the child, it grows.

We've been having a generally lovely time with the boy lately. I can definitely see the feeling that they grow up too fast, but on the other hand he gets more and more fun and capable as he grows. We expect a reasonably stormy adolescence (which sort of started a year or two ago, really), but it seems pretty likely he'll be close to home for a while. We doubt he'll be ready to live on his own at 18, for example. But he's nothing if not surprising.

Being the remarkable parent she is, Anna has been thinking about J's obsession with computer time, which he's been getting in return for participating in his various things: occupational therapy, social skills group, etc. She realized she doesn't actually care about the computer time, she cares about his level of involvement in all the things that aren't computer time, including free play and exercise. She and J sat down--for a few hours, they both really love organizing things in a way I cannot comprehend--and now there's a big weekly schedule on the wall with Post-Its and color coding and 27 8×10 color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining how it covers some number of concerns. Outside of those things, he can have screen time or do whatever he wants. (There is not a ton of free time, really.) Today he had his oldest friend over for most of the day, and that encompassed Socializing, Free Play, and Exercise all at once.


It's only Day 2, but this has some promise to reduce the stress and constant checking for both of them. It wouldn't have been possible even 6 months ago, but now he's capable of greater abstraction and perspective about his life and what he needs because of his non-typical brain wiring. He's had half a year of school not being awful, and for the most part he not only doesn't have to be badgered into participating in his various activities, he often enjoys at least part of them.



He's not worrying about his future much, it seems, though I think he relaxes a little every time I tell him the only things he has to do as an adult are to support himself, and love people.

this is new.

"Good night, my wonderful boy. I love you."
"Good night, wonderful Chris. I love you too."

water under the bridge.

Tonight was the annual cocktail party at my old house in Oakland. It's one of the least exclusive events I know, and you're encouraged to bring friends or co-workers--often it turns out they know someone else at the party anyway. Sometimes, it's a small Valley.

When Anna and I were dating, I once told her that if I got married, I could easily invite 200 people to the wedding without thinking very hard. She was skeptical, since she was still deciding whether I was a fountain of bullshit--I am, but not so it matters--but then she started meeting the horde, and saw that I wasn't showing off. It is actually a very big group, and while relationships vary as you'd expect, by and large we know each other well enough. The accumulated weight of shared experience.

Tonight there was my ex-girlfriend C, who was quite justifiably angry at me for a few years, until I got my head out of my ass and apologized, and eventually we became able to talk like old friends. Just last week, at a dinner party, I got to tell the remarkable story of our first date, which is one of my favorites. Of course everyone at the table has known me for years, and known her almost as long, and that just makes it all awesome.

There was also my ex from The Bad Relationship, who doesn't want to remember anything about our mutual past, but we did have quite a civil conversation about the labeling of the numerous cheeses. She reportedly acknowledged Anna's presence in the room, as well. Small steps toward a more peaceful world.

Many of us have dated, several have been married and divorced; sometimes the pairing up happens within the community, and sometimes the pairing up brings in a new person. (Or several, in my case: on the way home from the party when my late friend J and his wife H first met Anna, H commented how much she liked Anna and how well Anna and I seemed to fit together. J said, "Yeah...don't get too attached. We've seen this before, and they don't necessarily stick around." Anna was unable to convince H to tell this story at our wedding.)

(In my defense, this seems a little unfair, since my pre-Anna girlfriend was around for 3 years and still talks to my friends, if not, for mysterious reasons, to me. Nonetheless, a valid point.)

Most of the gang is a bit older than me, so they've had the pleasure of watching me grow from an obnoxious, if usually charming, twentysomething single guy, into a charming, if occasionally obnoxious, thirtysomething husband and father. These are my people. We've all grown up together, gone to Burning Man, eaten lovely food, helped each other, trusted each other, adjusted our expectations to what we're all capable of.

Across the community, biological families range from the fabulous like mine, to varying levels of dysfunction, all the way down to the horrific. No matter what we each started out with, now we have each other, too.

Our traditional dinner toast is "Here's to the family you choose."

back to work, slackers

We had a lovely holiday season here at the Snugglehaus. On Christmas Eve we went to St. Gregory's to watch a family we're friends with be in the Christmas pageant. (The 3-year old was the best sheep ever.) Of course, since it's St. Gregory's, the pageant is different every year, there's a script and choreography and varied kinds of singing, and of course they alternate years with the different versions of Jesus' birth (Luke's and Matthew's). Then we were off to Dessert Night elsewhere in the city, and then we were cooked.

On Christmas we got the boy back around noonish, and opened presents. We spread his larger presents over the twelve days leading up to Christmas, which encourages actually playing with them as their opened. I got various nice useful things; Anna got a boatload of ukulele accessories from her family Secret Santa, and I got her a ukulele. I had hoped the ukulele would be a surprise, but she had said she wanted one, I'm the resident string instrument expert, and I'm kind of predictable in that this is exactly the sort of situation where I will buy her a present.

