*mrowr*

We took the extraordinary step of going to look at cats yesterday. The therapist says we should get a cat: that the right cat would be a comfort to the entire household, since all 3 of us are in some high-energy emotional stuff. She's probably right.

We didn't have pets growing up. The reasons varied--"dogs are too messy," "parent X is allergic to cats" (which was a lie to cover "parent X doesn't want a cat")--but came down to parents already having 3 boys and being at the ends of their ropes and unwilling to take anything else on.

I later learned, at a sleepover at my friend Vinnie's house, that I was actually allergic to cats, starting with the itching in the nose and ears, leading to the runny nose, constant sneezing, watering eyes, and I think once I've been exposed for enough hours that it affected my breathing. I have re-tested it periodically, and I've never grown out of it, and ever since dating a woman with cats in 2004, I just keep little bottles of 24-hour Claritin everywhere. I don't know if Claritin keeps working if you take it every day for years, and while it is renowned for its lack of drug interactions, I am taking several other drugs right now.

(Anna used to be allergic, but we went to two shelters, and she was fine. My ears itched and I sneezed once.)

People actively work on treatments for cat allergy. It's hard to imagine there's enough allergic people who want cats to make a real market, but a strong allergy could be a serious thing for people who already have asthma (and friends or family with cats).

There's a desensitization routine, which takes about 100 individual shots. But! There's a company starting a Phase III trial (with actual humans, the last testing step before FDA approval) and this one is only 4 shots, each a month apart, and the effect claims to last at least 2 years.

We made friends with a very nice, introvert-yet-snuggly cat. We'll have to see.

podcasts!

A while back I started having stretches where I couldn't read, but did want to use my brain, so I looked critically at my list of podcasts. I found it unsatisfying, full of economics (Planet Money) and storytelling (This American Life, Radiolab, The Moth), and middlebrow miscellany (To The Best Of Our Knowledge, Science Friday, Living On Earth). Surely there are podcasts with the level of detail I would expect in a book? What do I enjoy reading about?

Ancient history. Archeology. Religion scholarship. I opened Apple's Podcasts app on my phone and updated my list.

• The Ancient World. This is the best thing ever. It's one guy talking, but his writing is sharp and clearly puts together a vast amount of knowledge in each episode, and his delivery is deadpan. I've listened to the whole thing, and may listen to it again: J loves it, and his usual response would be "people are talking, please make it stop."
• The Maritime History Podcast. To satisfy my jones after finishing The Ancient World.
• The History of English. This intersperses the fascinating history of the cultures leading up to English with somnolently repetitive tables of example words illustrating cognates and phoneme shifts.
• Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. Scholarly lectures analyzing Biblical texts and themes. Pretty awesome, it's like the "Bible as literature" course I should have taken but never did.
• Quanta Magazine Science Podcast. It sounds like someone is reading the magazine articles out loud, with a curious lack of narrative skill, but it's cool stuff with a gory amount of detail.
• The Memory Palace. I don't keep up religiously, but they're little dramatic factoid bites, quite a lot of impact for their 6 or 8 minutes.
• Welcome to Night Vale. I will not describe this, except to say it's the best radio show ever.

Honorable mention:

• The History of Rome. The Ancient World guy thinks this is the most awesome history podcast ever; I tried it briefly, and I guess it's fine, but at that point I had twice consumed the history of Rome through the end of the Republic, and Rome just doesn't interest me that much.

2015 in review

It's a New Year! 2015 wasn't so bad. 2016 is starting out on good notes! Well, mostly.

Our heat went out on Christmas Eve! The HVAC guy came during the day, flipped the same breakers we flipped, and it worked again. (He charges half-price for that.) Then it broke again and stayed broken. And the house was cold! We got by with a couple space heaters and our electric bed warmers, but there is no substitute for an actual forced-air heating system that's actually designed (if incorrectly) to heat a house.

The furnace guy had suggested that since it's an electrical problem, before we spend a lot of money on a fix, we could just run some extension cord and do some very minor splicing, and Bob's your uncle. It took us a couple days to get around to mapping our circuits; we were motivated by blowing a breaker with two space heaters plugged into what would plausibly have been two different circuits (living room and master bedroom).

Oh, no, my friends. It is true that we have 12 circuits of 15-20 amps each. All of those do appear to do at least one thing. The surprise was to learn that a single circuit handles:

• 2 bedrooms
• the living room
• 2 bathrooms
• every ceiling light and ceiling fan

Which is kind of insane. The upside is that there's plenty of load available on other circuits! The two outlets in the mudroom, for example, are each on separate circuits, and don't appear to connect to anything else.

Anna donned the Tyvek bunnysuit a couple times and went under the house, and drilled a hole in the floor, and I, her intrepid assistant, went to the hardware store and handed her tools, and then the heat worked again! It was kind of magical, and also nice and warm. The repair is only slightly Jethro, as Anna would say, which means it shouldn't be more than a couple of years before we tidy it up.

