Psychotomy

K hasn’t been to his daycamp in over three months. It’s a nuisance, b/c he IS a jack russell. Parson Russell. Whatever.

So we were taking him to the dog park. Our original trainer, who used to watch him when we were out of town (because there was no petshotel at the time and we dislike plain kennels), took him there a few times and he loved it, apparently. It’s only been 4 years since she moved away. We finally got around to registering K with the county and getting him a pass for the park. That was working well, I throw his lacrosse ball around for 30-60 minutes, he gets tired out, everythings decent. He doesn’t lke hanging with the big dogs, so we’re usually down by ourselves in the small dog area. But that’s fine, I don’t really care.

Of course, two months ago, DST ended. Which means it’s now dark when I get home at five. The park is open 7am to dusk. 15-20 minutes to gethere during traffic, and it’s going to be well dark and closed. So we go out to the soccer fields. November sucked for that, b/c the fields are used by the young NFL or whatever and they had games and practices at 6pm every night. And they’d turn on their gas generator floodlights any time after 5. K, not a fan of the gas generators. Which meant we were done when they came out.

But they ended. And things were OK for a few weeks. I’d get home, take him out and throw a tennis ball for an hour or so, he’d get run down. It wasn’t optimal, but it worked. And now it’s winter. He doesn’t like getting cold. When we start up, he runs hell bent for leather, as it were, and gets a lot of running and bolting. For about 15 minutes. Then he settles into a groove. Instead of galloping, bolting, and racing, he starts to trot. And just like a horse, it’s a ground eating, energy saving, trot. Which Is probably why it takes an hour or so normally to run him out. 20 minutes high burn , 30-60 more on slow burn. But it’s cold, right? And that energy saving trot? It doesn’t generate as much heat, b/c it’s saving energy right? Which means K starts to get cold. He’ll start running the ball past me, ~2-6′. Slowly walking me back towards the edge of the fields and the path home.

It’s not that it’s dark. Yeah, he’ll lose it occasionally if I throw it just as he looks the wrong direction, then we go out to find it together. As long as I can see, he’s always still been happy to play. But it’s COLD. And wtf wants to be out freezing their ass off? He’s not dumb. He wants to go home where it’s WARM.

What does this all mean? It means that from December until probably February (and mid-June to August, for heat) he’s inside and hyper. Barking at this, running around there, not settling down at all. It’s to the point where I have to put him out the baby gate after a while in the evening and just tell him to go upstairs. And if he keeps barking and whining at us, kiir ends up playing with the printer which makes him run up. I mean, I think he’s running away from it, which means basically we’re torturing him every couple nights for our own pleasure :(

I feel really bad about it, but he doesn’t want to play outside long enough for the park to even be worthwhile, he doesn’t want to run down on the fields, and the whining and barking gives me a serious headache. And I have a headache most evenings by the time I get home anyway :(

Posted in: k-line by attriel /
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A couple weeks back, we were at my parents with Des, and kiir suggested that we could bring soup for xmas dinner. My parents looked at her like she was nuts. (So, apparently, did I). Actually, first, there was a discussion of Des getting some stuff, like the mashed potatoes mostly, b/c the dressing is likely to be too crisp, although he may get some inner bits (we don’t du stuffing, it’s in a separate pan, because we all like the crispy edges and top and stuff) … he might get some cranberries (and then play with my mom’s white furniture ;) … he certainly isn’t going to be getting any turkey (see the part where I’m allergic to the shit, and he don’t get none til he’s at least 12 maybe 18 mo)

The ‘spuds’ have always been out of a box of flakes, b/c, as my mom recounts, they did 5 lbs of potatoes for 3 of them and fought over hte last spoon. My dad confirms the story, or I’d ignore it entirely. But since we’re not convinced flakes are real potatoes, I said I’d make the damned potatoes, boil, mash, squish squish squish. 10 or 15lbs. So, I might have been looking at her funny about “I’m making 15lbs of mashed potatoes AND bringing baked potato soup???” (although she may have been thinking of the corn chowder not the baked potato).