J got a full set of Star Wars Family Car Decals, so now our two back doors have adorable banthas on them.

The boy has been challenging at times recently, which I think is manifesting the half-year pattern: half a year of turbulence as he struggles to make a developmental leap, followed by half a year of cruising as he flexes new skills and cognitive abilities. He's been reliably on that cycle, and it's been a very smooth 6 months overall, so I suppose we're due. Given the level of sturm und drang we can already get at age 9, the teenage years are looking a little daunting. He's a loving, compassionate little human, and we'll figure it out.

At just about any tech job, the holiday season from Thanksgiving to New Year's is largely a loss. Half the company goes on vacation, which makes it hard for the remaining half to accomplish much; you have long deploy blackouts, not wanting to risk production outages during the holidays, which are customer-visible and also short-staffed (see above re: vacations). Years ago I stopped taking the holidays off, first because holiday travel is miserable, but second because workplaces become largely indifferent to whether and how long I show up in the office during that time, so it's not like I'm Bob Cratchit, toiling away while everyone else relaxes into the holidays. (Larger companies will often just shut the office entirely for the two weeks of Christmas to New Year's; nicer ones will do so without requiring you to take vacation days for it.)

Work has been unfortunate, if educational in a character-building sense, and that's probably all I should say about it for now.

We've added yet a few more stuffed animals to the household. We already had so many! But there's a specific kind of stuffed beaver that's a family institution, and Anna couldn't resist a pair of badgers from Ikea. I think we need a moratorium.

And, as always, being married is the easy part. Nice work, if you can get it. =)

brrrrr

I am terrible about writing here. I've been writing some stuff for my technical blog! And not finishing and posting it. It's a little silly.

I upped the dosage on my medication, and now I feel pretty close to the "normal" of 2007-2009. I just had a cold, and I'm out of shape, so there's some ambiguity in the state of things. The key thing I'm noticing is that I'm sleeping through the night, naturally waking up between 5 and 6 AM, then doing zazen, puttering a bit, and taking a nap. Then often another nap in the afternoon/evening, as available. This is the previous sleep pattern that I know to be sustainable (if not always convenient), so it's a little like meeting an old friend, and I'm feeling more rested.

I went back to aikido today, and some aspect of my body was not happy about it--after a cold, my lungs often don't work quite right for a while. I have to be careful when I train, because my muscle memory allows to do many things that my muscle conditioning will only tolerate a few times.

Work is...enh. I switched teams, which is way better than before, but the problems have always run deeper than that. I feel a little bad for the managers, when the best I can offer anyone is "We'll see what happens."

Lastly, it's cold here! Usually we consider it chilly when it gets down to 40°, but we've been hitting 32° and occasionally down to 28°, even here on the flatlands next to the Bay. Nothing and no one here is equipped for an extended cold snap: it's obviously the worst for the area's homeless, four of whom died of exposure the other night (while there were open shelter beds, even). For the rest of us, we're wrestling merely with the fact that buildings in this area are generally uninsulated. This is just as true of buildings from 1999 as of buildings from 1938. The building code doesn't require it, and why should it? Unlike my brother's town in Minnesota, which recently hit a charmingly lethal -1° after reaching a balmy 4° during the day, it is entirely possible to survive 32° indoors under a sufficiently large pile of blankets. If you're a builder, insulation is an obvious corner to cut: you won't be paying the energy bills, after all.

We can't insulate the walls without stripping them to the studs, but with the pronounced cold, I am noticing that our floor really is cold, and remembering a friend who installed insulation under his floor and was much happier. We can also replace our four worst windows, which are all some combination of drafty, janky, and/or dangerous. (The glazing of our large 5'x6' bay window is so rotted that if anyone ever so much as leans against it, they will crash through and fall three feet to the ground, followed by nice pointy shards of glass.) All single-paned, of course.

Normally I set the heat to 60° overnight, and the house can keep that warm if it's only 45° out; with this weather it's running every hour or so.

We have ice on our windshields. We don't have an ice scraper. Why do we need an ice scraper? Luckily, years ago I discovered that if it's not Actual Cold[tm] (as it would be in a place with actual winter), if you just pour some water on your windshield, the ice melts.

It should go without saying that if you do this in a place where boiling water evaporates on contact with the air, pouring water on your windshield ice may just give you thicker windshield ice.

Time to go to bed, and climb under our numerous blankets.

sparks!

J has been home the past couple weeks with chicken pox. There's a vaccine now! And he was about to get it, when he came down with the actual disease. I had no idea there was a vaccine. I'm not very educated about parenting. I take my considerable knowledge about people, and I've more or less learned to adjust it to kids--toddlers are still a challenge, but that seems to be universally true--but I don't necessarily know a lot of things about raising kids. Do they get adequate nutrition from apple juice and Doritos? Do they really need clothes that fit? How many days per year do I need to let them sleep inside at night? So many mysteries!

