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.

living all the things

Time is flying by, mostly an artifact of being busy and not doing the zazen and aikido that help slow down my experience of life. I did go to aikido weapons class last week, but then I promptly went to a conference in the City for two days, then had a three-day weekend visiting Ben in Minnesota.

Just two weekends ago we went to North Central Nowhere, New York for my cousin's wedding. With my wedding and my grandmother's funeral, I've seen more of that family in the past 3 years than in most of the past 20, which is great, because they're awesome. The cousin I'm closest to now has three great kids, including a gangly 13-year old in the classic male "non-verbal lack of eye contact" phase. On a recent visit with my 12-year old niece, I learned that one approaches these creatures by not talking; so I walked up behind him, tapped out his knee, held him up but severely off balance for a couple seconds, then put him back upright and walked away. We bonded.

I'm going to try to avoid flying for the rest of the year, though. It taxes my physical resilience, which is still coming back.

I finally bought and installed a Nest thermostat. Being able to control it from your phone or a website is more handy than you'd think, but overall I think it's a geek toy, and if you've got a functioning programmable thermostat, I can't recommend shelling out to replace it just on practical terms. It made sense for us because (a) we're dorks who like the occasional pretty gadget, and (b) our original thermostat, inasfar as it never actually turned the heat off once it reached a certain temperature, wasn't actually a thermostat.

I learned a little about thermostat wiring from this blog I read (the Nest bothers his heating system, but doesn't bother ours). I hesitated slightly on the installation, because there are two wires and they're both black; one day it occurred to me that if you've only got two wires, it doesn't matter what order they go in, so I could just go for it. (Current polarity does matter with individual LEDs, but even then the only thing that happens is the LED doesn't turn on.) The Nest is eminently civilized, a black glass circle on the wall, gracefully ringed with steel. The house is still cold, what with the dozens of drafty windows and general lack of insulation, but so far the Nest beats turning the heat on and off by hand.

I've been fantasizing about insulating the house. I'm not sure how practical that is, though. When I was a kid we had insulation blown into our house's walls, which involved drilling an endless series of 2-inch round holes in all the walls. They might be able to blow or stuff it into the walls from the attic. In reality, though, there are more important and effective projects: window repair/replacement, fixing the bathroom drainage, and adding piers below the house that aren't canted at a 20° angle.

J is doing pretty well, all things considered. His great-grandmother died, so he's been processing that in his J-specific way. He seems to be exploring ideas about death and adulthood in a much more mature way, thinking about what happens when he grows up.

"I'll have to live on my own?"
"Eventually, yes. Not until you're ready, though."
"But I won't be able to eat my favorite foods any more."
"That macaroni and cheese you like? They sell it at Trader Joe's."

We'll have to see what he needs when he starts pushing into adulthood, but it'd be nice if he could rent an apartment from us--over the garage, say, or if we moved into a different house with an in-law unit--as part of his transition.

Learning to purchase and make macaroni and cheese will obviously be a key part of that project.

scattered updates

We finally called the plumber about the bathtub draining slowly! It turns out the pipes underneath are installed backwards. We're trying to decide whether to spend a little money replacing the pipes, or a lot more money and effort re-doing the bathrooms entirely (they're gross and awkward, and need to be replaced). I don't see us really wanting to deal with a bathroom remodel in the coming year, but I've been surprised before. (By "us" I guess I mean "Anna," since she'd be managing the project.)

The specialist doctors reached a dead end with me! Suboptimal, but it's nice to have some resolution. Instead, I talked to my GP about a semi-plausible theory I had about fatigue and neurotransmitters, and got him to prescribe a psychoactive drug, which...helped me feel better after just a couple days, much to everyone's surprise. Over the past few years I've had a lot of variation from week to week, but after 3 weeks it's safe to say I've been feeling and (mostly) sleeping better--I've gone running a few times and recovered the way I used to. Today I could swear I felt almost rested, though that's not historically a familiar feeling.

Anyway, yay for drugs! Who knows why they work.

The new job is okay. I work with smart, nice people, and I'm learning stuff, and that's really the baseline. I don't know that it's lighting me up, exactly...my impression is that because of the split between the SF and Palo Alto offices, there's a limit to the magnitude and kind of impact I can have--for example, I don't feel like I can help guide the engineering culture from down here. And since I joined, I've been working alone on a bunch of stuff that no one else seems to care about. It's possible it's critically important and everyone just has every confidence I'll get it done in a reasonable amount of time, but since no one really asks, that feels like a bit of a leap.

But who can tell? I easily get crabby about work, especially in the absence of feedback and context. It's a good place to learn things and find my feet again--to say nothing of paying my mortgage--so in that respect it's working out well.

damp signs and moist portents

We have tacitly declared Fruit Bankruptcy: the remaining pluots and figs are falling and rotting on the pavement, to be shoveled into the compost bin...sometime. Whenever. Too much fruit. The apples don't taste good and we don't like pomegranates, anyway. This was the learning year, where we were just discovering even what trees we have; we'll prep for next year with tree pruning, removal, replacement, and some kind of fruit-preservation scheme. Fruitpocalypse 2013: NEVER FORGET.

As much as we were overwhelmed by fruit, our attention was suddenly diverted last week by an unusual and mighty rainstorm. On the bright side, water does not, in fact, puddle inside the garage, exactly, instead being partly absorbed by the wall, and mostly flowing out into the driveway!