Later, she pointed out something that I have never really noticed. Things that I would throw a shitfest at her mom about, I take from my parents. Xmas dinner, for the last few years, for me has been: Potatoes. Some dressing, when my mom makes some with v eg broth instead of hte turkey. And leftover fried shrimp. (growing up, xmas eve was fried shrimp ; they still do it, and i basically get my share with xmas since i can’t have the turkey). There’s pies after and such. But basically I get side dishes and random (not very good) leftovers.

Now, it’s a step up from the first year or two when they gave me Tofurkey that they found at some shop. B/c that stuff was vile. But if my Mother-in-Law tried to give me those offerings? I’d come off the wall. I’ve threatened to walk out and drive to a restaurant, before. Hell, I offered my youngest SiL a ride if there was nothing good to eat at the third sisters wedding rehearsal.

Fuck, I made my old job threaten to FIRE ME before I went back and sat through a mandatory lunch meeting b/c I couldn’t eat the offering (I couldn’t eat anything, though, so it’s a little furhter step).

But my parents? I just keep saying OK, and not really liking dinner. Kiir can see it, my parents haven’t noticed or think it’s b/c i want the turkey (don’t get me wrong, I DO want turkey), I guess.

So, I’m taking the foreman grill and a cut of salmon this year. Probably still not doing the soup, b/c I’m still not sure where in the car it’d go with Des, gifts, des’ stuff, kiir, me, and 15lbs of mashed potatoes. Hell, I don’t really know WTF I’m putting 15lbs of potatoes, to be fair :o

Posted in: general by attriel /
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Yesterday I took the old TV in the basement to Salvation Army. And I took the five (six?) dead computers to the dump’s computer recycling. clears up some of hte basement, with the trash i took too. mostly have the exercise bike to eliminate, now.

Then it’s on to the miscellaneous boxed crap. We processed about a dozen or so a few months back, and now those compacted eight are back in the big room, waiting to figure out where they go to live. There’s another half dozen or so (3 of which are full of D&D books), then random unboxed crap, the butterfly (bowl) chair … then the freezer room has gotten stuffed with more bits as i cleared out the walk down the stairs (now cluttered with the (filled with miscellany) box from the carpet cleaner and the strollers). Need to go through there with a torch again.

And after all of that? Yeah, then comes the really hard part. We get to go through all 2.4 billion books on the shelves around the house, consolidate, collapse, condense. Dispose. Because we want to rearrange the back room, in a way that involves not having those shelves taking up a full wall and holding a plethora of books we browse maybe a couple times a year looking for one in particular (kiir at least goes through a lot of her romances ; me? i have tens of thousands of dollars worth of sci fi and mystery and such that i am unlikely to ever feel inclined to read again :/)

Of course, I’ve been working my way through cleaning since … h … before kiir was pregnant. Noticeably before. It’s been 18-24 months I’ve been working at this crap, although it did pick up a year ago when we found out we were having a baby. I’ve fallen off lately, b/c the time I might’ve been willing to give up spending with Des has to go for K, since he needs walking and exercise and the two of them are too much for one person to take out, especially for winter.

And now my Mother-in-Law has offered to come up and spend a weekend “helping me.” because i dislike having someone clean my stuff their way (kiir doesn’t count, since it’s her stuff too, obviously). So she’ll ‘clean under direction.’ Which I don’t really see how that works, actually, since won’t managing mean i have to spend the time anyway?

The big problem, the BIG problem, is that to me it feels like admitting defeat. Asking for help means saying “I can’t do it.” And that’s where it falls apart. Because, in my head, it also means ‘I can’t take care of my own family’ … So even though everyone agrees that I need the help to clean the house … I still haven’t agreed to it.

Because I suck.

I really need to just quit sitting on the sofa on weekend mornings, and start cleaning when des is still sleeping in the morning :/

Posted in: general, house by attriel /
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this just happened in a chat with kiir when desmond decided to help

brb goingdo[w]n[stai[]r]s

i swear, it looks like a regex, and the boy even managed to close his brackets :o

Posted in: PI by attriel /
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So, last weekend I clocked in at 221.6 … still … after over a year … two?

Obviuosly I SUCK at dieting (note: i am also, apparently, infinitely hungry, of late, which doesn’t help that’s for sure). I also suck at exercise (because lets face it, after 10 hours out of the house, min, for work, do i want to (a) go home and take K for a walk, (b) go home and play xbox while des climbs on me, or (c) go to the gym for another two hours?)