Much to my own surprise, I finished 76 books in 2015. Most of them don't even have pictures! I have mastered my management of e-books: I download the copy-protected files, which are then whisked automatically into Calibre, which un-protects them and converts them for the Kindle.

(Computer programmers do this kind of thing all the time, and are notorious for spending more time automating a task than it would take to do it by hand. But! If we automate it, (1) we learn something, and (2) we won't screw up the task.)

This frees me from having a time limit on my library e-books, particularly a gift with books that are either genuinely challenging (Moby-Dick, which has certainly fallen by the wayside) or just very slow and I use them to quiet my brain at bedtime (The Rise of Rome).

Speaking of Rome! I have now learned Rome's story a couple times and I don't need to read or hear about it again. It's cool, in its way, and the transition from Republic to Empire is instructive, but mostly it was an un-creative hegemon that ate the known world. Besides The Rise of Rome (which is a fine history of the Kingdom and the Republic), I listened to the entire "The Ancient World" podcast, which is amazing. It's just one guy, no sound effects, but his scholarship is deep, his writing is incredibly clear, and his delivery is spot-on. Try it from the beginning. Even J loves it: pausing it in the car while we're driving is frowned upon.

And finally, the boy. Our amazing, kind, brave, intelligent, empathic, absolutely enormous boy. He's growing up, in his own personal, neurodiverse series of fits and starts. He is clearly going to be the size of a tree.

Anna and I are still happily married. Or I assume so, since she doesn't believe me when I complain about her. =)

parenting achievement of the week

The boy gets ranty, which is not that unusual for kids, but his father has a serious conspiracy-theory bent, and then we have worked to channel his obsession with justice and fairness with an education in history and systematic oppression. (Things read to him at bedtime have included Critical White Studies and Howard Zinn's A Young People's History of the United States. Anna carefully edits as she reads, since he's not emotionally ready to handle the graphic horrors of history. He knows they're bad, and he's going to be extra angry when he learns the details.)

He was extra ranty and non-listening yesterday, so I looked up from my book mid-rant.

"...and then they're lying to kids in school! It's evil, they're brainwashing them by telling them that anybody can make it in America if they just work hard!"

You'll have enough problems trying to promote justice in the world, even if you don't talk like a socialist version of Rush Limbaugh.

"'Brainwashing' isn't really the right word there."
"But they're lying!"
"Right, but...well, the American school system is designed to produce obedient citizens...it's really 'indoctrination' rather than 'brainwashing.'"

(See John Taylor Gatto's glorious and epic essay, "Against School.")

"Right, to make them do what the government says. So that's brainwashing."
"So, the context behind 'brainwashing' mostly goes back to the Cold War, and the fear that people were being captured and turned into secret agents. There was this movie The Manchurian Candidate...anyway, 'brainwashing' is where an enemy captures you, and tortures you until you believe what they want you to believe."

(I wanted to use Orwell's 1984 as a better example, but if he reads that book he'll go catatonic.)

"Some of my classmates say school is torture... joking, I guess."
"Yeah. Real torture. And being held captive."
"Captive, like a place where you try to leave and they bring you back?"

(Touché! Time to stop quibbling.)

"More like you try to leave, and they shoot you."
"Oh. Okay. Indoctrination."

We'll see if it sticks. If he stops saying "brainwashing," then when he rants at other people, I can stop (mentally) holding my head in my hands and explaining that my kid who wants to make a genuinely better world just happens to sound like he's about to sell you a tin-foil hat.

changing self-perception.

I was just in Seattle, and Alaska Airlines tore up my suitcase a little bit. They were super nice about it, and offered to fix the bag, or give me a travel credit. The woman asked, "Do you fly a lot?", and I started to answer "No," but stopped myself.

Since I work remotely for a company in Seattle, and Seattle is what an Edmonton co-worker described as "a long bus ride" for me, and I enjoy Seattle, I go to Seattle fairly often now. And since we have most weekends kid-free, Anna and I make and take opportunities to go places together.

This is just the stuff that made it into Google Calendar.

So, yeah. I travel a lot.

2014

• Feburary
• Massachusetts (parents)
• March
• San Diego outskirts (Legoland)
• April
• Santa Cruz Mountains (Zen retreat)
• May
• upstate New York (college reunion, never doing that again)
• June
• outside Seattle (in-laws)
• July
• Seattle (job interview)
• Cape Cod (parents)
• August 
• Seattle (job onboarding)
• September
• Marin County (in-laws wedding)
• October
• Seattle (company community summit)
• multi-family campout
• Santa Cruz Mountains (Zen retreat)
• Las Vegas (RICON)
• November
• Vancouver
• Seattle (job training)

2015

• January
• Seattle (in-laws + company rally)
• March
• Fuzdome (my chill birthday weekend with friends)
• Massachusetts (parents)
• Santa Clara (company conference)
• April
• Santa Cruz Mountains (Zen retreat)
• May
• Seattle (work [emergency product re-focusing for my group])
• June/July
• Connecticut (high school reunion)
• Seattle (work)
• Seattle (with the boy: combination Anna's work/my work, then in-laws) 
• August
• Cape Cod
• September
• Santa Cruz Mountains (Zen retreat)
• October
• Seattle (company community summit) 
• upstate New York (college a cappella group reunion)
• November
• San Francisco (RICON: not far, but still counts)

don't forget to show your work.