On the other hand, as we sat in the living room enjoying the weather, we heard a sudden crashing of sheets of water on the front porch, and discovered a section of gutter which no longer inclines towards the downspout (maybe due to the house settling?), instead just overflowing over a section of the eaves. There's another section of gutter in back which has no downspout, not even a place to attach one, and unsurprisingly that gutter just overflows in place, running down the kitchen window and the side of the house.

All of which is still better than the kitchen pipes that were leaking out the wall and over the foundation when we bought the place, so I think we have a good sense of perspective.

We talk and think about the house more than we actually work on it, I think. If you can imagine a fictional VW minibus that looks sketchy, and you can tinker with endlessly, but it actually runs reliably (I said this was fiction), that's sort of our house.

(True story: my brother bought a VW bus once. Twice it broke down on the way home from the seller's house. Eventually he bought something like an old Honda Civic that was easy to fix and chugged along until dying years later, at long last, north of 300,000 miles.)

So the rainy-season fixes have been re-prioritized. In moderation, of course: the roof is blessedly new, but every window needs to be replaced. There are lots of windows! And windows are expensive. And ours are funky dimensions. We'll see how that goes.

words every father longs to hear

I lost my job in mid-July. They processed it as a layoff, but that was just them being nice, because as far as I can tell, my boss just didn't like me. This happened at my previous job as well, which makes me think a bit about how I might manage my managers more gently; unfortunately, there are no obvious lessons. I could be a different person. Except I can't.

This is the fourth time I've lost my job, and while it always sucks, it does get easier. You start to see it coming: if you have a meeting with your boss and HR shows up, you're screwed.

In this particular case, I'd already gotten a remarkably dumb ultimatum:

"I'm really burned out and I need to take a break and work on something else."
"Nope, you can stay where you are, or quit."

So I was already interviewing, and at most two weeks away from giving notice when they let me go. In fact, I got two verbal job offers on the same day. (It was a lot to process. I got home that night and literally couldn't form sentences.) Had they talked to me honestly, we could have had a smoother transition and the company could have saved a month's salary. Not that I'm not grateful for the money, but all told I would rather have had time to say goodbye.

Managers are, so often, so stupid.

ANYWAY.

Yesterday morning I told J I have a new job that's closer to home, except for the days I go up to the city.

"Do you still work at [old job]?"
"No, now I work at [new job]. I left. Well, I was removed."
Anna chimes in. "He was fired."
"Well, kind of. Technically I was laid off, or terminated."
"What's the difference?"
"You get fired for cause, you can't collect unemployment--"
"Oh, right."

The child is a little agitated at this point. He has a hard time remembering arbitrary facts about people, and he's comfortably known where I work for years now.

"Why do you keep changing jobs? Why do you keep getting fired?"
"Huh? I don't keep getting fired."
"Yeah you do. Amalgamated Video, and Mathematica Inferna, and Unlimited Hazards..."
"I wasn't fired from Unlimited Hazards, I left."

We all had a decent talk about how this is just a thing that happens, that we change and our employers change, and sometimes even a smart, hard-working, generally nice guy like me just gets shit-canned sometimes. And my job-changing is at a pretty normal rate for the industry.

Still.

"Why do you keep changing jobs? Why do you keep getting fired?"

 Awesome.

family resemblance

And just like that, summer's done. After last year's insane activity (3 family plane trips and 2-3 campouts) we kept it more or less low-key this year. I had a brief overnight to Boston for a job interview, and then we went to visit my family on Cape Cod. At that point I'd been at my new job for about a week, and it turns out it's really easy to detach and not work when you don't actually know how to accomplish anything.

J loves the Cape, and my parents, and my nieces. He loves the water: last year we had to stop him walking out over his head, because he couldn't swim, even though he thought he could. He just kept walking, breathing be damned. But this year he can actually swim, and quite well, so he had a ball and we just checked on him now and again to make sure he wasn't headed for Maine.

I love my two older nieces, and they've given me a few good parenting moments over the years (especially the younger one). They have grown up to be truly marvelous young proto-women. They whine a lot, but their hearts aren't really in it--they lack a deep commitment to whining. They do it out of habit, because at their house, that's how they get what they want. When they come up against me, I set more rigid limits, and they tend to adapt quickly in really heartening ways.

One time, when the younger one was maybe 7 or so, she was trying to get all doe-eyed and manipulative on me. I looked at her.

"You seem to think I've never met a little girl before. You are wrong."

She giggled and meandered off.

This time, they were substantially older, and the whining was most often under control, except for one evening when it went on and on and I was done. I looked at the younger one and smiled.

"Okay, that's enough whining. Shut your cakehole."

(I should say that I had never said that to anyone except as a joke. Because who says that? Except as a joke.)

The whining continued. I have another, carefully developed way of speaking, where my face is smiling, but my voice really, really isn't.

"I said that's enough. You. Cakehole. Shut."

The whining stopped.

I can't help but remember an episode from my own childhood, when we visited my father's brother in western New York State. My little brother and I were fighting, as usual, and finally he was done putting up with it, and he sat each of us down at each end of a very long couch.

"Stay there, and keep quiet."
"How long do we have to sit here?!"
"Until donkeys fly."

The injustice!