Last week I found a link off of Lifehacker: Wii Sports Fitness

The link lists the sports and general calorie burn.

I’ve been doing this for a week, half an hour each night, and Sunday I was at 219.4!!! WOO! Yeah, OK, so that’s within the normal variance range on my weight (217-224), so maybe I just had a light dinner or whatever.

Unfortunately, I’m finding that I don’t really move that much playing tennis, just swing my arm. Baseball is actually more trying on me, since I have to scrunch down a bit to hit the ball really. But a couple best of 5′s in tennis (which tend to go all five games, really) and some batting practice baseball (which eliminates that whole “watching” thing the site complains of) and I do the WiiFit Age test thingie.

Last week: 28 starting (!!!), 32, 79, 48, 32, 28, 42

The 79 was because I suck at the “hit the gloves” boxing test, and got fed up and just threw punches. 25 hits. 27 “misses” where I punched the trainer instead. Including at least 2 uppercuts to his genitals. apparently that was bad :o

Posted in: fitness by attriel /
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So, we g ot back from our annual thanksgiving traipse to kiir’s folks. checking in at the airport was fun. two suitcases (one for us, one for him), the big stroller (we took it down so we could leave it at their place since we never use it and we were just going to donate it off otherwise), a carseat (not OUR carseat, b/c that’s in our car, but a new 40$ carseat that we figured was good to let the airlines whack-a-mole with), desmond, three carry ons (one for me, one for her, one for his butt) … ended up taking the stroller to the gate and gate-checking it. it was convenient to haul the bags around ;)

then we hauled that all over to car rental and picked up a car. and spent ~30 minutes or something getting set up to go. WHEE! ended up stealing a towel from the inlaws to put under the carseat on the way back b/c we decided it just wasn’t really properly stable. It was OK, and we drove out with it, but we decided we wanted to make it a bit better for the return trip.

spent most of the time with one or the other of us holding des b/c he was overwhelmed by the sheer number of people and kept wanting to go to someone he knew. and when he was willing to crawl around, people kept picking him up. I especially liked when dad picked up a happily crawling baby, and almost immediately handed him to kiir “he wants mommy” … uh, no, he wanted to not get picked up man! (she then handed him to me, and I took him back to his starting point, sat him down, and let him set off again, happy as a clam now that he was crawling like he wanted to)

every year at thanksgiving (well, for hte last few, don’t really remember doing it before that) dad goes around the table “everyone say something they’re thankful for” … which is boring and tedious and no one wants to participate. Zebras are popular at thanksgiving. (kiir went for wildebeasts this year, to be different). I “spoiled the mood” (my mother in law … makes you wonder why we do this yearly, eh?) when I said I was thankful for desmond being happy and healthy. I don’t even remember that dad did a serious one. grandpa did, happy for family being together, and my wifes sisters husband parents were there and they’re raising their granddaughter, and were thankful for her. but 3 out of 16 (? sounds right) why bother?

my sisterinlaw got all pissy one morning b/c des was awake and crying and I took him out ot the common room to see if he’d play with his toys or crawl around. she suggested that i should take him back to our room so that those who didn’t have kids didn’t have to suffer them, b/c it wasn’t her fault we brought him with us, and parents are so self centered. i took him for an hour walk to cool me off after that. at 7am … wheee. too bad i couldn’t find my car keys to get the stroller, certainly would’ve beeen less strain on my arms :o

overall des had fun, he likes seeing his nonnie and his uncles. i could do without his aunts a lot of the time, but his uncles actually aren’t raging egomaniacs, so they’re cool.

