epic. It’s powerful. It’s moving.

The Wire explores the world of crime and corruption in Baltimore, Maryland, looking at things not just from the cops’ eyes, but also from the eyes of the criminals. Creator David Simon does a fantastic job of drawing parallels, showing how honor and family are important in the criminal world, and how the “good guys” can be just as amoral and conniving as those that most people would condemn.

The fourth season was released on DVD yesterday. Though we’re not ready to watch it, we squatted on the first disc at Netflix. We’ll hold it until we’re ready to view. Mean? Perhaps, but I’d rather do that than have to wait. We’ll finish the second season this weekend, and then do the third over the following week. We’ll be watching the fourth season by Christmas.

Meanwhile, here are some bonus prequel episodes, which have been posted to YouTube. In the first one, we meet a young Proposition Joe (played by a woefully inept boy who must have been cast just for looks):

Warning: Plenty of foul language ahead.


Young Proposition Joe (1962)


Young Omar (1985)


When Bunk Met McNulty (2000)

Though these clips are fun for those who watch and love the show, they’re not really representative of the show itself. The show is simply amazing.

Not everyone agrees. Andrew and Courtney tried to give it a go based on our recommendations, but they found it unwatchable. There is a lot of swearing and violence — it’s a stark show that doesn’t flinch from reality — but I think it’s worth it. The first season takes four or five episodes to get rolling, but once it does, it’s amazing…

Finally, here’s a promo for season five, which begins next month on HBO.

Too bad Kris and I won’t be watching that for at least another year.

The Hottest Party

Over the past month, Kris has developed a new hobby: dancing. She sort of mocked my obsession with Dance Dance Revolution at first, but it didn’t take long for her to push me aside and take over as Queen of the Dance.

As with other things we enjoy, we’ve become evangelists for this game. This is strange, I know, since it’s been around for year. But it’s new to us, and new to most of our friends. Now when we have company over, they’re generally required to dance for their supper.

Here, for example, are Nikki and Celeste just learning to play:

Poor Nikki has the lousy pad in that video, and it slips and slides beneath her. (Since then we’ve added a carpet pad, which prevents potentially dangerous spills.) At the end of our last book group discussion, we dragged people to dance. A formal dinner party is no excuse — even then we put our guests to the test.


Pierre and Mike get their groove on (photo by Amy Jo)

Rhonda reports that she is now stuck on the same song I am. In “groove circuit” mode, you’re able to unlock new venues and songs. But the difficulty level makes a mind-boggling leap with the song “Super Samurai” (or whatever it’s called) comes along. Kris and I have been practicing other songs, working from Basic level to Difficult. Each song is rated by a number of “bombs”. “Super Samurai” has six bombs — we’re able to do songs with four bombs.

I guess we’ll just have to dance some more.

The Princess and the Pea

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. — Tolstoy

Nick and I just had a conversation about those incidents that scarred us in our youth. The crazy thing is that to adults — even to us as adults — these things seem trivial. Yet they’re the kind of things that shape our lives.

Fear of success

When Nick was in third grade, the church camp (Drift Creek) began to offer a week for kids his age. Nick wanted to go more than anything. At Bible school that summer, kids could earn a sort of scholarship to Drift Creek for accumulating points by memorizing Bible verses, etc.

Nick worked like crazy. He needed 1500 points to earn the scholarship, but he wanted to be sure. He earned more than 3000 points, far more than any other kid in Bible school. He was excited — he’d get to go to Drift Creek Camp!

But on the last day of Bible school, he found out that no scholarships were being offered to third graders. He’d done all that work for nothing. He was devastated.

As a result, Nick says, to this day he finds that he’s afraid to put all his effort into something. Somewhere in the back of his mind is the expectation that there won’t be any reward for the effort.

Dazed and confused

When I was about ten or twelve, our family made a visit to one of Mom’s aunts or uncles or cousins in Beaverton. We didn’t see Mom’s family very often, and both my parents were on edge. I think Dad always felt inadequate around them, as if he were being judged.

The house seemed like a mansion to me. I grew up in a run-down trailer house, and this place was enormous, filled with all sorts of expensive furniture. Jeff, Tony, and I ran around with the other kids while the adults sat in the living room, talking about adult stuff.