My ignorance comes from never having had to freak out about caring for a baby. I met J when he was 3 or so, and he was (and remains) very attached to a fabulous mother who knew all the ins and outs of caring for J specifically. It's not a small list of ins and outs, because he is off the usual map. I've picked up some of it, but to e.g. make his lunch, I still need to refer to the "Care and Feeding" manual she typed up. (For example, you have to pack the food in a specific arrangement in his lunch bag, or else he can't find anything. Also, the lunch bag has to be separate from the backpack, because it was separate from the backpack for years, and if it's inside the backpack, he won't be able to find it, and he won't eat lunch.) It's all relatively minor for kids on the autism spectrum, at least.

On this remarkable Sunday, we finally had Jim the electrician come figure out what was wrong with our garbage disposal switch. One day I flipped the switch, it sparked, and the power to the under-sink outlet died, and the breaker wouldn't reset, and I ran an extension cord from an outlet so we could run the dishwasher, and then we sort of called it good and I think it's been a couple of months. We couldn't remember which of the two switches was the disposal, anyway. The extension cord became a semi-permanent fixture, and we've settled for running the disposal periodically by plugging it in, often when the sink strainer stops up and the sink is full of delicious food-rinse water. I particularly enjoyed the surface layer of red oil that came after a meal with tomato sauce.

We'd replaced the switch already, and Anna had gone back in and reconnected the ground wire that someone had cut once up a time, but that didn't help. Jim was able to reset the breaker, using some arcane "push on it harder" technique he doubtless learned during his years of study with various Oriental mystics.

The next step was to try the switch again, which I did, and was rewarded with a loud *POP*, numerous sparks, and some kind of burning ember flying out of the switch and onto the counter. That's apparently what happens when a short circuit burns out: the ember is a piece of burning copper. (In retrospect it seems entirely possible another ember could have gone behind the switch and into the wall, but the one we saw extinguished quickly, and we're constantly at home for the next week. Good thing the house isn't insulated!)

Jim cracked the switch open, and there were just some side screws that had to be moved out of the way, or something. Now we have a garbage disposal again! We can dispose of things! Garbage will be disposed!

It is a good day.

hack hack cough cough hack

I don't do very well at writing these days. I'm so excited to have my brain back that when I have energy, I spend it learning things. Because learning things is what I do, and I'm able to make a living by synthesizing and applying the things I learn, and then learning from the application, in a virtuous cycle that keeps me from having to get a real job.

I've been feeling better enough that I went to aikido twice in a 7-day period, which hasn't happened since I don't know when--mid/early last year, probably. And afterward I felt the way I always used to! (Tired, logy, satisfied.) And I recovered in a normal amount of time! Pharmaceuticals are amazing. Not that we know what they're doing to me, but I'm enjoying life again, so I decided not to care.

Over the course of Tuesday, I developed a cold or flu or something. On Wednesday I worked a full day from home, Thursday I worked a half-day from home, and working today was out of the question. The decline has to do with quality of sleep rather than the sick, though. Briefly, it appears I had a slight fever, although since (a) I haven't had a fever in at least a couple decades, and (b) the awesome skin-reading thermometer gives me ludicrously high results on the first try--I'm pretty sure if I had a 101° fever I wouldn't be casually hanging out in the hallway checking my temperature--I'm skeptical.

Thinking back on my medical history, I've been blessed that before 2010 and what I might call the Great Decline, nearly all of my problems have been glaringly obvious to diagnose. Broken bones, bleeding wounds, concussions. There's no mystery. "I'm not a doctor, but you got washed over a coral reef, so that may be why your back hurts."

The Great Decline was unsettling because it's even hard to describe. Lethargy, absurdly long recovery from exercise, cognitive impairment...all tests normal. As always, on paper I am completely healthy. (I am grateful for a standard-issue no-surprises body.) Numerous rock-star doctors confessed bafflement. Now that there's a medicine that helps...do I take it forever? How can I even experiment, given the consequences? Does it fix the sleep apnea? (Okay, that one I can actually test pretty easily.) It's like a dark shadow out there in the woods, waiting to grab me again.

After months of trying to adjust my work approach to accommodate how my team works, I finally gave up, and I'm switching teams. There's a bunch of stuff around it, but it boils down to working in isolation and not having a use for my talents. Sounds like fun, eh?

I had a long IM chat with my new manager today. None of us are entirely sure whether or how this change will solve the problem, but it's an honest attempt. Plus it's really the only option available! I gather that my experience has generated some organizational turbulence, outside my frustratingly limited field of view. So we'll see how that goes.

At my last job I did the best work of my life, completely turning a team around, as well as its technology, while still delivering new features. The problem with performing up to your potential is that it then becomes really annoying to do anything less.