Posted in: general, PI, trips by attriel /
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A few miscellaneous items.

my car’s starter went out, so i had to blow 500$ last night getting that fixed. bleargh.

does everyone get searing pain from things being “too bright” every time they get a headache? or is that actually unusual? my headaches have always come with light sensitivity, and it’s only recently that i realized that was a “migraine symptom” … and it occurred to me today that perhaps not everyone gets that all the time?

we picked up mario galaxy yesterday b/c toys ‘r’ us had a deal where you got a 25$ gift cert with it. i figured it was unlikely we’d get a better deal somewhere else (yeah we might save 10$ somewhere, but 25$? not likely). now, i figured we’d buy a second game with it, or hold onto it for later maybe. b/c we’re trying to stay away from plastic and chinese made toys (mmmm lead and ghb, what could be better for babe?) to the point that my parents are afraid of buying things for babe b/c “we might disapprove of it”. and we are not shy in being quite vocal about it when we dislike what they say or buy or whatever … anyway, we then spent ~30 minutes wandering around trying to find something to buy. b/c we had a gift card. so we had to spend it! oi :o

what is it with our parents and rice cereal? it is NOT a cureall wonderfood! eesh. you’d think babe’s very soul was in danger if we didn’t give him rice cereal STAT

Posted in: general, PI by attriel /
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What is it around here with people wanting to fix things that aren’t broken? Solutions to problems that don’t exist, and we’ll ignore the ones that do b/c they don’t fit our plan!

Been working with VMWare, trying to clone live servers so we can do proper (read: destructive) and accurate (read: where the same environment is ACTUALLY the same environment instead of an environment that shares similiar letters) testing on development products. It’s not actually on my “job duties list,” but since THAT list includes “MySQL Database Administrator” and I have access to user accounts b/c someone else gave me a list of passwords and i’m not ALLOWED to have admin access to the database (let alone any say in their administration), I decided to spend some time on my Security processes.

And between security and development testing, meaningful environments seemed a good overlap :o So, this week I managed to clone my desktop into a virtual machine running on my desktop (it’s the only system I have available to me for massive abuse at the office). Haven’t tested the networking, but I managed to get it to boot finally, and since I really don’t care about my desktop being virtualized onto my desktop (ow), I’m done with that thought experiment.

From there, I’m moving on to trying to clone a server. Security boss comes by (boss may be the wrong term, but he’s the guy what calls the meeting so whatever) to let me know that he wanted to meet with me in the next few weeks to try to bring me up to speed on some things. I mention that i’m working on the VMWare thing and I’ve managed to clone my desktop. “we’re not going to do desktops” … right, anyway? i’m going to work on getting a server cloned next … “we dont’ do that on desktop” yes, but it’s what i have …

“we want a system that’s got the approved configuration and has been hardened …blah blah” uh, i was CLONING a server into a virtual. with the exception of a few driver changes to work with the virtual hardware, and an IP change to work wit hthe virtual network … it should be as approved and hardened as the real one, dude! c’mon! then he tells me there are programs that can be used to make those clones (rather than my poormans mechanisms) … then he talks about how they let you swap OS’s something something … i think he’s talking about a virtual boot loader now

these? THESE ARE NOT PROBLEMS I HAVE! oi. *sigh*

Posted in: work by attriel /
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Started playing Bioshock last night! WOOHOO!

Picked the game up the week it released. I had played the demo and figured out that I could control it. Gears of War and Crackdown used independent motion (left stick) and aiming (right stick) navigation; so if I were running forward and turned to my left to shoot something, i’d keep running straight forward. At a right angle to the direction I’m seeing. I was never quite able to figure out how it decided which way was “forward” since I don’t think it was absolute for the whole map. But it might have been that “forward” was “North.”

Bioshock, however, moves logically. If I turn to shoot at things, I keep running in the direction I’m facing. And it’s easier for me rotate aim to the right, and move run to the left to start “strafing”. In fact it’s generally semi-intuitive to me.

Of course, I can only play while Des is out of town, so I have to play fast :o

Posted in: games by attriel /
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So, yesterday we dropped Kiir and des at the airport for the week. Came home and cleaned (that’s part of my agenda for the week ; clean a little every day).

Then K and I played video games. well, I played, he slept on my lap. He was freaking HAPPY about it. he got to curl up on my lap and only had to move when my legs got cramped and I had to shift around. No baby coming for him, no daddy jumping up every few minutes to c hange a diaper or play with the baby. Just him and me.

He seemed blissful. I was a little fluttery. Before Des, we’d drop kiir off occasionally for a week, and K and I would hang out at home and be happy about it. But now? Now I’m kinda butterfly-y over the part where they’re not at home :/ *sigh*

Posted in: general, PI by attriel /
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