as one does.

It's Christmas Eve, so naturally we spent it, variously:

• Working at REI.
• Taking the dog to the groomer.
• Retrieving the dog from the groomer.
• Playing Cthulhu Wars.
• Bringing the home network back after a power blip.
• Making and eating empanadas.
• Watching Moana (or a big chunk of it).

This sounds much smoother than it was, since the boy was pretty broken today, lots of moods and crabbiness and melodrama. It's been a rough school year for him, with a pretty much non-stop headache of varying intensity and migraine-ness; though he may also just have been hungry.

The power blip was weird. It was in that sweet spot where it was long enough to make equipment stop working, but not quite long enough for it to power down all the way, leaving it in some weird half-on state. A couple years ago I got fed up enough to put some money into Ubiquiti UniFi gear for the house--a good investment considering we use the Internet more or less every waking hour--and its display showed one of the wireless access points (WAP or AP) as disconnected, which was weird since it was on. I power-cycled it, but noticed some other wireless devices still weren't working. It turned out I had to power-cycle the network switch first, then the AP. The switch's only active data is a Major Arcanum called the Address Resolution Protocol, which mostly Just Works™, but if it's corrupted somehow, nothing works, and it will not-work in irritating, obscure ways.

J was being a jerk while I was trying to fix it, but I was reflecting later how impossible it is for him to fathom the gap between his technical knowledge and mine. Some of it is the decades of experience; some of it is that biodad is more likely to get angry at things than learn how to fix them. It's just that there's no catalog of the stuff I know, and if there were, it would be SO, SO BORING. So why shouldn't he say "have you tried turning the Chromebook off and on again?" while I'm telling him the Chromebook and Chromecast need to be on the same wireless network? The Chromecast says "maybe your wireless router is messed up! maybe you should power-cycle it?" and it was more than he could do just then to listen when I said I did that already.

Work is closed until January 3rd, so I decided to spend some of the time learning more fiddle tunes, feeling like I can learn them now without making my technique too much worse. It's a lot of Irish/Scottish/(bluegrass/old-time/Canadian) tunes, which all sound very similar and take a lot of repetition to differentiate, though it's easier to remember them when learning them to play them:

• Whiskey Before Breakfast
• The Red-Haired Boy
• Drowsy Maggie (not sure yet if I'm up to this one)
• The Humours of Glendart
• The Kid On The Mountain
• Polska efter Pelle Fors (which I couldn't play 3 months ago! go, me!)

Scandinavian music is (a) harder, and (b) mostly named descriptive things like "Wedding Polska" and it's just hard to get a handle on. As regards (a), my favorite is a Swedish fiddler saying "Yes, that dance is in 3/4, but the second beat comes faster."

The dog is really soft now, though.