Because I was beginning to feel older, at some point I decided to join the adult conversation. In my memory, I went into the living room and sat down on the couch. I’m sure, however, that as most kids do, I plopped down on the couch. In any case, when I sat down, I dislodged an enormous painting that had been resting on the back of the sofa, causing it to fall to the floor.

Dad was livid. He took me outside and spanked me, probably one of the last times he ever did so. He was irate because I had embarrassed him in front of these people around whom he felt uncomfortable anyhow. I was dazed and confused. I couldn’t figure out what I had done wrong. In my mind, I had just tried to sit down on the couch. I had tried to do something good: join an adult conversation.

“I think about that incident several times a month,” I told Nick. He was shocked. “I’m serious,” I said. “All my life, I’ve thought about that incident several times a month. It is a deep part of who I am.”

Lie down on the couch

As an adult, it’s a challenge to cope with all of this baggage from my youth. Looking back, it seems so inconsequential. I know that Mom, too, fights some of this. She has often shared stories about the things that happened to her as a girl, the things that messed her up. When I hear the stories, I tend to dismiss them as trivial, just as you’re probably dismissing my story above as trivial. But they’re not trivial. These little things do lasting damage.

But how can a parent or teacher actually know which trivial things are going to do the lasting damage? Is it possible for a person to grow up without any sort of psychological scarring?

“People are strange,” I’m fond of saying. “They’re no such thing as normal. Every person is strange. But we’re each strange in different ways.” It’s not just my family that’s messed up — Kris’ family is messed up, too. So is every family. So is every person.

As of this moment, I am technically debt-free except for my mortgage. I haven’t actually paid the final debt, but I have the money in the bank to do so. This is an enormous step for me. Defeating my debt is akin to defeating the demons from my youth. It’s a sign that the adult J.D. is asserting himself, is denying that the things that happened to the young J.D. will actually control his life.

I’m not out of the woods yet, of course. I may have my financial life under control, but I’m still a fat middle-aged man who eats like shit and who never exercises. I have some very real social anxieties. For some time, I’ve considered seeing a psychologist to discuss some of my poor behavior patterns. Maybe it’s time to actually do so.

Re-Reading The Golden Compass

During our Thanksgiving road trip to bend, we listened to the audio version of The Golden Compass. Kris and I have both read the book several times, but since the film is coming out soon, we decided to refresh our memories.

Tiffany enjoyed the book so much that she insisted on borrowing my iPod so she could finish it on Saturday. (Tiff, Kris has finished the second book now, if you’re interested.)

When we got home, I decided to search for information on the film, which opens on December 7th. What I found made me worried. I was initially excited for the film, but recent trailers have me wary. I’m afraid the girl who plays Lyra may not be a good actress, and I’m afraid that the film may be over-produced. This clip does nothing to allay my fears:

Can you say “wholly invented” and “made from whole cloth”? This scene has no relation to the book. I am baffled. The following episode is a little better, combining two scenes from the book:

I’ve continued to listen to the book during my commute. I always forget how slow it starts. It’s leisurely, and doesn’t seem to be heading anywhere. But by the half-way point, you come to realize that everything that has been mentioned before is important, that story elements have been accumulating like a snowball. It’s quite effective story-telling, actually.

In fact, there’s an extended section about two-thirds through the book (starting with “the lost boy”) that is one of my favorite passages in any book. (I’m speaking of Tony and his fish, of course.) I only wish the rest of this trilogy held up to that last half of The Golden Compass. There are moments of brilliance throughout — including the dirigible chase near the end of The Subtle Knife — but I think that things eventually go flat.

Apparently there’s an uproar about the movie in certain parts of the Catholic church. They don’t appreciate that the series ultimately takes a dim view of religion. I never understand why religious people get hacked off at this stuff, especially in the U.S. What about freedom of speech? And why feel so threatened? Christians make up a vast majority of this country’s population. Why is it okay to have thousands and thousands of books that depict atheists in a poor light, but a single series that questions organized religion (and Catholicism in particular) is taboo? Give me a break.