It has not been a year of deep blog posts, I think. Life has had most of the same threads this year, and they progress and evolve.

I just plowed through the books of the Expanse series, really great sci-fi books. The "author" James S.A. Corey is a pseudonym for two guys; apparently one of them built this world for an MMORPG (big online multiplayer game), and then the author one was a writer, met the first guy, and said "Writers don't do this much work" and they wrote some great books.

To make sure I slept, and knowing how sad I would be when they ended, I tried not to just stay up late plowing through them, and I did pretty well. I'm in the middle of a dozen other books anyway, a lifelong habit further enabled by the library's ebook collection and my Kindle. Books I have been notably slow to finish include books related to work.

Work is work. It's a good job, working for a deeply moral employer, with super smart, kind people. I've recently been able to establish clearer expectations for the kinds of roles that are available, so I think we all know where we stand, and that's a good thing.

I did get super excited and hack out a side project last week, something elegant that various people at our Community Summit were interested in, and that made my co-workers' eyes pop out. So that was deeply gratifying.

We're playing a lot with the timing of medications, and I've been feeling pretty good, not just hour to hour, but improving over days. It recently occurred to me that I should make more friends, and while the route to that is not completely clear, it does not make me think "maybe later, I don't have the energy," so that's new. I haven't been running in a couple weeks, but I'm also nervous about trying: even if it feels okay at the time, I can never tell if it contributes to then being strung out a few days later.

We have had a mess of work done on the house, which turned out to be a more substantial project than expected, partly because we didn't know what to expect, but also the usual chain of hapless events that leads to otherwise competent people selling crappy work, which then gets fixed by the next guy. It's funny, even when the crappy work involves missing sealant on the window trim, heading into a record-breaking El Niño (which, this time, means lots of rain).

I think I posted a picture of the living room windows already, but I have trouble describing how much less janky the house feels, with windows that aren't a noisy chore to open, and back doors that are not actually hollow-core interior doors. (The stucco around the primary back door is being fixed up, so we've been using the back door into our bedroom, which is usually only used by shouting children rampaging in a circle around the property. The architectural history that led to an exterior door in our bedroom is, at best, muddled.)

And, of course, copious snuggling.

Finally, I've been unwinding some stuff in my head lately, and getting a clearer view of the way I don't really let my internal processes be seen on the outside. Relatively early in my life it got both tedious and unsafe to do that, so I learned not to, and I'm very good at putting on whatever mask the moment calls for. But that leaves people wondering how my thinking got from Point A to Point B, and in particular for people who care about me, they don't get to see what my experience of life is like. (Why do they want to hear it? I already thought those thoughts, they're boring now!) So I'm telling more of my stories, and letting my emotional reactions to things be more visible, though it's very much like speaking a foreign language (much like J's entire experience communicating with other humans). No disaster yet.

It's early days, though! There's still time!

I'm alive!

No need to send a rescue party. I've been working, and occasionally running, and apparently reading a lot.

We finally pulled the trigger on replacing all our windows, so Anna has been project-managing that, in her copious free time. It's amazing.
 

That big window used to be 8 panes of glass, tenuous held together by brittle caulk (presumably the original 1938 construction) that would come off with your fingernail. The entire assembly would flex if you pressed on it, and with the not-at-all-safety glass and the 3-foot drop on the other side, the situation cried out for some zooming child to crash through it and end up with a concussion and dozens of stitches. We drilled this point into the children entering the house, and put a big chair in front of the window, which made it safer, but the chair is very opaque and so we didn't really think of the window much.

It turns out there's an entire whole world out there! Easily visible through a single piece of glass that doesn't have a huge armchair in front of it.

We replaced everything except the bathroom windows, so a new sliding door in the office, no more rattling single-paned aluminum-frame windows with the weather-stripping gone. Occasionally we open and close windows just because it's so easy: no strenuous effort, no CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK as the windows skip and chunk through the frame rather than slide.

 

We replaced the two rear doors, which, as it happens, were actually interior doors that people had just gone ahead and used for exterior doors. That is how this house rolls.

(I say "we," but of course Anna is doing the day-to-day project management.)

The dark, cavelike corner of our bedroom now has natural light, of all the crazy things, filtered through trees. These doors are actually double-paned, but with a set of Venetian blinds inside. This is space-age stuff. (Or, rather, this is what we build instead of going into space.)

I'm not showing the hacked-up stucco, or the lonely-looking wall gaps or places where the trim hasn't been replaced. It'll get fixed, hopefully before it rains.

 This is the last big project for a while, but wow. It's like a different house.